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Sunday, September 26, 2004 |
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[Here's a bit of a piece I worked on for a while. I gave it to Orion magazine once; they held it in silence for six months, and then one day in mid-1998 (I think) I bought a copy of Orion at the local newsstand, only to discover in it a piece on soil written by someone else that included several sentences--and virtually one entire paragraph--from this one. I phoned them, they denied any connection, and sent my essay back to me. Possibly their author and I fudged from the same sources... Anyway, I didn't shop it around any more. So I'll put it here, instead, so it can be read once or twice before I retire it. It's been scanned in and I apologize for corruptions or typos. I'll edit them out later.--sm] THE ROMANCE OF THE SOIL Years ago I dreamed a draft horse died in a field. A group of farmers buried it deep in a hillside, but the horse's corpse moved through the earth. It galloped on as if the semisolid soil were just a headwind. I heard a thunder underneath, felt its pounding underground. I'd forgotten the image and the dream until I read soil scientist Hans Jenny's remark recently in a volume of essays on agriculture: "When I add up the live weights, exclusive of roots, estimated by soil biologists, I find more living biomass below ground than above it, amounting to the equivalent of 12 horses per acre." I sat startled, book in hand, as the recovered dream animal resumed its movements. A spoonful of rich soil may contain 80,000 single-celled protists, 4 million fungi, 2.5 billion bacteria. The hyphae (fungal filaments), laid end to end, would be two miles long. A square yard of soil might harbor several hundred earthworms, 45,000 small earthworm relatives, a million roundworms. The planet quakes with their labors. Observed via some cosmic time-lapse recording over millennia, the "still" inland meadow would resemble a roiling sea. Plant roots swell and grow, die and decay, forcing soil particles apart and collapsing them back together. Mammals burrow, but it's nothing compared to the mixing power of the numberless invertebrates that creep and tunnel down and up, back and forth, subsuming surface offal, raising the dead. Our vilest animal excreta fuels this cleansing engine. What chemistry!, wrote Walt Whitman. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, / It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions. We are all of us, in Wendell Berry's words, "bodies that have passed through other bodies." A healthy soil, although a grave, is alive, says Berry "No matter how finely the dead are broken down, or how many times they are eaten, they yet give into other life." We carry within us the partial, enzymatic means for our own fleshly corruption, and a living soil completes the cycle. Its deputies--the bacterium, the fungus, the blowfly, the worm and burying beetle--set up a juicy progression of aromatic events culminating in our dissolution, in nature's most obvious metaphor. E. E. Cummings' uncle is lowered into his grave--and down went / my Uncle / Sol / and started a worm farm. Karl Shapiro's "Fly" must in the tight belly of the dead! Burrow with hungry head/ And inlay maggots like a jewel. Baudelaire teases, alluding to the vermin that will eat you with kisses. Soils form in minute increments of mineral time, from a matrix of tiny deaths. They're born of the slow love of the lichen for the stone. Atom by atom the obdurate surface breaks down, chelated in the symbiont's tender grip. And the great trees inhale, forcing their carbon breath out roots against bedrock to free more parent matter. Wind, water, heat, cold, chemistry, the importunities of roots insinuating into splits--the rock yields. It crazes and chips, becoming less and more, awaiting a marriage with organic matter to bind the fragments and quicken the lifeless mineral. Microorganisms start up and die. Their decaying corpses charge the inert grains. Its own poesy, the language of soil science woos the ear. Our edaphic vocabulary is fertile with words from a hundred cultures. From the German we have loess, windblown accumulations of mineral dust, and wiesenboden, a black meadow soil with a gray subsoil. From Russia come chernozem, a dark soil with a deep humus horizon, and podzol, found under certain forest or heath vegetation. Australian aborigines named a pockmarked gilgai soil for the burrowing of wallabies. Gumbo, a sticky, waxy clay, comes from the Bantu language of central Africa. Rendzina, a Polish term, defines rich, limy soil, brown over yellow-gray. Spain offers adobe, India regur, Finland tundra. Soil's textures, its perfumes, seduce, as well, and the muted spectrum of its soft colors, the sweet, salt, and sour its clays offer on the tongue. We crave them, slick or grainy, sweet or sour, depending on tradition or prescription. It's mixed into bread dough or served as a condiment to offset toxins in wild foods. Mineral deficiencies or ill health can induce profound hungers--pregnant women often crave earth--or an instinctive need for an earth-derived antitoxin or antibiotic. Every level of culture, every class, engages in it. And all species. Our brethren-elk, bear, parrot, giraffe shameless geophagists. Each New Zealand sheep swallows 100 pounds of earth every year. Elephants in Kenya make arduous climbs to caves containing favored licks. ***** Remember? We were 5 or 7 or 10 years old, lying belly to lawn, our bodies the multicolored petals of a great daisy. We pressed our faces into the welcoming clover, peering so closely we became ants negotiating a dim, earthy wood. On summer nights we deployed across our darkened yards gathering fishbait. We learned to grasp properly the wan, fat night crawlers thrown up on the grass, steadily drawing them from the ground without halving them. We tossed the clenched spheres of pill bugs about like tiny marbles. We salted the gastropods and watched with sick satisfaction as slug tissue liquefied to bubbly snot. We buried the dead birds we found. We dug them up again. We were soil's confederates, each cheek smudge a covenantal seal. Growing older, we grow away from the earth, as civilization becomes estranged from its geoponic origins. If we acknowledge the common dirt it is to confirm our dominion over it. We invert it, smother it under paving, compact it under heavy machinery. It's a handy amalgam for propping up crops. But a living soil exists by contract. It and the lives that thrive on its account are profoundly interdependent. When the pact is violated we get an erg's bits of silica, or a peat mass incapable of decay. When terms are met, the melange of silt, sand, humus, clay, plant roots, fungi, microbes, and invertebrates becomes a richly life-supporting medium. It breathes. It holds just the right amount of moisture, easily draining the excess. One compresses it in the hand, savors its scent, evaluates its tilth. In Japan they have a proverb: Ancient ruins will perish one day, but the thousand fields must never die. As we feed from soils left us by our grandfathers, the fields we leave must nourish our progeny. Bike out to the country on a windy autumn day and view the naked acreage. It lifts, a black, amorphous body, and drifts toward the highway, topsoil fleeing the trauma of the plow. They melt like mists, the solid lands, wrote Tennyson. Like clouds they shape themselves and go. And Earth churns her continents, spills her viscera. She turns in sleep and buries all she's wrought as though it were nothing, as though she dreamed. 2:06:35 PM  comment []
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Sunday, May 2, 2004 |
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[I wrote this bit of memoir in 1993, when my youngest son had graduated high school and was packing to leave home. A version of it appeared that year in an issue of the Chico News & Review newsweekly.] CIRCLES At 9 o'clock one January morning in 1971 I put out my thumb on eastbound Wilshire Boulevard and never thought seriously about what I was doing until I washed my face in the restroom of a last-chance Texaco on the outskirts of Albuquerque. While I wandered I was surely accompanied by any number of guardian angels. There's an awful lot of Nothing out there; scary stuff happens in the middle of it. When she was 18 my mother somehow made her way alone from the rural Midwest and its perceived limitations to the limitless possibility California seemed to offer in 1950. Twenty years later, also 18, I reversed the process, hoping to exchange the anonymity and confusion that my Los Angeles had been for the welcoming familiarity of a green Midwestern dream. My "land of lost content" had evolved out of a dozen lengthy childhood stays with Iowa relatives. It meant snowed-in winters playing canasta or wa-hoo with my aunts and grandmother, summers cutting corn out of the soybean rows and carrying water to my uncles and grandfather where they labored in distant quarter-sections. It was climatic melodrama--the terror of the electrical storm, the tension of tornado weather, the hailstones of despair. Mom has rarely remarked on her journey--something about selling magazine subscriptions door to door, losing her footlocker in a Denver hotel when she couldn't pay the bill. Nor has she heard my own travelogue. What was for me adventure--first steps toward a mythology of self--was for her the loss of her only child, a time of anguish and worry. She just doesn't want to know. My journey lasted five days. It might have lasted only three, but I used a day to take in the Grand Canyon and another to accept a free hotel room in St. Louis--far out of my way, but the prospect of a shower and a night's sleep was irresistible. Bless the desperate woman who picked me up on the Oklahoma Turnpike; she was headed for Chicago and offered me the ride and room if I would comfort her fussing infant while she drove. I'd left Los Angeles, California, under clear skies with seven dollars and fifty cents. I arrived in Estherville, Iowa, during winter's first serious blizzard with five dollars still in my pocket. The kindness of strangers--how little I understood how much depended on it. I remember every face, but names for only three--Ken Bernard and Dave Boley, skiers from Santa Rosa who took me from Victorville, California, to that New Mexico Texaco (and who showed me the Grand Canyon on the way), and Valentine somebody, the trucker on his way to Minneapolis who picked me up in St. Joseph, Missouri, just as the first snow began to fall. The morning after I reached Estherville I was learning social skills pouring coffee for county cops at the Majestic Cafe. Then came the rooming house, the cat, the stint at the junior college, followed by marriage, children, and the inevitable rest. I never managed to find the Iowa of my childhood. By the time I got there every relative had been dragged off the land in the first stages of that tragic diaspora of small farmers. Uncles had jobs in feed stores. Aunts did clerical work in small-town chambers of commerce. Grandparents passed away too soon. After the divorce I moved with my children to Chico, in Northern California. It seemed to me in 1977 that if you put Los Angeles and a small midwestern farming town in a bag and shook it around awhile Chico was what would fall out. For 15 years it was the perfect place for my boys to grow up. That we live in circles is a truism for which I am all too often the proof. Now that my youngest child prepares to go out on his own it seems as if the years that went before were only a dream. Like my sons, who approach the world of adulthood fresh and curious--like, in fact, my mother as she is drawn into the terra incognita of old age--I enter again at the borders of Nowhere, navigating by instinct, hoping for the best. 3:57:35 PM comment []
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[I wrote this shortly after moving to a rented cabin on private land surrounded by the Plumas National Forest, east and south of Quincy, California, and a thousand or so feet above it.] A SOCIETY OF TREES (1994) No one here on the mountain can remember a summer quite like this. The weather is cooling some now, but every day for six weeks the temperature climbed over 95 degrees. In the parched forests to the southeast and -west the fires of summer burn. Late afternoons the wind gathers force and roars through the canyon, filling it with smoke from distant blazes. Eerie afternoon light turns everything unexpected shades of orange. Today's winds are fierce but they have shifted direction, clearing the haze. The A-frame's roofing tin shudders and creaks. Trees wash the air: black oaks flutter and tremble among the swaying conifers like fawning protegees, Gilbert and Sullivan to the evergreens' Puccini. *** Intermittently through the summer, and despite the general ban, we are privileged to hear the song of the chain saw. We rented our 20 acres In the Plumas National Forest last May expecting as much. Each day logging trucks converge on local mills with the corpora delicti. On distant slopes the greening rectangles of clearcuts past appear to recover. One hopes. The current killing fields are out of sight. Recently I coaxed my aging but able Volkswagen over the ruts and gullies and up the steep, stony grades of nearby logging roads. In doing so I startled a variety of wildlife--coyotes, ground squirrels, a distant bear. I came within yards of smacking a bobcat standing in the road around a sharp turn. Again and again I was stunned to stumble on great acreages of logged-over mayhem, grayed ruins of slash and debris not visible from the blacktop. There are curious loopholes in our anticlearcut laws. *** When you hike the woods around here, the warm scents, the susurrations of the moving foliage enchant you. Then you encounter a stump, and farther on another, and then another. Each measures three or four or five feet across. Then you realize you stand among juveniles: none of the trees around you have diameters greater than 18 inches. You think, Here is a community without elders, a society of orphans. The grandfathers have been disappeared. *** Mornings starting around 6 or 7 the chain saws echo back from somewhere down the hollow. They drone and whine in weird two- and three-part harmonies at random intervals until midday, an unseen trio of gargantuan mechanical bugs. The falling trees go crack-ack-ack. They hit the distant ground with soft concussing thuds. *** We live on a south facing slope at 4500 feet elevation. A picture window in the main room reveals the southern vista as far as Pilot's Peak and Bull Nose Mountain (or Blue Nose Mountain; depends on your map). The yard slopes down and away. The first 50 yards or so have been cleared, possibly as a fire safety precaution, but mostly to ensure a year-round supply of sunlight to our solar panels. Where the forest starts, at the back of this clearing, the trees seem ranged by height--squat infant firs up front, then a few slender oaks, and finally older and variously taller firs and cedars and pines. Mornings, when I sit with my feet on the sill and drink my tea, I gaze with diminishing content on this tender assemblage. Probably this is cabin fever, but it is becoming hard to shake the feeling that the view, in truth, is theirs. The trees stare in, as if my family were figures in a diorama at a museum of unnatural history. They're watching even now. So patient. So green. 10:44:53 AM comment []
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