Eating Dirt Read online

  On the road below, Adam unloads seedling boxes from the back of the truck and then stops to blow snot out of one nostril. The diesel engine gurgles. Sweat glistens on the top of his head, where a lean, V-shaped tuft of hair grows. He smokes furiously, flipping tree box after tree box down to the ground while issuing tactical directives into his walkie-talkie. Adam was born in Poland. In another century he’d be a Slavic warlord in fur and jackboots, poring over maps in a tent with snow blowing in through the flaps.

  Adam peers over the edge of the road to where Carmen works. He calls down to her. She stoops to plant a tree, ignoring him the way people on buses pretend not to hear by armoring themselves with iPods. She stoops and climbs some more.

  Carmen, he calls again, cupping his mouth with his hands. You’ve got to wear your high-viz.

  DayGlo orange vests, the kind worn by traffic herders. Requisite bush couture, in case we fall and crack ourselves open, so that a helicopter can find our pieces from the air.

  Go fuck yourself, says Carmen. She puts her head down and goes back to work as the single moms do, with an unswerving sense of purpose. Fast and yet slow, at the speed of someone hunting for a set of house keys, something small but vital and lost.

  Who knows what this grudge is about? It doesn’t seem to need a reason. We discover vendettas the same way we learn all the gossip: breakups, crushes, rumors of hiring and firing. Information circulates like airborne particles, like microbes passed skin to skin. In the end we know so much about one another and yet sometimes nothing at all.

  Back at the ranch, Carmen and Neil have been orbiting around one another. Their romance blossoms at night in the kitchen, over puddles of olive oil and husks of garlic peelings. Huddled chats on the steps with cigarettes and cans of Lucky Lager. Love: we creep up to it with our hands outstretched as if to the heat of a wood stove. What we are expands and contracts like a rubber band, crushing us all together.

  THREE AND a half billion years ago, the earth was bathed in a briny soup, and the atmosphere was a hot swamp of greenhouse gases. Life was microbial. Then a new bacterium was born. Its guts were speckled with light-absorbing proteins. This cell could perform a chemical magic that none of the other floating squiggles of the prehistoric seas could. It harnessed sun rays. With this energy, it transformed carbon dioxide into sugar and in the process pumped out oxygen. These rudimentary organisms are still around today, in practically every environment where sunlight and water coexist. Cyanobacteria—blue-green algae, the beginning of all things.

  Without this evolutionary game changer our world would look completely different. It might now be filled with unrecognizable organisms that thrive on methane or carbon dioxide. Instead, blue-green algae multiplied and colonized and began to transform the atmosphere, molecule by molecule, oxygenating it with their exhalations. Over time these simple photosynthesizers, with their nitrogen-fixing abilities, enriched the seas. They birthed the air we breathe. They are the prototype for vegetation today. When chlorophyll showed up on the scene, plants began their long path toward world domination, since no kingdom covers the land surface of the planet so completely.

  Plants began as rafts of single-celled organisms, clinging to one another on the surface of warm prehistoric seas. These cells joined forces and even crawled inside one another, and eventually they crept onto the land. As their numbers grew, they spread out in a thin horizontal layer until crowding began. And then they started piling up, one atop another, like people standing on each others’ shoulders.

  Instead of self-exterminating, they cooperated. The cells on the top did the photosynthesizing. The cells on the bottom provided architecture and delivered nutrients. So began the division of labor, the root-to-shoot relationship that defines vascular plants as we know them today. They developed paper-thin solar panels, both porous and waterproof, as remarkable an evolutionary invention as the human lung. They could tilt and swivel in relation to the sun. Their leaves could channel rainwater to all the advantageous places. They grew stalks and stems to better hoist themselves toward the light and to lift their heads above competitors. This evolutionary rise is reenacted each spring, in every garden and park and untended, weedy corner. A green swell so ubiquitous we take it for granted.

  Trees are the ultimate result of this evolutionary reaching. The colossal trees of the Pacific Northwest have developed huge, supportive trunks and broad canopies that waste scarcely a photon. Contrary to popular belief, the upper branches of a rainforest canopy do not intertwine. They overlap, but seldom do they touch. Individual trees grow carefully around one another, their branch tips separated by mere inches. It’s a feat of plant diplomacy millions of years in the making, but nobody really knows precisely how or why this phenomenon, known as crown shyness, occurs.

  Conifers, especially, are ancient creatures. Their genetic antecedents arose as long as 300 million years ago. Despite their impressive stature, they’re really quite primitive. They never evolved flowers to attract pollinators or fruit to lure animals who might eat and spread their seeds far afield. Although some conifers, like larches, are deciduous, most are evergreen. A conifer has stuck to its evolutionary guns, like a reptile or a fish. Other trees have acorns or chestnuts or winged whirligigs or seeds with rubbery casings, spiny coatings, or dangling seedpods that can be eaten whole or ground up as spice. Conifer seeds come packed inside cones, but they are mostly no bigger than a grain of rice. Each seed is a blueprint for an organism that may grow ten thousand times as large as its natal package. Another irony of nature: big creatures sprung from the tiniest genetic blueprints. Sturgeon can have roe as big as peas. But a human, with all our intricately complicated machinery, comes from a zygote that’s invisible to the naked eye.

  In a nursery, conifer seeds are poked into soil and germinated, watered, and fertilized and sprayed with trademarked chemicals whose names make them sound like engineered rain: Benlate, Rovral, and Captan, Bravo, Echo, and Ambush. Out in nature it’s a different story. A ripe cone spreads its flaps and drops its winged seeds only with the perfect combination of temperature and humidity. Some cones drop and are immediately snatched up by rodents, which machine them with their teeth the way we eat corn on the cob. Most of the seeds surviving these forest critters won’t germinate at all. They’ll lie dormant, woven into the tapestry of the forest floor, awaiting the right season, sometimes in vain, for a century or more. While they bide their time, they may be incinerated in forest fires. Many have no hope at all, because their landing pads are too wet or too dry, not warm enough, or too heavily ensconced in moss. The ones that do sprout may be stunted because of lack of light or crowding or overhead obstruction or heavy competition for nutrients.

  If you dig out ten square feet of dirt from an old-growth forest, you might find embedded within it a thousand seeds. Some of these might belong to trees that have long since died out or species that don’t grow anywhere nearby. For a conifer, the odds of survival are exceedingly low. But a tree makes up for it with a carpet-bomb reproductive strategy. A healthy parent can grow thousands of cones, each containing hundreds of seeds. In a bumper year a tree blitzes the ground with potential offspring. A phenomenon called, in the poetry of science, seed rain.

  A reproductive method like this is expensively rudimentary, subject to the whims of the wind. It’s one of the reasons why the golden age of conifers has already come and gone. But millions of years ago in our planetary past, conifers dominated. The surface of the earth was composed of one megacontinent, Pangaea. Dinosaurs grazed and stomped the land. Many of the creatures that thrived during this long prehistoric phase would not be recognizable today. Clams, squids, and sharks of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea variety. Amphibians and lizards. And all those creepy-crawlies that look like giant cockroaches crossed with centipedes, whose strange shapes we recognize from fossils.

  During the Mesozoic, conifers thrived at every latitude from the equator to the northernmost reaches of the globe. New tree species were born, and they diversified an
d specialized. Most of these genetic families are extinct. The survivors are among the world’s oldest living plants, and many are rare and endangered today. These include the ginkgo tree and sago palms, which are tropical plants that look like a cross between a fern and a palm but are neither. Also the dawn redwood, a relative of the California sequoias, thought to have died out until a small grove was rediscovered in a remote province of China. The fossilized stumps of dawn redwoods have turned up on tundra barrens deep inside the Arctic Circle—a sign of the extensive range that conifers once enjoyed.

  With time, conifers met a rising tide of competition from the next generation of evolutionary design—angiosperms, the great planetary flowerers. Angiosperms developed a more sophisticated reproductive apparatus. They grew fruit to attract animal distributors and flowers to lure winged pollinators, and with these mobile partners they edged conifers into extreme environments, higher up the mountainsides and closer to the poles. Today conifers still thrive in these cold marginal zones, while the leafy tropical and temperate angiosperms came to occupy the prime real estate around the belly of the globe.

  Pangaea split into two continents, Laurasia to the north and Gondwana to the south. As these two landmasses drifted apart, new species evolved into two parallel lineages. The effects of this genetic quarantine are still visible today in the distribution of modern tree types. Conifers that grow in the southern reaches of Chile, Argentina, and Oceania look nothing at all like those in the Northern Hemisphere, though the species of Russia and Canada are quite similar. Many southern conifers belong to the Araucaria family. An example is the Chilean monkey puzzle tree, whose swooping boughs are said to curve like monkey tails. They have tough, spiky foliage, reminiscent of Stegosaurus plates, perhaps not surprising since these trees are one of the world’s oldest species and are considered living fossils.

  Today, the conifer forests of the Northern Hemisphere are dominated by trees in the pine family. Those elegant, slender-leaved specimens we’ve come to associate with Christmas—spruce, fir, hemlock, larch, and pine. Most of these are found in the boreal forest, an expansive sheet of tree cover that runs across the upper strata of North America, Scandinavia, and Russia. Trees from the pine family also find homes in more southerly locales at high elevations, on mountaintops in Yellowstone National Park and in the Appalachians south to Virginia.

  There are few living things on Earth as old as the DNA of conifers. Modern evergreens are but vestiges of an ancient heyday, a fact that might contribute to the feeling people get, when they hike through an old-growth forest, that they’re experiencing something majestic and timeless. Conifer genes have survived for a few hundred million years, weathering droughts, infestations, mass extinctions, and wildfires, not to mention ice ages. It’s as if conifers were made to thrive in extremes. In this sense the coniferous forests of the world are heirloom ecosystems, repositories of survivor DNA.

  EVERY DAY brings a new mountain to climb. Today I’ve been assigned a steep wedge of the cut that extends from the uppermost road all the way up to the timberline, where the stumps are so distant they look like gray stubble. First, I must climb the cut bank, the scar left behind after the road was carved from the slope. Here I can see the layers of the old forest floor in cross section. On the bottom there is bedrock, above that a horizon of gray-brown mineral dirt, and on top, like cake frosting, a layer of living earth, which comes in shades of cabernet, rust, and ocher, depending on what’s composting inside. Out of this topsoil hang dead roots, spilling like the cords of a circuit box torn from a wall. I’ve got to climb up with my fresh load of trees. I find toeholds on outcroppings of broken rock. I grab fistfuls of roots to haul myself up, and I hope they hold, since the dirt is as loose and slippery as pastry flour.

  On a cut block the slash intensifies the closer you come to a road. It’s the nature of the way logs are removed, dragged from every corner by grapples and pulleys and cable skylines to landings where they are loaded onto trucks. Sometimes the ground is piled so high with overturned stumps and cast-off logs that I feel I’m entering a chasm or a maze or a room full to the rafters with broken furniture. Sometimes I walk on logs stacked three and four deep, so my feet never touch the ground. I’ve got to pass through these sections first, when my load is the heaviest. I poke a tree in here and there, but mostly I travel through as quickly as I can.

  Eventually the slash thins, and I find islands of life once again, moss and ferns peeking out between the logs. By the time I’ve worked halfway up the slope my quads and calf muscles burn, and I strip off an outer layer of clothing. As I climb it grows colder—the upper soils are chunky with frost for some time after the valley bottoms have warmed. Such small changes create new habitats and subtly varied communities. In this upper stratum the residents have learned to love an extra month in the fog, an extra hour each morning in the lee shade of the mountain.

  As I close in on the top I find old snow patches. If the snow is clean I’ll dip my hand in and eat some. Rodents tunnel underneath these melting heaps. Some creatures find their niches in the snow itself. With climate change, cold-loving plants inch up the mountainsides, year by year. Or perhaps their seeds will blow northward, finding purchase in previously inhospitable locales. Animals, too, will creep toward the sky and closer to the poles, searching for the climes of home.

  Once, this place—like much of the North American west coast—was impressively forested with Pseudotsuga menziesii, the great Douglas-fir, which is not a fir at all but a species unto itself. A long-lived, mighty tree named after Archibald Menzies, a botanist on Captain George Vancouver’s nautical expeditions who first encountered the tree in Puget Sound. Menzies stepped off a ship in 1791 and found a fir tree so big it would have taken eight people just to encircle it with their arms. In his time Douglas-fir forests grew from the south coast of British Columbia all the way to Mexico. Tree trunks grew with such stoutness that it must have been impossible, quite literally, to see the forest for the trees. It must have appeared that behind every tree there was another one, and another, and that they grew this way, inexhaustibly, forever.

  A mature Douglas-fir is a columnar giant. Its trunk looks as if it were made of cement. It has craggy, fireproof bark, which can grow a foot thick or more. An old fir forest looks like pillars supporting the sky. But these soldierly looks conceal vulnerability, for high aloft its soft needles fill the canopy like delicate brushes. Like many conifers Douglas-fir grows but once a year, furiously, for just a few months, pushing out new bracts like fanned fingertips. This fresh growth is so tender it may break off in the first stiff wind. There is an airiness in the upper reaches, a reminder that the tree is ethereal as well as earthbound.

  Douglas-firs love sunlight. They like to bury their feet in sand. But they don’t like to share their space with other species, preferring to grow among themselves. They are a little bit prissy but also opportunistic. They wait for devastation, wildfire, and windstorms, and then they grow rampantly and all at once. But only for a few hundred years, since their fate is to be replaced by cedar and hemlock, their patient rainforest successors.

  A felled Douglas-fir can yield a one-hundred-foot log that is knot free and perfectly straight grained. The wood has a distinctive salmon hue. It doesn’t warp, is both strong and beautiful, and is therefore prized for structural and decorative uses. It is an economic champion tree—to some, the most important lumber species in the world. That is why Douglas-fir seedlings are always passing through our hands. We dose the land in the hopes that someday there will be many more. An overdose, some would claim, this preferential selection of one species over another. But maybe our manipulation is an inherently human thing, for people have been shaping nature for all of recorded time. Hybridizing peas. Cultivating lawn grass. Breeding dogs and breaking horses. Bringing wild things indoors and then turning them out domesticated.

  The biggest Douglas-fir in the world is 242 feet tall. The Red Creek Tree lives on Vancouver Island, near Port Renfrew, but it is less
a freak specimen than a dwarf survivor. In the first half of the twentieth century firs that were four hundred feet tall and a thousand years old could easily be found. Families came to visit and to picnic underneath their magnificent crowns.

  THE DNA of trees may be very old, but many of today’s forests are relatively new. During the last ice age, plunging temperatures killed off much of the plant life in the Northern Hemisphere. Ecosystems were buried in snow and then plowed under by great accumulations of ice. Glaciers piled up to thicknesses of a mile or more, a mantle so heavy that land surfaces sank below sea level under the weight. As they flowed over the land, these rivers of ice ground down mountains and filled in valleys with scree and sediment. An earth-rending upheaval known as primary succession, wrought by forces on par with volcanic eruptions. And so the largest deforestations the globe has ever experienced were caused not by chain saws but by climate change.

  At the height of the Wisconsin glaciation, more than ten thousand years ago, forests retreated into ice-free corners of the North American continent. Plants and animals squeezed into tiny coastal refuges along the Pacific and into unfrozen regions farther south. Ice covered all of Canada, the American Midwest and New England, and even portions of Montana and Washington State. The subglacial fringe, from Pennsylvania to the Pacific Northwest, was tundra and cold steppe. The California coast from San Diego to San Francisco grew a patchwork of cold coniferous woodland. The southeastern corner of the United States, all the way down to the peach- and pecan-growing states, had a landscape similar to that of modern-day Maine.

  Once the planet warmed the forests recovered. In the wake of the glaciers, trees edged north from their warmer southern havens. Eventually they recolonized the continent, but they didn’t stop changing after that. Forests are ecosystems in perpetual motion, though their shifts, to the human eye, are imperceptibly small. If it were possible to capture these movements in a thousand years of time-lapse photography, we’d see that forests are always adapting—growing and shrinking, mixing in composition, moistening and drying out. They’re always changing, because nothing on Earth is constant, not the weather, not the climate, not even magnetic north. The Earth’s crust is on the move, always slowly, but sometimes with great upheaval.