The Sea in the Ground
It is on just such a day, when hope, interest, renewal seem to be afforded, though held in check, that I find other local residents—other people, other customs—that are not only in readiness, but blooming with color as though it were summertime. The temperature is barely at the freezing point. The air is bright and clear, and the top of the ground is played over by sunny warmth. In flowing fields that skirt the oaks, the reindeer moss, with many branches, perhaps suggestive of antlers (though it gets its name because it provides food for reindeer and musk oxen in the frozen tundras of the Arctic), is gray like dawn dew, or an almost luminous gray-green. Light nests of snow with sparkling hexagonal flakes rest between its curly fronds.
The reindeer moss is one of the lichens. A lichen, each separate plant, multitudes of which compose the visible growth, is a composite of a fungus and an alga, seen only through a microscope. The alga contains the coloring matter, or chlorophyll, and can therefore carry out the process of photosynthesis, manufacturing food with water and sunlight. The fungus, which has no such ability, wraps its threads around the alga, protects it from the sun, and stores the moisture for their partnership; and, if they are of the rock-growing variety, anchors them both securely.
The lichens are tough. They can endure extreme contrasts in temperature, and hang on in barren areas where other plants could not get a foothold. In fact, they are pioneers of millions of years’ service. They prepared the way for all the changing elaboration of plants with leaves and stems that followed them, after they had broken down bare rock with their acids, dissolved it, cracked it, and combined their own dead materials with the rock particles to form soil.
In these round-edged plates of lichen that cover rocks or tree trunks in the bare February woods, I see a life that is almost independent of the season. It goes beyond or behind our immediate knowledge of it into a kind of primal security, settling in where little else is possible.
The color of lichens is the color of the green algae of the sea and of fresh-water ponds. If their blue-grays, gray-greens, or yellows, bring up the cast-steel color of ocean barrens to my imagination, or green water lolling at the sand’s edge, or underwater depths running with fish and shafts of light, there is knowledge to back me up. The progenitors of the lichens and their relatives the mosses—this richly green hair-capped moss that soaks up melting snow in the sunlight—were unicellular organisms that formed in the sea. The line is direct. The algae in lichens need water. Without it they would not be able to make food or reproduce.
(The blue-green algae, which as a species is abundant in both marine and fresh waters, as well as in the soil, has the ability of lichens to endure very difficult environments. It can exist in icy pools or hot springs. The latter extreme was brought home very forcibly to me not long ago in Nevada, when I saw this plant growing at the edge of a fissure from which hydrogen sulphide gas was puffing out. The algae was growing where steam condensed near the surface and must have been thriving in temperatures of nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.)
The color of our inland lichens and mosses changes with the rate of moisture. Reindeer moss withdraws in dry months as a method of coping with a disadvantageous season, instead of trying to carry on an uncertain battle for existence. It shrinks, in other words, turning dry and crunchy underfoot, but in wet weather it absorbs, almost drinks up, water, and then turns spongelike and its color gleams more richly.
In the absence of leaves filtering the sunlight, the trunks of the larger oaks are dappled and spotted with these colors of watery origin. I say the larger oaks because the lichens once started may take a long time to spread. The golden lichen is a very slow-growing species, although there are many stone walls in this region that are covered with it. I have watched one spot of golden lichen for two years or more. No bigger than a fifty-cent piece, it grows on a stone step outside the house, and has hardly expanded at all.
So it is an enduring kind of fertility that shines here, as the gray sea waters rock in the distance. And when I turn over a log, or take up a handful of spongy oak leaf humus, half thawed in the sunlight, there is visible evidence of the life now arrested in the frozen soil. I find a millipede, curled up like the shell of a chambered nautilus. I hold it in my hand and keep breathing on it, until it comes to life and starts moving around, stretching out, its myriad legs moving with fantastic synchronization, ready to be busy again, traveling seriously with the given purpose of eating bits of leaves, breaking down organic matter in the earth. It is suggested that the millipede may have been one of the earliest animals to leave the ocean, where all life presumably began, and take to the land—one of those statements, of course, that leaves millions of years in the balance of human guesses, but gives me another approach to ageless tenacity in this ocean-bordered wood.
There is another ancient animal, the pill bug, damp bug, or armadillo, which I find in semihibernation in the middle of a rotten log. Pill bug because it can roll up into a perfect little ball; damp bug for its choice of environment; wood louse for its habitat and general appearance, although it is no louse but a crustacean, not an insect but related to brine shrimp, water fleas, lobsters and crabs. It is one of the few members of this family that have become adapted to life on land, but it retains a set of gills, or at least respiratory tubes with some functional equivalence to gills. It also retains an organic affinity for wetness, needing constant moisture in order to breathe, and will invariably direct itself to the dampest environment it can find. One dry summer day I uncovered a bunch of wood lice way out in the middle of a dusty patch of ground that looked like a miniature desert. They had taken advantage of the only shelter available, an old fragment of a board that held some shade and moisture under it.
In terms of millions of years the development of millipede, or pill bug, becomes extremely complex and partly unknown. When did the pill bug leave the sea? How did its special breathing apparatus evolve? How, in other words, did it gradually adapt itself to life as a land animal? The problems of science are manifold. For an observer the very sense of a link between primal sea and primal earth embodied in this half-bug, half-marine crustacean, gives it great stature. There is thunder and depth in the pill bug.
I suddenly feel lost in a wood which does not speak of calendar days or the month of February, but endless projection and development.
Not lost too long—because the cold deepens and bites in the late afternoon and gray clouds begin to spread and darken, as a raw wind rises and shoves at the trees. I am caught again in the immediate. It feels like snow.