The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  ‘When’s a good time to plant broad beans?’ I ask my father, as I look in to say goodbye.

  ‘October.’

  ‘Do you mind if I borrow a trowel?’

  15

  Osteoporosis

  She scurries

  She scurries as a spider light

  She scurries as a spider light and care

  She scurries as a spider light and care full.

  She hears

  She hears our language

  She hears our language secrete

  She hears our language secrete under her feet a secret

  She hears our language secrete under her feet a secret sequence.

  My hand reaches to steady the rest of me and lands on an apple tree, completely laden. I stop short, extend arms to branches: an apple midwife. Spotted with autumn, their ripeness is in the touch; small tugs on the waist, fingers around the spine. Cradle their ribs. Exert just enough pressure. Sometimes, two come at once: a twin birth. Other times, ones that look ready aren’t; you have to listen to the tree, you have to go on touch. Blackberries bleeding overhead, apple mushing underfoot; acorns: little spits of light in the dark leaves as I pick. These globes glow in the hand: the traffic lights of changing seasons. Green to yellow to red, they pulse and pause in my upturned palm. ‘Not yet,’ lisp the younger ones, clinging with all they’ve got. Others, drowsy from the sleep of the seasons, sigh: ‘Is it time?’ Whole summers asleep in the flesh; a crisp wintering of skin.

  Pockets weighted with apples, I strike out across the field. The throb of me pushes all sound down a syphon; vast at the top – the wide blast of road traffic; minute at the tail – pinpricks of insects clicking on and off in the grass. ‘Fartlek’, a deliciously stupid word, has always been part of my running arsenal, long before I knew it had a name, or was a verified practice. Mostly when I start to get bored, or the body starts to hurt, I spurt into a shock sprint which lasts for as long as the terrain of ground–body allows. There is a joy in speed, an absolute letting go of the mind, similar to the first onslaught of the cold in outdoor swimming.

  What is underfoot dictates the speed of the run. A clear path quickens; long tundra, potholes, the untilled meadow slow and stall. There are other slowing factors: a plastic hawk the farmer next door uses to ward off birds; the real hawks that attack it; the bitter screech of a chainsaw. As I run, I am conscious of not speaking the language, of the weight I give the grass and the ground below, the pressure on the soil. The millions of hectares abandoned every year to erosion. To which I add the weight of the ribs, the pulse of the head, the thundering heart. I don’t even know who I’m not speaking to. What is grass? What is in and under it?

  There are over eleven thousand species of grass. And it is really a canopy of leaves. At least the top part, that grows out of the stem and most often meets the human eye, is leaf. Their fibrous roots stretch into the soil, drawing up water and nutrients, sometimes spreading out to grow new plants, tethering grass to ground. Often, a ligule covers the lower part of the leaf: a thin membrane or fringe of hair-like strands. As I run, I tread the leaves’ hair, catching light. They photosynthesize, like those of a tree. I run green.

  My father has always run. In his youth, for the local running club; then at university; and in later life competing in hundreds of marathons. Navigating the country lanes daily by foot, the earth for miles around our home has been imprinted by thousands of his steps, the ground pushing up to meet him; his soles, the portals through which the underworld could travel. I feel this as I move over his old ground. Feel this underground movement, tiny tremors through the clay to leaf litter and humus, down to trickling roots and minerals, to sand and silt, to iron and aluminium oxide, to bedrock. And all the way back up. If there is speech in this, it is in the movement, in the drift of chemicals and their re-settlement.

  In the chemical language of nematodes, adding one more chemical to the signal for ‘go away’ means ‘come here’, perhaps showing that, for worms too, there is a fine line between love and hate. Like the control of traffic at Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction, worm thoroughfares throb with held and repelled worm traffic. I think of Druid’s Hill and the ‘sinuous’ field boundaries of Alcock’s description. We read these curves now as signals of the former Celtic cultivation; will future readers see the road’s curves as our own method of working the land?

  Soon, lane becomes road, and a slope down along steeply falling hill. I gust in huge lungfuls; golden leaves canopy over and sun trickles lightly through as I run. Not for the first time, I think of how my travels into the soil, the past, my father’s imprints, are opening up new kinds of living to me, are making me live a wider life. I reach the road that he would call ‘the lung opener’ when we’d walked it together. It takes a while to scale and my speed decreases practically to walking pace, but eventually I make it. As the road flattens out, I move with speed, though I am making the same amount of effort. It seems the perfect metaphor for privilege.

  I reach Arthur’s wood, where it feels good to swap tarmac for earth, moss, pine needles, to slip my way through the red sludge, adding my print to the paw and boot marks already there. Rain pulls a deep cloud over and it is suddenly dark. Trunks rise high, pointing up towards the source. A blackbird flits between the pines like a bat. The rattle of haulage trucks seems about to burst through the trees, though it is only coming from the road. That such an open, public wooded space exists so close to the village feels special. Coming out against road again, I see a ‘For Sale’ sign on the gate. I wonder if it includes any part of the woodland that has always, in my living memory, been a communal space and feel suddenly self-conscious and in the wrong place.

  I move back through the woodland, surreptitiously, not along a path but through the low-branched trees. I have to bend low to pass through them and feel my stomach muscles draw in at the challenge. I probably shouldn’t be here, but the sign’s threat of the land being taken away propels me into rebellion. I slink along the forest floor, all animal. The going is soft; here and there a needle pricks into skin. I make a mental note to remove them before rejoining the public road, along with the powdered pollen on my legs. A moth flutters by my fingers; we all match perfectly and seem synecdoches of each other: the dusky drab looper moth, my tawny hand, the rose-brown pine-needle floor. As I continue at ground level, I see seedlings shooting up, husks of pine cones and endless carcasses of out-grown, or burgled, shells. There are nests too, fairly low in the branches, so that you can see their spiralling patterns of twig. Nearby are quite large white wood pigeons’ eggs, broken open. Elsewhere along the floor are golden tissues of leaves, paper thin. Their gold gleams against the soft green moss. I want to pick it all up and carry it back with me to lay as my floor in Birmingham, in place of MDF.

  As I rejoin the road, homeward bound, I start using the whole space, veering into the middle when there’s no one else around. I run along a brook, back into banks of gleaming foliage, and brace myself for the long ascent. I wonder if this is how he felt, on every return from wherever he’d run; living at the top of a hill, the return is always going to be an upward challenge. But instead of the slow chug of my earlier climb, I find the body gliding into gear, some old chemical reaction pulsing through the body, something imprinted in the hormones or entangled in the DNA sending me flying uphill. Finish strong, some implanted voice is saying. And I do. As I burn over the brow, the road parts into a sea of onlookers – who happen to be clouds, meshing into panoramic green. I pull into the lane, singing with green and gold and airy applause.

  Even in the moments where nothing moves – not chemicals, not words, not bones – there can be a silent progress under the surface, can’t there? A healing? I think of that, as I retrace the soles of his feet, covering the ground that they covered. Mountain ash clutches heat in its leaves. I grasp it as I go; a handful of heat to take in to him. Pollen falls. Web trails. The grass is a network of diamonds. Can’t get a word in. Grass interrupts. Incessant. Do I know what it’s
like to have a diamond for a head? To carry a circle of light? To be colour? In place of bone to have lignin, cells and fibres? Carbon and oxygen; nitrogen, phosphorus; chlorophyll, cellulose; water and green? Its chatter is fast and light and linked. It chimes with the other blades – clover, a dock leaf, a fallen apple, a tangle of roots – endlessly signalling, twinkling, tinkling, and always looking up. Do I know what it is to be always looking up? To pine cone, needles, passing cloud and blue?

  Inside, my father looks down, curved by brittleness of bone. Inside, the house is full of spiders, escaping the farmer’s harvest blade. They scatter over draining boards, the back of the sofa, windowsills, on their way I don’t know where. I don’t want to move them. I love the multiplicity of leg. Two is too limiting. Two stalks of bone that break apart with the movement of months. That wear down, into smaller and smaller steps. That can’t take you anywhere anymore; that leave you relentlessly inside your own body, with nowhere left to run.

  16

  Protozoa

  She springs

  She springs and prances as she dances

  She springs and prances as she dances with the stars, the soil her sky.

  I sense movement below. No scurrying of foot or flapping of wing. Something is tumbling. I drop my head low, I tense my toes; far beneath them something flows. In the top six inches of the soil, aquatic animals called protozoa entrance me. Single-celled animals living in a film of water surrounding soil particles. A hidden water life in the soil. As a wild swimmer, I am enthralled, not only by the proximity of this secret water life but by the very notion of aquatic animals: a contradiction in terms for the land-locked.1

  Their name, ‘proto’ ‘zoa’ means first animals, with a freshwater species called ‘heliozoa’ or ‘sun-animalcules’. The names are intoxicating. When I enter a river there are three stages: 1) the plunge: complete denial of water temperature as body enters before mind can stop it; 2) the shake: vigorous movement to raise body temperature which lasts for as long as it takes for the pain to subside, generously termed by others as ‘swimming’; 3) the float: lying still, on the back, face up to sun, cloud, rain- or snow-fall. During the float I am heliozoa: one of the first aquatic animals staring at the sun. In these moments, colours intensify so as to become meaningless. Or, they no longer match their meanings, as if an OuLiPo poet had performed a language constraint on them, taking the word ‘sun’ and moving to the entry nine times below it in the dictionary and attaching that word’s meaning instead. ‘Sun: a small brightly coloured bird of warmer parts of the Old World, resembling a hummingbird but not able to hover.’ In these moments, you know what it is to be light. To not be pushing down on the earth, not lending your weight to what is already laden.

  Of the groups of protozoa, one is the amoeba, and of these, an actinopod amoeba is shaped like a star. As I run, I start sculpting my own body accordingly, throwing out my arms as my legs jump apart. I realize I am doing star jumps. As I run, I start to feel the stars jump beneath my feet and to match them. I feel them through the soles of my shoes, their vibrations meet mine in the twined nerve endings of toe and soil. Lightness is both a colour and a weight. Stars are animals. The soil needs its own dictionary.

  Protozoa: animal stars under the earth, consuming bacteria, releasing nitrogen. Fungi: threads of nutrient cycling, binding soil particles together. Humates: the concentrated nutrients and complex compounds from the breakdown of animal and plant life over millions of years. Nematodes, earthworms and arthropods; molluscs and grass; all breathing all moving all chattering in their own processes for breathing, for moving, for chattering. Cherts, lavas and tuffs. Breccias and sands. Mudstones and flint and ice and silt. Carboniferous, Devonian, Permian, Triassic. Cretaceous, Palaeogene, Quaternary, Drift. I don’t yet have all the names for all the processes. I have to keep looking them up and to keep looking down.

  17

  Quarter

  She uses words

  She uses words to help us stop

  She uses words to help us stop falling

  She uses words to help us stop falling but what do words add

  She uses words to help us stop falling but what do words add up to?

  A quarter of all known species live in the soil. Bacteria, fungi, plants, organic matter, nematodes, arthropods, animals. Some single-celled bacteria, some with billions of bacteria in a single gram of soil. Some decomposer bacteria, breaking down organic materials; some nitrogen-fixing bacteria, converting nitrogen into forms that plants can use. Some disease-suppressing bacteria; some actinobacteria, breaking down humates. Some sulphur oxidizers, converting sulphides into plant-friendly forms. Still more aerobes and anaerobes, adapting to the oxygen levels in different kinds of soils. Fungi decomposers, breaking down organic matter. Mutualists, like my-corrhizal fungi, developing mutually beneficial relationships with plants. Soil is one of the most complex ecosystems we know, or don’t know. There is still so much to find out.1

  The statistics in our reading of the soil can feel too large to comprehend. There are 270 million dairy cows currently being farmed worldwide. These dairy cows and their manure have a direct impact on the soil. Not only do they add large amounts of greenhouse gases – methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide – into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change, but overgrazing and the impact of cattle movement on the soil can lead to erosion, with the loss of topsoil and organic matter that can take centuries to grow. 270 million cows. 66 million people in the UK. 7 billion people in the world. One dairy cow to every twenty-six people in the world.

  Catering for this high volume of one species can also see a reduction in others, as natural habitat is converted into agricultural land in order to produce feed crops for cattle or provide pasture. Subject to their own particular gentrification, the less tangibly valuable species move further out, even as the areas left to host them diminish. I think of the teeming bacteria in the soil, how these populations work for the good of so many, against the limited roles assumed by humans. Sometimes saviours: saving our soil, our water, our planet; other times, villains: we created our own crises. We lurch from hero to demon, often overlooking the value in the small everyday consciousness of being neighbourly.2

  Noticing, with friendliness, what is around, or not around, us. Not stopping at the limits of our knowledge but pressing on and in and on and in, gently, tentatively, politely. Farmers, with their daily contact with the fields and their occupants, have pioneered innovations that are making dairy farming more sustainable. Many know that keeping a closer eye on the cows can contribute towards reduced disease and increased milk yields, but a friendly noticing prompted one farmer in Sweden to prepare quality rubber mattresses for her cows to sleep on. Their improved welfare, also helped by new housing, led to saved costs in other areas. Since the cows no longer need so much professional attention, she says she is able to spend more time with them companionably. ‘Now I have more time to just be around them,’ she says.

  What do I notice in my visits to the fields? In the time spent with the blade of grass in my father’s acre? That I am often the beneficiary of these moments. The fields, in ways I am only just beginning to realize, connect me to my father, while the blade of grass leaves me, somehow, more graceful, more upright. While all I do is write of them. Yet there may be a value in this amplification, in the bringing of these characters into the foreground, in changing the way they are looked, or not looked, at. And this not looking is one of the hardest things to visualize, to make it possible to see.

  A quarter is a statistic that is more readily realized. To know that a quarter of all known species live in the soil is to picture a packed thoroughfare, a burgeoning network of interlaced lives. But knowing that a quarter of all soil is severely degraded is less easy to see. Perhaps we envisage eroded soil in distant continents where plants cannot grow. Perhaps we see floods, where degraded land is unable to hold onto water. Or perhaps we can’t picture it at all.

  While there is still so much to learn ab
out the soil, we know that the interaction of organisms in the soil contributes to the cycles that make all life possible, and that to help ourselves we must help the soil. Whether it is a story that shows us that, or the maths, what matters is that we see it.

  18

  Ritual

  Just as a bird feels the moment to fly, to set off across country, continents, to new ground, I feel the time when I must leave what I am doing and come. And each time I visit the Druid’s Hills, a force rises from the ground to meet me. While logically it seems futile, this regular touching of a particular piece of land, I continue, following an inner knowing that won’t explain itself. I wonder about these internal rhythms, guided, perhaps, by a flow of external currents: the length of day, or temperature.