The Quaking Grove

The Quaking Grove

Axel Bullon stepped back from his carved graffiti, satisfaction wreathing his face. He sheathed his Bowie knife slowly, like holstering a hand gun.

‘Vandal’, Carla hissed. ‘Why can’t you just come and enjoy looking at this magical place. Why do you have to mark it, like a dog marking a lamp post?’

Axel said ‘Because that’s what all the early settlers did.’

Carla sneered. ‘The only place you’ve ever been a settler in is that damn recliner in front of the TV.’

The longer their marriage went on, the more Axel wondered why he stayed with that acid-mouthed woman and he wished there was a bar around here. Instead, he stomped off back to their Winnebago at the camp site.

Carla didn’t have to wonder what she’d ever seen in him. She knew. He was rich and she was damned if she was going to walk away now and probably die poor. She’d been there. Besides, when it came down to it, he never asked her what she spent his money on and he hadn’t wanted sex for years. At least from her. Life could be a hell of a lot worse. She followed Axel back to the camp site, planning dinner as she went.

After dinner, Carla read the National Parks pamphlet about the trembling aspens and the one they called Pando in particular. It seemed to be thousands of separate ‘trees’ but was in fact just one tree that developed 14,000 years ago and they were all genetically identical suckers. This was beyond any comprehension she had of the life of plants.

Then her blood began to boil as she learned that Pando was under severe threat from mule deer, cattle grazing and wildfires and may one day cease to exist. She had a restless night wondering what she could do to help stop this outrage. No point in telling Axel about it. He’d just laugh and say ‘Cattle gotta graze somewhere and I like steak.’

After finally falling into exhausted sleep, Carla dreamt that the aspens were talking to her. They told her about Black Hawk, war chief of the Utes, coming here and surveying the remnants of his people and the Shoshone and Navajo that had fled to the aspen forest to hide. They were fleeing the Mormons who’d invaded their land and killed his family and many others.

The men, women and children huddled in front of makeshift shelters and fed on the cattle they’d taken in revenge, with Black Hawk taking the largest bull to sacrifice to The Great Creator, in the hope of being given the strength to banish these devils that spoke of a merciful god they believed in.

The survivors tended to the ill and wounded the best they could with their traditional medicines and drumming and dancing lasting long into the night. But each day new bodies were quickly despatched according to their tribe’s custom. Whether it was cremation, burial or platforms high in the trees, no-one wanted to be near dead people. The aspens and the people trembled together.

The ground beneath the aspens rumbled, as it had done since the beginning of time, conveying the noise of thousands of messages the trees sent to each other. Warnings spread rapidly through fungal networks, along with the sharing of strength with those who were struggling. Only this time their succour rose through the soil and was shared with those above. And the grove became a sacred place for Native Americans, where every summer a bull was sacrificed in honour of the grove that provided safety for their people in their hour of need.

…

Giancarlo and Rosa and their two small daughters were visiting the exotic gardens on Pincian Hill to escape the stifling heat of Rome in July. They’d brought a picnic and, after the girls had exhausted themselves running around playing hide and seek in the bushes, the family sat laughing and eating in the shade. Before long, the youngest daughter’s eyes began to close and as she napped, Rosa read to the older daughter.

Giancarlo was restless and decided to walk off the lunch. He hadn’t gone far in the heat before he decided to rest in the shade of a grove of aspens and was soon dozing.

In his semi-sleep, he began to see Ancient Roman soldiers hiding behind the trees in the grove. Then a crowd formed and began a ceremony so he decided to join them. He asked an old man what was happening and he said it was the beginning of the festival of Lucaria. This grove was the hiding place of Roman soldiers when Ancient Rome was invaded by the Gauls. Later, a bull would be sacrificed in honour of the grove.

The ground beneath the aspens rumbled, as it had done since the beginning of time, and Giancarlo woke with a start. He was alone. He said nothing about this to Rosa when he re-joined his family.

…

It had been a quiet morning in the seismic lab at the Department of Natural Resources in Salt Lake City. Joe Smith was catching up on some data entry about the threat to infrastructure along the Wasatch Front, the fault scarp that runs through Utah. People had been jumpy since the 2020 quake that shook the city but nothing of any great significance had occurred since then.

Planners wanted to know what would happen if ‘The Big One’ ever came. Joe sighed. Short of relocating most of the population of Utah, and that was never going to happen, nothing could be done and who knew what the damage would be. Still, that was his job and he diligently recorded the possible scenarios.

When the alarm sounded on the seismograph, he wasn’t particularly concerned. Minor quakes happened all the time and he strolled over more for a break than in any expectation of a serious reading. What he saw stopped his breath and he hit the scramble button to bring his colleagues from their cubicles. They all stood staring in disbelief as the unmistakable evidence of The Big One danced before their eyes.

…

In their beds at the camping site, Axel and Carla felt the ground beneath them begin to undulate and the Winnebago began to sway. They leapt up and scampered outside. Carla grabbed Axel’s arm, yelling ‘The grove’ and began dragging him towards it. Axel shouted ‘It won’t be safe there. The trees could fall on us.’ Carla kept dragging him and shouted ‘No, they’ll protect us. It was in my dream.’

As they made their way deeper into the grove, the ground beneath the aspens rumbled, as it had done since the beginning of time, conveying the noise of thousands of messages the trees sent to each other. Warnings spread rapidly through fungal networks, along with the sharing of strength with those who were struggling.

But it wasn’t enough to save the tree that Axel had carved into and it toppled to the ground on top of him, killing him instantly. Sprawled on the ground but uninjured, Carla’s first thought was ‘Call 911’. Her second thought was ‘I’m rich.’

In the calm that eventually came, Pando began to send out new suckers and the mule deer, tentative at first, started to return. But the four-legged steak providers had fled to the plains.

…

In Rome, Giancarlo and Rosa woke when a tremor rippled through their apartment building, as it occasionally did, but it didn’t last and they went back to sleep. But not the aspen grove on Pincian Hill. The ground beneath the aspens rumbled, as it had done since the beginning of time, conveying the noise of thousands of messages.

…

In Salt Lake City, Joe barely noticed the smaller quake in Rome register on their instruments and wondered briefly if it was connected to The Big One but he was preoccupied with whether his house was still standing. He hoped that big aspen in the front yard hadn’t fallen on it.

…

Once Axel’s estate was settled, Carla sat with her lawyer, hands trembling, mapping out the future for her Save The Aspens Foundation.