But before she could even fully unzip the door flap to step out, a rumbling brought a swath of reddish water roiling down from above through the canyon. Dust kicked up in the dry area as the water from the rain that had fallen miles away swelled its way through the cracks and fissures, growing with force as it found its way toward Sal. Before she could stand up, the tent lifted up on a cushion of water and started to move downhill with the fury of a growing red-silted river flowing all around. As the tent bobbed more and more quickly in the current, Sal managed to keep the tent partially afloat by lying in starfish position across the bottom with one foot raised to keep the top of the tent up, stretched, and filled with air. Her instincts told her to stay as buoyant as possible, so she kept the thick air mattress beneath her like a lifeboat. Lightning continued to illuminate the caving walls of the tiny shelter as it bobbed and rolled down the arroyo with Sal inside.
All science fled her mind. All poetry fled her mind. Ideas were jumping ship as instinct took over. It was simply the moment of being and surviving. If she could keep the water under her and not over her head, turning her in circles and tossing her into the wall of the wash, she might have a chance of survival. As she was carried along in the current, the water began to swamp the tent, splashing in through the zipper and seeping through the nylon. She wondered if this was what people meant when they called it a watershed moment. She laughed the hoot of a madman and lay as a fallen star from the heaven, spread eagle inside the tent, letting the red river carry her along.
She had been part of the deluge for only a few minutes when the flow abruptly slowed. She floated on and the cushion of water seemed to be getting thinner underneath the tent as the pace of movement slowed. Sal clung to the only thing keeping her afloat, her ridiculously thick air mattress crumpled and folded below her, and managed to peek outside just as the tent was flung onto a silty shore and twirled in a violent pirouette toward the arroyo wall. The last thing she saw before the world went dark was a large boulder and drooping saguaro alternating in flashes like a slowing zoetrope, the movements caught into still frames. The path of least resistance, she thought, her muscles going slack. She caught her breath and held it as the tent whirled with great energy across the slick sand toward the wall of rock. It is the landing, not the flight, that hurts the flung thing.
Fruiting Bodies
Burning Woods, Oregon, 1994
Lily wove the strands of light brown grass one over the other, lost for a moment in the monotony of busy fingers. Max sat near her trying to get her attention, but she was completely immersed in the emerging geometric pattern, the triangles and hexagons. Over, under, under, over. Repeat.
“Hey, you,” Max said, dipping his fingers in the grass soaking water and flicking it her way.
“What do you want?” she looked up, annoyed. “Dork.”
“Want to go for a hike tomorrow?”
“We have school, numbnuts.”
“Do we?” he asked. “What else is senior year for except to take a few days off now and then? I think your precious GPA is safe.”
“I guess we could.” She returned to her weaving. “Where did you want to go hiking?”
“I hear the first chanterelles are just coming up at the higher elevations. I thought we might go find some.”
“Huh,” Lily said. In all her years living in the valley, she had never actually looked for mushrooms. But she had heard about the hippies on Aunt Sal’s commune cooking them up with pasta and butter. Alice always tried to get her to come along when she joined the commune’s outings, but Lily had never been interested. They came back from their fall hunts with big sisal baskets overflowing with golden-trumpeted mushrooms, their gators hooked on over their hiking boots sopping wet. They posed in various silly ways with the mushrooms for pictures, with the mushrooms as horns, or beards, or eyes.
“What do you say?”
“All right then. Mr. Janowicz is getting on my nerves lately anyway. He’s all, practice your equations, learn the life cycle of the shit fly.”
“All right, grumpy dwarf,” Max said. “Seems someone needs a little relaxation anyhow.”
◆
The next day the two loaded up the truck with mushroom baskets, knives, rain gear, snacks, and water. They drove up the ridge through a rain so fine it might more properly be categorized as a mist. There had been a strong rain a few days earlier, but the day promised to hold back its autumnal tears. They pulled off the road and onto a dirt, logging road and wound their way among the Doug fir, vine maple, and ash up toward the low pass of the coast range. Max pulled over on the side of the road.
“I think this is the spot, if I remember,” he said. “Top secret. Don’t tell all the white hippie folk.”
“But I guess technically I am said white hippie folk,” she said. “Plus or minus the hippie part. Jury’s out on that one.”
“It’s nice to see a girl who has such a strong sense of identity,” Max said, creaking open the heavy driver’s side door and hopping down.
“You’re really making me so glad I came today,” she said, jumping from up high and skittering into the ditch. She could hardly believe she had ever had a crush on him.
The two walked along single file not talking for a while, letting the narrow trail provide a buffer for their irritation toward one another. They walked along a little creek filled mostly with ash and alder, the moody gray bark mottled with spots of black. Lily saw all manner of little mushrooms poking their umbrellas up from the ground. Some were smooth and some ridged and pointed. Little white shelf mushrooms with clear edges grew out from a downed alder log.
“Angel Wings,” Max said, pointing. “Some people might think those were oyster mushrooms. But those people would be wrong.”
“Hmm,” Lily said. “I wouldn’t know anoyster from an angel’s ass.”
“This one,” Max bent down to put his finger on a bright red mushroom with white spots, “is the first one you teach a toddler not to eat.”
“Oh yeah?”
“So don’t eat them.” He smiled up at her mischievously.
“Asshole.” She rolled her eyes.
The trail turned up away from the creek and into a stand of Doug firs. They headed straight up in a steep curve toward the top of the hill where Max stopped.
“If you want we can split up on this aspect and look for the golden trumpets here. Good vine maple and Dougie action.”
“Trying to get rid of me, huh?”
“Nah.” He punched her on the arm. “Let’s just stay within earshot of one another. Cr-r-ruuk,” he drew a very convincing raven call out from his throat. “That will be our signal.”
“Crraw Crraw,” she said with a cowgirl twang. “Roger that.”
They made their way ducking under the vine maple and trudging through thick Oregon grape groundcover. Lily wondered how on earth anyone could ever find anything under all the prickly undergrowth. As she walked along she flashed back to her day in the forest when she’d first left home months before. She jumped over a mossy nurse log and landed hard on the other side, her boot breaking through the loamy soil and her leg falling up to her thigh into some sort of cavern below. Shit, she hissed. She remembered how she’d gotten hung up in the vine maple after running away, and how in that moment she had wished she could go back home and sit sullenly across from her mom and eat bread and eggs and sip hot coffee. She had almost turned back for the comforts of home, but something in her urged her forward and so she had made it out of that forest and finally to the ocean. Whether the outcome of her decision was positive or negative was still up for deliberation. Of late she had been feeling pretty cruddy about the whole thing.
She looked up to see if Max was nearby and able to help her out of the hole. She did a poor, sick raven call but heard nothing in response. She managed to lift her leg out from the hole and fished for her boot down in the blackness. The memory of
the spider bite tingled in the scar on her chest as she wondered what else might be down there in the depths besides her shoe. Her hand felt something and she grabbed ahold and pulled it out. It was a lichen-covered stick, the smooth plane of the lichen mimicking leather to the touch. She flung the stick away and put her hand back in and kept fishing around. Finally, she grabbed a lace and retrieved the boot full of loam and moss. She sat up on the nurse log and put her shoe back on and cawed one more time. This time she heard Max’s perfect raven response, gathered her basket, and headed downhill toward the call.
She was looking down as she followed the slight ravine downhill when she saw the first seductive yellow curve sticking out from under some leaves like the petticoat of a can-can girl starting the show. She squatted down and lifted the green undergrowth covering the rest of the mushroom. The thrill of finding her first chanterelle filled her with the kind of adrenaline rush she hadn’t felt in a while. She let a little whoop out and fished in her pocket for her knife. She flicked open the blade and pulled it across her skin, thinking briefly of her mom. This was just the kind of thing Alice would love. She cut the mushroom at the base and held it up to the light to see it better. The gills ran in jagged paths, uneven lines down the stalk of the fruit. She sniffed the cap and it reminded her of dried apricots and dirt. She put it in her basket and looked around to see if there were any more mushrooms, as Max had said they often grew in groups. She looked down and out of the shadows began to notice, one by one, a long golden trail leading as far as she could see downhill.
She was overtaken by a sort of hunter mind, the desire to collect more and more. With each fruit plucked from the fragrant earth she filled some great void she’d been feeling in her life, stuffing it full with little yellow mushrooms. The process of collecting felt like a small success. Her voluminous basket almost halfway full, she lifted herself out from the hunt. Some people stuff mushrooms, but I mushroom stuff, she thought. Max would like that. Feeling like she had eyes on her, she called out for Max one more time. Surely he was close. She’d heard his call not five minutes ago down this very hill. Just as she was looking around for Max, a raven lifted off from the branch above her and the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. She’d followed the call of an actual raven. She was lost. Yet again.
She tried using human language, yelling for Max in every way she knew how, but there was no response. Maaax. Nothing. Maximus Asshooooleum. Her voice rang out pinched and small. Helloooooo. The curious raven called again and landed in a tree to watch her. At least someone was concerned about her whereabouts. Trying to retrace her steps in her mind she looked up the hill and realized she had sort of blindly zigzagged down the hill toward the sound of the raven call and then further lost herself with the line of mushrooms. Max could be anywhere at that point. She wandered for another fifteen minutes looking and calling but heard nothing but the babbling of the creek. She finally decided the only way to go was up. She started scaling the steep hill, holding on to the sword fern for support as she pulled herself ridge-ward.
Her heart was racing and she was covered in a thin film of sweat as she raised herself up onto a flat, mossy area with little ferns growing from the cracks. There was a cut stump at least ten feet across, a long ago felled giant. She set down her half-full basket of chanterelles and lay down on the mossy, eternally moist top, and listened hard to see if she could hear Max shuffling through the underbrush. She listened for his whistle and imagined he must have been a bit frantic to find her at that point. It had been over an hour since she’d seen him.
The sound of her heart reverberated in her ears was backed up with a chorus of branches and leaves moving with the wind. A sound like a tiny helicopter taking off rang out somewhere close by. If it was hunters, their guns didn’t sound like any she’d ever heard. Then came the boom. She heard her own heartbeat meld with another louder, stronger booming. It wasn’t exactly alarming as much as it was foreign. She wondered if it wasn’t the giant mycelium under ground, the curling networks of michorhizal fibers twined in and among every other plant rooted there. Boom. As she lay and listened her nerve pathways were wide open and she could feel a sort of soft electricity coming off her fingertips and toes, out the top of her head like a beacon. Her vision grew blurred, like it did each time before she fainted. But she stayed conscious this time, one foot out of the dark tunnel. It felt as though she were being protected by some life force against falling down into the dark tunnel that had taken her away from living into blackness so many times before. She heard the ocean and the sky and the wind in the beating drone of the sound booming out from below the earth. It wasn’t an earthquake, but more like the earth waking after a long slumber. Lily felt herself falling, passing into some recombinant realm where beings merged. There were giant nerves made entirely of light coursing unseen underground in an intricate pattern of pathways, and they welcomed her to taste from the fountain. Landscapes flitted through her brain; images of sea cliffs, sagebrush, desert mesas, and forests melted into each other in a blur. The blind harrier’s face loomed large as Lily felt herself growing closer and closer to the cavern of the bird’s sightless eyes, until she finally disappeared into the cave and the visions went dark. She heard a sound like a huge wave crashing onto shore and her eyes opened and slowly focused on the shadow hanging over her. Standing above her breathing hard as a horse after a race, Max smiled. A drop of sweat dripped off his nose onto her forehead and he leaned down and kissed her square on the mouth.
“I was so worried,” he said, straightening up. “I’ve been running all over trying to find you. Thought the forest hobgoblins had made you one of their own.”
“Not totally sure they didn’t,” Lily said, rising up slowly and sitting with wide eyes. “I just had the weirdest dream, or, vision, or something.”
“Ha! Another sex dream about a—”
“No.”
Something in the seriousness of Lily’s face made Max cut his teasing short. She looked sallow and pale, like she’d just experienced the paranormal, or vomited. She put her hand on her chest, feeling for the same huge beat she’d felt earlier, the enormous, yearning sound of mycorrhizal fibers clinging and roots growing, of fern fronds unfurling toward the light. It had all been right there, under her hand—inside her. But all she felt under her hand was the gentle pum-pum, pum-pum, of a single little organ pumping nutrients, hormones, cells, and oxygen along their merry way. The community within whistled while it worked as though nothing had happened.
“Did you faint?” Max asked.
“Not exactly. No.”
“Good haul,” Max said as he peeked in her basket. “You found a vein, I see.”
“I did,” she said, getting up slowly and putting her arms around her friend. “I really, really did.”
The two walked back to the trail together, sticking close and chatting about the science of mushrooms. Lily tried to shake the strangeness of what she’d experienced—the out-of-body feeling of floating into and out of other living objects—as she listened to Max. Her mom had mentioned astral projection once. Maybe that was it. Max talked about mushrooms as they walked and mentioned that one of the largest known living organism was an underground micorrhizal structure over a mile squared that weighed over a hundred tons and was over 1,500 years old. He said Jancowicz had told him they were finding new and even larger species of these massive creatures all the time. Max talked about the filaments all matting together and fruiting little mushrooms up through the forest floor. As she stepped along the narrow trail, Lily countenanced the idea that she’d somehow been part of the mushroom as she laid there on the log, as though the wild beast of her soul had been unleashed to run around underground before returning to her body. She’d hitched a ride with the mushroom for one wild, crashing wave.
“Makes you think twice about the human definition of ‘community’ now,” Max said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Like,” Lily finished, retur
ning to the conversation, “if a fungus can figure out how to make it work with all the other living creatures around them, why can’t we?”
“Exactly,” Max said. “You’re the only person who gets me.” He turned around to give her a high five.
They found the trail and walked back down the hill out of the chanterelle zone and back toward the slender rocky pathway flanked by creek alders. Lily felt a sadness leaving the giant fungus under the soil and thought about her mom for the first time with a sort of longing. She could almost sense her all the way across the coast range sitting like an old mushroom in her library, her nose in a book, hand on an overfilled glass of wine. It occurred to her that she and her mom were just two parts of the same huge organism, fruits from the same tree. The forest closed behind Max and Lily in a dappled tunnel of quaking ash as they walked the last half-mile single file. The subsonic booms had shaken something loose in her. Under the protected canopy, among the living, breathing world, Lily left behind something dark that had been clinging to her, letting it slide off her and return to the earth, to mingle and settle with the ages. Let it be taken up by the forest floor and allowed to bloom however it could find a way.
In the truck waiting to turn onto the highway Max turned to Lily.
“You know what I just realized? Lily of the Valley. Your mom must have named you after the flower, right?”
“Hmm. Not exactly.” Her face grew dark.
“But she must have, like, on some level. She’s such a nature girl.” He poked Lily. “Like you. Birds of a feather.” There was a long pause.
“Would you mind taking me home?” she asked.
“You mean to the orchard?”
“Yeah. I think I’m ready.”
“Sure. I think that’s a great idea.” He gave her the smug smile of someone who had just gotten his way.
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