I drive south on Highway 89 through a series of small ranching towns while cattle graze in a high basin on the Wasatch Range. There’s an old farmhouse sunk into a bog, a Wal-mart in one of the towns. Local banks and credit unions, a few grocery stores, and numerous massive, lifted pick-up trucks with heavy treaded tires fill the parking lots of convenience stores—the social gathering point for many of these hamlets. These small towns are often my destination, sometimes for no other reason than I like the name, or that I’ve never been there before. I’m not looking for a diner when I go. I don’t imagine some sage wisdom I’ll receive, or enlightenment I’ll attain when I visit these places. There is no pair of old men in front of a mercantile whittling away with dull blades while they reminisce about a way of life long past. Rather my motivation to tour the West in a vehicle has something to do with time. Time and borders, if there must be a difference. I can’t exactly tell where the rangelands end and the towns begin, not until I see a small, green, one-word sign at the city limits: GUNNISON, or CENTERFIELD, REDMOND, SALINA. I pass all of these in succession as I head toward Fish Lake, but I’m not looking for Fish Lake, and on this trip I’m not looking for a quaint town. I’m looking for Pando, a colony of Quaking Aspen on the borders of the lake that is purported to be 80,000 years old, to be the largest and oldest living organism on the planet (though this is often contested). Unlike the string of towns, I’ll know the 100-acre plot of white-barked trees before I get there. From Highway 25 approaching from the south I’ll be able to spot the colossal copse on the hillside and discern a border of that being, at least I think so.
***
I don’t have my dog, Esmé with me because the muscles on her skull are degenerating. There is a dent on the left side of her forehead where her ear now flops, and her very prominent jaw muscle, also on the left side, is just a thin disc of sinew I can feel through her sagging skin. The heavy head of my pit bull is misshapen, like a fleshy bag of rocks. She’s also been epileptic most of her life and has had one knee surgery for a patella luxation and the ACL on her other back leg is blown—I can’t presently afford that surgery, and, frankly, I don’t know if it’s worth it. I’ll take her to the vet after this trip and he’ll tell me her skull condition is a myopathy, a kind of muscle swelling that, as he’ll describe it, actually sounds like an atrophied nerve cluster. Whatever the doctor can’t precisely describe can result in either a permanent slack jaw, if the muscle on her right side also goes, not allowing her to chew, to eat or, with treatment of very strong, immune suppressant steroids, lockjaw, also not allowing her to chew, to eat. The steroids might work, whatever that means—they might prolong her life, and with painkillers she might call back some glow of her previous disposition, but she will never resume that mass of muscle on her head. Right now she cowers at the sight of me, she scrambles, confused and frightened to the back corner of my yard when I step outside with her, and she shutters, squeals, and cries when I gently touch her. So for that, she’s not with me. Instead, I’m driving through these small towns and thinking about time. How much do we have left together, Esmé and me? Is she set to be bewildered and afraid of me, of everything, for her remaining days? Is that time worth it, and what is that worth? Money? Love? Undeniable and inevitable loss? She will die. I know this. As we all will. But while I drive away from her at 75 mph I’m imagining the last border of her living time, her death as an event, as a future I can see but only forestall.
***
I grew up with a Fruitless Mulberry in my front yard. I might remember when my dad bought and planted the tree, I might have simply conjured that memory from story, but when I asked him about it once he said, I bought that tree in a five-gallon bucket. So I don’t know if I remember that bucket, the inception of the tree in our yard, but I remember raking its leaves into piles as tall as a small child, climbing the crooked limbs, and jumping flat-backed into the heap only to have the wind knocked out of me in disappointment that the crunchy, dry mass didn’t support my fall. I held no real affinity for that tree while I lived with it—though I knew the low elbow branch up to the thin V and one more reach up to a sturdy perch where I watched the sun fall in the west during the summer. It was a tree, in the most generic suburban regard, and perhaps it’s familiarity, its commonality to my childhood, that makes me disregard that Mulberry’s importance as a singular entity. It didn’t have the swinging vines like the willow across the street, or the close-knit jagged branches of the lodge pole pine in my neighbor’s backyard where I could conceal myself from my parents when it was time to come in. In short, that tree never spoke to me as other trees do. It was an organic jungle gym that held meaning without emotional consideration or verbal regard. Now, as I write this, I love that tree a little more. Time, here, is a factor. As it always is.
***
Time is the calculable duration between two selected points. The two points, always of a human construction, are arbitrary. The earth is twirling around the sun, and the moon around the earth. These were perhaps the first arbitrary units of measurement, the inception of time. But the points in time need not be physical. A memory is a moment carved out of the seamless, indefinite expansion of time. So there is a tree that I once regarded differently than I do now. But the actions performed with and around that tree are ones that invariably shaped a cognitive and physical presence in my mind. Which suggests that the way I regard the tree in reverie and the way I did then both exist now, or the moment I regard as now. Here and then inhabit the same time-space. So I have always been indifferent to and adored the Fruitless Mulberry that my father bought in a five-gallon bucket.
***
It seems strange to admire one tree more than another. From a biological standpoint, humans should be most attracted to the plants that provide the most life. We’re drawn to berries and fruit bearing plants, edible and thorn-less shrubs, wind-breaking and shade-casting canopies, and those that simply look pretty. But as a single entity, Pando produces more oxygen than any other organism on the planet. There are fields of tropical grass and rainforest that, as a region, produce much more. But all 50,000 stems of Pando are one. All those shimmering yellow leaves are one. All the new suckerings and the 130+ year-old grandfathers are one—its rough translation from Latin is “I spread,” a veritable claim from one. The oneness of Pando is its paradox. It allegedly makes age dating possible—the area via rate of suckling growth—but its size, local environment, and meteorological epochs make it nearly impossible to determine. Pando is a male, meaning it asexually reproduces—suckerings spring out of the existing root system and can grow for over 100 years through adulthood and old age. Old and young stems grow simultaneously that to consider the age or inception of the colony is like locating a single drop of dye mixed into a lake. The oxygen it provides isn’t what’s important, it’s Pando’s size and age. Although the leaves changing color are splendid to look at, Pando’s beauty is its affirmation of the refutation of time.
***
I took Esmé to a vet when I returned home from a vacation with a friend in Ecuador after she scratched me awake, kicking and thrashing and her jaws gnawing on nothing only to awake exasperated and exhausted, wet with urine and huffing saliva through her jagged teeth. She had six seizures in the next four days but it was the second vet who noticed immediately that her small head nod, a new and permanent trait, was indicative of her epilepsy. He also told me that dogs’ brains work different than humans. While the self-preservation of the human subconscious tries to avoid the inkling of a seizure, a dog’s chases it like a ball. There was some glimmer of interest in Esmé’s secondary consciousness that her cognizant self didn’t know about and couldn’t recognize. For that, because she chased that dim light, she would be on drugs for the rest of life. She would be largely lethargic for the rest of her life, slightly over weight, downtrodden and, by appearance, forlorn—but she would not have seizures. They frightened her and she awoke from them dizzy and confused, often one eye cocked out, and ashamed of having soiled herself. For those watching her it was just outright confusion and fear. I kept telling them that you adjust to it, that the last seizure is always a little easier than the first, and that evolution of time is the only comfort the human is allowed. I know no science to suggest it, but if Esmé is contending with two self-consciousnesses, each of them in a life-death struggle, then that the space where her receded mind is constantly teasing the other might be an expanse of infinite time, a moment that what we know for this life is only a few spiraling minutes would be for her, a mountainside of green forest floor and a backdrop of aspens framing her in the late-dawn light.
***
I only have a couple days to spend at Pando, but one day, or two, or 1,000 doesn’t make a difference in comprehending the organism’s infinity and mass. I approach from the south and as I dreamily thought I’d be able to spot the colony from afar, I drive, road weary, for ten minutes under a flaxen crown before realizing I’m in why I came. I turn off the highway and drive for an hour up a 4x4-only road, slowly creeping over the black earth and exposed jagged rocks. ATVs and vehicles much like my own have worn away the dirt on these roads, so it’s a bit treacherous for my oil pan in parts. There are unimproved campsites every few dozen yards—this is the only place to camp without paying before entering Fish Lake National Forest—and the fire pits are fresh with black ash and piles of Pando firewood rest in neat stacks on the polychrome forest floor. I find a small clearing and park. In the valley to the West, cattle range in long green grass, the breeze grows to a gale and lets off, and there’s a crude 12x12’ structure built of fallen aspen to the east of the fire. It looks like a failed bivouac intended to weather an impending storm. I walk a footpath through the trees and run into a heifer and a yearling. They chew in big, sloppy circles and watch me turn off the trail and walk up, through the evergreen shrubs, to a couple trees fifteen feet or so apart and string up a hammock where I nearly walk over two whitetail deer. I sit perpendicular and swing with my toe touching the ground, keeping my cadence consistent and I start doing some simple math:
24 x 365 = 8,760
8,760 x 80,000 = 700,800,000
2/700,800,000 = 0.000000002853881
If I spend two hours in this sling, I’ll know 0.000000002853881% of Pando’s time. I’m lost in the assurance of scientists for that calculation. I can’t feel time here more densely than I can at a public park. But it’s quieter, and if I squint like Coleridge into the stems its leaves shimmer without a shape, in no definable order, as though it’s intentional, like this now is different than the rest.
***
I grew up with three dogs: Baby, a Cocker Spaniel who wasn’t allowed inside, who barked all winter in freezing temps while my brothers and I tried to chip the ice out of her water bowl—a black, bifurcated five-gallon bucket. Baby was gone one day when we got home from school, taken to the pound, deemed, by my parents, too much for four kids and two adults to handle. Then Missy, a six-pound Cockapoo who could be prodded to attack and bite my little brother, obsessed with my mom, and who was hit by a car while chasing my parents as they left for date night. And Jasmine, a Shih Tzu who lived to be 17 and incontinent when my parents put her down after she shit blood in the yard at 4 am. I loved all of these dogs, but now they are much the same to me—they are in the past. I know that’s not true, the past, as I climb the Mulberry tree and hide in the Lodge Pole Pine. I understand more clearly that loss is derived from devotion, that I enact arbitrary memories and associate importance to them because I can remember them. I’m convinced, admitted or not, that what I recall possesses more gravity than those slippery conjoined moments that sometimes appear in my thoughts as new. All of these previous nows are swirling around something (someone?), perhaps as moments alluding to the inception of an evolving identity. And now, with my dog thirty feet away from me in the yard, afraid to approach me, I see the future intrinsic to that cyclone.
***
As a species we’re obsessed with the past. There are animals that purportedly have immensely better memories than humans, but the tactile application of memory is never more prevalent than in the minds of we bipeds diverted from chimps. I don’t know how we test an animal’s knowledge of the past. The flight of birds over thousands of miles and many months as they land in the same location to rest, year after year? Or African elephants that unpredictably trek hundreds of miles across Kenyan desert into a cave 150 meters deep into the black-of-no-light for dark, white salt? These are memorizations, which is a skill learned from the past, and the independent blind walker and deaf dancer know this best. But we who see and hear draw on those shapes and sounds for guidance, maybe purpose. The human regard to call on the past for personal understanding is the foundation of our consciousness, sight and sound or no. Somewhere, someone getting the point—having that Aha! moment in human consciousness—is not received revelation or knowledge of the future. It is the future, in the past, enacted right now. For this, right now, when I consider my animal, I can’t give over to the future diminishing hurt of losing her as she’s here and already gone. I’d like to better know how to process a multitude of times.
***
I’m trying all of this in order to save my dog and because memory is a factor of time and I am most closely associated with Esmé, I have the most memories of her, I have the best chance of preserving her. So I consider her life in whose course there is an abundance of repetitions, and I enact these moments from the practice of caring for Esmé her whole life and explaining them to others, as is the way with pets. I will never again hike downhill in snow without her, because she loved to run beyond her capacity until she finally tumbled down the soft, cold hill. A three-inch-deep stream will always give way to her passively drinking and drooling, but five inches deep will touch her belly and call her back to shore. On the hike up to Gobbler’s Knob we will stop at Alexander Basin and lay on the soft green floor and cool our bellies, exhausted, breathless, our only reason for going up to go with each other. In the crook of my arm, now, she rests, almost eight-weeks old, unsure but warm. And there will be my cabin, the last trip we will take together, and a slow walk through a colony of orange and red aspen where she’ll follow me as far as I walk, but never get closer than a dozen feet, or so. I suppose the number of these circumstantial variants is not infinite, unless there are others imagining all of these identical moments, which seems to me unlikely, if not impossible. But I can see no borders of time, no edges of instance within these memories and with Esmé, and isn’t one repeated duration enough to break down and confuse the linearity of time, save many? Do not the fervent lovers who surrender themselves to an animal become, literally, that animal?
***
To register the importance of Pando in a significant scientific way, the knowledge of his inception is pertinent. To know how old the organism is, one has to first know its birth. This, as I mentioned is problematic and causes much esoteric conflict among invested parties. There are Bristlecone Pines, giant barrel sponges, a Mojave Yucca, moss in the Atacama, Antarctic Moss, and numerous others that humans lay claim to and vie to be the oldest organism, or cluster of organisms on the planet—and perhaps any of them are interchangeable for my purposes here. What all of these old plants are, beyond the scope of my consideration, or any human regard, is the manifestation of time. They get to be questioned and studied, preferred and dismissed, visited and researched. The span of their time is the undeniable recurrence of the records of memory constructed around them. All they have to do is be. I wish I had an imagination big enough to think of you, and of you, and of something you have loved and help construct a deepening instance of that relationship and of that blanket of time. Esmé is gone by the instance of you reading this, so help her out: think of her squinting into the sun as she’s curled like a croissant in a camp chair on a warm morning. It was her favorite way to lie.
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