Uncle Jack and Dad made their way through the humus layer and started into the mineral soil. By now the entire forest floor—the litter layer, and then the fermented and the humus ones—had been cleared from an area two shovel blades wide next to the outhouse. A thin bleached layer of sand gleamed, so white it looked like snow. I would later learn that most soils in this mountain country had surface layers like this, as if drained of all life by heavy, percolating rains. Maybe beach sand is so pale because storms quench it of the blood of bugs and the guts of fungi. Among these blanched mineral
...more
