Clean

If it isn’t rock or sand or water, it’s alive.

No potential that is not realized.

No inchoate humus, no muddy shoes, all that could be called dirt is transformed into a million clean patterns, each exquisite, perfect.

Most of the world falls short, the farther short the better for the farmer; a little too far and you have a cesspool.

Clean places on this earth are few enough and fewer by the day.  You find one kind of clean place on the highest mountains; clean granite, clean ice and clean cold air and life clinging to crevices, hardy survivors of not many kinds.

The other extreme of clean is a tropical coral reef, sparkling clear water flashing its light over a thousand perfect forms of life both multicolored and transparent: corals and flashing fish, crabs and shrimps in all manner of outlandish makeup, cephalopods with their own light shows, predator and prey, with shells and without, another world, as clean as a granite mountaintop but with proportions reversed: more life than rock.

Next closest to perfect is a tropical rainforest, where nearly all organic matter in the soil is translated into life, most of it a hundred feet off the ground, as multifaceted and complex and diverse and beautiful as in a coral reef but utterly different, and with vastly greater overall biomass.

By these standards lowland California is far from clean.  Where it comes closest are those places, not coincidentally, with the greatest beauty: the flower fields, where the soil is too lean or too shallow for weeds to grow, and where every spring what little soil there is is translated for a while to color and humming insects and delight.

Not many Californians living today have seen such places; a short 150 years ago every Californian took them for granted.  Up until then, to most Californians (i.e. Indians) they had been larder and lifeblood—and home.

Rainforest, coral reef, or flower fields—most of the kinds of plants and animals of this world rely on these “clean” places for their survival.  Whether or not the clean places stay clean and all these glories of life stay alive is, at this point in history, up to us.  So far we aren’t doing a great job of it.