A Peculiar Love

Surprisingly for a Nebraska summer, it has been raining regularly, almost daily. As a result, mushrooms have popped up all over the place. I adore mushrooms, though I cannot exactly say why. The best I can do, is explain a little bit about mushrooms.

When you see mushrooms in the same region that are similar looking, these mushrooms are quite probably part of the same creature, not independent organisms like plants are. That is because fungi grow very differently from plants. When a spore lands in a viable substrate (soil, a dead log, or a foot saturated in a trench, depending on the fungus), the spore begins to grow and digest the nutrients in the substrate through the formation of microhyphae, or tiny root-like structures. These grow and grow, digesting what they can in order to grow further. Under certain conditions, like highly saturated soil, fruiting bodies sprout from the soil and burst into the air above.

Originally, fungi were classified by the four types of fruiting bodies (cap, club, cup, and puffball, I think), but this does not actually reflect the evolutionary relationships between specific species. All the same, it is important to note these morphological differences, which are the basic qualities used by mushroom hunters and other fungophiles. Each of these structures emerges--for most fungi species--under the aforementioned optimum conditions on one species' own, or when the hyphae of two different individual fungus species mix and sexually reproduce. Picking or kicking (which I don't suggest) a mushroom disperses these spores in search of further candidate substrates.

Now, a few characteristics of fungi. First of all, they consume nutrients from the soil like simple animals, not at all like plants. They are actually quite good at this, developing unique chemicals in order to break up lignin, for example, which is the stuff that makes wood so resilient. (Termites have a bacterium or suite of bacteria in their guts which helps them do the same.) Lignin is more or less a network of simple sugars, chaotically bound together and tough to break up. Fungi figured out how to take them apart and so have access to great reservoirs of nutrients in decomposing plant matter that would otherwise build up and be locked away from the biosphere for thousands or millions of years. (Prairie soils, I might add, are composed of a rich humus layer of undecayed or slowly decaying plant matter--in part because of climatological dryness--that takes hundreds of years to build up.) Another characteristic is that the are subtly immense. The largest organism in the world is likely a fungus in the American northwest, which consumes fallen trees in a national park. They can also by very small, lacing the leaves of tropical plants, for example. The great breadth is difficult to articulate factually because most of the fungi we study are problem species, which eat up crops or plant stores.

Finally, fungi are colorful in more ways than are at first obvious. The average button mushroom is pretty pale and unassuming, but do not be deceived. Many fruiting bodies are fantastically colorful, but nearly all fungi are chemically ingenious. As a result, you have the development of powerful neurotoxins which can result in hallucinations during a trip. Other possibilities can paralyze you, even kill a trekker with the possibility of later digestion. This sort of idea is emphasized in a rather crazy episode of The X-Files, which includes an orange ooze bleeding Skinner. Terence McKenna has gone to great lengths to explore this range of hue that are not at first obvious. He has theorized, at least at one time, that natural psychedelics are the result of co-evolutionary forces that ultimately assist humans in understanding the timelessness of the universe. McKenna is a good read, full of rich optimism about the potential boundlessness of perception despite our conditioned intellectual limitations.

When I see a mushroom or some cousin of it, I see one appendage of a great, secretive creature, which grows mindlessly but purposefully. The hyphae network are in search of food and biochemical romance, but only tiny soil organisms ever exactly witness. Afterward, though, we can see the result of such marriage--or perhaps a fantastic instance of masturbatory excess--and some folks even engage in further experience with its unique chemical alchemies. Fungi do things that other organisms can rarely do if they can be done at all. Such ingenuity has made them a spark for human intellectual exploration, political intrigue, and cultural creativity. All the while, they evade our everyday notions of animal, vegetable, or mineral. Not only do they mostly stay out of sight, revealing from time to time their traces like fairy circles, but they require a deeper intellectualization and familiarization that is alien to what we often find. They have spurred particular social customs like using net bags for morrel hunting or psychedelic tripping. Too easily, I would say, do we forget these rich, archaic, and creative critters.