GROUNDED THE BEND OF THE FIELD just as the autumn sun came over the eastern hills, racing over the sorghum and lighting the rough edge of the pine forest. There before me I could see eight young men and women in muddy clothing. They were seated, kneeling, standing, or pacing beside an open pit.
A black woman in an Auburn University T-shirt was spraying water from a squeeze bottle onto a reddish lump of soil. A square-jawed man with a blond ponytail looked intently at a smudge of dirt that he was working with a forefinger into the palm of his hand. A broad-shouldered, florid man in a John Deere cap broke off a piece of soil and inserted it between his cheek and gums. The remaining part he held to his nose while he inhaled. I felt that I had come upon a latter-day school of alchemists, seeking with all of their senses to decipher the material world.
As I watched, someone said in a loud voice. “Ready? Change!”
Another eight young people came boiling out of the deep trench where they had been concealed, each of them bearing trays or cups full of soil. The original eight drew their knives and rushed down the sloping entry ramp into the ground.
I walked closer to see what they were going to do. The pits were at least twelve feet long, five feet across, and six feet deep, more like the entry to an underground barrow than a simple fosse, or ditch. Nevertheless, because of their nervous faces and the drawn weapons, I had the impression that I was going to witness a gangland remake of the fight between Hamlet and Laertes in Ophelia’s grave.
Instead of attacking each other, however, the eight faced the walls of the pit. They scored it, touched it, rubbed it, wet it, smoothed it, and cut off hunks and chunks and bits of it. They stared earnestly at the places where one color faded into another, or where mottles appeared, or where suddenly the soil gave way to a rotten whitish rock that crumbled between the fingers.
Agronomists, 4-H kids, and F.F.A. members all hold contests to measure and identify soils, but few are as fervid as the teams of college students in the southeast. Twelve teams from five states appeared for the southeast regionals of the National Soil Judging Competition in the North Carolina Piedmont. Just at dawn on the day of the contest, they’d been driven to a site where four pits that they had never seen before awaited them. Each of the more than seventy-five students would have a little better than half an hour per pit to examine, measure, and accurately describe the four soils.
It was comical to see them descend like pirates into the pits, then reemerge and seat themselves on the damp, matted grass, where straight-away they were transformed into contemplatives, interrogating their soils with every sense, not excluding taste. I have seldom seen a funnier or more graceful sporting event.
After they were done, I went alone into each pit. It was like entering the theater of a twelve-thousand-year-long play. The four holes were no more than five hundred yards apart, dug into the edge of the piedmont where the remains of ancient seas are jumbled together with older metamorphic bedrock.
Nothing in these soils was not alive. Nothing in the profiles was not moving. The tendrils of the roots made blond channels in the whitish yellow layers, from which for millennia water had leached the iron. Deeper in the profile, the iron had gathered into clumps of subterranean rust, freckling the soil against a base of ochre clay that was greasy to the touch. In one hole, the lower horizons had divided into deep red and golden layers, like cirrus clouds on an autumn afternoon. In another, a solid boulder of granite flaked and crumbled at a touch into sugary granules. In another, all that was left of the bedrock were shiny flakes of mica that sparkled in bloodred clays. In a fourth, a layer of pebbles had been lifted up atop the red clay, like an offering of the earth to the sun.
I thought of Hans Jenny, who now has been dead for more than a year, and of what he had said to me about looking with fox’s eyes. Since that time at the pygmy forest, I’d often wondered what he meant. In these pits, following these knife-wielding students, I learned the answer: Everywhere he looks, the fox finds life.