Spiral

THE SNOW OF THE PREVIOUS NIGHT HAD LEFT A WHITE blanket almost an inch thick on the grounds of the sprawling estate. An abandoned farm, it had been purchased for a song in the early seventies by a collection of back-to-the-earth types. They’d cleaned up the house, added more bedrooms, and built a large greenhouse out back to grow vegetables during the harsh Ithaca winters. Legend had it that while clearing brush, they’d found a shovel, its handle carefully and ornately carved with Hobbit heads, elves, and an angry orc. The residents had taken it as their totem. From then on, the place was known as Rivendell.

Maggie and Dylan bundled up before heading out the back door. The air was chilly cold, the skies relatively clear, a rarity for Ithaca this time of year. The sunlight was brilliant as they stomped a trail of footprints away from Rivendell, Turtle at their heels. Soon they were in shadows, beneath the canopy of a pine planted back in the 1920s, after the forests had been cleared for farming. Then the forest became more varied, more interesting. Larch mixed with hemlock; a grove of poplars surrounded a single, solitary oak. It was a stunning morning, a crazy superposition of fall and winter. Most of the leaves still clung to the trees, but they were giving up the ghost in droves, another batch cutting loose with every toss of the wind, falling to the bright snow.

Turtle stopped and sniffed near a log where the wind had scoured the leaves and snow. A late-season mushroom poked up through the exposed earth, the bright orange cap streaked with stains of brown. That’s strange, she thought. She knelt down, inspecting it more closely, feeling the texture of its skin with her finger.

“What’s that?” Dylan asked.

“I don’t know. It looks like Amanita jacksonii, but see there? The color of the cap is wrong.” She pulled a plastic Baggie from her pocket, along with a pocketknife. She dug the mushroom from the half-frozen earth and dropped it in the Baggie.

Dylan said, “Maybe another new species for the fantastic fungal forager?”

“You never know…,” Maggie replied, throwing an arm around her son. “If so, I’ll be sure to give the dog the credit.”

“Fungus turtulus,” Dylan said, smiling.

As they continued, the path was often obscured by leaves and snow, but Maggie and Dylan had no trouble finding their way. Nearly every morning, before Dylan went to school and Maggie to work at the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, they walked a loop though the forest, tending to their Fungus-Among-Us projects.

It had started almost a year ago, a few weeks before Dylan’s ninth birthday. On one of their off-trail jaunts through the woods, he had excitedly pointed to a patch of brown fungus on a tree, swearing that it looked just like Albert Einstein. Maggie hadn’t seen the resemblance, but it had given her an idea. For his upcoming birthday, she hatched a plan to spell out DYLAN-9! on a log using fungus as living paint.

A week later, she was in the hospital with multiple fractures to her leg, the victim of a horrific crash with a pickup truck. On their way home from a hike, Dylan had been strapped tightly in the backseat when the out-of-control pickup T-boned their Volkswagen. Dylan was shaken up but not hurt, but the Ithaca College senior driving the pickup had been propelled straight through the windshield. He didn’t make it to the hospital.

They talked about it many times afterward, the fragility of life. Dylan was having a hard time with it.

“You could have died, too, Mom,” he’d said.

She hugged him. “I know, sweetie. But I didn’t.”

Fungus-Among-Us proved to be a helpful distraction. Figuring out how to do it turned into quite a project. Ultimately, she’d taken her cue from the waxy coatings that plants use to ward off bugs and fungi, making a stencil in wax paper and attaching it to a log. She’d carefully made the wax paper’s edges flush with the surface of the wood, using candle wax to seal them. Then she’d liberally sprinkled on mold spores and left the whole thing alone for two weeks. The wax held, and the mold had grown on the exposed parts. The final result was striking, as if the woods themselves were wishing her son a happy birthday. Dylan had been giddy with delight, for the first time in too long. He’d started having nightmares a few days after the accident. They didn’t come quite as often these days, but still with some regularity he’d wake screaming in the night, terrified that everyone he loved was dying.