Nature Essay

The Wild Trees
Preston describes the wild trees as living "at the outer limit of biology, on the edge of the possible." Many of his characters seem to also live by this concept in their lives, near-deaths and through their discoveries. Analyze how this concept manifests itself in different aspects of the story (different aspects might include setting, characters, plot, etc.).

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Wild trees are titans that have yet to be explored or have never been explored. While they look impossible to climb, the characters of The Wild Trees, Steve and Marie and Michael, all prove that it's completely possible--they climb the trees and prove that there is life in them. Before then, nobody knew a thing about them, but the secrets of the forests were just waiting to be found. There is so much about them yet to be discovered, like how high the tallest tree is and how they grow to be that high and how old they are and if there's a limit to their magnificence. They haven't quite found it yet, as trees grow every year--and like humans, they are ever-changing. So 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 at their fingertips.

Steve, one of the main characters that is introduced in the first chapter, does everything that nobody had done before--he climbed a redwood tree without any gear, and discovered the biodiversity in the canopies when he was at the height of his life. 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, he found love and friendship with the oddest people, all different and important like the lichens were to the tree. Without the lichen, the tree couldn't have made those patches of soil in the air that fertilized things like the huckleberry bushes. Steve's friends were part of a chain event 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. He didn't think that he would drive six hours to just see her, and end up too shy to kiss her--nor did he think that he would end up marrying Marie.

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. This was when she realized that in all of her years of climbing, she hadn't been looking at the rocks or the sky, she had been looking at the trees growing on the side of the mountain. 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, 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 temperate rain forest. She saw the opportunities to explore and she took it--and she went beyond the borders of her limits and grasped the biology few others dared to grasp. She even did this with Steve, as she thought about different futures with him after their second meeting.

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, whenever he was someplace high he would get this urge to jump, wondering what would happen and what it was like to fall through the air and into the arms of death. He always pushed the possibility out of his mind and never went any place high. His father was a rich real estate investment company man with high expectations for his son, but Michael always did something unexpected like change his name and disappoint 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 when his father unexpectedly 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 many areas of the map were blank where these giants grew, and that the proclaimed tallest tree wasn't the tallest at all--and he decided that he would find the world's tallest tree. 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, 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.

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 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.