PLACES I FREQUENT, WORDS I LOVE
These are the places I return to time and time again. On aspens, this excerpt says it best:
A passage from
by Richard Powers
"She gets out of her car and walks up into the trees on the crest west of the road. Aspens stand in the afternoon sun, spreading along the ridge out of sight. Populus tremuloides. Clouds of gold leaf glint on thin trunks tinted the palest green. The air is still, but the aspens shake as if in a wind. Aspens alone quake when all others stand in dead calm. Long flattened leafstalks twist at the slightest gust, and all around her, a million two-toned cadmium mirrors flicker righteous blue. The oracle leaves turn the wind audible. They filter the dry light and fill it with expectation. Trunks run straight and bare, roughed with age at the bottom, then smooth and whitening up to the first branches. Circles of pale green lichen palette-spatter them. She stands inside this white-gray room, a pillared foyer to the afterlife. The air shivers in gold, and the ground is littered with windfall and dead ramets. The ridge smells wide open and sere. The whole atmosphere is as good as a running mountain stream.
Patricia Westorford hugs herself, and, for no reason, begins to cry. The tree of the Navajo sun house chant. The tree Hercules turned into a wreath, the one he sacrificed, when coming back from hell. The one whose brewed leaves protected native hunters from evil. This, the most widely distributed tree in North America with close kin on three continents, all at once feels unbearably rare..."
"...these fifty thousand baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they're a day. She wouldn't be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around the for the better part of a million years.
That's why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres. The thing is outlandish, beyond her ability to wrap her head around. But then, Dr. Westorford knows, the world's outlands are everywhere, and trees like to toy with human thought like boys toy with beetles."
- Richard Powers
.jpg)
