To me, Massanutten is a sacred mountain. True enough the bowl formation (I recently heard it is the weathered crater from an extinct volcano) on the other side of the ridge is now covered in ski slopes, housing developments, and even a water park, but our failure to acknowledge its importance with our habits does not diminish its status...the glow of electric lights reflected on low-hanging clouds that we can see many nights in winter may be a smudge on western humanity's reputation, but the mountain cannot be humiliated.
Even on this side of the ridge, the resort had attempted several decades ago to install a housing development, and to this end they cut in and paved a road across the slope, graded a series of streets and cul-de-sacs, and one homestead was built before the project was halted. Nobody has heard any rumblings of a resurgence of that notion, though they keep the trees cleared from the grades, for the most part. The western slope (the part we can see from our house) is currently used by hunters, mountain bikers, trail runners, hikers (like us), and countless forest plants and animals.
I think of the spiritual resource of Manssanutten Mountain many of my days, as I watch the clouds form and dissipate over its peak, as I watch the bulk of its ridge darkening in the twilight, as I feel its presence always while I go about my tending. I know many Valley residents feel similarly; it is a primary symbol of what living here means to us.
So it is always a special time when we take an opportunity to go there. From our doorway it is about a mile of hiking before we can enter a zone of the slope that always calls me out of the immediate and into the depth of time in this place. It is not virgin forest, but in the places where it was too steep for even the Shenandoah Valley's daring (and perhaps ignorant) wheat farmers to plow, suddenly the vegetation changes and diversifies. Plants survived here that were wiped out in the lower reaches and have not yet managed to return. It is such a stark reminder to me of the radical ways human intervention has changed the composition of the land. For the most part we eliminated these soil/plant communities so thoroughly and for so long that their absence is what we consider normal.
Mostly we valley dwellers seem to think (if our actions are more to be believed than our words) that we have no need for these banished species. But once in a while we have occasion to realize some piece of what we have given up. Our recent decision to start a planting of blueberries precipitated one such realization. We are trying to hold ourselves to the standard of reducing or even zeroing out our dependence on purchased inputs for the sustenance of the plantings which we hope will sustain us. As such, we chose not to use peat moss or imported pine bark chips to amend the soil in the blueberry bed, but rather to use wood and brushy debris gathered from our place, found at various stages of decomposition. Our hope was that this would provide the high organic matter, richly endowed with micronutrients, low pH soil environment that promotes the health of blueberry bushes. Situating plantings such that they have what they need to thrive on an ongoing basis is the key strategy to reducing dependence on inputs. Think of the inputs as medicine for a sick ecosystem, and remember that most medicines have side effects.
In the case of blueberries, there is often only so far you can go with reducing inputs by soil components alone. There is usually a piece missing. Blueberries, like the rest of the members of the heath family (the Erycoids), coevolved with a category of fungus that can only survive in the wild when it is in a symbiotic, direct-contact relationship with blueberry roots. This is not an uncommon story for plants...most of the world's plants form similar relationships with fungi. Combined root/fungal strands in the soil are called Mycorrhizae, and the fungi in question are known as Mycorrhizal fungi. The plants supply sugary root exudates to feed the fungi, which return the favor by acting as an extended, more versatile root network for the plant, the fungi being in possession of enzymes which enable the gathering of a wide variety of the minerals required for the plants' growth. They also supply water to the plant in tight times. In blueberries this relationship is so integral to both species' functioning that the roots lack "root hairs", extremely fine roots that most plants grow in microscopic abundance to increase the absorptive surface area of their roots. Blueberries have no need for such details...the fungus (known as Erycoid Mycorrhizae) has them covered.
Except when it doesn't. When you realize that neither blueberries nor their mycorrhizal fungi can survive the plowing process (let's be fair, blueberries may never have grown at this elevation...I don't know), and decades of plowing is quite enough to wipe out even the supply of their seeds and spores in the soil, it is understandable that when new plants are brought in (often if not usually nursery plants arrive with no mycorrhizae at all) they cannot find any trace of the biological partner on which they so depend. The attentive farmer has little choice, then, but to try to compensate by acidifying with sulfur, supplying frequent water to the vulnerable roots, applying fungicides to plants rendered weak by challenging conditions, and adding nitrogen and other fertilizers. All three of these things are quite hard on soil fungi populations, so that even if a spore were to happen to drift in and germinate, there is a good chance it would not survive, or at least would never have a chance to be of much use. And so the system is caught in a cycle from which escape will never happen spontaneously...it must be planned.
In our case we decided to try to head that cycle off, to the extent that modern-bred blueberry plants will allow, before it got started. I poked around online trying to see where I might order a drench of Erycoid Mycorrhyzal spores to innoculate the root zones of the plants, but found nothing meaningful. Eventually I concluded that our best bet was to go up on the mountain and take some soil from around the base of some healthy wild blueberry plants, then bring it back and give it to our new planting. I liked that better anyway.
And so our hike up the mountain yesterday was not just the fulfillment of Kali's birthday wish, it was also a pilgrimage for me, a journey into the closest place where I can feel enveloped in the eternal. Reaching my trowel into the dry but startlingly duffy soil under those blueberry plants felt like reaching back, or maybe forward, in time, collecting a little piece of this sacred mountain to take home with me. I knew I was dealing in things that are beyond my comprehension.
Today when it was time to add the soil to the blueberry bed, I opened the little plastic bags and the smell of the forest climbed up through the air to my nose, bringing home to me the reality of what I had done. This taking there and giving here: was it a sacrament or a sacrilege? Still unsure of the answer, I strided down the hill to the blueberry plants with their nursery I.D. tags still flicking in the breeze. I scooped into the soil until I found the edge of the root ball we had sunk there a week or two ago. Making sure I had exposed some of the roots, I took up a handful of the rich duff--my pilgrim relic--and stuffed it carefully down against them. I did this twice for each of the eight plants. As I tucked the soil back into place over the wads of duff, I felt like I should say some kind of blessing. Or maybe a greeting: Welcome back. May you prosper here. I would like for us to be friends. Maybe together we can make this world a little more whole.
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