The Soils I Have Traveled

The subway soil of Manhattan is made of crushed MetroCard fragments and the dreams of eight million people pressed into powder. Each morning, the 4 train carries the sediment of Washington Heights down to Wall Street—coffee grounds from bodegas mixing with the chalk dust of private school erasers, creating a compost rich enough to grow entire neighborhoods.

●

I have tasted this soil on my tongue every morning for quite a while. It tastes like possibility, like the breath of strangers who've stood too close on the platform at rush hour. The A train's soil is a mix, ranging from sandier to grittier. It carries the salt of tears shed in the Harlem River apartments and the sugar of birthday cakes shared in Brooklyn brownstones. Each grain tells a story of someone who came here with nothing but hope stuffed into a suitcase.

●

At 14th Street-Union Square, the soil changes color. Here, the earth is marbled with the residue of protest signs and street musicians' guitar picks, mixed with fallen leaves from the farmers market and the metallic dust of skateboards grinding against concrete. A businessman in a thousand-dollar suit brushes shoulders with a woman counting change for the next fare. Their footsteps create new soil together—privilege and struggle, ambition and survival, all ground down into the same fine powder that settles between the train tracks.

●

The Q train soil tastes like my childhood—like the time my nanny from Queens taught me to fold dumplings while my parents worked late in Midtown offices. It carries the essence of every language spoken in these tunnels. I hear Spanish prayers whispered by cleaning ladies heading to work before dawn, Mandarin lullabies hummed by mothers rocking babies to sleep during long commutes, and Arabic poetry recited by taxi drivers taking the train home after eighteen-hour shifts. This soil doesn't discriminate. It holds us all.

●

From my boarding school window in Massachusetts, I watch classmates complain about their small town's lack of diversity, and I want to tell them about the 6 train soil—how it's rich with the iron of construction workers' sweat, the phosphorus of students' late-night study sessions, the calcium of elderly bones that have walked these platforms for decades. I want to tell them how lucky I am to be from soil that knows no boundaries, that connects the bodega owner in the Bronx to the art student in SoHo through a web of underground ribbons.

●

But late at night, when I'm supposed to be sleeping in my dorm, I worry about that soil. I read about rent prices rising like flood water, about families being uprooted like trees in a storm. I wonder if the soil I love is slowly being sanitized, gentrified, swept clean of the very diversity that made it fertile. Will the next generation taste the same rich mixture of cultures on their tongues, or will they find something blander, more palatable to investors and developers?

●

Still, when I close my eyes, I can feel the rumble of the N train beneath my feet, even here in New England. I can taste the soil of my city—complex, sometimes bitter, often beautiful. It's a soil that has grown activists and artists, entrepreneurs and educators, all from the same underground network of dreams and determination. I am proud to be a daughter of this dirt, a child of these tunnels that refuse to separate us by zip code or background.

The subway soil of New York City is the soil I call home. And despite my fears, I believe it will keep growing us—all of us—long after I'm gone.