 Photos: From richardpreston.net
: Top: Author Richard Preston in the forest canopy 310 feet up a
redwood called Poseidon. Bottom: Botanist Marie Antoine 310 feet up in
a redwood called Adventure.
Richard Preston's new book contains some important lessons for
writers. Preston is an accomplished storyteller, and his biological
exposés The Hot Zone and
The Demon in the Freezer are riveting. His latest book The Wild Trees
is the story of the young men and women who have, recently and without
much support or acclaim, discovered a phenomenally rich ecosystem
within and atop the world's tallest trees -- the Coast redwood, Douglas
fir, and mountain ash -- by climbing them. It's an interesting story, since these
pioneers had to invent much of the technique and many of the tools they
use to climb these 350-foot giants, and the idea that the canopy of
these trees is so strong and intertwined that you can play in it like a
huge jungle gym (see top photo, of Preston, above, taken from his website).
Preston tries to create a sense of urgency for learning about and
preserving the thousand-year-old redwoods (which are 96% gone thanks to
logging) but this is a much harder task than the sense of danger and
urgency he taps so successfully in his earlier books about virulent,
infectious, largely unknown diseases. He also tries to create intimate
portraits of the pioneers, including Marie Antoine (lower photo
above). These characters are brilliant, courageous, dedicated and quirky, but (with due
respect) they aren't heroic enough to build a biographical story
around.
I'm an impatient reader, and I was just about to abandon the book
when Preston, about two thirds the way through, started a new and
personal thread. It seems the unassuming Mr Preston has become,
himself, at about (I would guess) twice the age of his story's lead
protagonists, one of the pioneers in this quest, one of the few to have
scaled the tallest of the giants, both in California and Australia.
What's more, he has infected his teenage kids, his wife and even his
parents with his passion. Now there's a
story. What would inspire a successful author to so step outside his
comfort zone that he would take up a new, complex and dangerous hobby,
relatively late in life, and pursue it to the limit? And what is so
compelling about climbing trees that just about everyone exposed to the
opportunity to do so gets hooked on the hobby, to the point Preston has
to conceal the whereabouts of some of the trees, and information about
some of the more advanced techniques and inventions, for fear
recreational climbers will overwhelm the last remaining stands of 'wild
trees' and bring about their demise before this newly-discovered
ecosystem can even be mapped?
The answers to these questions are the story screaming to come out
of Preston's book, and, either out of humility or perhaps because such
speculation is outside his area of interest, Preston leaves them
unanswered. As I closed the book I thought immediately of biologist and
ultra-marathon runner Bernd Heinrich's semi-autobiographical Why We Run.
Heinrich's work is immensely educational and interesting precisely
because he tells his story in the first person; you can relate to the
emotions he feels as he discovers kinship with other creatures,
and he is more than willing to generalize from his own passion for
marathons to speculate on our universal penchant for movement and
speed.
Preston, ever so briefly, describes his children's fascination
with climbing. He tells stories about their astonishment and delight at
discovering that some of the creatures who live in trees (e.g. saw-whet
owls and flying squirrels) are so unaccustomed to human contact that
they are unperturbed by human presence in their tree-canopy homes,
coming right up to Preston and his family and even climbing over them.
What I would have loved to read is whether and how they overcame an
instinctive fear of heights, and whether his children have any plans to
do something with this unique new skill, in their own words. I want to
hear Preston's own story -- what led him to go to such extraordinary
and seemingly-courageous lengths, beyond the need to do research for
his book. I want to learn the basics of climbing, step by step, enough
to decide if it's something I want to do. The real story here is one of
personal discovery, challenge and transformation, and what it tells us about
ourselves.*
The other major lesson for writers (and publishers) is the fact that this is largely a visual
story. The book has some useful black-and-white maps and sketches, but
what Preston is describing is unimaginable, even with the help of an
excellent story-teller, without rich visual images. And in the 21st
century, there is no excuse for not providing them. Preston's site has
some excellent photos
that not only add immediate clarity and drama to his story, but also
introduce us personally to the climbing pioneers he profiles in a way
that no rich biographical information can do. Marie Antoine and Michael
Taylor, particularly, look nothing at all like how I pictured them when
I read the book.
The publishers could have put the colour photo spread inside the
book. But they could have done something even bolder and richer:
National Geographic is making a TV special based on Preston's book. The
book could be cued to images and video clips from the special, so that
the reader pauses at prescribed points and goes online for the next
clip. The resulting multimedia experience would have been amazingly
rich. The merging of online and print media could, just like Preston
and his brave climbers, have pioneered something rare, extraordinary
and important.
It's not too late. If Preston were to work with National
Geographic to do this, and add in some video clips of his family
talking about their passion for climbing and how it emerged, and some
video clips teaching us how to climb safely (just small trees will do), and
then sync this with a second edition of his book, I'd go out an buy
another copy just for the URLs of the clips positioned appropriately
throughout the book. And then this book could be as revolutionary and
eye-opening as The Demon in the Freezer.
Anyone currently writing, or thinking of writing, a book should
imagine the possibilities of enriching it with video clips, interviews
and other multimedia content. It is no longer awkward to have both a
book and the Internet at your fingertips at the same time. There are
things that a hard-copy book just cannot do, and things that only a hard-copy book can do. It's now possible to have your cake and eat it too. *Interestingly,
one of the major reviewers of the book takes the opposite perspective,
arguing that Preston should have kept himself out of the book entirely.
I can imagine the agonizing discussions Preston must have had with the
publisher! The reader has no idea until two thirds through the book
that Preston has become a world-class climber himself, a player in the
drama he has, until then, told exclusively in the third person.. |
MADE IN CANADA
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