[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 
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