Underneath the Soil by Lucy Jayes

Nonfiction

Lucy Jayes Underneath the Soil

A group of Aspen trees is not a group of trees at all. They are a single organism, whose individual trees are extensions of a larger life force. They are difficult to extinguish.

These resilient trees lined switchbacks I crossed in the woods of Colorado, appearing as tattooed skeletons, thin white trunks peeling away to darker shades, marked with carved initials. I admired them in all seasons: bare branches the width of a pinky finger in the winter, slender trunks halfsubmerged in glistening snow, technicolor green oval leaves unraveling in the late spring, becoming a dynamic backdrop to lilac Columbines littering wild grasses, then fading to gold for a few, shortlived weeks in the fall, mountains suddenly streaked with ribbons yellow as sweet corn, before finally, peeling away to the ground in the early winter once more. Sometimes, they are interspersed among fragrant, full-bodied conifers, steady and reliable in their army green uniform. Conifers begin to dominate Aspen forests as the forest ages.

But, when a wildfire rips through, obliterating everything in its path, it resets the forest. After the raging flames smolder into cool richness, a proliferation of Aspen suckers will rise from the ashy soil, and soon the cleared land will be populated with their bright green sprouts. Fire removes debris from the forest floor, returns nourishment to the soil through the destruction of the giants that once shaded it, and allows sunshine to penetrate each inch. The dead material becomes sustenance for a new and healthy beginning. Shedding layers is the space in which we grow, become, and settle into the versions of ourselves that will best serve the world and ourselves. For it is only in making space that we can fill it with life better than what so far we have known.

I took a pregnancy test on a whim, alone in my apartment. I didn’t remember my last period; months blurred as did morning and night, a season-long drug and alcohol bender as a suddenly underemployed bartender, with a bunch of suddenly unemployed friends, in the midst of a global pandemic that had shut every restaurant and bar down. I was sleeping with my ex, and I was sleeping with the man who was the reason me and my ex broke up, and it was not outside of the realm of possibility. It was an era where I caused a massive amount of harm, but pretended that everything was fine, which took a lot of help from any substance I could get my hands on. I figured if I was going to keep destroying my body, I better make sure I wasn’t taking a child along for the ride.

The result on that test changed everything. For the first time in my adult life, I took vitamins. I quit weed, alcohol, cocaine, and cigarettes–– cold turkey. I went to sleep sober for the first 38

time in fifteen years. I was proud of myself for that, but it’s not the kind of thing your OBGYN or mom will congratulate you on. I vomited like I had been poisoned if I saw a raw vegetable. I couldn’t walk through the produce section of a grocery store without becoming nauseous at my ever-industrious imagination detailing how it would feel for raw spinach to rub its way across my tongue and my throat. I ordered Papa John’s pizza and only ate the cheese-stuffed crust. I slept like I was in a coma, but my dreams felt like a 5D movie theater at the amusement park; I could feel every single colored bourbon dissolve on my tongue like the sizzle of cold water on hot coals. I went to a wedding in rural Kentucky and slept along the bank of a lake, reflecting orange, yellow, and red leaves among the water. I climbed to the scenic Kentucky River overlook at Raven Run Nature Sanctuary, clutching my swollen stomach and ignoring concerned stares, lingering at the edge, high above the murky green river, snakelike amongst barren trees. I drove two hours to Mammoth Cave National Park six weeks before I gave birth.

detail. They were dark, haunting; I dreamt of my baby in flames and myself seconds I have watched my away from being able hand disappear into to grab them out of darkness in a cave the way. I saw muslin blankets engulfed, turning black. I smelled more times than I could count on that crisping skin. I dreamt same hand. of the ultrasound tech violently prodding my stomach, searching for a sign of life, only for us all to look at the screen and realize, with shock, that I was pregnant with a full bone-in Christmas ham. I slept with eight pillows and got up ten times a night to pee. When I was twenty weeks pregnant, I moved from my adopted home of Colorado to my home state of Kentucky. I was depressed, failed, sober, and full of regrets. I spent any time I wasn’t working trying to convince myself that I hadn’t made a mistake. I planned solo adventures for myself on my days off. I took scenic drives to jaw-dropping distilleries adorned with historic buildings, obviously pregnant, yet never receiving the side eye I’d expect during the sampling portion when I’d let a small sip of caramel-

As a girl who grew up in Kentucky, I have watched my hand disappear into darkness in a cave more times than I could count on that same hand. We took field trips to Mammoth Cave, Squire Boone Caverns, and Lost River Cave in grade school: unbuckled children on a yellow school bus, bare legs sticking and unsticking to brown pleather seats. It’s a blur of memories, some of them so surreal they feel like a dream: albino fish with eyes like plain white marbles, stalactites and stalagmites adorning rooms, gleaming like freshly glazed pottery. But, I always remember the blackness. You think you can see nothing in the night, but here, in this wide underbelly of this not quite Southern state, there is a darkness that there is no adjusting to. Even in the winter, the opening, or mouth, of the cave is surrounded by green, moss covering the rocks. I slowly made my way down the stairs, one hand on the black metal railing, to descend into the large opening. Once we entered the temperate,

limestone ballroom called the rotunda, the almost-ready-to-exit child in my womb began to stir. I could hear a slow, cadenced drip of water from somewhere along the walls, their texture like a melting candle. Its rhythmic dripping heightened my senses. Hands and feet stretched my skin, and rippled through my pubic bones, echoing to my calves. This was strange. He always slept during the day, and especially when I was walking, remaining still, sleeping as I went about my days at work as a waitress, bartender, and food delivery driver, rocked to sleep by my gait.

Throughout pregnancy, a woman’s body shifts in practically superhuman ways. She grows an organ that will siphon nutrients from her blood and reroute them to her growing baby. The placenta is made of both fetal and maternal tissue. It takes in nutrients and antibodies and then releases toxins and waste back into the mother’s bloodstream.

Between the mask we had to wear on the tour and my son pressing into my lungs, I felt out of breath. I focused on counting the seconds as I slowly filled my squished stomach with air, before audibly huffing out of my mouth for the same amount of time, grounding myself with the drip of the water. This cave holds history like nowhere else. Indigenous explorers first entered it over 5,000 years ago. The rotunda is filled with junklike artifacts, various pieces of scrap wood and metal left over from the saltpeter mine, in which enslaved people made gunpowder that aided the United States to victory in the war of 1812. We traveled, a herd of tourists through the cave’s widest passages, to some stone huts, which the tour guide tells us were used as housing for people suffering from Tuberculosis, because it was believed that the cave air was restorative. A cave is created through dissolution. Rain and rivers melt and shape soft stones like limestone, in the example of Mammoth Cave. It is always changing, with underground rivers still carving its interior to this day. Over 130 species of animals live in Mammoth Cave. The forest surrounding it is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the nation with over 1,300 flowering species. Light does not reach beyond the opening of the cave. The species that thrive amongst this unique environment can do so due to nutrients entering the cave by water or visitors from the outside.

The cool embrace of the cave calmed me, held me away from what was outside, and relieved me, if only momentarily, from anxieties of the very close future: giving birth, the extremity of the transformation from girl to mother. The underground rooms and tunnels of limestone comforted me and distracted me from mourning the past: what I was running from, and that which I had to leave behind to do so. Caves act loco parentis to a variety of species, including humans. They are arguably the natural feature most suitable to protect from the outside elements. Their temperature remains steady. They are a shield from rain and other elements.

We returned to the rotunda and ascended the same black metal stairs we had walked down, but we all had been temporarily transported through time, walking through the first homes our species lived in. We stepped on a biomat, rinsing our shoes in soapy water to prevent the spread of WhiteNose Syndrome, a disease lethal to bats. I cleansed the cave floor from the soles of my tennis shoes and walked across the asphalt parking lot toward the inevitable future.