Listening to trees

Part one: you don't believe me

"I can tell you don't believe me," Ida said, louder than usual, because of all the fans going in the workshop.

She went on. "You're doing that thing where you're trying to look like you're being open-minded, but you're sure I'm wrong. You move your mouth to one side of your face and then back and forth."

Ahab focused back on his cluttered workbench. Dusty circuit boards, notebooks, pencils, and a keyboard. Glass monitors on top of the ancient computers lit up the room.

It was a weird feeling to realize how Ida had figured him out so well. It was simultaneously very intimate and very irritating.

Ida went over to the chalkboard attached to one wall of the shed.

She grabbed the small towel they had hung on a hook, looked at the board.

She said, "Sol, take a look at what's on the board, and remember it, because I'm about to erase all this."

Sol, short for the "the robot that prefers solitude, even more than other robots" aimed its cameras at the chalkboard.

Ida stepped out of the way until a green light glowed on the top of the camera.

"Thank you Sol," Ida said while she erased their notes from the chalkboard with the dirty old rag hanging on the side.

Then she started drawing. She didn't wait to finish her drawings before talking.

"OK, so, it works like this. There's a grove of trees near here, in a forest. All the trees make an arc. A parabola, really. If you're in the center, and get quiet enough, you'll hear them."

Ida sketched with her back turned. Then she faced Ahab and shrugged. "And there's that skeptical look again!"

Part two: the first try

Ahab and Ida had been hiking for a while. He waved the pair of antenna with one hand while watching the dials on the instrument.

"OK, Ida, I'm picking it up. You're right. I don't know what it means, but there's a signal here."

"Of course there is. That's exactly how I told you. Now we do the next part. You can stop playing the inquisitor now. This is a mystical thing. It won't work right if you try to measure it and analyze it."

"But-"

"But Ahab can't not be analytical? Yes he can! Just pretend that you're listening to Circe talk about how she whispers in the wind -- oh wow you're blushing!"

Ahab shrugged and then scowled at her. "You can't use stuff that I'm sensitive about like that."

Ida did her little head bob to to admit she probably went too far.

Ahab followed Ida. They got to an open place in the forest. A few big boulders sat on the ground.

Ida pointed out at the edge. "This is maybe the easiest spot for tree listening. And, this is the time of year when the trees are loudest."

"What do we do?"

"Well, we're going to stay quiet, first of all. From now on, don't say anything. If you need to tell me something, write it down. That's the rule. And if we're lucky, in the middle of the night, we'll hear them."

They each picked rocks and unrolled bedrolls on them. Ahab hoped it would be a clear night, but no.

Ida woke up Ahab by tossing pine cones at him.

He sat up. In the dark, he could see her sitting up, aiming another pine cone at his head.

He watched her climb down off her big rock and walk toward the edge of the clearing. She paced left and then right. Then she stopped and then sat down. Not facing him, she waved.

Ahab walked over to her and sat on the ground next to her.

The grass was dry and really long.

She handed him her notebook. Ahab used his pocket light to read what she wrote:

This is best spot. Hush up and listen. Especially your thoughts.

She had underlined the last three words.

They sat there. In the quiet. Ahab used his eyes to trace the leaves on the trees. He saw how they formed a curve and if the curve were a complete circle, he would have been sitting in the center.

Ahab wondered if this position was like a focal point.

The night passed. Ahab didn't hear anything all night.

It starts working finally

After many nights though, he realized that although he never heard anything, there was a feeling he got to.

Then one night it happened. He realized he heard the trees whispering to him.

Then one night, Ahab realized he understood what the trees were telling him.

"You know, Ida, when you said how you listen to trees, this whole time, I'd been thinking the trees would be making actual sounds. Like vibrations in the air."

Ida looked at him silently. Ahab looked back at her.

"You're looking at me like I'm the silly one, but when you said 'LISTEN TO THE TREES' what you really meant was to allow the trees to send you telepathic messages."

Ida half smiled. "Yeah, but this is something we deal with plenty. You interpret everything so literally. Besides, if I told you how it actually works, you would argue with me even more and be even more doubtful."

Ahab involuntarily smiled at this.

Part N: the library

Ahab went back to the old library and decided that he wanted to research everything he could about the old ways of listening to trees.

The first book he found was a list of tree circles that were discovered in the old forests.

There were more books about the design of these old tree circles.

Ahab's notes

After a while, Ahab got out the old notebook and a pencil and started writing down what he could about the images and sounds and ideas he had while sitting among the trees.

He kept seeing people that looked vaguely like members of Ida's family, but wearing almost no clothing, and dancing through the forest, waving around wooden sticks that were artfully decorated with carvings and burn marks, and wrapped with beautiful threads and flowers.

Ahab wrote down "forest people? Tree worshipers?"

He saw them all, all the ancient versions of Ida's people, all dancing around in the same clearing.

But it looked different! The boulders remained there, but they had been painted and covered with runes and flowers and berries.

Painted with complex diagrams of lines and arrows and curving shapes.

Ahab thought he recognized some things in the diagrams that looked vaguely like the circuits he and Ida had designed.

He drew examples of the diagrams he saw in his visions in his notebooks.

The Warning

One time the trees said that Ahab had a different odor than Ida.

Then they said how more of his kind are in the wind.

Ahab didn't understand it at first. But on the walk home, it became clear that the trees were warning him that his brother was coming soon.