Forest Skulls, Porous Worlds

Amid the leaf litter bronzed by the slanting afternoon September light, a gleaming skull round and clean catches my eye. First one, then another further off the trail, and another smaller one like a child’s, and there is a white knob like a hip joint unsocketed and emerging from the ground.



“Botanizers are the worst out here. You’ve got to unscrew those green eyes from their sockets and put them away. No more flowers or leaf shapes. You’ve got to screw in your brown eyes and look for shades of brown and red, violet and orange, caps and shelves and spheres” advises my rotund forest guide as we soft-step through the leaf litter scrutinizing every shadow, every tree stump and rotting log, every clump of leaves tilted up as if by some tiny earthquake. We are searching for mushrooms.



Years later, having trained myself to look with my “brown eyes” at that other world sitting contiguous with ours – alien yet making contact at every point – I see from a hundred yards away what I have been looking for. Cradling the largest of these “skulls,” my hands reach under the smooth taut curve of it and with a light lift it pops away from the ground, as if snapping the delicate vertebrae of a neck. Where it emerged from the ground there are only leaves and twigs, no sign of its origin, no sign of the rest of the skeleton.



Calvo: bald. To be bald is to be one step closer to one’s skull. Gleaming taut skin across the hard bone. Most of my uncles are bald, as was my mother’s father. Dead: the baldest one can be when even skin and blood are shed away and only unyielding bone remains.



Across some hundred square feet, Calvatea gigantea, the “Giant Skull,” has burst from the ground, making its annual fruiting bodies, a fecund field of gleaming white skulls. As the recent colder weather brings down a few yellow leaves from the trees with every breeze, this magnificent fungus ripens its crop of spores, trillions inside each mushroom. As it matures, the pristine white marshmallowy interior becomes grainy and a sickly yellowish-green until with a silent snap the “skull” breaks from the invisible gigantic body underground and rolls away – downhill, tossed with the wind – cracking open with each bump and spilling its trillions of progeny to the breeze.



It is no wonder that the ancient Greeks thought mushrooms were created by lightning strikes, noting that the strange “plants” (actually fungi are more closely related to animals like you and me than to plants) would appear after summer nights of lightning-streaked rainstorms. The speed of their growth is prodigious, so quick and unyielding that where there was nothing yesterday today there might be a five-pound mass like the Calvatea I found this past weekend. Some fungi sprout their fruiting bodies so relentlessly that twigs, grass, anything already present in the vicinity is simply surrounded, engulfed by a form unable to countenance interference.



Fungi comprise 40% of all the life in the soil, and mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with some 90% of all plants on the planet. Actually it turns out that most plants are quite ill-equipped to absorb the nutrients necessary for life on their own. Fungi on the other hand, with powerful enzymes that can break down intractable substances like the lignin which makes wood woody (not to mention the Destroying Angel, which each year eats a hapless mycophile from the inside-out by liquefying her or his liver with its enzymes – “There are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.”), are excellent nutrient absorbers. While plants catch sunlight and bounce it through the narrow green-glowing canyons of chloroplasts in leaves high in the air, fungi tunnel underground melting away this illusion of a solid world into wisps and fragments. Fungi send molecules across vast waxy white networks of mycelia to plants and plants reciprocate with sugars sent down stems and trunks to roots which fungal hyphae clasp and even penetrate. Together, these “phytobionts” and “mycobionts” form one system. Can we even think anymore about one kingdom and another? As in politics so in biology, borders are imaginary lines drawn for convenience only, and almost always they do violence to the true nature of life which is porous and connective.