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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
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Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
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Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
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Up a Tree
Richard Preston '76 goes to great heights for a
story ...
By Bruce Reynolds
LOOK UP INTO THE TREES ON RICHARD PRESTON’S
FREESTONE FARM, NEAR PRINCETON, N.J., AND
YOU’LL SEE THERE’S BEEN SOME SERIOUS
PRUNING GOING ON. PRESTON NEEDED NO TREE
SERVICE TO DO THE CUTTING. HE DID IT HIMSELF.
“I’m a competent, skilled climber,” he says, though he adds
that when he’s suspended from ropes and twirling a buzzing
chainsaw, “my wife won’t look.”
Preston ’76 learned to climb recreationally in an Atlanta
school, and heard whispers about an almost mythical man who
climbed giant trees in California. After repeated attempts to
induce the secretive, reticent Steve Sillett to give him access,
Preston still had to convince Sillett and his Northern California
colleagues he was good enough to climb with them into the
canopy of California’s giant coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens,
which can grow to 370 feet. The climbers had no intention
of allowing him to ascend with them. “I wasn’t in their
league” as a climber, Preston admits, and nor did he understand
the specialized technique they employed.
 Preston persisted, and the result was his most recent book,
The Wild Trees, published in April. He follows the small, dedicated
band of botanists and arborists—and one unlikely acrophobic
who obsessively tracks the tallest redwoods, but won’t climb
them—as they map, examine, practically live in or near the
declining population of the planet’s tallest trees. Once he established
contact with his subjects, the real work began. In determinedly
following his project’s progress from idea to completion,
Preston showed why he is a titan of creative nonfiction
writing today.
The author of seven books (two are fiction) and more than a
dozen articles for The New Yorker, Preston gets inside his subjects’
heads, and their lives. His writing is as much about curiosity
and effort as it is about laying out the story, and he has a
technique he adheres to: reporting, researching, writing, rewriting.
He is careful with every step. “It’s journalism,” he says.
The best-selling author isn’t certain where his ideas germinate.
“You’re constantly looking for new ideas,’’ he says. “They
bubble up in your unconscious from things that interest you.
Then you can decide to pursue them.” Curious and intelligent,
he tries “to find subjects who are completely off the radar screen,
but who are doing interesting things, and write about them.”
Once an idea registers, Preston zeroes in on his key sources,
filling dozens of notebooks with the things they say and do,
descriptions and observations. He calls what he does “experiential
(or immersion) reporting.” He participates in the stories he
writes, so he understands the subject and relates to the people
who are at their core. “I try to dig deep into their experiential
reality,” he says. “That means when someone is in the redwoods,
I have to learn to climb redwoods.”
For The Wild Trees, he waited until the climbers were away
from their home one day, then carefully mapped out the gear
they used to reach the heights. He returned to New Jersey, and
had similar equipment fabricated for himself, then taught himself
to climb as they did, practicing in the trees on his own property.
To research his best-known book, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying
True Story (1994), which tells how a strain of the Ebola virus
came to the U.S., Preston gained access to a Level 4 “hot lab”
at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There he donned
a biohazard “space suit” and actually handled tubes of “hot
agents” that were known to be fatal if there were contact with
the skin or respiration.
As Preston hovered above the deadly virus, his space suit zipper
split. With air rushing out from the pressurized suit, Preston
asked his guide, “Hey, do I have a problem here?” The epidemiologist
quickly clamped shut the suit by hand and hustled him
out of the hot lab. There was no contamination, because of the
out-rushing air, but it was a near thing.
That’s getting close to your work, and it reflects Preston’s
desire to know his subjects’ lives or work microscopically. Later,
he would describe in ominous detail what happened when Col.
Nancy Jaax experienced a breached suit. The Hot Zone launched
Preston on a galvanizing three-book
journey that he calls
his “dark biology series” of
best sellers. The Demon in the
Freezer (2002) examines smallpox
and anthrax, and his novel
The Cobra Event (1997)
follows a forensic pathologist’s
investigation of a suspected
bioterrorist plot.
For his creative nonfiction,
Preston reconstructs vivid scenes,
allows the subjects to speak to
each other through recreated
dialogue, foreshadows important
events and relates memorable
anecdotes. And he supports it all
with solid, verifiable, even pitiless
reporting. Along with copious
notes, he also took hundreds of
digital pictures as he scaled the
redwoods in California and giant
eucalyptus trees in Australia’s
Hume Plateau with Sillett, Marie
Antoine and others. He used
these photos to help construct
and describe scenes, as when he
noted the “indescribable, profound”
expression on Antoine’s
face, as her husband, Sillett,
climbed out of her sight in a
risky tree. “You can see her emotions
right there,” Preston says.
Preston’s writing process is just as rigorous as his reporting.
“I begin drafting my book,” he says, “and the early drafts stink.
But gradually, through many rewrites, I structure a book, hash
it out.”
The author says his readers deserve stories that are meticulously,
even obsessively, fact-checked. “I call my subjects back,”
he says, “checking and rechecking scenes and trying to bring in
intimate details. Nonfiction writing features interior monologues.”
He spends “days, weeks,” on the telephone during this
phase. How does Preston recreate the things people thought? “I
ask them what they were thinking,” he says. “In a moment of
high drama or tension or fear, people will remember.”
Preston then takes that material and “really deepen(s) the
narrative, until it reads like a novel, though it’s nonfiction.”
Then, he turns his work over to a fact-checker, who re-interviews
everyone. This, he says, “makes the book cleaner; it’s the
due diligence.”
Even when Preston finishes his final draft, there’s plenty of
work left to do. He gives it to his book editor, Sharon DeLano,
who goes over it with a fine-tooth comb, doing both line editing
and structural editing. “She’ll tell me to reorder whole sections
or paragraphs, and she’ll change a comma.” Eventually,
from the jalopy Preston describes as
his starting point, a fine-tuned mechanism
emerges. “I want to deliver the
readers a Ferrari,” he says.
When she heard that Preston disparaged
his drafts, his editor at The
New Yorker, Amy Davidson, wrote,
“I certainly wouldn’t describe his
drafts as jalopies. Richard is a pleasure
to edit. He is able to evoke entire
unknown worlds—the redwood
canopy, the workings of a virus, or
even the mental landscape of great
mathematicians—in a way that almost
no other writer can. Part of that is
the reporting work that he puts into
every story, but other writers
wouldn’t be able to do what he
does even if they were handed the
same notebooks.”
Preston works in a white 18th
Century farmhouse on his property,
only about 30 yards from the house he
and his wife Michelle built. The farmhouse
acts as a guesthouse, office and
also, in a small downstairs room with a
view of the fields, a storage area for his
climbing gear. Several trees around his
farm have permanent climbing ropes
descending from their tops.
Sitting in a teak Adirondack chair
and watching rain clouds building to
the south and west, Preston receives a
call from Davidson at The New Yorker. She says his next piece
for the magazine, “An Error in the Code,” about a rare genetic
disease that compels people to cannibalize their own bodies, will
run the following week. An expanded and retitled version of
that article is set to appear in his next book, tentatively titled
Blood Kiss, arriving in 2008.
The Wild Trees may have sidelined him for a time. But
Preston’s interest in dark biology is, apparently, incurable.
Bruce Reynolds teaches journalism at Rutgers and Drew universities,
in New Jersey. |
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