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+The forest has eyes.
+
+Trees full of eyes. They watch. They shimmer. They shake. They know.
+
+We're 8,000 feet up the side of a mountain in the southeastern corner of Utah. Our tent is crowded in by white-barked, black-eyed aspen trees. The tangle of roots is so dense there's no room for the tent stakes. Crammed in a tiny stand of lumpen, but grassy ground, we put the stakes back in the back tie the tent off to the trunks of trees. 
+
+Above us a cover of glimmering green teardrop leaves quake at the slightest whisper of wind. You can trace these tiny flows of wind through the shuddering leaves, slipping and sliding around like the ghosts of children running and laughing, pursuing some unseen trail through the air.
+
+The sun rises early here even in late September. I'm up before dawn, creeping out of the tent, shivering and fumbling, trying not to wake my wife and children as I make coffee in the dark, standing a few feet from their heads. One day I pulled it off, no one wakes up. I take my coffee and sit on the massive trunk of a fallen aspen, watching the red orange light of the sun race across the dusty silence of the distant desert plains. A line of light slowly works its way up the mountainside to where I sit. That first blast of light and faint warmth. The day begins. 
+
+I can see the grass by my feet now. A few minutes later the white trunks around me burn with orange light. The leaves shimmy in the warming air. The forest shakes off nighttime drowsiness, welcomes the sun. The tree tops sway with the rising wind, leaves ruffle, a reedy voice moving through the forest like a tremor.
+
+We're here because two decades ago I stood on a picnic table and snapped a close up photograph of the "eye" of an aspen tree. I processed it into black and white and used it as a kind of talisman on the internet. When I website asked for a profile photo, I fed it an aspen tree. Pretty soon everywhere I went on the internet, there I was, a singular eye in a tree. The more I stared at it the deeper I feel into it. Somehow, I felt intertwined with that aspen. I considered trying to find the same tree. I dug up old maps, talked to the girlfriend who was with me at the time, but I was unable to narrow it down much beyond central Utah. I decided I needed other aspens in my life. We headed for southern Utah.
+
+The word aspen comes from the Greeks, aspis, "shield."  Shields that watch you. Watch over you? 
+
+There are three species of shields left in the North America. Around us are Quaking Aspen. All aspens shake in the slightest of breezes, sometimes when there's no perceptible breeze at all, which is where the Quaking comes from in the name. It can be unnerving at times, a forest full of shaking leaves. Especially when your shaking forest also has the distinctive eyes that aspen trunks bear, the places where branches have dropped from the trunk as the tree grows. 
+
+The aspen arrives somewhere in the middle of the forest succession cycle. Sometime after the grass and small shrubs have done the hard work of improving the soil. The aspens thrive until those first pines begin to steal their light. Then they wither and disappear, but they rarely leave completely, even when the visible evidence of them is gone. Once the lowland hills and mountains of the western United States were awash in aspens, the shudder of leaves murmuring through valleys, across the wetter, greener plains that stretch to the east of my coffee drinking perch. Today aspens are less common. Most grow in the northern regions of the United States, Montana, Idaho and especially as one of the early succession species in the northern arboreal forests of Canada, where they're joined by the their distant cousins the birch. Some aspens still manage to hang on in Colorado, and even Southern Utah, like the stand we’re camped in now.
+
+Aspens have been declining for a while, but they've really suffered over the last century. It's getting warmer, which they don't like. And humans have radically decreased the number and size of forest fires, which they do like. Aspens thrive after a burn and are later crowded out by pines, spruce and fir, which all outstretch the Aspens and steal their light. Aspens survive the fires that destroy pines, spruce and fir and then minute the earth has cooled they're coming back.
+
+Aspens are limited by their one requirement to thrive -- sunlight, lots of sunlight.
+
+It's possible this is the source of my affinity for them. I too need light. My body is chronically low in vitamin D, a nutrient most easily made when you spend time in the sun. Put me inside, or in dark, grey places, and I wither like an aspen overshadowed by a spruce. 
+
+Aspens are clever though, more clever than I. They don’t "die" even after they've been crowded out by the taller species like spruce and fir. Instead they just stop existing above the soil. A stand of aspen is considerably different than the trees around it. Aspens are rarely individual trees. Instead they grow like rhizomes, like giant white asparagus. Aspens are not really trees, the trunks we see are not the soul of the plant. The truth of Aspens is under the ground. They are massive root systems, some as large as twenty acres, that send up white trunks, which then sprout leaves. But even the leaves aren't necessary. Beneath the striking white bark is a there’s a thin photosynthetic green layer that allows the plant to continue synthesizing sugars even without leaves. Winter means little to an aspen grove.
+
+Death also means little to an Aspen grove. The one we've been camping in for a week now is of indeterminate age. I could find no reference to it ever being measured. It's remote national forest land, in our two weeks there the only thing approaching authority that we saw was a water specialist who tested the water from the one faucet in the middle of the campground. I asked him how the water was. He asked how long I was staying. 
+
+He didn't know of anyone studying these aspens, nor did he have any idea how old they might be. There is a grove a few hundred miles to the north of us that's know as tk and is over 80,000 years old. Some believe it's much older than that even. 80,000 years is staggering.
+
+Trees are intelligent. Mystics, occultists and gardeners have known this for millennia, science has been slower to get there, but it is getting there. Among the revelations of the past decade is good hard evidence that the forest talks. Trees talk. They talk to each other, to other plants, to the soil, to the bugs eating them, possibly even to birds, animals, and humans who bother to listen. Trees talk mainly with chemicals, but that doesn't make the conversations any less real. 
+
+What this means is that there's an at least 80,000 year old intelligence sitting somewhere up in the Utah hills. So far as I know no one has attempted to talk to it, though I would assume the researchers who studied it.
+
+and no one is trying to talk to it. It's very likely, even if we could find meaning in its language, that we would have no idea what it was saying. What would you know after 8,000 years? What would you have seen? What would you understand? How would you see the world? Tk is watching the 280th generation of humans to have lived since it was born. It's understanding of human life would come from work on a scale many of us might find unsettling.
+
+age
+
+the restless shifting of great passenger pigeon flocks. 
+
+aspens, birch, age, tendrils lacing through the earth, sensors of vibration, an intelligence 8000 years old, what would it say? What could it say? What is there to say over time spans so massive? If you want speech you have to die, maybe you could stretch it out two or three hundred years. Perhaps some a thousand, but after that words would break down, there would be no way to convey. I think of people who went too far into any one thing, their minds came back shattered mirror shards reflecting a world you can tell is beautiful and perhaps a little frightening, but reassuring too, but never fully communicable. 
+
+They haunt the halls of institutions, the newspaper piles under freeway over passes. I learned to use chopsticks from a man who'd been somewhere and never fully come back. Somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam or Indiana or Washington DC, depending on which version of the story he was telling. Crazy people get labeled that but they aren't, not most of them. Most of the ones I've spent time with were just tell stories either at odds with the primary story of our time or sideways to it in some way that made them incompatible with it. but if you spend time with them you can find that patterns in their stories, the internal logic of it, these things will rarely vary. Of course we seldom spend enough time with such people. They tend not bath much and rant without listening and hide behind wall of necessity. I read too much Tolstoy too early in life and have consequently never minded crazy people. Unless I need to get somewhere on time, if your pressed for time crazy people are the worst because few of them understand time in any meaningful way, they've been cast culture and consequently out of time. There is nothing to do thirty minutes from now, there is no thirty minutes from now there is only now and before now. I used to sit downtown Laguna Beach where a number of homeless people gathered to spend their days begging for change, collecting cans and otherwise trying to come up with a bit of cash for alcohol and cigarettes. I was young, a friend and I would sit around in the evenings playing bad cover songs for fun, trying to convince ourselves that if we could play out here we could play anywhere. People would drop change on the guitar case. We gave it to the bums, which made us a lot of friends in a hurry. One day some do-gooder came by with a bunch of Chinese food from a restaurant up the street, one of the sort who believe that they know what people need and they don't need more drink and cigarettes. I was indignant about the whole thing, but Steveo, the most talkative of the bunch that hung around, shushed me. "Free anything man, never complain about free anything. You don't want it, pass it on." The woman handed me a box of Chinese food before I could stop her so I took Steveos and advice and said thank you. I sat there with the little white and red box all warm in my lap, wondering what Tolstoy would have done. The woman had given me a pair chopsticks, but I was looking around for a fork because I didn't have the slightest idea how to eat with chopsticks. Finally I asked Steveo, who made sure he was one who ended up with the plastic bag full of napkins. I had already learned that what the homeless value is not often what the rest of us think they value. Napkins, toilet paper, towelettes, were all surprisingly coveted. I asked Steveo for a fork and he stared at me like I was insane. I remember it so clearly because it the only moment that entire summer I spent hanging around with him, that I ever heard silence coming from him. It wasn't more than a beat or two, but he stopped talking and stared. And then launched into a story about the Vietnamese regugee he met on leave in Bangkok who taught him to use chopsticks. He never asked if I needed to learn, he never remarked on the fact that I didn't know now, he just launched into a story, complete with demonstration, which after twenty minutes or so had me using chopsticks to eat cold, greasy show mein noodles. 
+
+
+
+
+
+I planted a risom once, asparagus. It beguiles you with this notion of never ending production, renewal, rebirth, food forever. All lies. Mine grew spindly and tough, like cordage, something you could rig a tall ship with, anchor a backstay, perhaps flog a sailor drunk at his post. Certainly nothing so frail and tender and purple green delicious as the picture on the curious sack of roots, the root ball the package called them, that arrived in the mail two days before. 
+
+It was winter, a cold, grey, premature dark winter afternoon. I was sitting at the desk where I used to work, looking out over the two hugelkulter mounds we sometimes called a garden. I was dreaming of spring, of light green aspargus soup with a gentle sprinkling of mint leaves, warm crusts of bread dripped in olive oil and salt, all of eaten outside on the porch in the warm sunshine and shade of Magnolia flowers and Iris blooms, the sort of half drunk midwinters dream that will make you do dumb things, like pull on a jacket and stumble out in the cold bleakness looking for a shovel.
+
+I turned the soil. Half rich red Georgia clay that lurked everywhere beneath the suburban infatuation with sod we inherited when we purchased the house, and half a dark loamy peat that came in bag from the home supply store, now sodden with rain and overrun with ants carrying little white beads I figured were eggs. Can't ruin dirt I reasoned and picked up the plastic bag gingerly by the top corners. I walked fast and managed to carry it over to the garden without too many ants scurrying onto me. 
+
+I picked a spot up against the fence and started to dig. The air was cold and dry and the skin on my knuckles split easily when I swung the shovel too close to the chain link fence. 
+
+I tossed in the knot of roots, trudged around the house to the back door where I took off my muddy boots and promptly forgot all about apsergus, spring and anything that might have hinted at warmth.
+
+It was the last time I seriously tried to garden, to bend nature to my will.
+
+"And even the most silent must sing a song of love"
+
+
+[^1]: This number is larger than the generally accepted 20-25 years for a generation, but is based off Nancy Howell's work with the Dobe !Kung, a contemporary hunter-gatherer people of Botswana and Namibia living somewhat akin to how all of humanity lived until roughly the thirteen century, and therefore a good average to use for deeper dives into the past. I took Howell's averages, 25.5 for women, 31.8 for men and averaged them to come up with 28.65 years to a generation.