Luckily, the education fund left by her father is just enough to pay for international schooling, where she takes special lessons in botany. By the age of ten, she’s committed her dendrological encyclopedia to memory. By eleven, she can discern images of balsam from hemlock, oak from dogwood. By twelve, she can make the same classifications by ear, with only the YouTubed sound of wind running through leaves as her guide.
On her fourteenth birthday, she convinces her grandparents to let her travel nine hours north on a crowded bus, with not a square foot of space left unoccupied, to the famed Forest Research Institute at Dehradun. A sprawling wooded estate established by the British at the foot of the Himalayas, it’s one of the oldest institutions practising scientific forestry in the world. With her clothing shamefully crumpled from the ride, she meets the Institute’s director, Dr. Biswas, a leading expert on the Bodhi tree, the same species that the Buddha meditated under at Bodh Gaya. Jake has written many letters brimming with questions for the doctor, who was sufficiently impressed by their fluency that she offered Jake an informal week-long residency at the Institute, a time she spends in its laboratories, herbarium, and arboreta, meeting first-hand the countless species she’s previously only read about. For the next few years, Jake returns to Dehradun for the week of her birthday, and when she graduates high school, Dr. Biswas recommends her to the botany department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a treed city in which, as Meena once mentioned, Jake’s father had lived.
In Canada, aside from a brief engagement to a fellow biology student, Jake devotes herself wholly to tree rings and tap roots, to polyploids and triploids, to pollen dispersion, gametes, ovules, and seed genetics. Daily, her head zaps with fresh currents of insight. She becomes convinced that a true and perfect understanding of the tree’s secret workings will provide the intellectual skeleton key to unlock all her questions. That even the impenetrable mysteries of time and family and death can be solved, if only they are viewed through the green-tinted lens of this one gloriously complex organism.
It’s while she’s earning her Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht four years later—a degree paid for by a complex scaffolding of student loans, scholarships, and credit card sorcery that lingers on the servers of collection agencies to this day—that she first detects the traces of what will become the Great Withering, in dendrology-related periodicals and scholarly reports. As more and more old-growth forests around the globe succumb and die off, the soil dries up without trees to shade the ground from the gnawing sun, creating killer dust clouds as fine as all-purpose flour that choke the land—just as they did during the Dust Bowl, but this time on a much larger scale, burying even the largest industrial farms and strangling entire cities.
It isn’t until after Jake has returned to North America and is in Boulder, Colorado, to present a paper on communicative scent compounds used cooperatively by coastal Douglas firs that the world’s biggest tree, the Northern Californian sequoia known as General Sherman, splits lengthwise in a moderate wind, and the halves of its trunk, which are revealed to be shot through with fungus, thunder to the forest floor. It’s not a great loss in ecological terms—many giant redwoods remain, some just as ancient—but the dark symbolism of the event knocks the economy into a tail-spin, kicking off the Withering-induced economic collapse. Farms fail, the stock markets go apoplectic, employment dwindles, unchecked wildfires and shortage riots become commonplace, and utter despair becomes the only rational response.
With her bank card now useless, Jake hitchhikes her way north from Boulder, begging for food, with a dampened T-shirt tied over her face to keep the dust from caking in her lungs. She sleeps in drainage culverts and interstate rest stops, and when she finally reaches the Canadian border, she’s shaking with hunger. Luckily, the Withering is still in its early days, and vast stretches of undefended border remain, which means Jake, who is technically one of the first climate refugees, is able to cross unhindered. Just outside a town called Estevan, Saskatchewan, she manages to locate the farm that her father had willed to her. While most of its buildings have been plundered and stripped of their wood, and thigh-deep drifts of dust blanket its fields, somehow the well beside an old willow still pumps clear water and the farm’s storm cellar remains intact. Jake holes up there for a month, eating expired canned food, sleeping, and gathering her strength. One evening, she hears the voices of people searching the ruins above. Someone even tries to open the cellar door, but Jake has barred it with an iron rod, and eventually they give up and leave.
The next morning, she walks through the choking dust to the train tracks in nearby Estevan, where she climbs onto a massive rail car carrying new automobiles, all covered in white plastic. Twelve new Mercedes, which somehow there’s still a market for, even while people starve and asphyxiate with pale blue faces by the side of the road. She finds a car door that’s been left open and sits on the grey leather seats, the new vehicle’s smell so strong it gives her an immediate headache. The electronic key is in the glove box, so during her westward journey she’s able to play the radio, recline the seat, run the heater, and turn on the wipers when the dust gets too thick.
In two days she reaches Vancouver, only to find her former university shuttered and looted. She picks up the few things she’s stored there, including her father’s box, and at the bank she’s able to access her remaining savings. It’s there she also learns that the student debt she planned on paying off with a professor’s salary has survived the Withering. She takes cheap accommodations in an old hotel by the water, but food has become unbelievably expensive, and she faces bankruptcy if she doesn’t begin to pay down her debt. In desperation, she applies for a job with a vaguely described project located on an island northwest of the city. Though she’s grossly overqualified for the duties of Forest Guide at the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, she remains convinced that the primary reason Holtcorp plucked her application from what must have been a stack of thousands, thereby rescuing her from a life of rib retch and dust-shrouded destitution—and, worst of all, a life lived without the steadying companionship of the island’s trees—is the terrifyingly meaningless coincidence of her last name.
PLANKED SALMON
JAKE REACHES THE Maintenance Shed just before it closes, where she signs out a microscope, three rainfall meters, and a soil collection kit. It would be impossible to take measurements of the sick trees during one of her tours, so she’ll have to sneak into the old-growth after hours, which will be risky, especially with the increased Ranger patrols. But she has a private to wake up for tomorrow morning, so she reluctantly decides to leave it for another night, and settles on a quick walk to the ocean to calm her thoughts before turning in early.
The air is breezy and the sky pixelated with stars as she takes the trail to the wharf, where the supply barges tie up. Passing a group of Indonesian chambermaids, she catches the scent of the organic cedar oil they spray the guest Villas with, but only after they’ve already scrubbed them with eye-flaming chemicals. At the water, Jake stops under an ornamental cherry tree to watch four Salvadoran groundskeepers silently cleaning a cluster of hot tubs that overlook the bay. While her fellow employees always offer her a friendly nod, she’s heard that she’s the source of great puzzlement among them. Even though her skin is as brown as theirs, she somehow shares a surname both with the Arboreal Cathedral and the island itself—and yet, she still receives the same measly compensation they do. To them this suggests a downfall nearly impossible to measure.