Aspens & Redwoods
There is nothing quite like sunlight filtering through the canopy of a redwood forest, unless it’s sunlight filtering through an aspen grove in autumn.
They both take light and paint with it. It’s hard not to allow the result to pull up the corners of your mouth. You don’t have to remember to look up while walking through the forest because a part of you knows the brilliance will be gone within days. The peak of leaf color is like sunshine in its purest understandable form. When you hold an unblemished coin of an aspen leaf in your palm, you know you’re holding the color of the actual sun in your hand.
Funny, then, that the fall’s color change is technically the opposite of bloom. It’s the withdrawal of life-giving chlorophyll and a nestling into winter sleep. But that last burst of delicious color is like a sip of lemonade or fingers brushing across your cheeks.
The redwoods pull light through their consistent greenery and reflects it off the red pigment of their trunks. They have a grounded, earthen quality where the aspens are more solar. They are unmistakably grand and seem immovable even by the force of the wind. If you sit still you can hear the branches rustling, of course, but in the way of an ancient, foundational creature merely rearranging its hair. Not the younglings of the aspens fluttering this way and that and bending to whatever storm will pass through tomorrow.
Aspens exist in stands so closely tied genetically they are considered one organism. They speak to each other through their roots, sending nutrients and help where lacking. They use the others in their network to sense the dangers and deficiencies and use their collective power to as a remedy. They seem young, even though their DNA may be shared by ancestors over a thousand years. Maybe that’s why they give off tenderness especially in the leaves they will soon lose. Maybe that’s the reason behind the vibrancy, because they know it won’t last.
When redwoods die, their massive trunks lie decaying as “nurse logs.” On their surfaces grow tiny mosses and baby ferns and saplings of their own kind. These logs are the creche of the forest and through their gradual transformation into soil they nourish those who come after.
In their light, aspen and redwood forests are both astonishing; in their existence they are both helpful. They are the bringers of exquisite, chromatic sunlight but they are also the bringers of exquisite, enervated connection among the forest’s inhabitants.
These two forests both root into the fragile layer of ground covering Earth’s rock. They both go through the cycle of seasons even though that looks different for each.
And every now and then, they both contain some humans looking up in wonder. Staring out in awe, bathed in the yellow light of the sun filtered through their branches.
Finding themselves altogether different than they were upon entry.
Inspired by events in the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park of Northern California and the Wasatch Range of Utah.