Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  A salmonid carcass is an environment unto itself, an ephemeral ecosystem. More than sixty species of insect from thirty-six families were found teeming on carcasses marooned in British Columbia, especially saprophagous (“putrid-eating”) flies. These in turn lure tiny predators. Certain parasitic wasps carry high concentrations of marine nitrogen, because their larvae feast on fly larvae raised on salmon. In fact, chemically speaking these wasps are as much of the ocean as sea lions or orca whales: They’re on the same trophic level, the same step of the pyramid. Slugs and snails slime across carcasses; ants, beetles, spiders, bristletails, cave crickets, mites, and springtails arrive opportunistically. And in the footprint, “the hotspot,” of a dead fish there is heightened subterranean burrowing: Millipedes and worms thrive in the enriched soil. So do roots.

  How much nitrogen does a dying fly then bequeath to the earth or to the bird, the viridescent tree swallow, that catches it? The answer doesn’t matter to me, ultimately. Just the fact of it. The act of it. The face. A fly will have a nitrogen “signature” specific to the fish in which it was born.

  Back on the bridge, waiting for some further sign, I spotted a mink—a shaggy, brown member of the weasel family, an aquatic specialist and nemesis of crawdads. It galumphed swiftly up the rocks with obsidian eyes, and once more I held my breath. Surely it would find and scavenge one of these fish. On some rivers, more than 40 percent of carcasses are strewn inland as scraps or scat. Chuck had seen bald eagles descend on the freshly tossed. “Bears get a hold of them,” he also told me, “and you know what happens when they get’m: They tear’m up and run’m through. That spreads them to the far reaches of the riparian area.” Where the run is strong, bears eat the brains, eggs, and dorsal muscles, and leave the dregs to the smaller world. The trees get the bear shit, too.

  This mink was no bear, though, and it kept bounding, under me and the concrete span, and upstream through the glowing lattice of living and dead willow. It would find the carrion later, or maybe it had already had its fill. It wasn’t alive to fulfill my story. Instead, I found my banana peel where I’d accidentally left it, draped on the wood rail of the bridge. In an hour of sun, its skin had mottled entirely black and brown.

  But this journey will finish as you might expect: They did come, at precisely eleven thirty on a Sunday morning, just as I first felt the wind touch my face. Or perhaps I noticed the warming breeze only after those three drifted nonchalantly overhead, from behind, on rigid up-tilt wings of silver primaries. But I don’t think so; the wind and the hoodless birds arrived as one. The pink of their low, passing faces reminded me of the alpenglow that burns on the cheek of a spawning steelhead.

  They triangulated in the V-shaped canyon, trolling stiffly across the spires of conifer, circling the few hundred meters to which the fish had been randomly delivered. So many bodies confused them, I thought, made it more difficult to home in. They didn’t land as I watched, but they would. They would defecate steelhead onto their feet, as vultures do to keep them free of bacteria. They would carry these fish—this ocean—to their basalt cliffs, to their downy white nestlings hissing in some concealed recess.

  It was then that I felt I could end my vigilance and let the fish live.

  Chanty

  Lift this cup and drink the scent of apricot and mud.

  Of wet California winters in the rambling woodlands: red-berried toyon and blue hound’s tongue, madrone and bay laurel, oak and poison oak.

  Cut through, the flesh is firm and white, the aroma also slightly peppery.

  In profile, a fresh slice of chanterelle might remind of a horned skull, bleached in the desert, in a rain shadow, far from its natural clime.

  Or Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers: those intimate lines and pastels, which suggest unfolding. A mushroom is also a fruiting body.

  Most often, mushrooms are likened to male anatomy. Perhaps the chanterelle, more elegant and freeform, suggests the limits of metaphor.

  That a chanterelle is a chanterelle is a chanterelle is a chanterelle.

  No: It invites metaphor, and they multiply. As if by spore.

  The ancient Greeks made a wide, footed drinking vessel, the kantharos, with looping handles that rise above its lip; on the vessel’s side, human figures were often painted in black and orange, as if in procession around its curve.

  Helmeted warriors with ornate shields and drawn swords; women in robes, pearls in their ears; pipers and harpists.

  Above the lips, I mean. Meant to be held with two hands, carefully. Fired at a thousand degrees, thousands of years ago.

  Many, many more.

  Chanterelle, the French diminutive: little cup.

  They’re found on every continent except Antarctica. More than ninety species, several of which exist on multiple continents.

  Anzutake, in Japan: apricot mushroom. Pfifferling, in Germany: little pepper. In the Valle de México, the Nahuatl say xochilnanácatl: flower mushroom.

  The nude sporocarp, of course, is only temporary, an offering of the buried organism, the near-invisible mycelium running through the soil with filaments known as hyphae.

  From the Greek huphe, “web.”

  In the case of chanterelle, these fibrils entwine with the roots of a nearby tree, diligently feeding it nitrogen and phosphorous in exchange for a modest drink of sugar, born of sun.

  Thus their golden color, I imagine.

  Hexoses, which the fungus transmutes into mannitols, arabitols, and erythritols.

  This symbiosis is known as “mycorrhiza”: “root,” “of fungus.” We have discovered that the vast majority of the world’s plant species find such a coupling essential.

  Stoop to a chanterelle and, as your fingers touch its flesh, you touch the crown of the tree casting the shade in which you stand.

  But what if all words are symbiotic.

  “Metaphor,” for example: meta-, “with, across, or after”; and phor, “to carry, bear.”

  Consider that, if one utters “chanterelle,” one reaches not only to kantharos, but further to the Greek kanthus, for “side,” “edge,” “border.”

  “Decant”: to pour over a rim, slowly.

  From kanto, from kamb-to, from the proto-Indo-European root Kemb-: to bend, turn.

  Just so, the potter shapes his clay.

  A hypha is a single cell thick, allowing it to absorb nutrients from whatever it worms through or around. It grows from the tip: As water is absorbed, pressure increases within the cell until it bulges forward, and a wall develops behind, pinching off another link.

  “Hyphen,” from the Greek huphen, “together”: hupo, “under,” and hen, “one.”

  Before long, the sheath or mantle of mycorrhizal hyphae wraps around a hair of a root so that, through an electron microscope, together they look like twine around a spindle.

  Zoom in, once more: The hyphae nose between the root’s epidermal cells, pushing into their crevices, forming what’s called “the Hartig net,” the interface for exchange.

  From the proto-Indo-European Kemb- came the Celtic kamb-i-, which became the Latin cambiāre. Change, as they say, is inevitable.

  And cambium, the living tissue that rings the dead heartwood of a tree, the xylem and phloem that feeds and is fed by the chanterelle buried below.

  From a single spore, a “mycelium mat,” that hidden tangle of hyphae, can grow to be acres in size, uniting and nursing multiple trees. Even those of different species. It creates a network of nutrient and chemical flow that reduces the risk of all, balancing the forest.

  Communicating, some would argue.

  Theories for the urheimat, the origin of Indo-European language:

  That the root lies on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea, where the horse was first domesticated; where, between 4,000 and 3,000 B.C., the Kurgan nomads, a cluster of warring cultures, spread across Europe and the Near East carrying the mother tongue.

  The German mutter, the Russian mat, the Persian madar, the Polish matka, the San
skrit mata, the Latin mater.

  Or that our language began to travel earlier between 7,000 and 6,000 B.C. from Anatolia, now Turkey, where cereals were domesticated and agriculture arose. In turn, growing populations radiated outward, mixing with others and supplanting their languages.

  That God looked down and saw a rising tower: “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

  From the base of an oak, a chanterelle mycelium may develop and spread below ground for decades, unnoticed and uncollected. Never once mushrooming. Then it may fruit perennially, for centuries. Just so long as the tree stands.

  The largest living organism in the world is thought to be a parasitic honey mushroom mycelium, Armillaria solidipes, in eastern Oregon. It’s estimated that, for over two thousand years, the mushroom has spread beneath two thousand acres. It was discovered from an airplane because, in this case, the nutrients flow only one way, killing the pine forest and so forming a giant footprint on the land.

  Luckily, the chanterelle cooperates.

  Below the surface, the mycelium of a fungus gathers into primordia, nodules of woven hyphae less than two millimeters in diameter. They begin to swell and push upward.

  An incipient ziggurat, a shrine to reach the foggy heaven; one destined to disintegrate, to become gelatin, in three or four weeks’ time.

  “Go to,” He said, “let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

  “Babel,” from the Hebrew balal, “to jumble.” Ba and ma, the exclamations of a baby.

  Yet the original Indo-European lexicon includes words for “wheel,” “axle,” “harness-pole,” and “to go or convey in a vehicle,” which suggests these inventions already existed, that our cognates rode into the present on conquering chariots: the Kurgans.

  That every single word, after all, is a metaphor, carrying us across time.

  Kantarel, kantarell, kanterlla, kantarelli: Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish.

  They begin as buttons. They bloom into a sprawling canopy of waving edges that sometimes lifts a handful of forest humus on its cratered back: a floating island planted with an oak seedling, maybe, or even a few worms.

  “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it,” said O’Keeffe, “it’s your world for a moment.”

  “Mud puppies,” some pickers say. A vase isn’t necessarily meant to hold flowers.

  Of course, the metaphor of a tree is often used to describe the dissemination of speech, each node of the past branching toward increasing complexity, as if seamlessly.

  The main limbs: Celtic and Germanic. Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Balkan. Hellenic, Armenian, Indo-Iranian.

  (Anatolian and Tocharian, now extinct.)

  Each word like a stoma on a leaf, opening and closing. All our “material” stemming from the Latin materia: tree trunk.

  But maybe a mycelium is the stronger metaphor, since language is more fluid or labyrinthian, traveling in waves, back and forth and often underground, across centuries and cultures. Evolving in the very act of speech and, now, writing.

  Where winters are cold in North America, the chanterelle climbs out of the earth at the return or height of summer. But along the more temperate Pacific Coast, the first chanterelle appears two weeks after a cold December rain.

  Cantharellus formosus, the golden mushroom I know from the Northwest. The Latin formosus: beautiful, handsome; aesthetic, well-formed.

  Close cousin to the eastern North American and European species, cibarius: edible.

  Go forth on Christmas morning. Go ahead. Wear old shoes. Carry a wicker basket, or a paper grocery bag folded in your back pocket.

  An optimistic heart.

  A hollow at the base of a shady, north-facing amphitheater: a bowl in the hillside with a downed tree and bramble winding across the ground.

  Smell of bay leaf.

  Even from a distance, chanterelles seem to call out to a beginner, one of the easiest mushrooms to see in the woods, to stumble across. Always inviting my attention.

  Catching the corner of the eye: the “canthus,” where the lids meet and tears gather to drop over an edge, to slide down a cheek; a word which means just as it did in ancient Greece.

  And the neighboring proto-Indo-European root, Kand-: to shine. Candle. Incandescence. Candidate, from candidatus, “white-robed,” the purity of the toga.

  The candid flesh, the incendiary pan. The white chanterelle, Cantharellus subalbidus, which is ever partial to Douglas fir.

  There are many foragers who hunt only chanterelle, for they are abundant, choice, and not easily confused for the poisonous, though the jack-o’-lantern mushroom might try.

  When you find one, get down on your hands and knees. Look uphill. Usually others are peeking out from under the eaves.

  Galbiori: yellowish one, Romanian. Rubito: little blond, Spanish.

  Lanterns on dark water.

  Over the course of about a month, they continue to evolve, growing larger, adding layers of basidia (“little pedestals”), the spore-bearing organs of their underbellies. Often they come as twins. Just pick one, it’s suggested, so the second may propagate.

  Sporulate.

  So the other may remember its lover.

  (But, the temptation.)

  Reach into the earth and pinch the mushroom’s base. Twist gently, so as not to damage the white hairs running everywhere through the scalp.

  Another nickname: girolle in France, from girer. “Little twist.”

  Dwo-

  Twilight. Twelfth night. The twig, which splits in two. A dozen golden biscuits. Balanced between pinochle and diploma. And never the twain shall meet.

  Duet.

  I think of Keats: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on . . .”

  Take up this chanterelle and run your fingers lightly across the flutes and ridges that climb from the stalk to the bottom of the cap.

  Pleated, like the throat of baleen whales off the coast, those rorquals that gulp thirty tons of sea at a time and then squeeze, filtering planktonic life.

  At the foot of giant trees, on the margins of redwood canyons, chanterelles surface all at once and breathe awhile.

  The undersurface of a mushroom, which bears the spores, is known as the “hymenium.” Most have gills, thin as knife blades, but chanterelles have only “blunt folds.”

  Hymenium, from the Greek diminutive for “membrane”: humēn.

  Mem-: meat, flesh.

  Then the jaunt back to the kitchen. A loose-weave basket is recommended for carrying mushrooms, because it helps scatter spores as you go, seeding the forest.

  Clean them with a brush. Sweep away dirt, bits of leaf and grass. Rinse quickly, if you need to, so the mushrooms don’t absorb too much water, diluting their potency.

  Pare off any rot, those soft discolored pieces. On a tired specimen, one ready to melt back into the earth, the ribs of the hymenium—those blunt folds—will break easily, mushing under a fingernail.

  Glistening when wet. Covered with fine, white hairs when dry, like the fuzz on an apricot: canescence. The chanterelle also rises from a dark pit.

  Canescence, from the proto-Indo-European root Kas-: gray. Kas-no becoming the Latin cānus, “white, gray-haired”; becoming also the Germanic hazōn, becoming “hare.”

  Oreille de lièvre, hare’s ear. The French have so many wonderful endearments.

  Lay the tender slices altogether in a hot pan; let the rain cook off and condense on the ceiling overhead. Add butter. A splash of chardonnay. Salt, pepper.

  Shallots, perhaps.

  So many eggs, cracked open in the forest. Jidanhuang, in Chinese: egg yolk.

  The Czech kuratko: chick. The Portuguese canarinhos: canary bird, chicken. The Italian galletto: young rooster.

  When a covey is found, you might hear a
brief crowing in the woods: chanticleer, in boots.

  Which brings us to the proto-Indo-European Kan-: to sing. Which became the Germanic han(e)ni, which was destined to lay “hen.”

  Which also begot the Latin canare or cantus: Charm. Sweet canorous cant. Canto, cantata. Accent and enchant. Incentive to recant.

  “Chanties,” the mushroom gatherers say, affectionately. Songs of labor.

  So it occurred that, from two separate roots, or spores, the same word arose: In French, a chanterelle was also a decoy bird, the melodic female partridge used to draw in others of its species during the hunt.

  Now obsolete. But the chanterelle remains the topmost string on an instrument, the ethereal note. The thumbstring on a lute.