Nature Writing

The Wild Trees.

1. 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.).

The thick cluster of ancient California redwood was always there and many a thousands observed them daily as they drove through the highway. But Richard Preston saw something special and fascinating in them. He saw the giant whales in them. A mesmerized Preston writes, ``in order to see a giant tree you need a magnifying glass” the biosphere of the redwood kingdom was a wonderland for him. Part of that big appeal is the redwoods, utterly epic giants of trees that are so big they become your environment rather than just part of it. He digs into the stories of those spellbound by the redwoods, a handful of dreamers, botanists and adventurers who've been scaling the redwoods. Balancing history, ecological musings and his own growing fascination with redwood country. He puts you right there as his cast scale redwoods with impossible skill – relying on a single rope or two to hold their life dangling 300 feet in the air.

He's clearly awed by the redwoods, but avoids too much new-age tree-hugging sentiment in favor of letting the facts speak for themselves: "Botanists think that the oldest redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old. They seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon." And estimates are that since people began buzzing around, about 95 percent of the coast redwoods are gone.

The main antihero of the book, Steve Sillett, who goes from near suicide, dementia, to heroic conqueror and famous professor, asks a student , a fellow tree climber to marry him, up 300 feet in the air, as she slits an avocado for him. " Marie, do you think you could keep doing this for a while," "Sure, I know I could keep doing it " "Will you marry me?"

The trees themselves are amazing in that on the tops of trees, a whole forest grows, including Douglas firs, blackberry bushes, hundreds of thousands of insects, and amphibians. The main form that the trees follow at the top is reiteration. The tree, making smaller and smaller copies of itself at the top until it ascends to almost 400 feet in the air, with many bonsai trees and plants of all description in the top.