Home and Shop Companion 0133
Home and Shop Companion 0133

Rural Ramblings – Summer 1982
Ralph C. Miller

With spring hanging back this year (it snowed on Tuesday, although it’s well on to mid-April), I went out just this morning to put in a dozen plants. Azaleas mostly, a Japanese holly and a couple more roses. Shredded bark, some treated steer manure, river sand, with a little of our native soil. It’s mostly sandy loam and clay mix that tends to be heavy and not too deep. All that bark and manure increases the humus and the added sand helps lighten it. But it’s all dirt, especially on the hands, so I had to get out my Cornhusker’s lotion to give them a beauty treatment.

“Beauty is only skin deep,” says the old saw (never mind that some wag has added, “but ugly goes to the bone”). In the last issue, the Nulls – Ed and Chris – gave us a fine view of their “Reverence for Dirt.” They quote the frequently repeated warning that we are dependent for existence on six inches of topsoil and the rain.

Out there in space, the astronauts extol the beauty of our planet. Along with the cosmetics of green vegetation and blue water, that “six-inch layer” represents the world’s beautiful skin and our hope of salvation. If you haven’t read the Nulls’ article yet, do so; if you have, you may want to re-read it. I’ve been aware of the impending day of judgement they imply for some time, but they really spell out the whys and wherefores. I recommend it.

That’s what this particular “dirty story” is about. Dirt. If a rolling stone doesn’t pick up moss, he often raises a little dust. As I travel, I’m always on the qui vive for a beautiful skin – excuse me – good-looking soil. There is some, and some of the other kind too. I see it in my ramblings – like last winter’s.

When you ride out of here across Eastern Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas, a lot of that country is on the dry side. Not so many rains or floods to wash away the “skin” of the land, but neither do they have the ample vegetation to provide organic matter and humus; so that skin is pretty fragile. Rain, snow-melt, and constant wind have cut it pretty fine, often right to the rock.

There are other soils of course, and some of them very good. Some good grasslands and some more of it under the plow. Wheat often, and occasionally row crops, where water is no problem. Many of those areas look alright. Well, the skin on the back of my hands still serves too, but you’d never call it beautiful.

With a lot of chemical additives and normal water, they’ll get by alright for awhile. But it’s an addiction: chemical or irrigation or both. Irrigation leaches and consumes, or even burns out the humus; so it takes more water since the soil won’t hold it and more chemicals because without organic matter, the land won’t store them. The water washes them into streams and rivers, where they pollute the waters or encourage algae. Addiction and the tell-tale signs are there.

The elasticity is gone from my hands and from the soil. Skin oils or humus – without them, this beauty is soon gone. Now the earth is chronologically older than I am, but science says it is just approaching middle age for a planet. It does still have the capacity to regenerate itself, if given the chance. As a certain melancholy prince was reported to observe, “There’s the rub.”

The earth has a problem and we’re it. If we could unload someplace for a million years or so, our planet could get itself back in shape, but since we can’t, it can’t. Not without help. And it isn’t often getting it.

I did see one piece of evidence that someone in the government had recognized that a problem existed. There’s an area out there somewhere designated “National Grasslands.” I’m not altogether positive of my facts, but it’s my understanding that within its confines the soil may not be disturbed. No plows, I take it, and I think no bulldozers either. Grasslands forever, or until Congress changes its mind, whichever comes first.

Now it wasn’t hard to see how they came up with that logic. Nearby is the Teddy Roosevelt National Park and heart of the Badlands (they look like background for a horror movie). With that as an example, and a quick scan of the soil and vegetation in the area, it is readily apparent that beauty is lean there and close to the bone. Buttes everywhere, rocky outcrops and what grass grows wouldn’t feed half a jackrabbit to the acre. It isn’t really a desert, but grasslands is a very charitable estimate…

Well, that was on the way down, and I’ve belabored the North enough. We were heading south. There’s a lot of dirt in Florida. I got a little of it under my fingernails. One of my friends out here in Oregon recently asked me if Florida was plantation country. Too many of us here think of all of the South in terms of Scarlet O’Hara.

Actually, parts of north Florida did support plantations at one time, especially near the St. Johns River, I think. Steamboats plied the river to Palatka and beyond, to carry off cotton bales and bring back the imported pretties. Then there was a labor crisis in the 1860s; by the time that muddled its way through, the boll weevil struck.

In the abandoned fields, now worn down by overcropping, the thorn vines and palmetto grew rampant, followed by pine seedlings. In forty years, the land had gone back to the wild. Turpentine spills dripped into buckets here and there, lumber and later pulp wood became the order all across northern Florida and parts of southern Alabama and Georgia.

Tucked away in virtual pockets, the land was still cropped as it is today, but for the most part it is forest, which doesn’t tire the soil as much as you might think. The growth is gradual and the roots go deep to bring up nutrients and trace minerals. Where the detritus is allowed to remain on the forest floor it decays into humus and adds to the topsoil. Much of that soil is sandy, with some loam and a clay bottom not too far down.

Here and there lies what is known as hammock; that’s a Southern expression for certain pieces of dark, rich soil usually thickly overgrown with hardwoods. Some are a veritable jungle. I’m a little curious to know the exact derivation of the word in that sense, because the hammock we know is from the Spanish hamaca, a swinging bed or cradle suspended from cords or hooks.

From the looks of hammock land, I would say many, if not all, evolved from swamps – and that could be a clue to the name. One definition of the word hummock with a “u” is a slightly higher piece of ground in a swamp, usually wooded. At any event, floating or suspended, the rich, dark soil of hammocks usually runs very deep and is wet and heavy.

Perhaps the most famous of all the hammocks in Florida is the one popularized by the late writer Marjorie Kinan Rawlings and set around Cross Creek. That lies some 45 or 50 miles from Starke and we drove down there occasionally. It isn’t quite as isolated as it was back during the days she lived there and the restaurant named for her novel The Yearling is quite a tourist mecca.

I’m not sure if the steady stream of visitors has had any effect on the hammock yet or not. Probably not too much, as most of the vegetation there is undisturbed. Of course The Yearling’s table may be affecting the wildlife to some extent. They serve frog legs, quail, cooter (a swamp turtle), and even some alligator, I believe. Maybe even opossum and water moccasin, although that last is a rumor I’ve only heard.

Some hammocks have been turned into highly productive cropland. One wonders what effect that may have down the road a few years. There is one other one that may be worthy of note, in passing. It lies south and a little east of Jacksonville, not far from the ocean, on the edge of an area called Palm Valley. You may have heard of it as the Tournament Players’ Club – golf, that is.

When the architect Pete Dye went in there to create the course, they took core samples; first three or four feet of dark hammock, then a layer of marl before they hit sand. A curious thing about golf courses is they need sand for good, firm sod, so they wound up removing both top layers and piling up or burying all that rich hammock soil and marl, and bringing the sand to the top. Well, it’s a topsy-turvy world. By the way, marl, if you didn’t know, is a crumbly combination of clay and calcium carbonate ( often from old shell deposits) and is highly prized for acid soil correction. Mr. Dye says, “well, it makes excellent spectator mounds.”

Across the lake from Cross Creek you run into the first of the extensive and intensive citrus culture. Florida raises a lot of truck crops for eastern markets; strawberries are very big in places, most notably around Plant City, between Lakeland and Tampa. They stretch for miles – strawberry fields forever – to coin a phrase. But I’m sure the biggest crop raised down there is the citrus. (The marijuana only passes through.)

One thing that surprises some visitors to Florida is the number of beef cattle raised. Actually, there has been a beef industry since earliest Spanish times. They found they could turn cattle loose down there and they would thrive. Like the early Californios, they’d mount a big drive from time to time and comb the near-wild cattle out of the thickets. The sea channel that separates Anastasia Island from St. Augustine is called the Matanzas River. It takes its name from the Spanish matanzas, meaning the virtual festival surrounding the roundup and slaughter of the animals near the sea. From there the hides and barrels of salt beef could be loaded aboard ship.

Today beef is pasture-raised over much of the state and processed locally or shipped to northern markets. With extensive grass pastures and the cattle residues, the soil can hold its own, at least if it’s not too heavily grazed and has sufficient water.

There’s another crop that has been proliferating all over Florida in the past few years that is not quite so kind to the soil: amusement parks. I won’t attempt a guess at the acreage involved in Sea World, Circus World, Ringling Museum, Lion Country, Jungle Gardens, Cypress Gardens, Sunken Gardens, Silver Springs, and twenty or thirty more whose names escape me. Of course I haven’t mentioned the big one – Disney World. I don’t think anyone really knows how much of central Florida that covers. It’s probably smaller than Rhode Island, but not by much.

All that produces tourists and lovely green lettuce, so Florida isn’t complaining too much. The only thing that occurs to me is what the archeologists 2000 years from now will make of the ruins of the Magic Kingdom. Or the soil scientists studying Pete Dye’s golf course…!

With son Tony (my usual co-pilot flew home), I left Florida on St. Patrick’s Day. We decided to break new ground on this trip, so angled up across as far north as spring would let us. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, then crossed the river into northern Louisiana from Vicksburg (didn’t stop to see the swamp where Grandpa Miller spent all that time in 1863), and then to Texas. Those other states were fairly heavily cropped and large areas get flooded from time to time, but perhaps the floods bring down as much soil as they take away.

Texas, however, is different. That’s the whole story on the Lone Star State, isn’t it – it’s different. Although politically it is all one state, geographically, physically, even demographically, it is many States. It’s so-o-o big and so different. East Texas is still rich delta country, influenced by the river or rivers and with the vegetation of the Mid-South. Without a little more time to sniff around there, I’d hesitate to judge whether their dirt is alive and well, but it does sustain that vegetation.

I have to apologize in advance to all Tejanos, but Texas makes me vaguely uneasy. I suppose it’s that aspect of size. Like taxes (and some other things), Texas is unavoidable; that is, if you have a hankering to go west anywhere south of the Big Red. I guess we could have run all the way ’round through Arkansas and Oklahoma, but that seemed too cowardly, so I pulled my hat down and we just headed straight out onto the plains. Then at the last I sort of lost my nerve and scooted on around Dallas on the bypass and stopped in Denton instead.

Well, plains I said and they were; after the lushness of Florida and the Southeast, that country can’t help but seem drab and unending by contrast. And the wind… Nothing to slow it down for a thousand miles. I had no trouble seeing what the soil was like several times. Drove through it, smelled and tasted it, in fact all but choked on it. Anywhere somebody had stirred it up – sometimes when they hadn’t – it was on the move. Not enough organic matter, so it dries as soon as the water stops – and blows. That’s probably another reason east Texas looks pretty green. The prevailing wind is out of the west.

Texas doesn’t have a corner on drabness or wind or drifting soil. After Amarillo, I-40 goes on through Tucumcari and Santa Rosa, New Mexico. The same and more so. Except that now and then there are a few pleats and folds where you get down out of the wind a bit. Wind and water, however, had done a job on parts of that country. If buttes and bare escarpments – just rock – are your bag, New Mexico and Arizona should be your pleasure. Man can’t take all the credit for the erosion there, but of course he’s not making things any better. Where there are habitable areas, we work our clever act and soon it’s only fit for rattlers and tarantulas.

In Arizona the land finally got tired of being so flat and stood up on its hind legs again. We climbed up out of the semi-desert to Flagstaff, at around 6000 feet or more. Couldn’t see what the soil looked like for the eight inches of snow that covered everything. I visited my step-brother there though, and talked about the soil, among other things.

He’s got a small backyard garden up in the foothills that he has been working since the first time I was there 26 years ago. He’s put so much mulch, humus and compost in it over the years that it is really too rich to grow some things well now. Burnt out his string beans last year, he told me. I guess that’s possible. Up that high in their short growing season, they have to force things through. They raise so much garden truck on 750 square feet that they have to pass it along to friends and relatives.

He also told me about a piece of ground he’d gotten down the river valley (the Verde?), where they got five cuttings and $1500 worth of alfalfa off ten acres. Ditch irrigation. I don’t think that part of Arizona has been under irrigation as long as some other parts of the West. I only hope they can keep things in balance.

Over the mountains, we crossed the Colorado River at Boulder Canyon and Hoover Dam. As a small boy I delighted in damming up spring rivulets of the snow melt. I’ve got a dam for a driveway and I have worked on or seen a few dams in my time, but every time I drop into that canyon I get tongue-tied and stuttery. I don’t pass judgement on something like that, but I wonder anew if man isn’t overly ambitious, even presumptuous, in his undertakings. I guess if some of the forecasts are true and man succeeds in destroying this civilization too, some of our dams and bridges will make impressive monuments.

At Las Vegas we yokels were only planting silver dollars, while casino manipulators were taking in the green harvest. There’s erosion there and dirt, but not the kind this column is about.

Up across Nevada, east of the Sierra is mostly barren, uninhabited country with precious few exceptions. You skirt Death Valley on one side and the Nuclear Testing Range on the other. Kind of a sobering thought if you weren’t already numb with the sight of all that erosion and pollution. Tonopah and Hawthorne at 2000 to 4000 people are the metropolises of the first 450 miles across there. Everything else is small. Mostly nothing but scenery until you drop over the ridge into the valley below Fallon. First thing you come to is an historical marker designating the Pony Express trail to Sacramento, then a sign touting a government reclamation project followed by the first barbed wire fence northwest of Amarillo – or so it seemed.

We had run spank into civilization and agriculture, ranches, farms, the whole thing. I wasn’t aware of what a farm center the country is around Fallon, although I’ve seen what they do up toward Winnemucca, along the Humboldt and down the Truckee toward Reno. Wherever the topsoil is six inches or more and they have sufficient water. And that’s just what the Nulls said.

I don’t know if it is only insular pride, but it seemed to get better as we passed into Oregon. The Klamath Basin has been farming and grazing land since Indian times. There’s notable hay ground there and it’s not farmed out yet, either. From Klamath Falls it’s just a jump over to Eugene… Well, the Cascades are quite a leap, but I have made my brag on them aforetime, so I won’t dwell now.

I can’t exactly say what my preoccupation with dirt and topsoil accomplished on this trip. Except that way back at the beginning, when talking about planting, I spoke of doing considerable soil conditioning with bark mulch, sand, and steer manure. Maybe it did me some good anyway. I’ll go on “dishing the dirt” and preaching good soil practices. Maybe I’ll be a little more careful in my own. After all, I love beauty – and that wag was right, “Ugly goes to the bone.”


Home and Shop Companion 0133

Home and Shop Companion 0133