Reflections on The Overstory / Patty Westerford
The following words form the first trickles of thought and feeling inspired by The Overstory. Richard Powers won a Pulitzer for this novel in 2019. I have no idea why I didn’t hear about it sooner. It, a massive, walking, talking forest of a book that makes reference more than once to Macbeth’s nightmare on-the-move forest, only made it to this Vermont, rural, woodsy cabin this spring. I haven’t finished reading it. I will likely never finish reading The Overstory.
There are writers who love characters and writers who love places and writers who love ideas and writers who love Earth. I suspect Richard Powers loves all of these and so much I can’t conceive of loving because I have not lived his experience of the world. The one experience I share with him, the love of and gratitude and reverence for the greater than human world, is enough to keep me faithful to the story, word after word, line after line, page after page.
Growing from character roots through trunk and canopy and seed making, this wild interconnection of passions and awakenings and disillusionments and deaths is a call to kinship, to owning the sprawling family of species growing every which way on this planet we humans call Earth. Patty Westerford, one of this story’s human roots, mulls a response to an invitation to speak at a sustainability conference called, absurdly, Home Repair. This engagement means exploding her miniscule carbon footprint by flying from the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee – where she is going to seed in her own unique way – to California.
Since experiencing academic belittlement as a scientist who in her first forest studies presents evidence about tree communities not accepted within the narrow confines of current scientific tree research, Patty is a traumatized scholar who takes refuge in the safety of living and dying tree species. I couldn’t help but remember Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the traditional scientific community’s violent attacks on what has come to be counted as bedrock truth regarding the murderous effects of human created persistently toxic substances on air, land, water, and all insect, plant, and mammal species. Living through constant attempts to humiliate her by destroying her credibility has made Dr. Patricia Westerford agoraphobic as well as entirely allied with species far more evolved than her own. As she considers traveling to California to repeat what she has already written in several different configurations for the reading public, she muses . . .
She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A Tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.
Many readers are utilitarian. They read for work, for approval, for glibness when conversing. Many readers want to be the smartest people in the room. This year, on Earth Day, I reach out to readers who absorb books to increase their humanity, their wisdom, their interconnections with all that is the way trees absorb from soil and air and water and sunlight and one another whatever they need to continue to protect this planet while increasing its beauty and harmony and meaning.
This post is for readers whose patience and faithfulness invites The Overstory and its unruly, unpredictable inhabitants into heart and mind, and deeper, into gut and imagination, to fertilize as it will. Earth Day is the one day when such preposterous invitations are possible. And . . . for the readers I hope to mingle with, every day is Earth Day.
Every day is life on and within this Beloved Home’s Heart and Soul. Every Day is mourning for our own species’ hubris and tragic engagement with more, with next, with bigger, with power without love or understanding, in short, with everything that has led to the destruction of so much of this planet’s generosity, wisdom, nourishment, and healing.
Richard Powers remembers Ovid, who also writes of People turning into Other Things.
What we turn into is up to us.
I’d like to believe, on this Earth Day 2025, that this tiny Vermont Yellow Birch grove has claimed me as one of its own.
May we all become like trees, knowing how to live and how to die.
May we nourish today and fall when life nudges us over.
May we repose feeding unknown wonders ready to blossom and bear fruit.
May we take hold and let go.
May we make room and connect.
May we learn to appear and reappear as root, trunk, canopy, and seed.
Until next time,
Betula Alleghaniensis
aka Jane