Nothing grows as fast as fungi, at least to judge by the mushrooms that some of them produce.
Consider the yellow ones beside my lakeshore pathway at dawn. They weren’t there at dusk the day before. I’m sure of it. Or if they were, they were too wee and wan to wrest the stage from the grass around them, inconspicuous extras waiting in the wings.
But just 12 hours later, they’re full-fledged divas. Are they ghastly or gorgeous? A terror or temptation? For me that’s the wonder of mushrooms, the riddle. They could be poisonous. Then again, they could be soup.
They dazzle me regardless, refugees from a surrealist canvas, Dali in the dirt. They’re poetry: Sylvia Plath proved that, using verse to turn them into feminist metaphors for overlooked strength, for stealth assertion. “We diet on water, on crumbs of shadow,” she wrote in the role of a colonel in a mushroom army. “Our kind multiplies.”
Her kind was there the other day, on the edge of a trail that I explored. The trees in the area were especially tall and densely clustered, and there, nuzzling the trunk of one of them, was a mass of orange mushrooms so fiery and flamboyant that I almost gasped. I wanted to touch them. I wanted to run from them. Instead, I just tiptoed up to them, as if approaching a slumbering beast, and snapped a picture.
I’m not alone. A photographer I know, sent me shots of mushrooms — fluffy, knobby — that he had recently encountered. We together spotted an extraordinary mushroom, one that looked like the fungal equivalent of a tequila sunrise cocktail, during a hike I marvel over this dizzying riot of growth, these overnight transformations of the terrain around us. We’re ’shroomstruck.
I surprise myself. I’m no naturalist, no botanist, just a city boy who has traveled fast from paucity to plethora in terms of the flora and fauna in his days. I see deer in the distance. I find fungi underfoot. I traverse the world differently from before, my senses quickened, my eyes peeled wider, a spring in my step.