The Crash Course, Revised Edition

CHAPTER 10What Is Wealth?: (Hint: It’s Not Money)

Once, as I drove around southern New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts looking for a home to buy and a place to settle, I suddenly noticed something. Beyond the usual list of criteria including a nice neighborhood and proximity to culture and shopping, I had one non‐negotiable item on the list: good soil. I wanted to have a big, lush garden and it's much easier to have one if you start with good soil.

My trick was to keep an eye trained on the types of trees and plants in each area, looking for the plant‐based clues would let me know if the soil underneath was good quality or not. I knew that an excess of pine trees often indicates weak, sandy, and acidic soils, while maple trees portend rich, sweet soils.

After passing through a succession of small towns, each established 150 or more years ago, a relationship between the types of trees and architecture emerged. In the towns surrounded by pine trees, the historic churches were small, modest affairs, generally without steeples. The churches looked poor. But in the towns with maple trees, the churches were invariably grander, with large, ornate steeples attached. All at once, the saying “dirt poor” took on new meaning to me.

The phrase originally dates from the Great Depression and may well have meant “poor as dirt,” but to me, from that trip on, it could only convey that one is as rich as one's soil. If you were poor once upon a time it was because your soil was poor ...