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Horizons
The delineation between earth and sky is not so clear as a person might think. The earth is pregnant with roots. One cell splits in two, and two to four. Clay is prised from clay, sand bound to sand.
The tendrils delve beneath my feet to unimaginable depths. One alfalfa seed, a sprout to dress a salad, will make a wisp of foliage four feet tall or so. The roots of that lucerne go down a dozen feet or more. A mesquite can send its roots down through the desert soil to groundwater a hundred feet below. I have walked through caves a hundred feet down, and seen roots dangle from the ceiling.
The rains have tilled my soil. A turn of my wrist and weeds come up with a shrug, a whisper.
Light falls on leaves. Leaves turn light and air to sweetness. The sugars run down to the roots, are stored as starch. Plants keep light and air beneath the soil. Roots seek out water. They drink, and water dissolves rock, minerals to build tissues in the leaves. Leaves flick in the wind, the rock conjoined with air, made liquid. The soil extends to the tops of trees. The sky a hundred feet below the desert.
Four years ago I planted three little bunchgrasses here, Festuca californica, a fescue native to the site a hundred years ago. Atop their stems blue panicles of glumes flicker in wind. Deep red skin clasps the culms at the plants’ crowns. My garden is full of weedy grasses, the foxtails and feral Avena fatua. Another grass I do not know, gray with furry velvet skin. I pull them all, damp mats of sweet earth where a foot of mulch has rotted. One grass new to me, thin and hard with cylindrical leaves, comes up reluctantly. I take a look. Deep red skin clasps culms. The fescue is repopulating its old haunts, seed from those glumes falling on the earth.
The rains have soaked this little hill. The rock below a sponge, but it can drink no more. Each new rain wets springs asleep for forty years. A raincloud needs but pass overhead and the creek comes up a foot.
A tug and mallows come out whole, and thistles, and the horrendous tickseed with its nonexistent roots, and dandelions for the rabbit, roots disgorged entire to their very tips. A squirrel-planted nogal is more reticent, holds its ground as hard as the black-rind nut from which it grew. My grandfather had one of these trees, fifty years old at the least, and our floor stained black from days of going after nutmeat. When he died his widow paid some men to cut it down and haul it. Its brown-black heart, a cord at least, went into someone’s fire.
The little walnut tree I killed today will compost with the thistles.
A new, odd grass beneath the fescue, and I take off my glove, run my finger on its leaves. It is no grass but a beargrass, Nolina texana, sacahuista, a thin-leaved cousin to the Agave it nestles up against where the yellow-eyed grass makes a carpet of blunt blades. I planted the sacahuista some years ago and then forgot it. Where it grows, a sidewalk ran from street to porch all at right angles. Jim and I took a jackhammer to it, less soulful work than just my hands and sledge would have been, but over that much sooner. Where concrete had been the new-exposed soil smelt sour. Now a broad arc of red sandstone flags runs from street to house, and fescue sequesters sweetness in the earth.
That sacahuista grows on limestone in the wild. I planted it atop the rubble from the walk. It is thrice the size it was when I tamped earth around its roots. I do not know now how deep those roots extend.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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