Eating Dirt Page 8

  In nature there is no such thing as absolute stasis. But if such a state could be said to have existed, a moment of sylvan equipoise, of triumphant postglacial return, it would have occurred between five thousand and eight thousand years ago, when the forests recovered from their frigid setbacks. After the planet had warmed sufficiently, they took on roughly the shape that we recognize today. In this fragile period of maximum expansion, humans had not yet wielded their adzes and axes, not yet begun divesting the world of its forest cloak. If you found yourself at the equator at precisely this moment and began walking north to the Arctic Circle, you would see countless forest landscapes and thousands of kinds of tree.

  You might begin this journey in the Amazon rainforest, with its staggering variety of plants and animals. You would walk among endless tropical trees, their flowers heavy with scent. You’d see many kinds of sweet, exotic fruit. You’d see vines and creepers and strangler plants, winding their way up the trunks of tall, smooth trees, parasitizing their superlative architecture. Brazil nut trees and silk cotton trees, murumuru palms and big-leaf mahogany. You’d pass through luxuriant hanging gardens of ferns and orchids and myriad airborne plants dangling their roots in midair. These trees never shed their leaves all at once, since it is balmy all year round. There is no need for winter dormancy. As a result, if you cut down a tree, odds are good it would have no annual rings. In the Amazon you’d sleep among ten thousand tree species. You might never notice the same kind twice.

  As you journeyed north you would pass through the tropical rainforests of Central America. And then the temperate montane forests of Mexico. Through the grasslands of Texas into the moist temperate woodlands of the American South. You would travel into a transition zone between warm and cool regions. You’d cross into the varied and beautiful deciduous forests of the United States. They’d contain fewer species than hot, equatorial regions, but you’d still find a cornucopia of types. Oak, elm, beech, and maple. In the autumn you would see the leaves change color, from green to red and yellow, a sign of the remarkable angiosperms at work. They draw out every last bit of chlorophyll and minerals before casting their foliage to the ground. Once the leaves have dropped they begin to break down, providing compost in years to come. And this, too, would have its own aroma.

  Around the Canadian border, you would cross the Mason-Dixon line of the tree world, transiting from deciduous to coniferous regions. It is not a line really but a gradient of zonal shifts from broad-leaved to needled forest. You’d see firs. And then a lot of spruce. The great variety of species you experienced in the tropical rainforest reduced to just a handful of hardy, cold-weather types. You’d glimpse quintessentially northern animals: caribou, lynx, bear, moose, and even bison. Chances are you’d spend much of this journey trudging through muskeg, bogs, ponds, and peatlands. For in the north there is water everywhere.

  It might begin to snow. As you continued farther north, lakes would ice over. You might notice that black spruce have the meanest, sharpest needles. They’ve got to be tough to resist freezing. You might also notice that conifer boughs are perfectly designed for the weight of frozen precipitation. They catch snow and shed it strategically close by so that come springtime, there will be snowmelt, perfectly positioned for the roots to drink up. These are harsh environments. Summers provide just a few short months of frost-free nights. For much of the year water is locked up in ice.

  As you moved north the temperatures would grow colder and the days shorter still. The trees would shrink, becoming more gnarled and dwarfed until some stood no taller than your shoulders. Eventually you would reach a zone of alder and birch shrub. And then you would come out into the clear of the tundra heath, completing your journey through the three great forest belts on Earth.

  You may have noticed, walking through jungles, swamps, and pine barrens, that the basic morphology of trees is everywhere the same. Leaves, branches, trunk, roots. An elegant design that is both simple and mind-bendingly complex. On the one hand, you might feel as if you’d passed through an all-connected thing whose infinite sum was much greater than its parts. A global thatch interrupted by grasslands and deserts and lakes but whose reach was so extensive it could be taken as a defining characteristic of Planet Earth. On the other hand, you might take it for granted, like air or water.

  Today, only one-third of this original forest cover still exists. Temperate deciduous forests were cut down long ago. There are only a handful of large, ancient timberlands left in the world—the boreal forests of Canada and Russia. In the tropics three areas remain—the Southeast Asian tropical rainforests of Indonesia, Borneo, and Papua New Guinea. The primary forests of Africa are contained largely within the Congo Basin. Last there are the rainforests of the Amazon, ecosystems so richly life giving they are thought to contain one-tenth of all plant and animal species in the world.

  TREES MAY be the most obvious thing about a forest, but they are far outnumbered by other organisms. The coniferous ranges of the Pacific Northwest are home to hundreds of different mosses and lichens. In our soggy world, organisms that thrive on moisture and rot do a brisk business. Toadstools rule. There are over a thousand kinds of fungi in every shape and color you can imagine and many more yet to be classified. Some look like horse’s hooves, like albino pinecones or beef tripe, like cocktail umbrellas or undersea coral. Some of them are edible. Wild gourmet mushrooms like chanterelles and pine mushrooms sell for exorbitant amounts per pound. Some mushrooms are hallucinogenic. Poisonous varieties, if ingested, can cause gastrointestinal distress, tingling fingers, unquenchable thirst, floating sensations, delusions of grandeur, and even coma. Some work quickly. They have caused people to fall into chemically induced crazes after just a small nibble. The most deadly kinds cause liver and kidney failure. Some toadstools can kill you slowly, over several days.

  Above-ground mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of vast subterranean networks. One such fungus, a honey mushroom, is the biggest organism on Earth. It grows across two thousand acres in the rainforest in Oregon and is thought to be more than 2 ,400 years old.

  Despite their homely, blanched looks, humble fungi are among the most important living things in the forest. They’re saprophytes, recyclers of nutrients. But fungi are also the unseen life-support system of the plant world.

  The dirt in the forests of the Pacific Northwest is poor in nitrogen, which is a critical nutrient for plants. Tiny, underground fungi sheathe the tree roots. But they lack the ability to photosynthesize. They draw nitrogen from the environment and convert it to a form the tree can digest. In exchange the tree feeds the fungi sugars. Together they grow, turbo-boosted by each other’s secretions. It’s an evolutionary miracle that the conifers have grown to such soaring heights, and they owe their success to this symbiotic relationship.

  Often enough, it is an ephemeral association. The embrace of plant roots and fungi forms and disintegrates every year, like a summer camp romance. In the autumn root and fungi tissues dissolve, in turn plumping the soil with organic matter.

  Mycorrhizae, these fungi are called. They were discovered little more than a century ago and are still not fully understood today. Some kinds of mycorrhizae even penetrate plant roots and proliferate inside. They are so intertwined with the tree that if you look at them under a microscope you can barely see where one organism ends and the other begins. In an established forest, parent trees dose new seedlings with mycorrhizae, in effect sharing their fertilizer. After a wildfire mice eat truffles and spread fungal spores, re-inoculating the land. Without mycorrhizae, many of the world’s forests would look totally different—they might be grasslands or clumps of dwarf trees. Nature has a gentle way of pairing giants with miniature beings; for example, whales, the largest mammals on Earth, feed on shrimp the size of pinheads.

  Interspecies relationships occur everywhere in nature. They are so ubiquitous that we take them for granted. Flowering plants, their roots locked in the ground, depend on the unfettered mobility of animals for wide dissemi
nation—birds, bees, bats, moths, ants, and butterflies are all flower pollinators. These are very old co-evolutionary marriages, millions of years in the making. Sometimes the relationship is monogamous. Yucca and fig trees and many kinds of orchid have exclusive relationships with just one pollinating creature. One-third of the world’s food supply comes into being this way. Without this symbiosis we’d have far fewer things to eat, no apples, plums, or berries. No turnips or pumpkins, no cashews or almonds. We’d have no chocolate or vanilla. No coffee or Coca-Cola. Without pollinated flowers we’d be stuck eating ferns, mushrooms, and algae.

  Root-fungi relationships are thought to enhance the growth not only of trees but of most plants everywhere. Some 80 percent of vegetation has relationships with mycorrhizae. Some plants can’t live without them. Only a small percentage can survive without any symbiotic association at all—those vegetables that kids like to hate: cabbages, broccoli, and brussels sprouts. Symbiotic relationships are so crucial to life on Earth that some scientists propose, in a theory called symbiogenesis, that interspecies collaboration is a driving force of evolution. According to this idea, the origin of species isn’t random mutation or competitive selection but reliance and cooperation.

  Lichens are simply fungi that have made friends with algae. In the Pacific Northwest they grow on practically anything that doesn’t run or slither or fly—tree bark, rocks, soil, and decaying logs. They dangle from branches like napkins thrown over a waiter’s arm. Some are bright orange, whereas others are coal black. Some look like barnacles and others look like lace. One lichen resembles a toad pelt. They can mimic anything at all—cabbages or dust or Silly String or antlers hanging upside down. Most look faintly evil, like ingredients for witch’s brew. They have poetic names like pimpled kidney, questionable rock-frog, rag (tattered or laundered), and devil’s matchsticks.

  Lichens are also extremely sensitive organisms. They are supersponges, absorbing the faintest traces of whatever toxins happen to drift past, from air pollution to radioactivity. Like many forest organisms, they grow with excruciating slowness, a tiny fraction of an inch per year. Methuselah’s beard is a rare and beautiful lichen that looks like long lengths of fluffy white string. Before it died out in Europe, people wound it around their Christmas trees as tinsel. In North America it loves to grow in the arms of an old Douglas-fir tree. In fact, it prefers an old-growth forest to the exclusion of any other habitat. Once these forests are gone, scientists believe, so too will be Methuselah’s beard.

  SOME PEOPLE prefer to plant trees with a partner—for the company, the shared snacks, and the subliminal comfort of knowing they won’t be caught alone with a bear or a sprained ankle. Some people say their minds have too much to gnaw on when they work in silence. I met a guy once who said he quit planting trees after two weeks for precisely this reason, the unbearable emptiness of the field.

  Some people wear iPods to drown out the solitude, but I don’t mind being alone, if only because I can’t plant trees and talk at the same time. I expend all my brain power thinking about where I’m going to step next and if I’ll waste precious minutes climbing around instead of over. When I arrive, will it make a good spot to put a tree? Most days I carry several species, and every three steps I must choose which one to plant, depending on the composition of the soil. I can tell what the earth has in store by the vegetation that grows on top. My hands know each kind of tree by feel alone.

  I’ve got to memorize where I’ve been so that I don’t hit the same spots twice. This is verboten, along with two dozen other planting taboos like J-roots, leaners, air pockets, trees planted deep and shallow, too close and too far apart. Misdemeanors sniffed out by quality control staff, summer interns, or rookie foresters who troll our fields with plot survey cords and measuring tape and quivers of mechanical pencils. Checkers, they are called, and we like them as much as most people like tax auditors—as a necessary, impersonal evil. Maybe they resent us, too. Often they’re paid less than us by a factor of three.

  A bundle of trees feels fundamental in my hand, like a loaf of heavy bread. I crack the plastic wrapping and slide out a seedling. It’s a Douglas-fir that looks nearly edible, like a shoot of gourmet salad. But a cultivated tree, for all its organic seemliness, is quite an artificial thing. It’s grown from seed in nursery greenhouses. The seeds come from orchard trees or genetically superior wild specimens. These are harvested by cone pickers. Who are these people? We’re workers at different ends of the assembly line. Our paths never cross.

  Today I carry extra pounds of fertilizer, which come packed in paper pouches. Tea bags filled with powdery beads that look like swimming pool chemicals. I prod one into the soil next to every tree. Seedlings often refuse to grow without a shot of artificial nutrients. Native ferns and shrubs, the free-range competition, have an advantage, since they were born in the wild. For a year our trees have been watered and protected and cared for, and they grow lushly, with lots of needles—a biological load they must feed all at once without yet having sprouted new roots. A planted tree is like a transplanted kidney. It must knit itself into its new environment and grow a mycorrhizal sheath. It must learn to drink and eat and get along with its feisty neighbors.

  Climbing up, I smell cut wood commingling with dirt and the bitter vegetable fragrance of plants. I pass through aromatic zones that fool my nose. I’ve worked in cut blocks that smell like dill pickles, like wet cinnamon, like mud baked onto a tailpipe. Sometimes I get phantom whiffs that remind me of other places, that plunge me into memory, that make me feel sad or inexplicably happy or a bit of both at the same time. A clear-cut is a protean place. It is both full and empty, depending on the eye of the beholder. It doesn’t smell like any air freshener you can find on a supermarket shelf. No laundry softener or room spray or shampoo wrapped in a leafy, green label with the word glade stamped on the packaging.

  My favorite part of a clear-cut, if such a thing is possible, is the very top edge, where the stumps meet the old forest. I will have climbed hard to get there, but usually it’s as clean as a fairway and is a good place to catch my breath. Inside the pillars of the standing forest, the breeze calms. The air is moist and cool. Many of the trunks are marked with lines of spray paint or ribboned with tape—they’ve survived by inches, for now. This is the block boundary, where the ecosystem cleaves in two. The ground is still clothed with a thick layer of moss, sometimes several kinds in various colors. Sword ferns sway. The wind rushes through the canopy. This is the voice, according to local indigenous myth, of Dzunukwa, a witch-spirit who eats misbehaved children but whose blessing brings great wealth. Standing in the drip line of these forest grandfathers I often wonder what it must feel like to be a faller. Trees crash down around these men all day, like dinosaurs falling from the sky.

  Some people think a clear-cut is dead and ugly, but I don’t. To me it is heavy with history and ruination and decay, the way a crumbled Doric column tells of extinct civilizations. Branches with chandeliers of trembling, rust-red needles. The corpses of creatures that once lived a dozen stories in the air litter the ground. I find the wrinkly remains of lungwort, which once hung from upper branches. High-flying tree lettuces that perched in the crooks of the canopy. They look not like organisms that lived on mist and tree bark but like something a scuba diver might have plucked from the depths of the sea. I touch them and they turn to mush or to powder, or they crackle into tiny pieces. Perhaps mine is the thinking of scientists who find rat brains fascinating or surgeons who think of sutures as craftwork. A perception of strange beauty that comes from overexposure and the willful overlooking of the obvious.

  At this time of year, before the winter is really gone for good, the slash fields are brittle gray, weathered and skeletal as a bone yard, but only when you look at them from afar. Up close and inside there is always something moving between the broken logs and stumps. The dirt is alive. Before the heat of summer the salamanders, frogs, and earthworms are busy sliding in and out of their holes, as if they were r
enovating. Slugs the size of bananas leave trails of viscous goop. Every five steps I crash through a spider’s handiwork, a sticky veil across my cheeks and eyelashes. Water percolates just beneath the ground surface, like a pulse beating under skin. I open a hole and find water at the bottom. I can even see the current, the slow eddying of this tiny pocket of snowmelt as it dribbles through the soil. I wonder how long it will take for this cupful to reach a creek and eventually pour out to sea.

  I find human objects, too. Loggers’ axes and wedges and chokermen’s cables. Mostly they are things that have broken or been used up and tossed aside. Empty Gatorade bottles and juice boxes. Silvery pouches that once held Hickory Sticks and Planters Peanuts. Gas cans that slowly erode, oxidized and consumed by the outdoors. Paint weathers. Edges dull. Sometimes, when the cut is really old, I can’t tell what an object is without picking it up and holding it to the daylight. Sometimes I find some stray bit of cast-off machinery. The forest eats the chain saw instead of the other way around.

  There is a peculiar energy to a cut block in spring—a cold, moist sizzle. Although the trees are gone, a galaxy of buds and seeds and eggs and creatures waits underground for the right day to burst forth. They build, cell upon cell, with unseen industriousness. Their progress is as inevitable as the French curls of ocean currents or cumulus clouds tumbling across the sky. Nature marches ineluctably forward. It’s why blobs of moss grow on cement and mold blackens bathroom caulking. Why we declare war on the dandelions in our lawns. Outside, beyond our fences and sidewalks and window panes, something is always devouring something else. Some ugly, tough-stalked stinker of a flower struggles up out of rubble. It rises, dies off, is eaten or rots down to make room for something else to grow in its place. That’s plant destiny. It’s our fate, too.