The Hour of Blue

At the moment, it’s raining in the forest. Or anyway it’s drip­ping. Up there above the taller trees, it may have stopped rain­ing hours ago–sometimes it’s difficult to tell.

A lot of people would call this jungle. Which is a word better for fantasy, loincloth romance, as far as I’m concerned. I prefer forest–a place defined by trees. That’s the way it is here, the trees are everything. Underneath, the soil lies thin, not as fertile as you’d think for all that grows. Overhead, the climate rages, but the wind never touches the soil, and water reaches it only by seeping and dripping through the layers of canopy above. Lush as the place is, without the trees the rest of it would vanish, turn to grass and rock.

Much of the time now, during wet season, I wait inside this tent the color of the sea. The tent walls are moist, luminous, turning everything aquamarine and brightening the color of my skin. It’s a shade soothing to the eyes, good for daydreaming. I’ve grown used to living in this tent. I drink strong coffee, eat fourteen varieties of fruit, and wear clothes badly stained by mildew.

Clouds roll over this region of Earth just as elsewhere, but you have to climb out of the valley or trek down to the river to see them. They are disconcerting clouds–ragged, hungry–though we’ve discovered their chemistry is more elemental, not so poisonous as back home. Of course, all that is changing.

As always, the trees are under surveillance. They are marked and, according to the latest government plan, will be put to use. I remember X telling me that certain rare lubricants in our satel­lites come from the trees in these forests. But that isn’t why men cut them down. The men are after paper. And land to grow bananas.

It doesn’t matter how deep into the forest you go. You can travel for days. You listen and you can hear them. The saws, the bulldozers, chewing up the forest. The way you do it–you put both hands on the trunk of a sapucaia, your ear to the soft bark, and squeeze. The sound pours out like honey. You can hear them. It sounds crazy, I know. But it’s true. I learned it from Amelia, the molecular-biologist sorceress. She’s expert at that sort of thing.

What most startled me here at first were the insects–the size of birds, some of them, and colorful. Like robotic specimens of folk art, they move through the forest on legs and wings in kaleidoscopic orbits, buzzing, searching for things to devour: plants mostly, or one another. However, one tiny species of fly here hovers outside the tents and in ambush along the trails. If it catches you in an unguarded moment, it will dart in and drink the fluid on the surface of your eye. When this happens, you see only a shadow and feel nothing. The little fly is as fast as it has to be and can avoid blinking eyelids like a child jumping rope. It is harmless, but there are other species deadly poisonous. Some of them very beautiful. One learns to live by such congruences. Death and beauty, in exquisite combination.

This rain forest, our refuge, has for a time become our world. We have nothing to complain about. We walk the trails, venture into broadleaf vegetation lugging recorders and microscopes, like gigantic and erudite ants, foraging for information. Rose­ lighted evenings around rude tables we dine quietly on roots and beetles and nectar, and afterward bathe in the river. A part of the weave now. It is more than enough for us, this world.

And now, as if we needed the excitement, it is a world at war. Again this morning we were awakened by helicopters, the seventh morning in a row. Always around dawn, the hammering whir that seems as if it couldn’t get any louder, though it always does. All the more menacing when you can’t see the sky.

By some romantic twist, they call themselves Air Cavalry. The mechanized mounts of the beige police. The hounds of hell, Amelia calls them. Dropping canisters, gas, incendiaries–burn­ing hillsides, valleys. All, incredibly, in pursuit of us. What do they imagine they’re accomplishing?

Every week, out spurts another expedition. Search units, they’re called. They sweep eagerly after us down networks of trails, unsuspecting, hurried along in file as if by peristalsis, to disappear, dissolve in vegetation like so many granules of light brown sugar in the lining of some vast green stomach. They have no idea what they’re up against, what it is they’ve declared war against.

Even now, sometimes, I wonder at my being here. Working, hiding in another land, an outlaw in my own. Though, certainly, my situation is incidental, unimportant. What matters is this thing that is happening, this new thing that has come to the world, pouring over it like a song. Arising from the forest floor to neutralize the metal air of cities.

Think of it as a transformation. Or, better, as the correction of an error. An erasure.


Listen. Last November, though it was drowned in the wake of livelier news, an odd, forlorn little press conference convened at ERRSAC, that federal agency whose activity it is to watch the Earth from the sky-by satellite. In a room much too large, a somewhat tall man, flustered in a brown suit, his hair not quite successfully combed, fielded questions from a handful of bored, amused, or otherwise distracted reporters. The man was Dr. Ralph Sinclair. Some of what he said was this:

It is the first time in the Center’s history that we find forest cover actually increasing over the surface of the planet. This is surprising. We see no apparent reason for it. And no ground truth confirmation yet to speak of, no trees sprouting up overnight in anybody’s backyard Put it another way, it looks a bit as if the forest is sneaking up on us. We have no good idea why.

What the reporters failed to appreciate, so that the story bare­ly made it to the wire services, was this fact that Dr. Sinclair was trying to report–a fact powerful enough in that man’s estima­tion to ignite a sustained electrical hum along the surface of his medulla oblongata.

The aggression of forest.


There are no precise beginnings. If this were a movie, I’d open with one of those photographs of our planet that have been captured by foil-suited men exploring the moon. Earth, the lumi­nous blue-green sphere. That would make a good thematic point of origin. It reminds me, too, of my own precipitous fall into this chain of events, which occurred barely a year ago on another rainy morning.

This was in the black, unlikely corridors of Government Cen­ter, a labyrinthian complex of civil service buildings in Augusta, capital of the state of Maine. I worked there–a systems design specialist, in computers, attached by some thread of bureauc­racy to the Forest Service, Aerial Photography Section.

On that morning I was piecing together satellite images, as I routinely did, on the black tile floor of a corridor in Hall Build­ing. The building–named after the pioneer of American geology–dated from the 1930s. Its corridors were architectural show­ cases in the style of the WPA. Spacious, finished in art-deco black granite, marble, and brass. But where I worked, they were dead ends now, made useless by rearrangements of office space that the architect hadn’t foreseen and by the installation of new elevators at the opposite end of the building. No one walked in these corridors anymore, but the janitors kept the floors im­maculate. So I used them as work space for laying the blue and­ red satellite pictures that were supposed to be monitoring the state’s forest.

I’d expected the same old story that morning, a quick look at the data to make sure things were running as they should, all systems go. But suddenly now, instead of the usual pictures, I found myself confronted with features I’d never seen before. Terrain so unfamiliar, it might as well have been mapped from the moon.

A janitor by the name of Roger, who’d shown an interest in my work in his corridor, caught me making faces at the floor. He stopped, leaned on his broom. A chance to talk.

“How’s it look today, Amos?” he said. I shook my head.

There was silence. He would wait patiently for an explana­tion.

“It looks wrong;’ I said. “Very wrong. There’s something weird going on.”

“With the forest?” Roger bent his neck around, trying to recognize woods in the garish blue-red mosaic of the satellite images. “How’s that?”

I nodded at the floor. “It’s a little hard to see, until you know what to look for. They’re using infrared, invisible to human beings.”

Roger stared at the floor. ”Appears plain enough:’

“Computer puts that color in. Like a translation, into some­thing we can understand.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “So what’s wrong with it?”

“You work with this stuff awhile, you know pretty well what to expect.” My eyes went back to the satellite images. “The pat­tern’s all wrong.”

Roger’s gaze followed mine. “What pattern?”

“Well, it’d be hard to describe.”

I tried to think of an analogy. “Let’s say one day you walk into your living room. OK? A thing you’ve done–what?–thousands of times. Say you’ve got your coffee and your newspaper and you sit down. “

“I don’t drink coffee,” Roger cut in, not wanting to get off on the wrong foot. “Stimulant.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. You come in, you sit down in the same place you always sit, and you look down at the floor. And what do you notice? The design in the carpet is suddenly different.

Roger the janitor, staring straight at me, suffered a little spasm of disbelief.

“The living room carpet, the one you’ve known for years, all of a sudden looks different.”

“So what you’re saying…. what, Grace bought a new one?”

“No, uh-uh, same exact carpet. But the design in it–a design you know like the back of your own hand–it’s changed. No rea­son for it that you can see. It’s just changed.”

Roger looked back at the satellite pictures. He smiled. The smile of one confronted by a riddle. “Pretty unbelievable, huh?” He shook his head.

“Well, that’s like what I’ve got here.”

After awhile he said, “Satellites.”

I glanced at him.

“I suppose,” he said, “you look at the Earth from way up there, you got to expect some surprises.”

Later I dragged a stool out into the hall and sat for I don’t know how long, contemplating several year’s work gone awry. The thing was, even then I had the feeling. The problem wasn’t the system. Not my algorithms,. or the computer, or NASA’s equipment.

It was as I had told Roger. There was something going on with the forest.


Aerial photography.

“Airplanes allow us to look at entire forests without the trees getting in the way.” So says the narrator of a little film entitled Faces of the Forest. We used to show the film to visiting school­ children and legislators.

The truth is, I didn’t know much about forestry when I en­tered the Forest Service, in headlong flight from Massachusetts computech, by which I’d felt sorely used. I didn’t know much about aerial photography either. It didn’t seem to matter.

“I wouldn’t worry about it;’ said Justin Sprague, chairman of the State Forestry Planning Committee and my principal inter­viewer. His attention was buried in my dossier, leaving the bald crown of his head confronting me like an unformed face.

He rose from his desk, walked over to the window, parted the venetian blinds. “I wouldn’t worry about it;’ he said. “That’s my job, to worry. That’s what I’m paid to do. Your job’s the com­puter.” His voice slackened, wistfully. “They keep it over there across the lawn, inside that gray building looks like a convent:• He remained gazing out the window, a pensive silhouette, spewing a lengthy, inexplicable silence.

I waited in a chair by his desk in the posture of one being in­terviewed, legs crossed, eyes trying the room. There was some­ thing about it–Sprague’s office–that had a little of the effect of a museum. Something calling for retrospection. I felt drawn into another age, dark with varnished wood and languorous centuries of government, the scuttling echoes of bureaucratic process­ men and women in the daily, inertial, unexalted service of paper.

Sprague returned to his desk, stood with his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know what your idea of Maine is,” he said. “A lot of folks from away, they think it’s quaint, primitive here.”

“I was born in Maine,” I said. “I grew up here.”

“I know you did. I know you did.” He waved away this digres­sion. “But let me tell you, the technology we employ for trees here couldn’t be more up-to-date. Maine values its forest.”

I voiced approval, recrossing my legs.

“Don’t get me wrong:· His hand slashed the air. “We’re no wiser or nobler than any other state government. The forest here is measured in dollars, and in the numbers of human beings it employs and entertains. As far as the government is con­cerned, trees themselves have no status.”

Justin Sprague, apparently, liked trees.

He sat down, hands clasped on his desk, and looked straight at me. “Anyway, aerial photography–it’s a misnomer. We don’t work from the air anymore and we don’t take photographs. Surveillance now is remote sensing. We’ve gone from black-and­ white to color and from color to infrared. Started out with biplanes and now we’re in satellites, NASA’s LANDSAT program. Instead of a camera, the satellite uses a multispectral scanner, beams back visible light and infrared. Goddard’s computer gets a hold of it, turns it into what looks like an aerial photograph with a gaudy suit of clothes:·

He reached to the corner of his desk and unrolled a blue-red infrared map, held it up for me to see. He craned his neck around appraising the thing himself.

“Ugly, but they sure do the trick. Five hundred seventy miles out in space, we get images sharp enough to trace a forest road a few feet wide. Military satellites are even better, they can spot the porcupine crossing the road.” He shrugged. “Anyway, that’s what they tell me. I’ve never seen the military data.”

“All of which is fine.” He leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head. “Only problem is we’ve got a problem. Aerial photographs have been gathering in our files from before the day you were born. I could show you some in the map room go back to the nineteen-thirties. And now the satellite shots fall­ing on us like snowflakes. We’re photographing every god­ damned acre of the state from the air once every nine days.”

Sprague stood up again, went to the window. “The long and the short of it, the Maine Forest Service is getting buried alive in its own information. Which is where you come in. I want to stick the whole shooting match into a computer, bring forest manage­ment in this state into the twentieth century.”

He turned, looked me up and down. “We can’t afford to make a half-assed project out of it, have a system screwing up every time our backs are turned. What we need is a computer wizard, not a forester with a fistful of FORTRAN.”

I cleared my throat, told him I was his wizard.

“Well, that may be,” he said. “It’s a cinch you’re no forester.”

So I began the job, heading “Project MONITOR, under a certain pressure. After years of abstraction in college and the profit mentality of industry, I was delighted to see computers applied to something as tangible and down-to-earth as trees. Even more than the geographical move, programming a computer in the service of the forest seemed like a return home. I liked Sprague. I was determined to make his project a success.

Never mind what Sprague had said–there was a lot I needed to learn. Each evening after work I visited the State Library, a five-minute detour over the lawns and parking lots of Govern­ment Center. The Library’s holdings on forestry seemed endless–forest ecology and timber management, climatology, micro­biology, entomology, remote sensing–one thing leading to another. For over a year I bootstrapped this way, and gradually I began to feel more connected to my new profession, less an out­sider. Given time, I felt, I could even become expert.

In theory, my task was simple. Department files held a satel­lite record of the forest, going back some nine or ten years. From this, I needed to create a model of the so-called “normal forest, accounting for changes in season, climate, and so on. In the dream of the Forest Service (which they called the Master Plan), the computer soon would manage state land automatically. Satellites were envisioned as sensors in an early warning system against disease, insects, drought, overtimbering. If the state’s timberlands were in any trouble, the Service should learn about it in plenty of time.

So much for theory. In practice, I was looking at the real world. A computer model is always a paradox, a map of restless, multifarious nature etched on banks of digital circuitry. On-off, open-closed, silicon, copper–with ingredients like these I was trying to duplicate a hackmatack in autumn, a maple without rain.

I worked long days at the terminal, often into the night. And eventually it began to appear as though the effort hadn’t been wasted. Within a year and a half, I was sure I was in touch with something. Through the media of graphs, numbers, and signifi­cance tests, tentatively a kind of dialogue was forming.

On certain days, when the atmosphere of Hall Building had reached a critical density, I’d find myself driving out of Augusta to walk alone in state parks or along remote roadsides. There in the woods, I felt uniquely intimate with the trees, whose bark I had been prying for months with algorithms. From my numer­ical vantage point, I’d learned things about the forest that perhaps no one else in the world knew.

Around the end of my third year there, the Planning Commit­tee issued a report. Project MONITOR, it said, was “near opera­tional.” Just about everyone seemed satisfied. The northern coniferous forest was about to enter the computer age.

Posted 1 Year Ago