When I was young, there were questions I would ask my mother. Why wasn’t I allowed near the ochre tent? Why did we have to make the journey to the redline? And how was it that we never ran out of the magic soil, no matter how much of it we gave away?
All I ever received in response was a plate shoved into my hands.
“Hush up and eat your dirt, child,” she would say.
I hushed. I ate. We packed. We moved. We tilled. We bartered. We returned. I asked. I was told the time for answers would come later. First, we needed to test the pH balance of the local soil. It seemed low for the crop yield they needed. Two scoops of soil mixture should do the trick. Maybe three. And eat some dirt while we wait for the nanites to adjust to the resident soil conditions.
I hushed. I ate. We packed. We moved.Along our migration routes was a town called Podzol, notable primarily for the fact that it housed my best friend, Terrence Argilloso. We wrote each other constantly, and about once a season I would see him when we stopped through Podzol. I treasured the time we had while it lasted.
“I can’t believe you have to leave already,” he said to me. “It’s not like it takes that long to get to Gleyton. You usually stay in Podzol a few weeks.”
I handed him a bag of our magic soil and helped him work it into the spinach beds.
“We’re not going to Gleyton,” I grumbled. “We’re going to Karst.”
“Ohh,” Terrence said. “It’s that time of year, huh?”
I nodded, glumly kneading the soil. Next to me, Terrence rubbed his hands together, front and back, scrubbing dirt into them. As instructed.
“The thing is,” he continued, “I don’t understand why you guys keep going back there. I mean, I know you’re nomads and all that, and I get that a lot of people rely on your clan to provide the dirt, but what’s the point of going to Karst? There’s nothing there.”
“I get that a lot of people rely on your clan to provide the dirt, but what’s the point of going to Karst? There’s nothing there.”He was right. There was nothing there. It was basically a ghost town and only saw life when the clans came together. I had explained our rituals to Terrence before. The ochre tent I wasn’t permitted to enter, the collective mourning for our lost homeland, all that. But San Focas was beyond the redline, the entire Potrero basin was. Karst was as close as we could get. I’d explained everything, but Terrence never really understood. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t really understand either.
“Looking good, Terrence,” my mother said as she entered the room. She gestured to his dirt-covered hands. “You can wash that off by suppertime but not before. Hear me?”
“Yes ma’am,” he answered. My mother scanned her tablet.
“Your folks good? Everyone healthy? House garden doing okay?”
“Yep. Everyone is well, Ms. Paha,” Terrence replied. My mother mm-hmm’d her approval, then turned to me. “Les, I’m not getting any data from the three sisters’ soil mixer. Can you go check on that?”
I took Terrence, and we bustled out the door, but not before my mother shoved a small sachet into my hands.
“You all really eat that stuff, huh?” Terrence asked as we climbed through the farming tower. “Can I try it?”
“Just a little.” I gave him a pinch of the granola-like mixture of soil, blue cornmeal, red chili powder, and honey. “Too much could make you sick. We can only eat it because we’re introduced to it as babies. We build it up in our bodies over time.”
“We can only eat it because we’re introduced to it as babies. We build it up in our bodies over time.”I stuffed the sachet into my pocket. We entered the maize unit of the farming tower and stepped gently through beds of corn, beans, and squash growing alongside other companion plants.
There was a time when farming towers looked very sterile, like laboratories. Or hospitals. People were proud of their ability to grow crops without soil. These modern hydroponics were different. They were built with dirt integrated throughout. If the soil’s microbiome was kept rich and diverse, the crops yielded food with more nutrients, making the people healthier. The physical act of working the soil boosted serotonin, provided natural antibiotics, reduced allergies, and improved gut health. It wasn’t easy to balance this soil in an enclosed tower, but that’s where we came in. That’s why our knowledge was so crucial. That’s why our soil mixtures, so revered by the townies, were so valued. That’s why we kept on the move, traveling from town to town, tending the soil and making sure everyone had plenty of magic dirt to rub on themselves.
Sometimes I longed for the sterile farming towers of old. Sometimes I wanted to wash my hands clean of all this dirt.
The next morning, I hugged Terrence farewell and secured my things in our rotor-schooner. He asked if he could keep a bag of our magic dirt, but even I couldn’t shake the yoke of traditions and expectations. Some secrets weren’t mine to give away. Yet.
The rotor wings began to hum. The solar sheets glistened. Our schooner lifted off the ground, and soon we were sailing over an ocean of prairie grass and sagebrush.
“Nice to be out in the open,” my mother said. She smiled, wind rustling her hair, the sun in her face. With each minute, her body seemed to relax, releasing the tensions built up through all those hours calibrating soil mixers. Nothing healed her like the journey to Karst, leaving the usual migration route behind and vacating the functional world for a few weeks of ceremonies in the middle of nowhere. I watched the landscape pass by in a blur of greens and browns, my mother beside me humming tunes while snacking on handfuls of dirt.
“Les, would you climb in the back and grab my sunglasses?” she asked. “I left them in my blue bag. I climbed out of the cockpit and into the hull. Secured for the trip, most of our possessions were crated and folded into the walls. Only a few bags with essentials were left out. I quickly found my mother’s sunglasses but paused before I returned her bag to her cabin. Next to her room was the unit for housing our magic soil, the base for all our mixtures. No matter how many handfuls I withdrew from it, season after season, we never ran out. It was one of the mysteries my mother would never answer when I brought it up. She always said there would be a time for answers. Later.
No matter how many handfuls I withdrew from it, season after season, we never ran out.The schooner bounced over a pocket of turbulence, and I dropped the bag, its contents spilling across the floor. Groaning to myself, I was hurrying to scoop them up when one item caught my eye. Black eyes and a clay-red face stared at me—the mask my mother wore when she went to the ochre tent. I stuffed it in her bag and climbed back into the cockpit.
“Thanks,” she smiled as I handed her the sunglasses. She watched me unroll my tablet.
“And how’s Terrence?” she asked. “I always liked him. Nice boy… for a townie,” she added with a wink. I smiled weakly and went back to writing Terrence about our plan.
My mother wanted to be fresh and ready when we arrived in Karst, so we stopped to rest in some little Podunk for the night. Her spirits were high from the journey. It was as good a time as I could hope for. Maybe she’d actually answer some of my questions. Maybe she’d listen when I told her about the idea Terrence and I had been developing. Maybe, if I did this right, the next time we passed through Podzol, we’d stay. I might never have to leave it, or my friend, again.
Timing was key. My mother and I were often at our closest when cooking together. She had scarcely unfolded the kitchen, however, when there was a knock at the door.
“Good evening, Ms.… ”
“Paha. Come around back, I’ll meet you there.” Her bag was already in her hands. She knew why the people were lining up outside.
“Les, finish up the supper while I help these folks. Once the water boils, just reduce the heat and add the veggies,” she instructed. She looked back over her shoulder. “And toss a handful of dirt in there.”
My mother opened a window and began unpacking jars. I listened while I cooked. People lined up with their questions about gardening or physical ailments. My mother selected the dirt mixture most appropriate for their problems and told them to spend ten minutes a day working this soil into their gardens by hand.
All of this was routine. What caught my ear, however, was a piece of gossip circulating among the townies outside.
“Really? Someone tried to cross the redline? That’s bold.”
“Someone tried to cross the redline? That’s bold.”“I bet it’s one of these people.”
“Makes sense, way they are. There’s a reason the dirt-mongers lost that valley in the first place. Vagrants don’t care about anything but themselves. Oh, we’re up next. Show her that rash on your arm.”
Ears burning, I turned my attention back to the pot boiling on the stove.
I was often reminded that my grandparents’ generation fought against the Regenafuel pipeline. The artificial biofuel burned clean in engines and factories, but its raw form was still a synthetic solution. The whole valley was poisoned when the pipeline combusted. It was devastating. Largest industrial accident of its kind. The entire population of San Focas was forced to flee, and we’ve been moving ever since. Legend held that our dirt was a facsimile of something once found in the Potrero basin. A rich, healing soil held sacred for generations upon generations. I never put much stock in legends.
The only comfort was the knowledge that the valley was healing fast. Government regeneration programs had quarantined the area. They insisted that nature be allowed to run its course without human interference, and clearly, they were right. The Regenafuel should have taken decades to break down, and it would be decades more before the ecosystem would be restored to health. But all ecology reports indicated that the basin was exceeding expectations.
My people loved that valley. Every year, we gathered together just to sing our grief at losing it. To suggest that we didn’t care about the valley was absurd, yet something about our need to return there every year had always rubbed me as strange. Compulsive, even.
Something about our need to return there every year had always rubbed me as strange.I found myself wondering if it was possible to love something so much you caused it harm, like crushing wildflowers by holding them too tight. Surely my people knew the difference between paying respect and refusing to let go.
Or maybe the temptation to touch that land was too much. Maybe this was why our attachment to that place, our refusal to settle down, was dangerous.
The contradictions swirled within me. My head hurt.
“You’re quiet tonight,” my mother observed. She eyed me from across our table.
“You don’t think any of our people would actually try to cross the redline, do you?” I asked. My mother stiffened, her eyes growing darker.
“Don’t believe everything the townies say,” she told me. “They’re not all as kind as Terrence, kiddo.”
I traced my food with my fork.
“Terrence…” I mumbled the name. “Terrence and I have been talking.”
“I know,” my mother said. “That’s hardly news of the week, Les.”
“I want to let Terrence analyze our dirt.” The words spilled out. I looked up at my mother. Her face was frozen mid-bite, confusion paralyzing her features.
“It’s just,” I continued, “we think that if we analyzed it, we could figure out how to artificially compound the magic soil. We could fabricate it on site in Podzol. That way we could stay. We wouldn’t have to move all the time.”
“If we could figure out how to artificially compound the magic soil...That way we could stay. We wouldn’t have to move all the time.”My mother nearly choked on her food.
“Artificial-compound-stay?” She sputtered. “Well, I was wrong about Terrence! Just like the other townies, trying to end our way of life. Don’t let him get in your head, baby.”
“It was my idea!” I interrupted. “Come on, Mom. There’s nothing that special about our dirt, is there? Nothing we can’t replicate. No reason we have to keep it such a secret. I don’t want to keep leaving. I want to stay in one place and do something that matters more than peddling dirt!”
It was as if I had slapped her. She held a hand to her face, touching a wound that wasn’t there. Then the ghostly pallor of shock was replaced by red, red like burning terracotta, red like the coals at the base of the kiln.
I braced for her outburst, but it never came. Something tempered her anger, and she released a slow breath. She stood from the table, went to her room, and closed the door. As I washed the dishes, I finally recognized the look in her eyes that had drowned her rage. It was sadness.
The rest of the journey to Karst was quiet. I would say something about a landmark, and my mother smiled, but otherwise few words were exchanged. Finally, we arrived, landing our schooner amid a field of similar crafts. When our wheels touched the ground, I could almost feel the weight of our fight disperse. She stepped outside, fingers brushing against the piñon trees. Here, we were as close to the redline as you could get without touching it. As close to our homeland as you could get without inhabiting it. She exhaled slowly and turned to me.
“The Paha family!” We were interrupted by the booming voice of Elder Clay. He embraced my mother and shook my hand. “Welcome!”
“Glad you got my message,” my mother said. “I need to talk to you.”
She took his arm, and the two walked away, leaving me alone.
After my mother returned, she set about the rest of the festivities as if nothing had happened between us. We sang our sacred songs, danced and ate and laughed with the other families of our clan.
One night, when the moon had grown so bright that we barely noticed the dying of the fire, I drew a blanket around myself and watched the last coals pulse in the base of the fire pit. The full moon meant it was time for those who had come of age to take their leave of us too young to participate in the most sacred rituals. Instead of walking off with the others, my mother turned to me, shadows flickering over her eyes, her face set hard like adobe.
“Follow me,” she said.
My mother led me through a maze of schooners and festival tents until we arrived at one I’d never set foot inside. Never been allowed to ask about. The ochre tent.
Elder Clay stood at the entrance.
“You sure about this, Sandy?” he asked. My mother nodded, and Elder Clay stepped aside. My mother ushered me in, and I beheld in the torchlight people wearing red and black masks like the one from my mother’s bag. In the middle of the room was a broad rectangular pit filled with dirt. I watched in silence as, one by one, the others stripped their clothes and entered. They bathed in the soil, covering their bodies in it, then wrapped themselves in adaptive smart fabric, white as fresh snow. When I turned to ask what was happening, my mother slipped a mask over her face. Then she handed me one of my own.
“We are part of this land. Indistinguishable from it.”She turned, the siren call of our lost valley beckoning her.
“You could alert the authorities. We are trespassing on federal property. Or, you could trust our people’s love of this land. Trust our ways. Trust me.”
She held out her hand. I took it, and together we stepped across the redline.
I followed my mother in silence as we traced the river down into the valley, creeping through coyote willows and buffaloberry plants under the watchful light of the full moon. My pulse raced, uncertainty and guilt twisting within me, yet these anxieties were held back by something far deeper. A sense that I was close to finding answers to long-held questions. Eventually we caught up with the others. I gasped, the sudden intake of cool, night air tightening my lungs.
Our people were dispersed throughout the valley, split into small groups, each hard at work. In the meadow, people lit fires so small that they barely gave off heat or light. Each pair followed their fire as it burned through dry grasses and leaves in the undergrowth, a trail of quiet, fertile ash in their wake. Teams alongside the river snipped cottonwood branches and replanted the clippings. Others tested the ruddy waters, taking vials for sampling and running them through chem analysis. Everyone else seemed to be building or repairing various rock walls and depressions along the streams that braided together this tapestry of a river.
My mother took my hand and led me through the worksites. She explained that natural infrastructure systems had been used by people of this region since time immemorial to slow the waters, allow the buildup and distribution of organic nutrients, combat erosion, and enrich the soil. She told me how my grandparents pleaded with state officials to let them use their traditional knowledge to repair the damage from the biofuel spill. How the government gave its contracts to private eco-restoration corporations who quarantined the valley, drawing the redline around it. How our people never stopped their work, returning every year over the generations because they knew that the earth needed their touch. The dirt longed for human hands.
Everybody thought the Potrero basin was healing on its own without human interference, but I saw before me a once-depleted and ruined landscape being lovingly worked back to health, growth and vitality sprouting from every patch of wonderful dirt.
I saw before me a once-depleted and ruined landscape being lovingly worked back to health.All that night, I worked alongside my mother. And the next night. And the next, until the full moon began to wane.
On our last night of work, the elders burned incense and said prayers to the land. Then they identified an exposed section of riverbank that had been cleaned several seasons ago and began shoveling the weathered clay into large crates. I finally understood. The secret of our dirt was never some magical alchemy of nature. Yes, I learned that this soil was unique in some of its chemical properties, but it was enhanced and built generation by generation, land and people working together. Each family took only enough dirt to sustain them for the next year, enough until we would return again.
As I helped my mother shovel dirt into our family crate, she explained why we could never share it with the townies unless we mixed it with their soils first. Potrero basin soil carried a distinct isotopic signature. If the townies ever analyzed it, they’d know we’d been crossing the redline.
She apologized for making me bear the weight of this knowledge and told me she wanted to let me have my friendships unburdened by secrets as long as she could. I told her that times were changing. Terrence didn’t have the same attachment to traditions that his parents did. He cared for our people and for us. My mother conceded that maybe there would be a time when we could trust some townies. Maybe. Someday. I asked her when. Why not now? She handed me a baggie.
“Hush up and eat your dirt, child.”
The midnight darkness melted into soft marine and pastel pink, and we packed our supplies. I looked with new eyes over the valley. I would take some of it with me, in spirit and in body, and I would give its gifts away to townies who would never know the secrets of its magic. Because someone had to teach the townies that our relationship with the land was reciprocal, one of giving and taking, healing and being healed. Someone had to remember that our place in nature was not something that could be fabricated. Someone needed to know the difference between what was real and what was artificial. For this land, for our people, for all of us, healing began in the soil.
Our relationship with the land was reciprocal, one of giving and taking, healing and being healed.My mother said it was time to go. I looked at my palms, dirty from work. I bent down and washed my hands in muddy waters.
