The Overstory: Part 1: Roots—Douglas Pavlicek Summary & Analysis

One morning, the police arrive at Douglas “Douggie” Pavlicek’s tiny apartment in Palo Alto to arrest him. Douggie can’t help smiling as he’s being taken away—he’s participating in an experiment where he will be paid 15 hours a day to do essentially nothing. He is taken to the real police station, however, and then blindfolded and placed in a makeshift “prison,” where he is labeled as Prisoner 571. The nameless guards are already overeager with their clubs and perform several roll calls and “ritual humiliations” that night.

In the middle of the night, Douggie is pulled from his bed for another torturous roll call. He realizes then that this experiment is testing something more frightening than he’d been led to believe, but he still feels that he can survive for at least two weeks. On the second day, tensions escalate further between the guards and the prisoners. Soon, the guards are torturing those who rebel and throwing them in solitary confinement, strip-searching at random, and making even the bathroom a privilege. Douggie already starts to think of himself only as Prisoner 571.

Douggie now feels like he can’t survive two weeks after all. Another prisoner snaps and says he wants to go home, but per the parameters of the experiment, he cannot. Douggie can tell that the man is having an actual mental breakdown, and eventually someone takes him away—but the experiment continues. Everything gets worse, with the guards pitting the prisoners against each other and escalating the torture and manipulation.

A new prisoner starts to organize a hunger strike, and the guards punish him severely. They then announce that if anyone wants to give up their own blanket for the night, the new prisoner will be released. Douggie feels guilty about it, but because no one else gives up their blankets, he doesn’t either. That night, Douggie lies awake, wondering what would happen if this experience were to last for years, as it does for millions of people.

The next morning, some higher-ups arrive and disband the experiment. Everyone is allowed to go home. Only six days have passed, yet Douggie can barely remember himself outside of Prisoner 571. The “prisoners” are all indignant about what has happened and the suffering they’ve endured, but Douggie knows now that he must always see himself as someone who wouldn’t surrender his blanket to help a fellow person.

When Douggie returns to his efficiency apartment, he holes up, drinking and watching TV. He sees a program about the U.S. operations in Laos and decides to enlist. He knows the war is hopeless, but he also recognizes that “something is distinctly fucked up in the status quo,” and he just wants steady work for a while.

Years later and now in Thailand, Douglas Pavlicek has become a technical sergeant with the U.S. Air Force, flying planes loaded with barrier material and explosives. He still recognizes that the war is lost, but he prizes staying busy over “paying attention.” During the day, Douggie often forgets to drink water and passes out, but he gets drunk or high every night. The Thai people seem to recognize that they’ve backed the wrong side in the war, but Douggie only experiences kindness from them, and he is considering staying in the country even after the war.

One day, Douggie is making a routine flight to Cambodia when his plane is hit by a missile. They try to fly for a while on only one engine but then begin to go down, and a fire starts on the plane. Douggie knows they must drop their pallets of explosives or they’ll all die, and he works quickly despite the flames. He manages to drop all the deadly cargo, but then Douggie himself falls out of the plane as well.

The narrative switches to describe the birth of a banyan fig tree three hundred years earlier: how it was fertilized by a specific wasp, passed through the digestive system of a bird, and eventually took root. Centuries passed, and the fig grew massive. Its limbs became new trunks dripping down into the earth and finally became a grove of thousands of tree trunks, yet still all a single banyan tree.

Douggie is still falling through the air. In his panic, he accidentally discharges the gun strapped to his thigh, and a bullet tears through his leg. He screams and then crashes into the banyan tree, which has “grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall.” Branches cut him and tangle his parachute, and he ends up hanging 20 feet above the ground.

Meanwhile, a bus of pilgrims arrives to see the “divine tree” and the shrine set among its trunks. Just as the group approaches the shrine, Douggie crashes into the tree. The pilgrims scatter and then see the American hanging from the branches of the banyan. They cut him down and debate what to do with him. When he regains consciousness, Douggie first thinks he’s dead, but one of the pilgrims tells him that the “Tree saved your life.”

Douggie is driven to the city of Khorat, where his leg is treated, and then back to his base. All his crewmates have survived, mostly thanks to his actions, though his own leg is hopelessly crippled. Douggie himself is still mystified that he was saved by a tree. The Air Force discharges him, gives him a medal and a pension, and sends him back to California.

Nine years later, Douggie is in Idaho watching a horse ranch for a wealthy elderly couple. Winter is coming on, and Douggie spends his Saturday smashing potholes into the road that goes past the ranch just so people will have to slow down and maybe talk to him a bit. Otherwise, he spends all his time alone with the horses, reading to them and thinking about humanity. He increasingly believes that “the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.” At the same time, he recognizes his own need for affirmation from others—why he’s smashing potholes in the road, for example.

The next night, Douggie goes to Blackfoot, the nearest town, and drinks and gambles the night away. Then he returns and settles in for the long winter. For months he is completely alone, reading to the horses, whittling, and thinking about women. In spring he tries to go hunting, but he finds that he can’t pull the trigger. When his employers return in the summer, he politely quits and leaves the ranch, unsure of where to go next. He decides to drive west to Eugene, Oregon, where he has a friend.

Driving backroads through the dense forest, Douggie pulls over to use the bathroom. He steps through the first few rows of trees by the road and then sees daylight—the entire hillside has been brutally clear-cut. Douggie staggers across the road and checks the other side, only to find the same thing. He realizes that all the supposedly pristine forest he’s been driving through is just a façade, a thin veneer of nature to disguise the mass destruction happening behind it. At a gas station, Douggie asks the cashier about the clear-cutting. The man says that the thin curtains of trees are called “beauty strips,” and that the land is a national forest, not a national park, so it’s not protected at all.

Douggie keeps driving, growing increasingly enraged by both the logging itself and the successful trick of the “beauty strips.” In Eugene, Douggie pays for a ride in a prop plane, wanting to see everything from above. He is devastated by the destruction. When he returns to ground, he spends three days on his friend’s couch, depressed. Then he finds a job with a contractor, planting Douglas-fir seedlings back into the clear-cut lands. He vaguely knows that he’s just working for the same people who logged the forest in the first place, but he feels he has to do something to change the appearance of the ravaged landscape.

Douggie works for months, traveling the clear-cut zones and planting thousands of seedlings, sleeping in tree-planter camps with other quiet, isolated workers. As he works, he is overwhelmed by the smell of the cut trees, and he can hear the logging equipment working in the distance, but he is comforted to know that silent growth is also happening all around him. Douggie works through fog and rain, alone and with others. The tiny saplings look helpless amid the destruction, but he recognizes that if they survive, they can become giants. Douggie blesses his trees as he plants them, thinking, “Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. […] You just have to outlast us.”