Nature Essay Final

Wild trees are titans that have yet to be explored or have never been explored, much like life itself. Before the characters of The Wild Trees, Steve, Marie, and Michael, found and climbed them, nobody knew a thing about them, but the secrets of the forests were just waiting to be found. These characters touched only the edge of everything that's possible within the forests and their own personal lives, they made discoveries that would lead to more questions and discoveries about the biology of a mystery and the unpredictability of living. There is so much about the trees and themselves yet to be discovered as they progress throughout the book--things about the forest like how high the tallest tree is and if there's a limit to their magnificence. They haven't quite found those yet, as trees grow every year--and like humans, they are ever-changing. Anything is possible with these trees, just like with the lives of humans, and the characters are just reaching the outer edge of those endless possibilities.

Steve, one of the main characters that is introduced in the first chapter, did things that nobody had done before--he climbed a redwood tree without any gear, discovered the biodiversity in the canopies, and saw the significance of tall trees like Giant Sequoias and Coastal Redwoods. He found lichens and huckleberries and all sorts of things, things no one would ever think would exist up there. And as he progressed through life and up the trees, he found love and friendship with the oddest people (as Marie realized, "There was something sweet about this man who could be so kind with his strange friends, so passionate about trees." (Page 197).), all different and important like the lichens were to the tree. Without the lichen, the tree couldn't have fertilized the variety of life in its canopy--"It was a garden in the sky containing tones of dirt, along with sheets and beds of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes. The canopy soil has been accumulating in Atlas for unknown numbers of centuries. It is composed of a mixture of rotting redwood needles, twigs, the roots of plants, and dust from the sky. The soil is apparently being fertilized by rotting lichens and twigs and redwood needles." (Page 149). Like the biodiversity thriving in the trees, Steve's friends were part of a chain events that helped him grow. Without them, he wouldn't have overcome his fear of heights, which he would have never thought possible when he had it, and he wouldn't have chosen the life of a biologist and explorer. Without Amanda LeBrun, he wouldn't have learned heartbreak, and if she hadn't left, he would have never met and loved Marie, who climbed beside him and propelled his career and life forward. He never thought it would be possible that his first wife would leave him, and after she did, he never thought that he would fall in love ever again. His first marriage was like the fall of Telperion, a tree he had climbed that had been tilting--he thought it would last a few more decades or centuries before it cratered, but sooner than he had ever thought possible, he had witnessed the death of a titan.

Marie, like Steve, climbed a tree without any equipment, but she was just a little girl. She never thought that she would ever become a professional tree climber, and yet she did. She grew up climbing mountains and rocks, and she didn't think she would ever fall--not until she took a forty-foot whipper and decided not to climb again. She couldn't have ever predicted that she would ever do that. And then one day, she decided almost out of the blue, that she would study trees. "While Marie Antoine had been rock climbing, she had often noticed trees growing along the cliffs. She had been able to look horizontally into their crowns, and had been close enough to some of them to almost reach out and touch them. She would often pause in climbing, staring into the trees. 'They were Douglas-firs dripping with lichens and mosses and things growing on them,'" (Page 142) this was the moment she realized she was interested in forestry. The unpredictability of her thoughts and actions--from being a sweet innocent girl who cared for a mother who unexpectedly developed bone cancer, to being a troublemaker as a kid, to becoming a daredevil in college--is almost like how trees would randomly grow extra trunks or sprout small bonsai trees. The possibilities were there, but no one ever thought of them. When she was studying Lobaria Oregania, or lettuce lungwort, she started out riding a crane and reaching out to grab the lichen from the trees. She had many questions she hoped these lichens would answer, but she also knew that the crane was only reaching the edge of the forest--there were much more lichens than just the ones in the outer-ring, and so many more possibilities existed deeper within the rain forest. "The only thing she knew for certain was that even if she spent the rest of her life studying lichen, whatever she found out about it would be almost nothing in comparison to what remained unknown about the tall temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest." (Page 179). She saw the opportunities to explore, especially when Steve offered them to her, and she took them--and she went beyond the borders of her limits and grasped the biology few others dared to grasp.

Michael, on the other hand, didn't take any risks. Like Steve, he had acrophobia, a severe fear of heights, except that in his case, "If he got too near a window on a high floor, his acrophobia would kick in and he would get an urge to jump out the window. It was as if some demon inside him were whispering, Jump, just do it--it's gonna be interesting. At those moments, he experienced an alarming sense of curiosity about what it would feel like to actually sail down through the air to his death." (Page 41). His father was a rich real estate investment company man with high expectations for his son, but Michael always did something surprising like change his name and disappointed him. Michael went to college to major in engineering after a series of indecisive events that included forestry and chess, as he had an ingenious ability to tinker with objects and come up with cool inventions. However, he never went through with it and dropped out after his father abruptly cut him off financially, and he was on his own. But as he tried to figure out his life, he saw the redwood trees and figured that the proclaimed tallest tree wasn't the tallest at all--"Michael had been walking around lots of redwood groves, and he knew that he'd seen taller trees." (Page 48).--and he decided that he would find the world's tallest tree. He also figured, "He had been around the redwoods long enough to know that in places the redwood terrain was nearly impossible to get through. . . there were no roads or trails, no easy way in. He sensed the existence of blank spots on the map of North America--along the coast of California, no less. He had a strong feeling that the most inaccessible parts of the redwood forest along the North Coast had never been thoroughly explored. The world's tallest living thing was out there, somewhere, perhaps hidden in a lost valley." (Page 49). He knew it was possible that there was a tree taller than what tour guides and signs claimed, and he spent the rest of his life searching for it. Of course, along the way, he had a few odd and boring jobs and gained a girlfriend whom he would later marry, his talent for tinkering came in handy when he created cheap measuring devices to aide him in his quest, and through a series of connections made by fate, he met Steve. And from there, without warning, the two became close friends. Michael didn't expect to be the first one to see Steve break down, or that Steve would be the one to make him climb a tree for the first time. Nor did he expect that he would actually find the world's tallest tree--he did. "Using their lasers, they estimated that Hyperion was close to 380 feet tall. . . . Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor had discovered one of the crown jewels of nature on earth." (Page 282).

Like the trees, their lives were unpredictable and even when they knew the possibilities, they never thought they would delve into the unknown as far as they did. And when they did, they found that things were new but ancient, wonderful and mysterious, beautiful as well as shocking, and exciting beyond belief--things they could have never dreamed of. The lure of secret places high above the ground had drawn them all in and helped them discover little wonders about their world and themselves, but the mysteries they solved were only the beginning. While they went beyond the edge of the possible, they created a new border, with new things yet to be discovered and new questions waiting to be answered.