By JUDE TAIT
A small child weeps as parents bury a bunny in the backyard. Hastily planted petunias stand vigil under a clouded sky as the tiny body disappears beneath the earth. The child can still feel the warmth of the bunny’s belly, can still smell the familiar comfort of its fur. But now there are no more ears to stroke, no more droppings to clean, no more tears to shed. The funeral is over. All is gone, returned to dust.
Two months pass and the child will dig up the bunny and find nothing but bones. What was once a choking grief has become a morbid curiosity. As black grave dirt and tiny white tibiae slip between fingers, the child wonders: Why can’t we live forever?
Seventeen birthdays and three bunnies later, the child has become a premed student on the cusp of graduation, and perhaps maturity. While an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex may lend itself to such misfortunes as four failed relationships, three nasty blackouts, and one broken arm caused by unmentionable circumstances, this student is not a slacker. Far from it. After countless sleepless nights and grueling labs and unforgiving internships, the student has finally found that most elusive of things—purpose. Becoming a doctor is a long-awaited dream, a means to pursue the burning question that has rattled about in the mind since all those bunnies ago: Why can’t we live forever?
But progress is rarely linear. A promising postgrad position falls by the wayside, and the student is stuck. Sitting at home, trying to ignore the unsolicited advice and disapproving sighs of parents. Sometimes all it takes is a whirlwind romance with a chance-met drifter to sweep a disillusioned twentysomething-year-old off the feet and further horrify authority figures, which is indeed the whole point.
Thus the bio grad becomes the beatnik, uprooting to the redwoods (birthplace of the “bad influence” paramour) after a transformative road trip west in a banged-up blue Subaru Crosstrek. Falling into a circle of fellow mavericks brimming with zeal and camaraderie, quoting Thoreau and Butler and Simard, is the easiest decision of the grad’s young life. Falling in love with the brilliant bohemian with the warm eyes and dimpled smile is easier still. There, in the glorious evergreen cathedral at the edge of America, the two are wed with the wise and ancient trees as witnesses. A marriage that will never see a courthouse record but is devotional all the same. Joy overflows, and for perhaps the first time, the specter of death is forgotten for a brief but beautiful instant.
Sequoia sempervirens, the redwoods are called. Their branches reach for the sky, and their roots—deep and vast, unimaginably old, intertwined with fungi—are the immortal lifeblood of this place. Here, the young couple and their companions swap stories by firelight and sleep beneath the stars, and everything feels perfect and right. Like it would never end. “Sempervirens—it means to live forever.”
It is authority—anathema to freedom—that returns to tear apart their forever with a cruel and brutal hand. Rumbling bulldozers raze the earth, and chainsaws fell the giant sentinels of the woods. The friends, cloaked in and armed with righteous anger, strike back with protest songs and civil disobedience and, eventually, sabotage. Navigating by the light of a mournful moon, the young couple deface and disable the beastly machines of their enemy and from that moment know no peace.
A scattered resistance boils into a full-blown conflagration of logger and activist, a back-and-forth of fury that cuts deeper than any knife. Someone calls the police, and the National Guard arrives. Helmeted, jackbooted men and women in camo toting assault rifles, opposite a cluster of young adults in sweat-stained t-shirts and colorful bandanas. The redwoods can only watch in silent anguish as the shouts and screams swell, a discordant symphony with hatred as its conductor.
All is a chaotic haze of tear gas and terror. The Captain of the Guard, a family man with a salt-and-pepper beard, six months away from his pension, is barking orders when something hard nearly splits his skull open. A rock. Who threw it? From where? It doesn’t matter. In that moment, the Captain doesn’t remember his wife’s embrace or his daughter’s giggle or the smell of his famous fresh-baked bread. All he knows is hate, and hate, and hate. The Captain’s roar sounds above the cacophony—”get the hippies!”—and the once-tranquil forest explodes with gunfire.
It’s all over in an instant. The young couple collapse, one in a red heap and the other in disbelieving, then agonized, shock. There’s so much blood and it won’t stop it won’t stop it won’t stop. The onetime top student who could’ve made for a fine doctor curls up on the forest floor, heaving with retching sobs, and pleads in a silent scream to the universe: Why, oh why, can’t we live forever?
The confrontation in the forest results in no prison time for any of the activists involved. Nor does it for their killers. Little consolation is achieved by the paltry settlement money or the protracted agreement by the logging company to leave that sector alone. The student never would go on to become a doctor, instead devoting the many years to come to the defense of wild places, even as they slipped slowly away.
In the span of one lifetime, the human race would come closer to answering the eternal question than ever before. The diligent research of doctors and biologists would eradicate cancer in nearly everything but name. Laser-printed heart transplants extended life by decades. AI-planned economies proved to distribute wealth and feed the world better than the likes of Marx ever could have imagined. It all came at an indescribable cost. The Sequoia sempervirens, who had watched over the wilderness for eons, were all but gone. Having been born into a planet of plentiful natural beauty at the advent of the 21st century, humanity was forced to reckon with its wrenching loss by the century’s end.
Yet, life goes on. Despite believing it would never be possible, the aspiring doctor-turned-conservationist falls in love once more. The hollow emptiness of nature’s disappearance is abated somewhat by the beautiful innocence of children. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that these children are birthed into a brave new world where death is drawing its last breaths. Without death, what meaning had life? Was the triumph of conquering mortality worth the price of entry to immortality? The question was no longer why, but what, would it truly mean to live forever?
Writer | Jude Tait ‘28 | vtait28@amherst.edu
Editor | Clara Chiu ‘27 | cchiu27@amherst.edu