#247. BENEATH YOUR FEET.  In 2016 Robert Macfarlane published Landmarks, a work in which he gathered hundreds of nearly forgotten dialect English and Gaelic words for natural events: kleef, for a field on the steep side of a hill; lunkie, for a hole left in a wall for small animals to pass through; prick-nickle for a hedge of thorns set to protects new plantings.  Kepp-kepp-kepp in Herefordshire was to call cattle, but koop-koop-koop was to call horses.  It was a delightful book, but with a mission behind it: Macfarlane wrote it in response to a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, in which he found words like acorn, cowslip and kingfisher losing their place to attachment, bullet-point, and chatroom.  He called Landmarks “a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook.”

      In Underland (W.W. Norton, 2019) he moves from words—“the nothing-weighted air,” a poet calls them—to what’s going on below ground, beneath our feet, down there where we can’t see, unless we decide to look.  His decision to look is marked, as with the previous book, by a muscular, specific language—if Macfarlane sees a bird or a plant, he knows its name—a marvelous conviviality (this is not a nature book in which there are no people), and every evidence of a fine moral sense and of physical courage and energy in his pursuit of seeing. As an observer he is beautifully sensate: he fastens on the feel of wind on the skin, the scents of the below-ground as well as the perfume of flowers, the taste of water from a chalk-stream: “different from any other I know: somehow round in the mouth.”  As a writer he has the vocabulary as well as a grace in sentence-building that never fails to pull us down, up, whatever direction he’s going.  Or being still: “Each pool is inviting as a place to wait and jabble.”  He quotes the mountaineer W.H. Murray, speaking after being released after years in World War II prison camps: “Find beauty, be still.”  Don’t overlook the structure of that sentence.

       Caves, sinkholes, tunnels, vortices, below-ground rivers: Macfarlane is vivid on how these are formed, built, how they continue to exist.  He’s vivid on what it’s like to be down there: he goes into a natural crawlspace below Paris so confining he has to lay down and drag his rucksack behind him, tied to his ankle; as he is edging through it, claustrophobia gripping him “like a full-body vice,” he feels the stone above him begin to vibrate as the trains pull into Montparnasse station.  (A claustrophobic friend of mine screamed out loud when I described that passage.)  He is vivid too on the strange dissociation of being so far below our everyday calendrial reality: descending into a gap in a Greenland iceberg, the strata of the formations turn to “a blue unlike any other in the world—the blue of time.”  He speaks of the more than five hundred glacial reservoirs below the Greenland surface, “unexposed for millions of years, as alien as the ice-covered oceans thought to exist on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.”  The subtitle for Underland is A Journey in Deep Time.

      In Underland many themes converge as he writes not just about these spaces, but about some of the horrific things we’ve hidden away in them, and about how some of them are coming to light as our mindless tinkering with the ecology comes home to roost.  He transcribes a poem for the Slovenian people who were killed during the Communist-Fascist village factions in the forties, their bodies dumped into caves and glades of the karst: “But despite it all, they were people like you and me. / Who are you?  The living thrown into madness, / Killed with clubs and stabbed, / Here crucified and no cross for you.”  Many of these places, those Slovenian tombs included, are named as gates to the underworld:  Door to Hell, Hell’s Gate, Helheim.  In the penultimate chapter he describes a station in Finland—Onkalo, “the hiding place”—being built to house 6500 tons of spent uranium.  A similar site in the U.S., left unfinished due to protests, would if filled hold about seven trillion doses of lethal radiation, “enough to kill every human on earth 350 times over.”  Macfarlane is startled to read a passage in the ancient Finnish epic, Kalevala, in which the hero, Vainamoinen, must don “shoes of copper and a shirt of iron” to enter the underworld in search of an artifact which, exposed to the upper world, will bring a terrible wind-borne disease. I thought of still another underworld—“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”

       But it is not in Macfarlane to leave us there.  The last few pages are his description of a walk with his four-year-old son to a nearby copse, the Nine Well Wood, source of that rounded chalk-stream water.  It all seems very ordinary, but of course, to use Ted Kooser’s phrase, it is not ordinary at all.  The weight, the dense weight of the entire book is behind these pages, the somber and frightening passages as well as, for instance, the chapter about the passage of nutrients between trees—inosculation, another good word—or when, climbing to beat a thunderstorm with a friend, Macfarlane writes, “We are alive in the world, happy to be alive in the world.”  The last chapter is quieter.  “My son and I talk quietly about nothing much.  We feel small in the universe, and together.”  It is just the right human coda to all this earth and ice.  He thinks for a moment of his child’s eventual death, then:  “I run to catch up with him, calling loudly, and he turns to face me at the edge of the wood.  As I kneel down on the earth he raises a hand in the air, fingers spread wide.  I reach my hand toward his and meet it palm to palm, finger to finger, his skin strange as stone against mine.”  Find beauty, be still.