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Roger Swain Finds "Joy In
Mudville"
There Is Joy in Mudville
In the spring, one man's fancy turns to thoughts
of dirt.
by Roger Swain
Mud season is upon
us. The great thawing that began with the welcome plink, plink of
maple sap dripping into metal sap buckets has now produced a terra
infirma. Whole sections of this New Hampshire town are, for the moment,
off-limits, the roads impassable wallows. Calls to the road agent
are no use. The ruts are bottomless. And so, where there is no pavement,
we walk, discovering once again the pleasures of squishing through
the black ooze, watching the way it curls up around the sides of rubber
boots. It is but a brief few weeks, this transition from frozen ground
to a dry one. All too soon we will be caught up in the rush of spring
chores. But for now, while we are up to our ankles in it, let us acknowledge
the primacy of mud, this union of water and dust.
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| In a larger sense, mud is never out of season. What
would life be without it? As any gardener will tell you,
we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and
the fact that it rains. And yet every child called in
to lunch these days will be greeted with a chorus of "Leave
your shoes right there, give me that shirt, scrub your
hands, remember to use soap, don't touch the good towels."
Mud season highlights one of life's most basic contradictions.
We may speak of kissing the earth, but heaven forbid anyone
should actually get mud on his face while doing it.
"As common as dirt," "mean as dirt,"
"dirt poor." These are not complimentary expressions.
Now and then we allow ourselves to laugh over a dirty
joke or hail the prospector who strikes pay dirt. But
the word itself is inextricably linked to the mean and
the base, coming as it does from the Old Norse "drit,"
meaning excrement. The mud that we daily track indoors,
defying doormats, boot scrapers and designated mud rooms,
becomes dirt the moment it crosses the threshold. "Good
clean dirt," at least in the house, will forever
be an oxymoron.
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| Yet as one who has spent much of his life shepherding
food from the garden into the house, I must point out
that even the finest banquet has its roots in the muck.
My sweetheart's mother may have been taken aback by what
she called the "dirtiness" of my hands, but
what did she expect, given that the French onion soup,
the timbale of fresh corn and the pear sherbet had been
so recently wrested from the earth?
We gardeners are inherently passionate about soil.
We like its smell, the damp, moist exhalations of microorganisms
working their infinite alchemy. We like to touch it,
stroking furrows with our fingers, sweeping it into
hills with our arms. Again and again we know the soil
with our bodies. When a ball of earth formed in our
palm crumbles readily at a touch, it is time to plant
peas. For okra, it should be warm enough to walk in
barefoot. Any way you look at it, we are lovers.
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| My own garden is here in the Granite State, where the
growing season is short, the soil shallow and the boulders
huge. Yet these same rocks, these monolithic outcroppings,
are the soil's ancestors. Reduced by heat, cold, wind,
rain and glacial ice, they have spawned not only the sandy
loam of my plot, but by descent the limestone, sandstone
and shale, the soils that result from them, as well as
all the salts and sediments of the sea. Soil science is
too dignified to be sexy. Tectonic orogenesis -- mountain
building -- is about as titillating as it gets. Let us
forget that soils have been surveyed and classified, mapped
and analyzed, and concentrate on the simple truth that
there is soil in our blood. It isn't just those Dartmouth
students whose college song boasts that they have "the
granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains."
It's all of us, the gardener, the cook and everyone else.
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| The Bible, of course, put it more succinctly. "You
are dust" (Genesis 3: 19). You are and I am, whether
we stop to wash our hands and faces before we sit down
at the table. No matter how carefully we rinse our lettuce
or scrub our potatoes, we end up eating a mineral fraction.
We can pick every last pebble of mud out of the dried
beans, and split every leek right down to its base, but
we will never rid our diet of its essential dirt. It's
in every mouthful, in every succulent strawberry, in the
tea bags and the biscuits. |
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| A baker's dozen minerals from boron to zinc are essential
to the growth of plants. Incinerate a plant and you will
find them in the ash. Eat those plants and you eat the
minerals too. Tea is rich in fluorine, soybeans in phosphorous.
The very taste of food can reflect its mineral content.
The celebrated Vidalia onion lacks eyewatering pungency
because it is raised in low-sulfur soil. Wine connoisseurs
insist they can taste the vineyard's limey clay every
time they lift a glass of grand cru Chablis. All of us
are dirt-eaters. We eat of the earth from cradle to grave.
Nobody knows precisely how much soil we consume over a
lifetime. As a rule of thumb, though, we might as well
invoke the old American proverb, "You have to eat
a peck" -- or pint or bushel -- "of dirt before
you die." It refers, of course, to eating one's words
and other such embarrassments. But it serves just as well
at mealtime. |
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Roger B. Swain is the science editor of Horticulture
magazine and the host of "The Victory Garden" on PBS. This
article first appeared in the April 7, 1996 issue of the "New
York Times Magazine " and is copyrighted by Roger B. Swain.
Images are provided courtesy of: Agricultural
Research Service Information Staff.
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