Hello Dylan. I'm in Hello. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. Everything's everything's fine. So I'm back again and this time I have a voice memo for you to listen to.

Great. I'm excited to hear it. I, yeah.

So this voice memo is from Alex Katz,

and they have this vivid memory of this giant oak tree

in Peoria LaNois, where they grow up.

And the tree is surrounded by so much history, and this is what they had to say.

Hi Atlas Obscura, my name is Alex Katz, and I use they them pronouns.

I grew up in Peoria, Illinois and one of my most powerful and surreal childhood memories

was going to Giant Oak Park once in elementary middle school. I remember being overwhelmed by the scale of it all,

the density and bright greenness of the leaves, the age the tree was supposed to be at least 500 years and the feeling that somewhere

in among those packed leaves was something wonderful or terrifying up in or next to the trunk.

A couple of decades past and I kind of forgot about it, kind of thought I'd dreamed

it when I called my parents and my dad said they had gone for a walk to Giant Oak Park.

I went, wait, that's real?

And not only is it real, but I'm going to get to visit it again when I finally get to go home to my parents this summer.

Anyway, giant centuries old fairy tale tree within walking distance of my parents house.

I hope that's at least a seed for an episode, pun very much intended.

That's a wonderful message from Alex. I want to know, you know, how big is big? How tall is this tree actually?

So it's branches spam at least 100 feet and the trunk is 13 feet in circumference so

whoa pretty big that is an incredibly big tree yeah it's huge. The thing that Alex's message made me think about, trees have this feeling like whales and elephants of being from a different time or a different universe.

And I think I really felt that in Alex's message like this thing was so incredible that it kind of couldn't have been real and the

other thing that Alex gets at is this idea of not just scale but age right like this this feeling that trees and I had

...