Enjoying the climb

I've never been much of an outdoorswoman (what with the appreciating the marvels of indoor plumbing and all), but there's something compelling about adventure tales of people exploring and encountering the farthest reaches of our world. Hence the latest pick, Richard Preston's The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring.

As any fourth-grader worth his natural-history salt can tell you, California redwoods are at the pinnacle of tree life - they don't get higher than this. Despite the fact that their imposing size is enough to give even non-acrophobes the heeb, a few hardy students and researchers decided that it would be nifty to climb these things and see what's up there. What they found is a fascinating and entirely unknown ecosystem that still isn't fully explained.

Non-fiction is at its most appealing to me when it's paced like a novel, with a strong narrative thread and clear themes that tie the whole story together. Anyone can pull together a dull recitation of facts (including a fourth-grader doing a report on redwoods), but not every author can make the facts flow and sing. Preston, thankfully, falls into the latter camp - what could have been something on the order of, "and my seventeenth most favorite lichen is...." instead grabs you immediately and pulls you into the narrative of discovery. Perhaps most significantly, it inspires as well - suddenly the wilds of northern California and southern Oregon are much higher on my list of places to visit one day. I kind of like the idea of standing next to something that was alive when Gutenberg first brought us the printed word.