4
To Keep an Ear to the Ground
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
—ANNE SEXTON
In China long ago, people hid drums inside holes they’d dug along ancient roadways. To put an ear to the ground was to bend down, miles, maybe days, later and listen for the deep percussion of the enemy’s boots approaching.
In Antarctica, marine biologists, stretched out on their bellies with their heads turned sideways on the ice, heard—down there in the deep, dark cold—the ancient songs of penguins.
Sometimes when I put my ear to the ground, I make my own arbitrary rules: No listening for anything I might expect. No listening for anything that has a plan for me. No listening to anything that knows I’m listening. No pretending to listen to what bores me utterly. One day late last summer, when Samantha and I were walking along the river near Warnick’s Point, we lay down in a fern-filled clearing, turned our heads sideways, and pressed our ears to the ground. Above us, the fronds waved like small green flags of allegiance to a country with no congress, to a time when listening to the soul might have meant saving your life.
More rules: No listening to blather. No not listening to her. So when she, ear to the ground, whispered, “Meemi, what are we doing?” I added another rule: No making her listen to what might be my blather. I said nothing about the soul. “Listening to the dirt,” I whispered back, and she, happy as any five-year-old for a reason to lie on the ground, stopped wiggling again.
If we’d had better ears to the ground that day in the woods, we might have actually heard the unexpected: a rapid series of snaps, a soft popping, a whispered rat-a-tat. Ears cannot widen, but eyes can, and ours might have, as we turned our heads this way and that and tried to find the source of that light smattering sound. Not rain or bird droppings, not cricket wings or leaf fall. No enemy or ancient song, as the scout and the scientist have been trained to hear, though I might argue that poor listening can also, in fact, be both. How often, after all, have our own deaf ears been a cause of hostility and longing?
We lay there for a full three minutes and heard at first just the whish of ferns and, higher up, occasional bird song.
For days, my walks had been full of pinnae and rachis, the difference between lobed and toothed, and the determination to distinguish between evergreen and spinulose wood ferns. And it’s not just the language that boggles. The difference between them, for example, is the relative size of the innermost lower pinnule of basal pinnae below the costa. Between the pages of my Field Guide to Ferns I’d stuffed fronds, sketches of fronds, and notes about rhizomes and stipes. At night for the last week I’d been lying awake, the windows open, the forest just a few steps away, and reseeing those wide swaths of green out there, which had looked for years like wild swaths of green but which had begun now to split into clumps of emerald and fir and sage gray. To spend time in the woods these past few days was to be on my knees, ticking off the distinctions—color, spore patterns, blade shape—and to know the comforts of taxonomies, of things in their proper place.
“I think this one’s a bracken,” a friend said, pointing, one day when we were out, calf deep in the undergrowth. To our right, the ridge rose steeply, its flanks a blurry mess of maple and oak. To our left, the trout-laden Savage River gurgled under hemlocks. But in front of us that fern usurped center stage, became the puzzle I wanted to solve. Silently, I ran down the checklist and finally announced, “Nope, brackens have blades in three parts.” Sometimes things keep dividing and subdividing, not just the frond and the field guide’s method of keying but my smug notions of accomplishment: knowing ferns is a higher skill, I’d decided that week, than knowing wildflowers, which is more complicated than knowing the names of mushrooms: the former, in fact, is better than the latter unless you’re lost in the woods and starving. And on it went, until I had, in a few seconds of taxonomic nitpicking, removed myself from that walk, my friend, that lush ferny valley into which I love to disappear. I know, I know: God’s in the details. But so’s the devil, and that day—maybe increasingly every day—what I want more than heaven or hell is this resounding earth.
* * *
Two hours away the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh devotes a whole room to ferns. They spill into the damp walkway, tower overhead, rise in clumps and spread in swaths, some new, some ragged. After the next-door Orchid Room with its splashes of color and audible human gasps of delight, people move through the Fern Room quietly, barely stopping. In the hour I sat and stood and strolled there one day, the only conversation took place between two men obviously waiting for others in their party still lingering among the orchids. “Investment,” I overheard. And “digital,” “three years,” and “fast turnaround.” Talk, I assumed, about doing something now which might pay off in the future. Meanwhile nothing in this room would attract birds or bees or butterflies or any other means of reproduction. When it comes to building for the future, ferns are on their own. To scatter their spore, they need only a bit of moisture, the slightest breeze.
To see the largest ferns—Tasmanian Tree Ferns, the label said—I, who’d left my field guide at home this time, had to crane my neck. Its rhizome, instead of lying horizontal on or under the ground, rose from its hairy base straight up almost to the ceiling, where it flared into a canopy of fronds close to fifteen feet across. This is the forest primeval, Longfellow intoned. Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, but I, standing under the tallest one, thought of a time more primeval then even that of Evangeline, a languorous time, 350 million years ago, before birds and blossoms, when nothing strode and overhead was only the swish of fronds the size of small trees and the wing hum of giant dragonflies, a time when hundred-foot-high club mosses creaked in overhead breezes. To keep an ear to the ground in that ancient world would have meant long, slow times of silence, broken only by the occasional slurp of mud under the feet of giant centipedes and, from the earliest ferns, periodic spurts of spores so large their plunk to the ground might have been cause for alarm.
Had we humans, still 349 million years off in the future, been there, we might have noted the quiet intimacy with rain, its invitations to hunker down, the huddles of green, damp feet, and dark corners, the kind of place, Loren Eiseley says, in which you strain to hear the undernote of long-dead activity, of something that lingered, that would linger till the last stone had fallen, something that would not go away.
Isn’t this, finally, what the soul—whatever it is—wants: neither the past nor the future (it isn’t interested in time) but the attentive ear of the one whose life it makes restless? It doesn’t want story; it wants to hear itself.
As I surreptitiously flipped a fern pinnule over to look for spores, a young woman entered the room, sat down quietly on a mossy stone bench, unbuttoned her blouse, and lifted her baby to bared breast. A giant frond arched over and in front of them so that from where I stood, the baby’s head, bald, and the breast, pale, almost shone from behind a feathery veil, both of them half-hidden by the drooping, dripping, green mantle of too much musing. The blouse draped open, the baby’s mouth widened, and as the woman leaned her head back against the bench, her face went slack. Memorize this, I told myself, this palimpsest, this momentary juxtaposing of tattered and fresh, this adjacency of images that might mean the kind of resonance I long for is occasionally possible.