The first night, the night I drove up there to rescue her from the storm, her very first night in the tree, I was so disoriented I couldn't have found her if she were standing behind the cash register of a 7-Eleven lit up under the leaves. I stumbled around through the graveyard of the trees while the wind screamed and the branches fell. It was a relief when I finally found my way back to the car and wrapped myself up in Andrea's mummy bag. The morning wasn't much different from the night that had preceded it. Rain fell without reason or rancor, an invisible creek blustered somewhere nearby, the car settled into the mud. I pulled on cold wet socks, wet jeans, wet boots, and a wet T-shirt, sweater, and windbreaker, and went off to find my daughter. This time I walked straight to her tree.

There were eight redwoods in her grove, two conjoined at the base and blackened by the ancient fire that had scarred the trunk of her tree, and the forest of cedar, fir, ponderosa, and other pines was a maze of trunks radiating out across the hillsides from there. Except to the west, where the skin of the earth showed through and there was nothing but debris and stumps as far as you could see. This grove was scheduled next, and my daughter—if she was alive still and not a bag of lacerated skin and fragmented bone flung out of the treetops like a water balloon—was determined to stop the desecration. I was proud of her for that, but wary too. And afraid. I leaned into the wet, dark trunk and peered up into the sky—her platform, the shadowy slab of plywood lashed across two massive branches with nylon cord, was still there. I pushed back from the tree to get a better angle, blinking my eyes against the fall of the rain, and saw the bright aniline-orange flash of her tent trembling in the wind like a wave riding an angry sea. She was there. She was alive. "Sierra!" I shouted, cupping my hands.

A gust shook the treetops, and Sierra's tree quaked till I could feel the recoil of it in my feet. I looked up and there she was, her face a distant, drawn-down splash of white in a welter of rocketing green needles. And then her voice, buffeted by the winds and assaulted by the rain, came drifting down like a leaf: "Dad!" she called. "Dad!"

My heart was breaking, but she was smiling, actually smiling, if I was seeing right—and even in those days my eyes were nothing to brag about. "Sierra!" I called, feeling as if I'd been turned inside out. I didn't want her up there. I wanted to be up there with her. I wanted to bomb Coast Lumber, neutralize their heavy machinery, throttle their stockholders. "Honey," I shouted, and my voice broke, "do you want to come down?"

It seemed as if it took an hour for her answer to drift all the way back to me, the tree quaking, the rain thrashing, my heart like a steel disc in the back of my throat, but her answer was no. "No!" she cried, cupping her thin white hands round her mouth to make it emphatic. "No!" And the message fell with the rain.

I was her father. I knew what she was like, heard the determination in her voice, the fanaticism: She wasn't coming down, not today, and there was no use arguing. "Tomorrow maybe?" I shouted, my neck already strained from flinging my head back to gape up at her. "Till the storm stops, anyway? You can always go back up—when the weather clears!"

Again the answer drifted down, this time in a long-drawn-out bleat of protest: "Nooooo!"

All right. But did she need anything? "Do you need anything?" I shouted.

In time, she would need all sorts of things: a chemical toilet, books, magazines, art supplies, a cell phone, fuel for her camp stove, a special harness so she could descend to 30 feet like a big pale spider and conduct the endless press interviews her crusade would generate. But now, on the first morning of her life as an arboreal creature, an evolutionary oddity, a female Homo sapiens of breeding age whose feet never touched the ground and whose biological imperative would have to wait, she needed nothing. Except a favor. "Can you do me a favor?" she called out of the drifting white flag of her face.

"Yeah!" I shouted, digging at the back of my neck and pushing away from the tree for a less inflammatory angle. "Sure! Anything!"

"Take these," she called, and suddenly two objects, oblong, pale gray and streaking white, came sailing down out of the tree. It took me a minute to identify them, even after they landed separately in the duff not more than two feet from me. Thump, came the first of them, and then the second, slapping down beside me with the sound of finality. They were her shoes. Her shoes. Her running shoes, walking shoes, walking, breathing, and living shoes, the very things that connected her to the earth. But she flung them down to me on that first morning, because she wouldn't be needing them, not anymore.