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CHAPTER 1 – NELLIE
Eleven thousand people were watching Nellie Fuller, Nellie was watching the worst thermos of coffee she’d ever made finally go completely cold, and somewhere on Phoenix Ridge’s northern border, a centuries-old tree was, for the first time in its life, trending.
“So, she’s about four hundred years old,” Nellie said to her phone, which she’d duct-taped to a branch at eye level so she could keep both hands free—or rather, one hand free, since the other was currently attached by a fourteen-gauge chain to the base of Eleanor’s trunk. “Give or take a decade. Douglas firs are notoriously hard to age without coring, and I’m not about to core her, obviously, because that’s exactly the kind of disrespect that got us all here this morning.”
She paused to sip the coffee. It tasted like someone had brewed it from despair and then let it sit overnight in a thermos made of more despair. Which, technically, was exactly what had happened, because she’d made it at four a.m. in her tiny percolator and then forgotten about it while she was mixing thewheatpaste for her sign. She’d been so pleased with the sign. She was slightly less pleased now that she had to drink the coffee.
The sign was still her best work in months. She held it up for the camera: ELEANOR IS NOT A BOARD FOOT. The letters were slightly uneven on account of running out of room toward the end, so BOARD FOOT had been compressed into a font that required a certain amount of squinting and goodwill to decipher, but the sentiment was there.
eleven thousand people watching omg, the chat scrolled.hi from Portland!!! go nellie!!
And then, because the internet was a place of great range and wonder, someone asked,what is a board foot?
“A board foot,” Nellie explained patiently, lowering the sign, “is a unit of lumber measurement. One foot by one foot by one inch. And Eleanor here”—she patted the bark, rough and deeply furrowed under her palm, the texture of something that had survived things she couldn’t fathom—“is estimated at two hundred and eighty thousand board feet. Which is how Alburn Systems has been thinking about her. As a number. As a yield.”
She let that land.
Twenty-two feet around at the breast, Eleanor was more column than tree, the kind of scale that stopped making sense to the human eye and started making more sense intuitively. Her canopy disappeared into the fog a hundred and fifty feet overhead. Below the duff, her root system threaded through an acre of understory in every direction, exchanging carbon and water and chemical signals with the rest of the forest in a network so complex that ecologists were still arguing about it in peer-reviewed journals. Nellie had contributed to one of those journals. Technically. Her advisor had written most of it and she had written the acknowledgements and a very solid literature review, but the important thing was that her name was on it.
“This forest,” she continued, “all four thousand acres of it, was quietly acquired by Alburn Systems eighteen months ago. No public announcement. The seller had a non-disclosure clause in the sale. And then last month, Alburn filed a development proposal with the county that included the removal of three hundred and twelve old-growth trees.” She held up three fingers. The chain clinked against Eleanor’s bark. “Three hundred and twelve Eleanors. The county board votes in one week.”
Her phone buzzed against the branch.
Paloma: you ate breakfast right?
Paloma: Nellie
Paloma: NELLIE
She typed back with her free hand:define breakfast
Paloma: oh my god
Paloma: a granola bar. a piece of fruit. literally anything that has ever been near a nutrient
Nellie: I had coffee
Paloma: that is not breakfast, that is a cry for help
Nellie: it was a very filling cry for help
Paloma: I’m putting granola bars in your emergency kit and you’re going to eat them and you’re going to like it.
The chat had swelled past thirteen thousand people while she was typing. Questions about the development proposal and where to donate. A spirited debate in the comments about whether Eleanor needed a last name. Several people asking about Nellie’s bathroom situation, which was either touching concern or voyeuristic curiosity. Almost certainly both.
“Okay, bathroom questions,” Nellie said, pointing at the camera. “I have a system, and it’s private. What I will tell you is that it involves a five-gallon bucket, a shower curtain I bungee-corded to two saplings about thirty feet that way, a composting protocol that I am genuinely proud of, and the complete absence of any dignity whatsoever. Moving on.”
this is the content I pay for, the chat said.literally iconic. And, from someone called MountainMammal88:wait she has a BUCKET CURTAIN SETUP?! she’s done this before.
“I’ve done this before,” Nellie confirmed cheerfully. “Eight times, if you’re counting chain actions specifically. Twelve if you include the non-chain variety, which I personally think deserve their own category because they require a completely different skill set and nobody ever gives them enough credit. You want to talk about the mycorrhizal network?”
The chat did want to talk about the mycorrhizal network. Or at least they were willing to be talked at about it, which was close enough. Nellie spent ten minutes on the fungal threads running beneath their feet—the way Eleanor was connected to the younger trees around her, mothering them through the soil, parceling out sugars to the ones in shade, sending chemical distress signals when something was wrong. The part that looked like nothing. The part that was actually everything.
I’m literally crying about a fungus, said someone called perpetually_offline.
“That’s the correct response.” Nellie giggled. “Fungus is awesome! I love fungus.”
