The Overstory
Narrative coalescence and my fear of forgetting the trees.
The slight squeak of his manual truck always delights me. To be riding in a relic, maneuvered by someone I love, blasting out hot air and antique tunes from the dashboard is a gift. It’s day 4 of staying with Chef/Lover in his picturesque, snow-covered hometown that has been nothing but sunny since I arrived, and I find myself forgetting to notice the trees.
I finished a book last night that had me pondering how to write about it from page one. I’ve been in a fiction rut for a little— after digging through most of Kingsolver and Yamashita’s work, I haven’t been able to find new authors that really capture my attention the way their narratives can. Until now. This new novel has racked up a long document of notes I intend to turn into the following something.
Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory is beyond summarization. But I will foolishly try.
It is about trees. It is about people. It’s about the forgotten relationship between the two. It’s a love story, a story about grief, a story filled with panic and hope. It spans an unbelievably long time to us, and only a blink to others. It’s catastrophe and solution, it’s fear and hope. It somehow encapsulates exactly how I feel about the earth and what we’re doing to it.
I won’t be going too deep into the plot here, since it’s a very dense story that spans hundreds of years. But the main ethos of the plot echoes my (only recent) understanding of nature in an eerily accurate way.
I have talked previously about my relationship with fiction and my obsession with memoir on this blog. I have found myself gravitating towards novels that weave multiple stories together into big mosaics of lessons and life-changing ideas— novels that almost feels memoir-esque in their conclusions, novels that feel real. The Overstory is this concept boosted to 1000%. And something I found so cool is that, even though the novel is mainly about trees, there is a subplot/ subtheme of fiction’s power. From the books that entertained climate protestors who lived in a tree for a year, to those that bonded a wife to her husband who has suffered a paralyzing stroke, fiction pops up again and again as something like a gift, akin to the trees.
“He can’t remember why fiction used to make him so impatient. Nothing else has more power now… He hangs on the most ridiculous plot crumb, as if the future of humanity hinges on it. The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive— character— is all that matters in the end. … Though I am fake, they say, and nothing I do makes the least difference, still, I cross all distances to sit next to you in your mechanical bed, keep you company, and change your mind.”
Reading fiction and climbing trees are two things I know I have been out of touch with for a while. I’m getting back to the former at a much faster pace than the latter.
I grew up in a small suburban town nestled between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Mountain Range. We had our share of manicured parks and regional hiking trails, but my family rarely took us to the latter. As a kid, I learned how to climb trees on the Japanese Maple in my front yard.
That tree is still one of my favorite parts of coming home. Seeing her leaves flick from brown to green in alternating vignettes of winter break and summer vacation reminds me that the world keeps turning, regardless of what we feel or do. I could have the best or worst semester of my life and she will still be brown and barren, or green and fertile. I look at her trunk and remember the girl inside me who used to use her shade to collect pill bugs, dirt, and rocks, and make habitats in little plastic containers my mom originally bought to store hair ties and accessories.
Even though I had a strong desire to be outside when I was younger, I was growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley with a computer programmer dad. Technology was praised, oftentimes more than nature.
That lifestyle got to me, and I eventually started to grow more concerned with the dirt that would collect under my nails than the joy of feeling a pill bug crawl over my hand. I became obsessed with writing, with reading, with being “educated” and moving to New York City to be a Big Time Journalist. I grew concerned with social media, with computers and my digital image. But when I ended up at a university known for housing hippies, a campus that’s half-tree, half-building, I let myself be changed by my environment, going back to my roots (pun absolutely intended).
The main plot of The Overstory surrounds climate activists and their individual lives, spanned across tree-time. My first read of 2024 also happened to be a climate activism book, albeit done in a much worse way. The Monkey Wrench Gang follows four misfits (all white, with one women so incredibly clearly written by a man) as they pillage and destroy fracking and deforestation sites. Their cause is just, but the story is much more about their lives as outlaws and adventurists than it is about their cause.
The Overstory takes this concept and improves upon it tenfold. Split into sections— Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds— the book features a large host of characters with deep and long backstories. They seem as if they will never connect, until they do. Roots gives each of the many main protagonists a chapter-long backstory; Trunk details the meat of the rising action, as these unlikely heroes find their way to the climate activists of the Pacific coast; Crown follows the climax; and Seeds looks to the future.
This structuring hints at the other main protagonist of the book: the trees themselves. One of the human protagonists is a scientist, and discovers the chemical signals that trees will send to one another through their root systems over the course of the book. Powers’ genius comes through in the way he simultaneously reveals this discovery— this rooted connection— with the ways the humans’ “roots” are revealed to be connected as they begin to cross paths.
That’s just one example of the deeply subtle and powerful methods of storytelling Powers employs in this novel.
Unfortunately, I have to credit my string of college boyfriends for a lot of my natural re-awakening.
In freshman year, J had a car. And J liked photography. So driving out to the coast— on the rare occasion he wasn’t ignoring my texts— was a blast for us. He showed me how nature can be aesthetic, something we were both too concerned with at the time. He used it as a frame for our outfits, our perfect couple photos that were anything but the truth.
In sophomore and junior year, K taught me how to let go. He taught me the importance of ugly clothing as an avenue for adventure. He showed me that buying less, wanting less, doing less, and just being under a canopy can change your worldview. When I hiked with K, I felt like I was seeing the world for the first time. I was shocked and awed every time I walked through the redwoods on his coastal college campus. I felt surges of gratitude when I pulled myself away from my work long enough to sit in the woods with myself. I talked to trees every day. He showed me what hiking could be, what birding could be— he set me up to take on study abroad with the mindset of a backpacker and do the craziest things I could think of.
And now, approaching graduation and The Real World, Chef/Lover and I take our secondhand bikes and our beat-up shoes up the hills as often as we can. We spot birds everywhere, walking to the grocery store and sitting on the top of a mountain alike. We try to catch sunsets when we can, we stop and admire pretty trees when we remember to. We want to get out of this college town so, so bad.
Chef/Lover is lucky, being from a mountain town near Tahoe where nature is an impending force. Returning to my Silicon Valley hometown for 4 weeks without him was less than ideal: trading one cityscape for another. So, over winter break, I strung together trains and buses to spend a week with their family before returning to school.
Waiting at the Amtrak station in our college town, I felt the slightest drizzle. I was anxious— I had heard horror stories about being stuck on the bus from Sacramento for hours. I told him to keep me posted about the weather. I wasn’t going to get caught in the snow.
And of course, I did. A 2-hour bus ride devolved into 2 and a half, and then 3, and then 4 and a half hours of hell. I was livid, blind to the flurries of frozen water swirling outside my warm bus window.
In my impatience and discomfort, I stared through the glass without music while the chains were being put on (shout out to bus drivers, they rock). I was wallowing. Why did the weather have to be bad on the one day I decided to travel? I hate this bus. I hate the snow. I hate sitting here. I just want to see my partner. I want to take a hot shower. I want to lie down.
And then an SUV pulled up beside the bus, with its back window rolled down. The tiniest hand peeked out of the crack, waving around as little white pieces of magic fell on its surface. I could imagine the “wow”s that echoed in the car below me.
Pulling into the station, seeing the excitement of locals and tourists alike as the first snow in three weeks falls down from above, 2 extra hours on a bus become worth it. For the first hug after 2 weeks apart. For the beauty of the snow as it whips into my eyes and falls onto itself in soft sheets, mutilated by tire tracks and still beautiful. For the trees, and the trees, and the trees.
Something I really appreciated about The Overstory is its subtle franticness. It feels like an imperative read; I have been talking about it to my friends nonstop. I want everyone to read this book, despite its 502 page count. It manages to talk about human endeavors and climate change, all while integrating the value-based and technology-based failures of our society without being cringe. It vocalizes the fears of scientists since the mid-20th century— that we have to stop meddling if we want to survive on this planet.
But it isn’t “in-your-face” with this argument. It explains the shortness of life, reveals the things that actually matter, through deeply human stories told in gutting and powerful ways. It hints at AI and the looming fear of this technology in the face of art and writing— the threatening loss of creativity, one of the good things humans have done for this world— in a way that feels impossible to be as accurate as it is. It’s a book that holds deep criticisms for the way the masses live, and offers— through one of the many human protagonists— a philosophical pondering about why we’re knowingly destroying the planet. I don’t even know if there’s a concrete answer to spoil for you. There’s a hopelessness to these queries, and yet, in writing the book, Powers imparts an implicit hope.
I don’t really know how I managed to stop noticing the trees after a few days with Chef/Lover. This town is littered with them. It’s tucked into a mountain, enveloped in trees. They’re all you see for miles and miles. They’re around you in the car, at the house, on the ski lift. They replace the presence of buildings, of roads, and of sky.
And maybe that’s why I stopped noticing them. Because they’re everywhere, they become everything. They aren’t something to notice as much as they’re something to take advantage of. They are the background, rather than a nice frame to the buildings that have become my normal background.
Chef/Lover and I are planning to move to a much more rural place after we graduate, and I find myself worrying about forgetting the trees when that happens. I worry that implementing the beauty of nature into my daily life will make me forget about its majesty and excitement. I worry that I’ll let my appreciation for it dissipate and let life get in the way. I worry I won’t be grateful enough for the calm that the trees provide in the face of the constant background humming of anxiety that comes with being in your early 20s.
In the squeaky old truck, I find myself sucking in a moment of silence and looking. Really looking at the scene before me. And remembering the drab of the buildings and the trash on the streets and the damp air of our college town. Suddenly I am back in my first year of college, learning how to frame a landscape in a camera. I’m back on my first hike on Mount Tamalpais, in disbelief that something so beautiful could be real. I’m in France taking watercolors with me to a natural preserve and spending hours failing at capturing the beauty before me.
The next day, Chef/Lover and I put down the skis, turn off the engine, and just walk. We take a long hike/stroll through the forest of his backyard and I can’t help but admire every tree we pass by. Up close, in the mountains we have been seeing from far away, among the trees themselves, I think of The Overstory. I’ve only been here for a few days, and I let myself forget. But in this moment, with the stillness of walking and the sound of the snow crunching beneath our feet, I remember to notice, and listen. I remember our smallness on the face of this earth, why I liked to be outside to begin with. Being outside makes you learn how to forget— not the trees, but yourself. And the humming in your mind slips away, replaced with the shudder you feel when you touch a trunk and know it will outlive you.
“Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.”
i adore this and you