The Empty Ground

Maya crouched at the edge of the boardwalk and pressed her fingers into the forest floor.

"It's just clay," she said. "Red clay. There's nothing in it."

Soren knelt beside her. The tallest trees he had ever seen went up and up until the leaves blurred into green. Everywhere around them, life. Frogs, vines, a beetle the size of his thumb. And under his hand, the ground felt like the bottom of an empty flowerpot.

"That can't be right," he said. "Look at all of this. Where's it getting fed from?"

A soil scientist named Delfina was working ten steps down the boardwalk, filling little bags with samples and labeling them. She had told them at breakfast that she had been surveying this plot for nine years and she still argued with it.

"Delfina," Maya called. "Your dirt is empty."

Delfina laughed without looking up. "My dirt is the most famous empty dirt in the district. Everybody who comes here says the same thing. They expect black soil. Rich soil. Like a garden."

"Because it's a rainforest," Soren said. "The biggest one. It should have the best soil anywhere."

"Should it?" said Delfina, and went back to her bags.

Maya sat back on her heels. She had that look she got when two things she believed were bumping into each other.

"The trees are enormous," she said slowly. "So there's tons of food somewhere. But it's not in the ground."

"Then where," Soren said.

Maya didn't answer. She stood up and walked to a spot where a branch had fallen off the boardwalk months ago. You could tell it was old because moss had crawled over it. But when she picked up the end, half of it crumbled into wet brown powder in her hands.

"Soren. Feel this."

He took a piece. It fell apart between his fingers into something that was barely wood anymore, soft as chocolate cake.

"That's fast," he said. "At home a log sits in the yard for years. This isn't even hard."

"It's warm here," Maya said. "And wet. All the time. Never freezes, never dries out."

Soren looked up into the canopy, then back down at the crumbling branch, and something began to line up.

"Warm and wet is good for growing," he said. "But it's good for the things that rot stuff too. The fungi. The bacteria. The bugs."

"They never stop," Maya said. "There's no winter to slow them down." She pulled her notebook from her back pocket and drew a leaf, then an arrow, then a question mark.

"So a leaf falls," Soren said, working it out loud, one step at a time. "At home it lands on the ground and it just, sits there. Over the winter. Building up. That's the layer. That's the good black dirt. All the dead stuff piling up faster than it breaks down."

Maya's head came up.

"Here it doesn't pile up," she said. "Here it gets eaten the second it lands."

They both looked at the ground. Now that they were looking for it, they could see. There was almost no leaf litter. A rainforest, the richest place either of them had ever stood in, and the floor was nearly bare. A leaf, a few weeks of rot, and gone.

"Delfina," Maya said, and her voice had changed. "The nutrients aren't gone. They're not in the ground because they never get to stay in the ground."

Delfina straightened up. She was smiling now, really smiling, the way you smile when someone finds the thing you love.

"Go on," she said.

"A leaf falls," Maya said, pointing up, then down. "It gets broken apart almost right away. And the tree grabs everything back before the rain can wash it away. Roots right up at the surface. It goes leaf, ground, root, leaf. In a circle. Really fast."

"It never sits still long enough to build up," Soren said. "So the soil stays poor. The dirt is poor because the recycling is so good."

He stopped. He looked at the branch dissolving in his hand, and then he looked up at the trees, all that green stacked into the sky, every leaf of it built out of stuff that had been another leaf, and another, and another, going back further than he could count.

"So where are all the nutrients?" Maya asked. But she was already turning her face upward.

"Up there," Soren said quietly. "They're up there. In the trees. Not under us. Over us."

Delfina crouched down between them and held out a bag of the red clay.

"For nine years I have been measuring the emptiest rich place on Earth," she said. "Every atom of food in this whole forest is locked inside something alive. The soil is bankrupt because the forest is holding all its money in its hands. If you cut it down and it washes away, this clay can't feed a garden for more than a season or two. There's nothing in the bank. It was all in the trees."

Maya was quiet. "So it's not sitting in the ground waiting," she said. "It's moving. The whole time. It's all moving right now."

"Right now," said Delfina. "Above your head. Around your feet. Through that branch in your friend's hand."

Soren looked down. The soft brown crumbs of the branch were still coming apart, slowly, in his palm, feeding something too small to see, on their way to becoming a leaf that did not exist yet.

Maya tipped her head all the way back until she was looking straight up the trunk of the biggest tree, past the beetle, past the vines, into the green that had no bottom and no top.

"Everything here," she said, "is somewhere in the middle of the trip."

Overhead, a single leaf let go and began to fall toward the waiting ground.