Andrea and Teo got the press involved- "Coast Lumber Starving Tree-Sitter," that sort of thing — and the timber company backed off. The support team returned, more determined than ever, the lower platform was rebuilt and Coast Lumber turned its back on the whole business. If my daughter wanted to trespass in one of their trees, they weren't going to deign to respond. Because any response-short of suspending all logging and restoring the ecosystem-would be used against them, and they knew it. They would wait her out, that was their thinking. The longer she stayed up there, the less anybody would care, and before long she'd get tired of the whole thing, hold a press conference and leave them to strip every last dollar out of the forest and nobody to say different.
By this point, Sierra had begun to take on the trappings of the mad saint, the anchorite in her cell, the martyr who suffers not so much for a cause but for the sake of the suffering itself. She became airier, more distant. She'd been studying the teachings of Lao Tzu and the Buddha, she told me. She was one with Artemis, one with the squirrels and chickadees that were her companions. There was no need to come down to earth, not then, not ever. She didn't care — or didn't notice-that she was the idol of thousands, didn't care that she was incrementally extending the record for consecutive days aloft till no one could hope to exceed it, and she barely mentioned Coast Lumber anymore. Toward the end, I think, she'd forgotten what she was doing up there in that tree to begin with.
The end, that's right-this is about the end of all that.
Can I tell you this? I was there-her father was there-when it happened. I'd moved out of the house in Tarzana, leaving the mosquito fish and mallards — and my wife-to fend for themselves. Why? I was embarrassed. Ashamed of myself. All along I'd been wrong about Andrea and Teo- there was nothing between them, and after we left Sierra in her tree that first weekend they both sat across the table from me at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Willits with the drawn-down faces of the martyred saints and made me understand that. (Later, long after it was over between Andrea and me, they'd have their time together, and I couldn't help thinking I was the one who'd been campaigning for it all along.) The parole board gave me permission to move to Eureka, where I had a job lined up — a nothing job, clerk in a hardware store, but it was enough to get me out of L. A. So I could be close to my daughter. I packed the Jeep while Andrea was at work. I left a note. I don't know-we never discussed it — but I think she must have been relieved.
My apartment wasn't much bigger than the cell I'd shared with Sandman. A sitting room with a bed and a TV, a kitchen the size of the galley on a thirty-foot sailboat, toilet. And shower, a patch of dirt out back with a rusting iron chair bolted to a slab of concrete in the middle of it. I could have had more-any time I wanted I could have drawn on the money we'd invested in Earth Forever! And nobody at GE the wiser — but I didn't want more. I wanted less, much less. I wanted to live like Thoreau.
My chief recreation was Sierra. Four, five, even six days a week, I'd hike out to her tree and chat with her if she wasn't busy with interviews or her journal. Sometimes she'd come down in her harness and float there above me, the soles of her feet as black as if they'd been tarred; other times we'd chat on the cell phone, sometimes for hours, just drifting through subjects and memories in a long, unhurried dream of an afternoon or evening, her voice so intimate right there in my ear, so close, it was as if she'd come down to earth again.
We had a celebration to commemorate her third anniversary aloft-her support team, a dozen journalists, a crowd of the E. F.I Rank and file. Andrea and Teo drove up, and that was all right, a kiss on the cheek, a hug, "You okay, Ty?
Really? You know where I am if you need me, "Andrea so beautiful and severe and Tierwater fumbling and foolish, locked into something that was going to have to play itself out to the end. I got her a cake that was meant, I think, for somebody's wedding-four tiers, layered frosting, the lonely plastic figurine of a groomless bride set on top. I was trying to tell my daughter something with that forlorn bride: it was time to come down. Time to get on with life. Go to graduate school, get married, have children, take a shower, for Christ's sake. If she got the meaning of the lone figurine, she didn't let on. She kept it, though — the figurine-kept it as if it were one of the dressed-up dolls she'd invented lives for when she was a motherless girl alone in the fortress of her room.
A week later. Forty-eight degrees, a light rain falling. Those trees, that grove, were more familiar to me than the sitting room in my apartment or the house I grew up in. There was a smell of woodsmoke on the air, the muted sounds of the forest sinking into evening, a shrouded ray of sunlight cutting a luminous band into her tree just above the lower platform — which was unoccupied, I saw, when I came up the hill and into the grove, already punching her number into the phone. It was four-fifteen. I'd just got out of work. I was calling my arboreal daughter.
Her voice came over the line, hushed and breathy, the most serene voice in the world, just as I reached the base of the tree. "Hi, Dad," she whispered, that little catch of familiarity and closeness in her voice, ready to talk and open up, as glad to hear my voice as I was glad to hear hers, "what's up?" I was about to tell her something, an amusing little story about work and one of the loggers-timber persons-who'd come in looking for a toggle switch but kept calling it a tuggle, as in "You got any tuggles back there?" When her voice erupted in my ear.
She cried out in surprise- "Oh!" She cried, or maybe it was "Oh, shit!" — Because after all those years and all the sure, prehensile grip of her bare, hardened toes, she'd lost her balance. The phone came down first, a black hurtling missile that was like a fragment dislodged from the lowering black sky, and it made its own distinctive sound, a thump, yes, but a kind of mechanical squawk too, as if it were alive, as if it were some small, tree-dwelling thing that had made the slightest miscalculation in springing from one branch to another. And that was all right, everything was all right-she'd only lost her phone, I'd get her a new one, and hadn't I seen an ad in the paper just the other day and thought of her?
But then the larger form came down-much larger, a dark, streaking ball so huge and imminent the sky could never have contained it. There was a sound-sudden, roaring, wet — and then the forest was silent.
Petunia is not a dog. She's a Patagonian fox. Above all, I've got to remember that. It seems important. It's the kind of distinction that will be vitally important in the life to come, whether it's on top of the mountain or in a cloning lab somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. Petunia is not a dog. I seem to be repeating this to myself as we wind our way up the fractured mountain road, the hot glare of the day ahead of me, Andrea nodding asleep at my side. What I'm noticing, at the lower elevations, is how colorless the forest is. Here, where the deciduous trees should be in full leaf, I see nothing but wilt and decay, the skeletal brown stalks of the dead trees outnumbering the green a hundred to one. The chaparral on the south-facing slopes seems true, the palest of grays and milky greens, twenty shades of dun, but each time we round a bend and the high mountains heave into view, the colors don't seem right — but maybe that's only a trick of memory. Just to be here, just to be moving through the apparent world after all these years, is enough to make everything all right.