Putting Down Roots

Abstract

I am looking for roots. I see their sinewy eruptions at the base of cedar's striated trunk, and watch them crisscross the duff dusted trail. Uplifted by roots, the ashen sidewalks offer heaving topographies, and the monochromatic roadways become palettes of texture. I search river's burly banks, where roots anchor earth. I inspect cliff's shifting wall, where they lose hold. From soil toward sky, I seek roots and try to sense them as they calmly and boldly navigate the ground (see fig. 1). My search began when I was growing up in South Florida and roots meant prolonged play. I climbed the thick twining roots that dropped down from the banyan canopy and had the company of yellow orchids, green anoles, spiky pineapple-like air plants, fat black ants, and mocking birds. I swam beneath the arcing prop roots that sprawled from the red mangrove's base and was joined by barnacle splotches, finger-sized flicks of silver fish, and sways of flat turtle grass blades. I clawed through purple and green spiderwort knots trying to find the end of the plant's rhizomatous roots and met flat pinky-nail snails and sandy soil. These mysterious aboveground, underwater, and subsurface tangles and the spaces they occupied invited fierce exploration. And so I went, on a root pursuit.