Pando

About 750 miles southwest of my house lies Fish Lake National Forest in central Utah. It is a typically scenic western national forest with a blend of evergreen and deciduous trees, mountain lakes, and various resident wildlife. Beautiful and predictable.

Less predictable is the presence of the world’s largest living organism by weight, an estimated 6,600 tons extended over 106 acres. Its age is commonly stated as 80,000 years old, but that is disputed and considered speculative even by old-earth advocates. More conservative estimates put it closer to 14,000 years old. From a young earth creationist perspective, we can simply agree it is very old.

It has a name and a gender: Pando and male. Pando is a Latin word meaning “I spread,” which seems appropriate.

If you were to visit Pando (as I nearly did this fall but didn’t) you would see only a picturesque grove of quaking aspens because that is what Pando is. But this is an aspen grove unlike any other yet discovered.

Long ago, a Populus tremuloides seed sprouted near what is now Fish Lake in central Utah. This was Pando, a quaking aspen destined for great things. As aspens are wont to do, Pando decided that reproducing himself with seeds was too inefficient; instead, he sent up a sucker, a new tree shoot from his own root system. And why stop there? So he did it again. And again.

Years later, the first tree died, but the root system, sustained by the photosynthesis of younger shoots, lived on, putting up new shoots and spreading, spreading, spreading. Today, Pando, a single Populus tremuloides organism, consists of around 40,000 individual, genetically identical quaking aspen trees sustained by a single, massive root system.

I find Pando’s steady existence through the vast stretch of history to be awe-inspiring and thought-provoking. I wonder what unobserved dramas have transpired in the shade of those aspen trees over the millennia. Drought, blizzards, forest fires? The hunting of wolves and cougars, and perhaps of animals now extinct? How many elk herds have browsed there and given birth to new calves under the spring leaves? How many Indigenous American love stories bloomed and faded there, unwritten and forgotten? Were there heinous acts of murder and treachery veiled by its branches, or did it look down on unrecorded stories of kindness and self-sacrifice hundreds of years before Columbus ever boarded the Santa Maria and sailed west? Through time Pando was there, watching the ebb and flow of the world. What has he learned? But Pando keeps his own counsel.

Pando knows things I wish I knew. Not just details of the stories and the dramas that played out under his watch but about the art of surviving and thriving for eons. Pando knows things about persistence that I wish I knew, persistence through fire and blizzards and drought and wind. I wish he could talk.

I’d like to ask Pando about new growth and root systems and how to balance the two. Did he ever put up so many new shoots that his root system couldn’t keep up? Or was that never a problem?

Today foresters say that he is old and stagnant and not putting up enough new shoots to replace the aging trees. They say that he is suffering from a lack of forest fire, among other things. I wonder what Pando would say to the foresters who have kept the wildfires from searing his leaves and killing his trees and has allowed pests and diseases to proliferate, which created an imbalance of aging trees that block the sunlight needed for new growth. Would he ask for fire?

I’d like to ask Pando about his shared root system, which shuttles nutrients and water to those sick or weak trees which most need it. Do the solid and healthy trees ever complain about this? Do they ever point out how much photosynthesis they are responsible for and demand a proportionate benefit from the root system?

I wonder if Pando would have anything to say about humility and doing things out of sight. It was only in the 1960s that a forester discovered Pando, as most of his mass is underground, out of sight, and his beauty on display above ground gives little indication of his true nature. What would he say about the status-grubbing culture that has taken over the world?

I’d like to ask Pando about disappointment and failure and cynicism. How does he process a fine healthy tree smashing to the ground in an ice storm? And after seeing thousands of his shoots grow up only to die or be nipped off by a mule deer or shaded out by other trees, what reason does he find for putting up one more?

Does existence justify itself? Or does he ever feel like a victim of his own success and think wistfully of old friends who died out long ago?

And what did he think when the humans traded their moccasins for steel tracks and roaring internal combustion engines, tore a gash across his face and deposited hot, smelly asphalt so that his masterpiece of patient endurance could be ogled more quickly and easily?

After millennia of watching the cycle of life around him, a tourist, trailing petroleum fumes and following an iPhone, shows up with a sleeping bag and a pack of granola bars. He stomps around for a few hours, spends the night shivering in his sleeping bag, and in the morning disappears down the road taking his selfies with him, little improved by his brush with deep time. He thinks Pando is an interesting oddity, five stars on Trip Advisor, but a bit chilly at night.

Does he not hear Pando’s rustling leaves whisper of a quiet endurance and peace that is the undefined longing of his own restless and uneasy spirit? Does he, himself but a vapor, reach and touch this material metaphor of tenacious life throughout the uncaring centuries? Or will he reduce it to a frame for his face and a hashtag? I wonder what he thinks of Pando.

I wonder what Pando thinks of him.