NV Awe: Discovering a Stand of Aspen

 NV Awe: Discovering a Stand of Aspen

by Rebecca A. Eckland, MFA, MA, MA

June 24 , 2024

Aspen trees remind me that my home—

Nevada—has fostered a special love for what it lacks. As a high desert landscape, Nevada is a place where there are not many of them, where wind and sun have created an ecosystem of sagebrush and grasses; to exist as a tree in this place is to find the pauses between the high desert just as the rainstorms that are pauses between the sunny days, to be remarkable as an anomaly and not as the rule. 

Most visitors to the desert first notice cottonwood trees which are defiant soldiers staking claim to springs and watersheds, improbable and steadfast, a glimmering hint of hope as I run or ride my bike for miles through the high desert. In this way, trees are markers that there is water here, that there is life here, that a great many miracles are unfolding—the transitory reprieve of shade, birds nesting, that there are lifeforms that articulate the better aspects of the human spirit, this yearning to grow and to never stop growing, to spread and stretch and to embark on a never-ending journey of becoming.

Cousins of cottonwoods—members of the poplar family—aspens are not individual trees but instead massive organisms whose presence can spread for miles thanks to web-like lateral-growing roots called rhizomes beneath the earth’s surface. 

Perhaps this is why discovering a stand of aspen has always felt like coming home, their leaves flickering in the constant breeze as a friendly wave, a welcome. Surrounded by mothers, sisters, and aunts—a single organism of aspen can be a myriad number of trees. To walk through an aspen grove is to walk among the soul of a single living creature.  

Aspens have saved me when my state of mind— my heart itself— is something like a desert, vast and open and dry, when the loneliness seeps in, and it is impossible to believe that solitude can be a good thing.  I’ve felt that hours into a trail run— the impossibility of each step and the futility of wanting to arrive wherever I believe I am going. I have curled into a ball and cried beneath an aspen stand as flickering leaves all around me the reminder that even as shattered as life can make us feel, we can be made whole again. 

I had so much fun participating in NV AWE: Tiny Treasures.  I was the second collaborator of this piece (the first artist was Candace herself—it is the disk in the bottom left of the second image)—her shapes inspired me to try and create one of my favorite features of the Nevada landscape: a stand of aspen. But 4” is smaller than I thought it would be, and I haven’t squealed with sheer joy as much as I did as I figured out how to create tiny aspen trees.