The aura of trees inspires author

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When he lived in Palo Alto, Calif., author Richard Powers hiked the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains.

“I actually loved to go up into those mountains and hike because it was a quick and easy way to escape that go-go culture of Silicon Valley. It’s a fascinating place. It has really created the present and it’s busy at work creating the future.”

On one of those treks, he encountered a 1,000-year-old California redwood and that experience inspired him to write his latest novel, “The Overstory.” Mr. Powers will read from his book and answer questions at 8 p.m. Monday during a free event at City of Asylum @ Alphabet City, 40 W. North Ave., North Side. His 2006 novel, “The Echo Maker,” received the National Book Award for fiction.

Mr. Powers has seen plenty 100-year-old California redwoods, but this particular specimen dwarfed him.

“This tree was as wide as a house and as tall as a football field,” the writer said during an interview from his home in the Tennessee foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. “When you see something like that, it immediately becomes clear what those old-growth forests must have looked like.

“Silicon Valley was down there because these trees were up here,” he said. “They gave this place its start. They gave people the resources that they needed to launch this civilization, this outpost on the West Coast. I had never really seen that story — that story of men and trees.”

“The Overstory” dramatizes in rhythmic, vivid prose, the long-standing conflict between human beings and their natural surroundings.

The novelist was surprised to learn that 95 to 98 percent of America’s original old-growth forests have been cut.

“That flabbergasted me,” he said.

He visited an old-growth forest in the Great Smoky Mountains after learning it holds “more tree species than there are in Europe from Portugal to the Baltic States.

“Old-growth forests,” Mr. Powers said, “look different, sound different and smell different. The biodiversity is incredibly rich.

“I’m no stranger to walks in the woods, but to walk through regrowth up into these ancient old-growth forests and to see what an Eastern forest looked like, not only before Europeans came, but almost all the way back to the Ice Age, 9,000 years ago — my jaw dropped. I couldn’t stop looking. I could not stop looking.” He left California. “It got under my skin, and I ended up buying a house and moving [to Tennessee] just to be close. And that’s where I’ve been living for the last two and a half years,” he said.

“Meaning is not inside you. It’s out here,” he said. “It’s in the relationship between you and these other living things. Every child starts out as a scientist, as an explorer, as someone who is infinitely curious. They know when something is fascinating and complicated and alive. And they’re interested.”

Unfortunately, he added, “We are training them on handheld machines.”

To have your name added to a waiting list for a free reserved seat visit: http:// www.alphabetcity.org/ events/richard-powers/.