"Yes," she says, a quiet smile pressed to her lips, and I'm thinking about that, about our life together as it stretches out before me, a pale wind-torn sun in the windows, voices roaring around us, and I can't help wondering just what it's going to be like. We could live another 25 or 50 years even. The thought depresses me. What's going to be left by then?

"You're not eating," she says. A dozen kids—children, babies—run bawling down the aisle, ducking under the upraised arms of as many waiters. They are infinite, I am thinking, all these hungry, grasping people chasing after the new and improved, the super and imperishable, and I stand alone against them—but that's the kind of thinking that led me astray all those years ago. Better not to think. Better not to act. Just wave the futilitarian banner and bury your nose in a glass of sake. "Mine's good," Andrea says, proffering a forkful of pus-yellow catfish basted in salsa. "Want a bite?" I just shake my head. I want to cry. Catfish.

Her voice is soft, very low, so low I can barely hear her in the din: "You know"—and she's digging through her purse now, a purse the size of a steamer trunk suspended from two black leather straps—"I have something for you. I thought you'd want it."

What do I show her in response? Two dog's eyes, full and wet and pathetic. There is nothing I want, except the world the way it was, my daughter restored to me, my parents, all the doomed and extinguished wildlife of America—the white-faced ibis, the Indiana bat, the margay, the Perdido Key beach mouse, the California grizzly, and the Chittenango ovate amber snail—put back in their places. I don't want to live in this time. I want to live in the past. The distant past.

The rustle of paper. It's a manuscript. A book. And the title, suddenly revealed, stares out at me from beneath the cellophane wrapper of the cover:

MARTYR TO THE TREES:
THE SIERRA TIERWATER STORY
BY APRIL F. WIND

I already know how it ends.

Sierra set the record. Set it anew each day, like Kafka's hunger artist, but, unlike the deluded artist, she had an audience. A real and ever-growing audience, an audience that made pilgrimages to the shrine of her tree, sent her as many as a thousand letters a week, erected statues to her, composed poems and song lyrics, locked arms and marched in her name. In all, she spent just over three years aloft, above the fray, the birds her companions, as secure in her environment as a snail in its shell or a goby in the smooth, sculpted jacket of its hole.

In the beginning—in the weeks and months after Climber Deke's frustrated effort to dislodge her—the timber company initiated a campaign of harassment designed either to bring her down or to drive her mad, or both. They logged the trees on all sides of her, the screech of the saws annihilating the dawn and continuing unabated till dark, and all around her loggers cupping their hands over their mouths and shouting abuse. At night they set up a wall of speakers at the base of the tree and blared polkas, show tunes, and Senate testimony into the vault of the sky till the woods echoed like some chamber of doom. They brought in helicopters, the big workhorses they used for wrestling hundred-foot logs off of remote hilltops, and the helicopters hovered there beside her tree, beating up a hurricane with the wash of their props.

They tried starvation too. The hired goons established a perimeter around the grove and refused to let her support team in. For three nights running, in the company of a loping, rangy kid named Starlight who haltingly confessed that he was in love with my daughter and wanted to marry her as soon as she came down from her tree, I lugged supplies in to her, and for many more nights than that I wandered the dark woods with a baseball bat, just praying that one of those foul-mouthed sons of bitches would try to make good on his threats. Sierra was unfazed. They couldn't intimidate her. "Don't worry, Dad," she whispered one night as she descended as low as she dared to collect the provisions we'd brought her (Starlight straining against gravity from the top rung of an aluminum ladder while I braced him from below). Her face glowed palely against the black vacancy that was her tree. "They're scared, that's all."

Finally Coast Lumber backed off and the support team returned, more determined than ever. By this point, Sierra had begun to take on the trappings of the mad saint, the anchorite in her cell. 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. 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 EF! rank and file. 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.

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 wood smoke 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 4:15. 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—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.  

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of 12 works of fiction, including The Tortilla Curtain and Riven Rock. This story is adapted from his new novel A Friend of the Earth, which will be published by Viking in September.