malaise*lithium

        Today I went to a state park and hiked up along Eagle River. I circled back over the stony ground through groves of Aspens. The ground sounded hollow; there were stiffened tracks in the trail. Although it was after noon, the sun was barely above the mountains to the south. The persistent haze of the past several days still clung to the draw and scattered the shadows and hushed the sounds of the birds and of the water.

         I was once told, when driving through miles of Aspens in Utah, that they are distinctive in that they grow in colonies. The root systems of the trees grow together and shortly become one living thing which outlasts any individual tree. I was told the trees we were driving through were as perhaps eighty thousand years old. The network is deep enough that the colony can survive even a harsh fire. Afterwards the roots send up new stalks and the colony carries on. Water and nutrients can be transported from on end of the network to another, and disease can spread through the roots the same way. In effect, the colony becomes one organism, stronger than a single tree in many respects, and vulnerable in as many others.
         It was eerie, thinking of this today. The slender trunks surrounding me like feelers; I felt as if I were walking on the belly of an upturned insect, and the drone of the silence began to sound like the overpowering hum of a gigantic metabolism. The creature reached from my boots all the way down to bedrock. It stretched from the mouth of the mountains miles away to the valley floor. It inhaled what I exhaled. I was watched by a thousand eyes which were one eye. My footsteps were recorded and reported miles away. I was a famous intruder.