“A hydrophone was placed in contact with the roots of a tree (or “stem”) in the Pando aspen forest in south-central Utah. The sound captures vibrations from beneath the tree that may be emanating from the root system or the soil. The recording was made during a July 2022 thunderstorm and represents perhaps millions of aspen leaves trembling in the wind. It was made by Jeff Rice as part of an artist residency with the non-profit group Friends of Pando [www.friendsofpando.org].”
-From Ecosystem Sound, https://www.ecosystemsound.com/beneath-the-tree
It sounds exactly like you’d imagine:
A breath. A heartbeat.
An immense door opening.
Twelve thousand years ago, while humans
were just starting to venture out of Africa,
in the Utah mollisol, beneath the tread of
bison and mammoth, a seed embedded itself.
Now, we know that trees talk. They send
distress signals through the mycorrhizal
network, warning of disease and insect
attack. Having heard the aspen’s song, it’s
easier now to imagine this vegetative
language, a vocabulary of fungus, stone, and
rain. Blades of grass conspire with
mountains, a single leaf trembling eighty
feet overhead whispers to its mother-node
thirty feet down. A million golden leaves.
Forty thousand stems. Creeping rootstalk,
laid end to end, could span almost half the
globe. Nodes spawn shoots, like galaxies
eternally expanding, colliding, dying. The
trees we see are stems, a clone army, whose
motto is I spread. Eventually, the Puebloans
will come with their kivas, understanding
that you have to descend to ascend, that
what lies beneath the surface can still touch
the sky.
Twelve thousand years of growing alongside
humanity. The Celts saw how its quaking
leaves seemed to shimmer in the wind, and
concluded that the tree must be touching the
world beyond this one. Most parts of the
aspen are edible. Roots twine through the
dead. We eat from the earth that cradles
sucker and bone. For eloquence, Druids
would have prescribed an aspen leaf under
the tongue. In the yellow grove, we listen for
the spirits to speak. Lay a crown of aspen
leaves at our gravesides to help guide us to
our necrodestination. Cellulose ties that
bind. Above or below, we are never alone.
Tree of ancestors, we climb.
Now, Pando is in decline. Because of us, of
course, and all we do. We took away water.
We took away fire. We took away wolves.
So, now, a titan must endure the death of a
thousand cuts, the insidious slow whittling
down by flat-molared herbivores, deer and
moose; tunneled into by long-horned beetles,
edged out by conifers. And even as Pando
thirsts, it longs to burn. Twelve millennia of
memory, and somewhere, a root harbors the
future, its final pulse and flutter, its final
exhalation. The door’s swinging shut.
