“The mycoremediation was her idea?” Wind snaked around our bodies and rattled fir needles onto the path and into our hair.
“She met a man who told her it was possible to clean up toxic soil with mycelia, and she knew of an island that needed to be cleaned up. It became her mission.”
Jen left me with Elle at the apothecary. We sat on the stoop, and she took my pulse at the wrist, first on one side, then the other.
“Does it have a center, or is the pain evenly spread?” she asked.
“It’s here,” I said, tracing the line of pain from my eyebrow to the bridge of my nose around to the inner socket.
She took my pulse again, her steady hands on my wrist, her head cocked to the side this time, like she was listening to my pulse.
We hadn’t met earlier; Elle wasn’t at lunch, no one mentioned why. She had been standing in the grass near the apothecary when we walked up, staring at something in the distance. She was tall and reedy, with short dark hair that curled over half her brow. She wasn’t what I thought she would be. I had had visions of an earthy woman in layers of flowing skirts and scarves, like a young Stevie Nicks. But Elle was boyish in a worn-out T-shirt and jeans, beautiful and androgynous in a way that both men and women probably found attractive. A small sea-worn shell, suspended from a silver chain around her neck, landed at her sternum. My eye was drawn to it, the chalk-white of the shell against the thinning white of the cotton.
“You didn’t sleep much last night?”
“No.”
“Okay. Come with me.” She stood up and disappeared behind the screen door, and I closed my eyes. The porch was shaded, but the meadow before it was blazing in the midday sun. My eyes prickled when I looked anywhere near it.
The cottage was cool and dark. I waited at the threshold for my eyes to adjust. There was a small living room with a wood stove, furnished with soft armchairs covered in pillows, a wooden table, and a bookshelf stocked with volumes on folk remedies and herbalism and Chinese medicine and nutrition. An amethyst geode the size of a human face rested in the center of the table. I squatted down to look and traced the crystal formations with a finger, rested my palm over the glassy curves. Elle appeared in the arch that led to the kitchen.
“I’ve just put the water on,” she said, not smiling, but not unkindly. She had a direct, gentle way about her.
In the kitchen, sunlight slid around the edges of a blood-red cloth in the window, but a cool breeze blew through the back screen. I walked around the room while Elle put herbs into a mortar and pestle at a worktable and the water simmered on an efficiency burner. In the place of a stove and refrigerator, there were dehydrators and drying racks, bundles of herbs hanging from them, mushrooms laid out to dry on sheets. The cupboard doors had been removed, and the shelves were lined with jars of herbs, labeled with names and dates. Each shelf had a label, too, indicating the family of herb stored there. There was an indentation in one wall that had once held a folding ironing board. The ironing board was gone, and the space now held small brown and blue dropper bottles of tinctures and flower essences.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Almost eight years.” Elle looked up and out the back door, which led to the edge of the meadow and the start of the trees.
“You’re Jen’s partner?”
She nodded, continued her work. Jen was loquacious, outgoing; Elle was more reserved.
“Did you two meet here?”
“We did. I came to apprentice with Margaret—Maggie. She’s our midwife, our medicine woman.”
“I met her this morning,” I said. “She was milking the goats.”
“We all do, sometimes.” She nodded. “Even Sister J.”
The water was starting to boil. She poured it over a jar full of the herbs she had prepared for me, screwed on a cap.
“It just needs to steep. Do you often get headaches?” she asked. She wanted to turn the focus away from herself.
“Just in the last few years.”
“Stress, maybe?” she offered.
“Stress?”
“Are you stressed?”
“No.”
She looked at me and nodded like I was full of shit. I turned away.
“Can I touch?” I was standing over a tray of dark blue fungi.
Elle looked up. “Of course.”
“What are they?”
“Cortinarius violaceus. Violet caps. About a week after the fall rains, we start collecting them.”
“What are they for?” I picked one up. It looked like a mushroom you’d buy in the grocery store, but it was the color of a varicose vein. I sniffed it.
“We’re not exactly sure about those.”
I looked at her curiously. She smiled for the first time.
“We only work with edible varieties in the apothecary. But part of what I’m working on for the Colony is understanding what each individual has to contribute to the health of the whole. In the beginning, we work with a combination of what we know and what we can intuit from what we know. We know, for example, that Cortinarius violaceus fruits in the early fall after warm rains. So, we might start by wondering whether they would be helpful for ailments induced by wet warmth, like certain kinds of rheumatism or influenza. Or we might wonder the opposite: if it might ameliorate ailments that are exacerbated by dry, cold climates. Cortinarius violaceus grows near conifers, but not just any conifers: it prefers the amabilis fir, Abies amabilis, which are rarer than noble and Douglas firs on the islands—and perhaps that has something to do with the sweet sap the amabilis exudes. Maybe the violet cap digests the sugars of the sap, and maybe it could be indicated for blood sugar regulation.”
“But there aren’t that many people here—how often do you actually get to test these hypotheses?”
She poured the tea through a strainer into a mug for me.
“It’s not an allopathic model; I’ll never be able to write a peer-reviewed paper or anything like that. But I don’t really care.”
She pulled a jar of honey from a shelf and set it in front of me with a spoon.
“Stir a good tablespoon of honey in the tea.”
I did and watched the honey dissolve into the murky liquid. I took a mouthful and felt the heat and scent flow to the back of my throat and bloom up into my sinuses and around my eyes. It wasn’t spicy, exactly, but it had the effect of a hit of horseradish, opening my nasal passages and making my eyes water. I swallowed and felt it cool my entire throat as it went down.
“Jesus Christ.” I started laughing. The sensation passed, and I was left with the honeyed, herbaceous flavor on my tongue.
Elle raised an eyebrow. “Just take sips.”
“What’s in it?”
“The strongest flavors come from the rhizomes of garlic mustard. It’s an invasive species but almost impossible to get rid of, so we found a use for it. We weed it from our fields and the wild spaces—when we can—and it becomes part of our medicinal collection here. There’s also wintergreen, yarrow, skullcap, fireweed . . . It’s a useful blend.”
“How sick do people actually get here? How often do you need to try a new treatment for rheumatism? Everyone seems relatively young and healthy.” I thought of Sister J. and her cough, but didn’t mention it.
“The average age here is forty-two. So, it’s true, we don’t see a lot of diabetes or rheumatism or things like that. Flesh wounds, insect stings, strains, and sprains. There are almost a third more women here than men. So, migraines—yes. Menstrual irregularities.”
“Birth control?” I offered. “I notice there are couples here but no children.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at me. “Yes. There’s a long tradition of wise women using herbs for birth control. You’ll want to drink lots of water, too. The tea’s diuretic and diaphoretic.” She gestured to my mug.
She poured off a jar of water for me from an old Tupperware pitcher, like the kind my mom made lemonade in when I was a kid. The water was perfectly clear,
catching the light from the window. I took a drink, conscious for the first time that I was drinking well water, that I couldn’t taste anything but water. I held it up. I don’t know what I expected to see floating in it. Lead? Cadmium? Sulfur? Little skulls and crossbones?
Elle saw me.
“It’s as clean as water you get in the city. Probably cleaner.”
“How?”
“Filters, for drinking and cooking water.”
She showed me a lidded bucket with a spigot and a tube in the corner behind the door.
“Six layers: gravel, sand, charcoal; gravel, sand, charcoal. Muslin at the bottom.” She handed me the pitcher and gestured toward the end of the hose, turned the spigot. Water flowed into the pitcher.
“We probably don’t need to use them anymore—it’s been a while since everyone was religious about it. I boil, then filter twice. I don’t want to compromise the treatments.” She nodded at my tea. “It works best when it’s hot.”
I watched her work for a while, as I sipped the tea. Feeling it burn its way down my throat and into my head, my chest. Soon, I was sweating the headache out of me.
Katie came to collect me. The pain in my skull was waning, but my eyes were still sensitive to the light. I borrowed a straw hat from Elle, who told me to rest awhile and handed me a lidded jar of water with a sprig of mint in it. Katie walked me through the medicinal garden and out to the meadow. We made our way over a dirt and grass path through the trees to the central cluster of cottages. They had the look of a prewar summer camp, with a name for every house, painted in bright colors on a sign outside each door. The first colonists named the cottages, and though they must have been struggling in those early years just after the quake, they seemed to have brought a sense of whimsy to Marrow. There was Oysterville and The Pequod, Valhalla and Atlantis, The French Quarter and The Royal Fernery. My cottage, which was set aside for guests—visiting scientists, ecologists, family members—was called the Helix Nebula. There were flower beds and herb gardens around some; others had gone to seed with whatever would grow there—grasses and flowers and young trees, but with birdhouses rising out of them on stilts, or piles of wood alive with mason bees. It was all habitat, Katie said. The only requirement was that a conscious decision had been made by the inhabitants. There were laundry lines slung with sheets and underwear and jeans. Wind chimes answered every breeze.
The vault toilets were not like the typical outhouses of campgrounds. They had built them to look like regular buildings, little shacks and cabins made of salvaged wood and windows and doors. The inner walls were made of a clay composite—a perfectly insulated material that kept them warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Tuck was the one to innovate on the design, a model he perfected after studying at Yestermorrow in Vermont. It became an artistic challenge, improving on the toilets. A couple had retractable sunroofs so that you could shit under the open sky. Each was planted round with native herbs and wildflowers.
“Where did the salvage come from?”
“Some were from cottages here—the ones that collapsed after the earthquake—they took them down piece by piece and reused everything they could. In the time I’ve been here, we’ve had quite a few donations of materials, too. There’s a network of folks around the islands who keep us in mind when they have something taking up space. Like that, over there.” She pointed off through the trees.
“Is that a boat?” I peered through the trees to an open space where I could just make out the blue-and-white hull of a cruiser—probably a fifty-footer—the V-bottom buried in the dirt, like it was sailing through the forest. We were at least a mile from the dock. “That’s incredible. How did you get it up here?”
“Tractor. It took some doing, though.”
“Does someone live there?”
“It’s the lab.” Katie started walking again and I followed.
“That’s a lab? What kind of lab?”
“Soil and water stuff, mostly. It’s where they process the samples.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Tuck and Aaron. Zadie and Jen. The occasional student—they come and go—you know the types. I was one of them once.”
“I’m surprised more of the students don’t stay, honestly.” I was taking in the view, the quaint cottages with the Salish Sea beyond, the gentle swaying of the trees. I looked at her, expecting agreement. But she looked troubled.
“We attract a certain type of person, for sure. Young, interested in environmental issues, social justice, minimalist living. But there’s usually a point, after six months or so . . . Either it’s something you can give yourself to, or it’s not.”
“But you stayed. Tuck, Jen, Elle—?”
“We were the last newcomers. We had a little cohort—along with Andrew and Tom, who had been at Yestermorrow, in Vermont; Carly and Angela, the sisters from Alaska who run our fishing boat now; Zadie and Luke, who were part of the organic farms exchange. We were all looking for something meaningful that we couldn’t find out there.” She gestured toward the mainland. “We were all in it for the long haul, from the beginning, so with Sister’s blessing, we started making the Colony ours. Most of us never had the chance to make homes for ourselves out there. It wasn’t this trendy thing yet, to be raising goats and bees, and fermenting vegetables or whatever, you know?”
We sat on the hillside in the breeze and looked out at the water.
“I can’t explain it. Things have changed. For a while after the earthquake, when we were teenagers and going into college, it seemed like there was energy around dealing with big problems. Reconstruction, earthquake mitigation, energy efficiency, affordability, and quality-of-life issues. There were people willing to do the work. But something shifted in the consciousness a few years ago. It was like people had reached this level of comfort and didn’t want to give it up. They stopped wanting to fight and started to accept that we would never win the fight. That the forces against us were too great, the problems too out of control. People smart enough and caring enough to see the danger the planet was in, but too—I don’t know—too overwhelmed? too complacent? to do anything about it. We started losing benefactors.”
“What do you mean by ‘benefactors’? Jen mentioned them, too.”
“There were some liberal Catholic supporters of Sister’s mission who donated supplies—solar panels, yurts, goats, farm equipment, money for mycelium spawn—which doesn’t come cheap when you’re cultivating them large scale like this. Everything, at first, came either from benefactors, bartering, salvage, or voluntary labor. It hasn’t been easy, keeping this level of support for the last decade. There are sexier movements out there.”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking about my ex and his orchards. “But I’d write about it.”
Katie looked at me like she was measuring the distance between my eyebrows.
“How does a nun get into mushrooms?” I asked.
Katie left me at my cabin to rest while she finished her chores for the day. Of all the houses, all the buildings I had seen so far, this one was most like an old summer cabin. Logs for walls, stone fireplace, one room with a kitchen at the far end and a door out to the privy and shower. The door to the left off the living room led to a small bedroom, a door on the right to a screened-in porch just wide enough for a twin bedstead, no curtains. It was simply furnished, like all of the buildings I had seen so far. A rug in the main room, but otherwise bare floors, swept clean, a love seat, and a coffee table. In the kitchen, a wooden table and two mismatched chairs, a ceramic jug of fireweed and meadow rue in the center. I leaned down to smell them and saw that pollen and black aphids had fallen all over the table. An earwig shimmied under the pottery.
I plugged my phone into my solar charger and put it in the window. I had a message I couldn’t retrieve because of the shaky signal. Chris Lelehalt, maybe, with news about Jacob Swenson.
I opened the windows of the sleeping porch, took off my shoes, and laid myself down on the bed. The sun was low in the sky. I
hadn’t felt so weary in a long time. My body sank into the soft mattress; the heat sank into the room. The breeze lifting the thin muslin curtains, a bee throwing its body at the screen. Hum-tap. Hum-tap-tap. Hum.
I should let it out, I thought. But I felt weighted to the bed, wooden-limbed. What was in that tea?
Training my eyes on the trees outside, the way they seemed to bend over the cabin, over the bed itself. I thought my eyes were open, but the way my thoughts turned, I knew I was starting to dream. I was falling backward through the day, details large and small, floating forward. I was searching the cabin’s kitchen for a jar, a cup to capture the bee. I was at the window, cupping it in my hands. When I opened my hands at the back door, it was gone. I walked into a field of fireweed, listening to a lecture by a famous ecologist—I knew she was famous—on the first plants to return after a fire. That’s why it’s called fireweed. It looks like a fire on the hillside, those waist-high red fronds licking at the wind; it’s the ghost of what came before it. It brings the bees back, and they make the best honey from it, Katie was saying to me, holding a stem of it up to my face even though the bees were all over it. I was trying to take notes for an article or a book—a book I was going to write about Marrow Island resurrected. I could see my hand scrawling notes, but the words made no sense. I tried again: furweed, friarweed, friendweed. I can’t get the fire. I write it over and over again. My hand numb, my letters loopy, drunk. In the pictures I’ve taken, the lens is buttery soft. Is it the camera or my eyes? Muscles twitched, my hand reaching, but only my fingers lifting, and I was aware, for a moment, that I was still lying on the bed and the sun was lower in the sky. I heard singing somewhere nearby, like a choir, that sent goose bumps along my arms.But I’m dreaming, I told myself. The distant conversation of ravens, harmonizing with the wind chimes. I pulled the blanket over me and sank, again, into the bed. An unkindness of wind chimes.
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