The Forest Breathes Out

The tower stuck up out of the trees like a thin metal finger, and at the top of it there was just enough room for Soren, his aunt Dele, and a box of instruments humming to themselves in the heat.

It was not raining. That bothered him.

It had rained every single afternoon since he arrived, at almost the same time, the way a bell rings for class. Yesterday Dele had laughed and said you could set a watch by it. But the sky this morning was clean and empty and blue, and the air felt wrong on his skin. Thick. Held.

"There aren't any clouds," Soren said.

"Not yet," said Dele. She was crouched over a sensor, not really listening, tightening something with a small screwdriver. "Give it time."

Soren opened his notebook and looked at the forest instead. From up here it was not a bunch of trees. It was one green thing that went all the way to the edge of the world in every direction, breathing heat up at him in long slow waves you could almost see.

That was the part he kept circling back to. You could almost see it.

Over the far trees the air shimmered, the way it does above a hot road. But this shimmer was rising. Lifting straight up off the canopy in shaky columns, like the whole forest was steaming.

"Aunt Dele. The trees are smoking."

She glanced up, followed his finger, and smiled. "That's water. Each one of those trees is pulling water up out of the ground through its roots and letting it out through its leaves. A big tree can breathe out hundreds of liters a day. Multiply that by a few hundred billion trees."

Soren tried to multiply that. His head ran out of room.

"Where does it go?" he asked.

"Up," she said, and went back to her screwdriver.

Up. He wrote that down, and then he sat with it, because up was not really an answer. Up was where the question started.

He watched the shimmer climb. It did not just disappear. It gathered. By late morning there were small flat smudges of white forming above the steaming patches, exactly above them, like the forest was writing on the sky directly over each breath.

That was the thing that did not fit.

Clouds were supposed to come from somewhere else. From the ocean. From weather that traveled in from far away and happened to arrive over you. That was what weather was. It came to you.

But these clouds were not coming from anywhere. They were being made. Right here. Right above the trees that had breathed them out.

Soren stood very still on the platform.

"The forest is making its own clouds," he said.

"Mm," said Dele, which was the sound she made when she was concentrating and when something was true.

He needed more steps. He always needed more steps. So he laid them out loud, one at a time, to the trees, because there was no one else up there who would let him.

"The trees breathe out water. The water goes up. It turns into clouds. The clouds get heavy." He stopped. "And then it rains."

He waited.

"And it rains on the trees."

The same trees. The exact same trees that had breathed the water out in the first place. The water came back down to where it started, soaked into the ground, went up through the roots, out through the leaves, and up again. A loop. A loop with no outside. The forest was drinking its own breath and breathing its own rain.

"It's a circle," Soren said. "The forest isn't in the weather. The forest is the weather."

Dele put the screwdriver down. She looked at him properly now, the way adults do when you have caught up to something they forgot was amazing.

"There's a name some scientists use," she said. "They call the river of vapor that comes off this forest a flying river. More water moves through the air over the Amazon than flows in the Amazon itself down on the ground. The biggest river here is invisible, and it runs through the sky, and the trees are the ones pumping it."

Soren wrote flying river and then could not write anything for a moment because his hand was not steady.

"Where does it go?" he asked again. "The flying river. Does it just go in a circle forever?"

"Some of it," Dele said. "But not all. The wind catches part of it and carries it out. South, mostly. The rain that falls on farms two thousand miles from here, on cities, on places that have never seen a single one of these trees, a lot of that started as breath right under your feet."

Soren looked down at the canopy, at one tree in particular, an ordinary one, breathing its quiet column of water up into the blue.

"So if the trees weren't here," he said slowly, "it wouldn't just stop raining here."

"No."

"It would stop raining somewhere a person had never even heard of this place."

"Yes." "Aunt Dele," he said. "How many people know this?"

"More every year," she said. "It took us a long time to even think to measure it. We assumed the rain came from somewhere else. We assumed the forest was just sitting under the weather, getting rained on like everyone else. Nobody thought to ask if the forest was making it."

"Why not?"

She shrugged, and there was something almost embarrassed in it. "Sometimes the biggest thing is the hardest to see. You have to be standing on top of it."

The first drops came at noon, exactly on time, fat and warm and loud on the metal roof of the platform.

Soren held his hand out past the edge of the shelter and let the water collect in his palm, and he looked at it, this small warm puddle that an hour ago had been breath, and he tipped his hand and watched it fall back down toward the trees that had made it.