The Wild Trees
by Richard Preston

This is a love story – a passionate love story – of people for trees.  Not just any trees – we're talking the tallest and biggest trees in the world.  We're talking redwoods that reach 35 stories above ground and grow mainly in one area of the world – southern Oregon and northern California near the sea.  But I wouldn't have read almost to the end by now if it had just been details about the trees, fascinating as they are.  Richard Preston, a climber himself, has captured the wonderful society of tall tree climbing fanatics who find, name, climb, study, and fiercely protect these trees.  The two in the photo – Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine – are seriously famous in their world today, like gods.  Their story is told from their childhoods until they meet and merge their lives.  We also meet their delightful friends and colleagues, who all find life in the forest canopy high above earth the very best place to be.  Thanks to them what little remains of our old growth forests is loved and guarded for the future.  Where I'm reading now, the author himself has taught his children to climb and taken the whole family to Scotland to climb some rare trees there.  Here is one paragraph about his daughter:

"Laura said she wanted to learn more, so I took her to the tree-climbing school, where she learned how to skywalk and, at thirteen, became the youngest certified tree climber in the history of the sport.  With the instructor Tim Kovar, we climbed a giant tulip poplar tree in the mountains of north Georgia that has a cave inside it.  The mouth of the tree cave opens ninety feet above the ground.  Laura climbed in through the mouth and rappelled down twenty feet through the center of the tree.  She came out into a room inside the tree, where a hole looked out into the canopy, like a round window.  'I kind of thought it needed a bell and a sign that said THE WOLERY,' she remarked (referring to Owl's house in Winnie-the-Pooh)."

For more photos and facts, visit here .  I've been having this fantasy that I would like to videotape myself reading this book with my children and grandchildren, chapter by chapter, as a memento for them to keep all their lives.  It would be the perfect choice.

Fieldwork
by Mischa Berlinski

My current book is a novel that at first I didn't think I'd take to, but it's grown on me and now I can't wait to see how it all turns out. The narrator is a journalist who gets swept up into doing what is called "fieldwork" to discover why a female anthropologist who was herself doing fieldwork in an obscure Thai hill tribe has committed suicide in a Thai prison where she was sentenced for murder. His own fieldwork consists of backtracking through all the people in her life and following the trail from her birth to her death to unravel the mystery of how it all went down. Here are a couple of sentences from the page I'm on now:

After lunch, the villagers dozed. The pigs rooted in the mud and then, having dug themselves comfortable wet beds, stretched out; the dogs found quiet places under the houses and lay their flea-bitten heads on their worn paws; the chickens pecked industriously at slow-moving  bugs; lazy clouds gathered together slowly in preparation for the afternoon rainstorm; the bullocks were tethered and dozed in their traces; water slithered down the bamboo pipes and dripped into the ceramic cisterns; the clang of the blacksmith's hammer petered out; the last woman pounding rice or grinding corn stretched her arms out, yawned, balanced her basket on her hip, and wandered home. This was Martiya's favorite time of the day.

The author is 35, studied classics at UC Berkeley, and has been a journalist in Thailand like the narrator in this, his first, novel. I'm totally impressed with his eye for detail and character description.

This economy thing is making me nervous. For one thing, I haven’t spent much of my life studying things like interest rates and sub-prime mortgages and the stock market and such. There are lots of folks out there with more money (and some with less) than I have who do though, and they must be nervous too. Just got my year-end statements from my two tiny investments (a 403B and a tax-deferred annuity). This year they only earned about 2% each and lost money this last quarter (they’d been doing much better in previous years). That’s worse than having the money in a simple savings account at the bank. I thank my lucky stars that when I bought the one and only house of my life in 1994 I picked fixed interest rate, not variable, because that’s apparently where lots of home-owners screwed up. So I keep hearing now that Bush has some fancy big stimulus package he’s proposing, but if you think that means that in April or May you’ll get $800 in tax rebates, think again. Workload issues at the IRS would prevent the mailing of rebate checks until after the peak tax filing in late May or early June. And then it could take 8 to 10 weeks to distribute the checks so we’re talking late summer. And even then, I’m totally suspicious that this incentive plan is really about making more bucks for his rich corporate friends. Not that I won’t love to have any amount of $ he wants to send me. Maybe it will help me pay my oil bill that month (which just increased from $70/month to $129/month). Or maybe my health insurance which just increased by 37.5%. Meanwhile my pension and social security income cost-of-living increases this year amounted to a whopping $56/month between them. So I’m scrutinizing my miniature budget more than ever before and hoping this is all a bad dream I’ll wake up from. Voluntary simplicity is a grand idea, I just didn’t want to be rushed.

Wait, there’s no crying in primaries! Yesterday, I was mystified to see Hillary Clinton tear up when asked about her reasons for trying to be President. I totally had a mixed reaction. On the one hand, I could instantly imagine what delight her opponents would have with such ammunition. Major sexist attack fodder. On the other hand, for a minute she seemed like one of us, a human. I’m one of those undecided voters who is still watching and hoping for something underlined and in bold to happen that will flip my switch. I’m sure I’ll vote for whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be, but in the meantime I’m not convinced yet - no, not even with the popular Obama and his wonderful speeches. I’m so cynical I could even imagine those tears being planned. But I hope they weren’t. I’d like to see a few on some of those male candidates’ faces, in fact. Not bloody likely though. Not in public anyway. On to South Carolina.

Saturday was the first day of Winter, today is the eve of Christ’s birth, and tomorrow my two children and two grandchildren will be in my house, all together for a few hours for the first time in months. I wish you and them a peaceful holiday and new year. My own spirituality is a mix of insights and values found in all religions. Like our bodies are made up of cells, I believe I am one cell in the body of god and all the answers are within me if I can listen carefully enough.

Here is a quote from Fra Giovanni, a 16th century Italian monk:

I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not;
but there is much, that, while I cannot give, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.
The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take Joy.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.