Weeks ago I heard a rumor that in the city to the south there was a place where for ten dollars you can watch binary trees flicker and glow in all the moods of heatless neon. It seemed an obvious falsehood, the demented whisperings of television journalists and late-night commercials. Glowing trees! Puuuleeaase! But still, such talk often contains a kernel of truth so like tardy magi we undertook a post-Christmas journey to see for ourselves.
Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011
When we arrived at the Mecca of light we discovered that others had also made the pilgrimage and that just a hundred feet from the gates they’d created a kind of purgatory for themselves. We waited an eternity in lines of lines and queues of queues, shuffling our feet and muttering dark oaths and incantations under our breath. When at last we reached the gatekeeper we swapped hard cash for printed tickets and were ushered inside where all the rumors were proven true and more.
Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011
Inside were the great wondrous trees of fever dreams and James Cameron movies, their trunks and limbs sheathed in shimmering digital radiance and coursing with kilowatts of unseen power. Vast networks of chaotic branches arched high overhead, outlined in red and green and blue light. As I stood rapt beneath them they flickered and danced and sang the song of the body electric against the starless night sky.
Jesus H. Christ, imagine the electric bill, I thought.
Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011
At the feet of the great scintillated trees a crazy carnival of vendors sprouted like mushrooms. The pungent odor of movie theater popcorn and cotton candy mixed with the earthy smell of elephant dung. Children ran and swarmed like flies, wildly waving glowing lightsabers above their heads. Bored camels waited in a pen, slowly shifting their weight from one side to the other while parents opened their wallets and wriggling kids were hoisted up on their tall humped backs.
Many years ago on the other side of the world I'd watched similar camels dash across a lonely desert highway, their brown bulks floating weightless across the sand, barely touching the ground. Men dressed in robes and checkered keffiyehs had run after them, playing at a sort of tag that had been going on since time immemorial. My companion and I waved at them, but the desert tribesmen didn't trust our uniforms or our M-16 rifles or our odd ideologies and simply ran faster, prompting the camels to race ahead even farther.
I looked at the camels in their glowing fluorescent corral and wondered if they remembered the desert - their desert. When the last visitors were gone and the lights finally turned out, did the electric camels dream of sand and open vistas of shimmering heat?
Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011
When we’d circumnavigated the Lite-Brite world and found ourselves back at the beginning I noticed the waxing crescent moon floating overhead. It hung there in the blackness heavy and grinning with meaning. Whoever had placed it there had precisely matched it to the real lunar cycle, even positioned it so it would be visible in the western sky where the real moon would be setting this late December. Perhaps it was only a random coincidence, the workings of pure chance, but in that alignment I thought I smelled the logic of purpose.
Waxing Crescent Moon, December 2011
Around us the children laughed and adults snapped final blurry pictures with their camera phones and remarked at how beautiful the lights had been. Beyond the facade of high technology luminescence and carny commercialism the extravaganza of LED trees had perhaps tickled some lost genetic memory: we knew the glowing trees were beautiful and to be appreciated, that the lights were important, that there was something special and powerful going on in that place. I suspect few (if any) of us understood exactly what.
Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011
As we left I wondered what an eighteenth century Navajo medicine man would've thought of the flickering trees and their high-tech spectacle. Would he have marvelled at them as we did? Would he have feared them and their digital song of electricity? Or would he have simply shrugged and said that trees always glowed like that and that we were blind to think otherwise?
