When God Forgot the Chlorophyll

          It has been a great mushroom season. The woods are so full of mushrooms my friend from Lithuania complains about how easy they are to find. In Europe, she says, you have to hunt all day for mushrooms. Here, you just go into the woods and pick them.

          Walking in the woods this season reminds me of an essay in my first book, Fire from the Dragon's Tongue, about how beautiful mushrooms are, so I'm using it for my post this week.

When God Forgot the Chlorophyll

          God was in a frenzy of creation. He only had six days in which to finish the project, and there was so much to do! But deadlines always arrive; the sixth day did come, and God was just finishing up, painting those last-minute thin lines on the wood duck and looking forward to a day of rest, when he saw the mushrooms.

          "Oh, my God!" he cried. "I forgot the chlorophyll!" But it was too late. Chagrined, God hurriedly bestowed on mushrooms four compensating factors: strength, shape, the use of all other colors than green, and edibility.

        Thus it is that mushrooms push up through the earth with iron-fist force, the eponymous metaphor for unstoppable strength and sudden emergence.

Nothing stops a mushroom once it begins pushing itself into the dark, damp light of the forest. Sticks, leaves, bark, logs, and stones are shoved aside. Vines that would bind anything else are forced to stretch around and twist the shape of but never stop a mushroom, the quintessential "out of my way; I'm coming through!" emergent. And yet mushrooms are so soft. How could anything as delicate and soft as a mushroom, so mushy to the touch, so spongy and fragile, have such strength?

          Mushrooms are flat like tabletops or pointed and curved like umbrellas. They are bulbous or convoluted, small as buttons or big as cups, thin as platters or thick as steaks. They are smooth as a madrone limb, scaly like lizard's skin, bumpy, flaky,

or in the terminology of the mushroom book, covered with warts, a word much too ugly for the delicate flakes and spots of white on the regally scarlet amanita.

Large, yellow-brown, flat mushrooms with edges slightly curled look like buttermilk pancakes, which, when they age, look like they've been left too long on the griddle.

        Mushrooms are freckled, striped, or plain. They whorl with concentric rings or fade their colors with the delicacy of a sound fade-out. They grow singly, in clumps, or in large colonies The white ones look like scattered eggshells, the brown ones like chocolate wafers, the orange ones like yam skins. A scattering of mushrooms in the woods looks like a turned-over compost heap.

They are shiny, wet, dry, slimy, curly, convex, concave, rubbery, slick. They emerge folded like butterfly wings, or they jam a six-inch-wide top through the earth like the head of a nail being pounded from below They measure from half an inch across to eight inches or more.

They have curdled edges or smooth, tree-trunk stems or toothpick stems, under-layers like petticoats or like leaves of the Bible slightly warped with dampness or like sponges from Florida's seas. They have all the floral colors: red yellow, purple, grey, white, brown, pink, coral, but no matter how bright the hue, the tone is muted with earthiness.

          And they are edible—sometimes. Mushrooms are the big gamble of the vegetable kingdom. "Try me" is the tempting message. Just as good as some are to the palate exactly so poisonous are others. Some mushrooms are so good enthusiasts dare the edges of edibility, others so poisonous the unwary can die for having touched them and brought fingers to tongues. Some mushrooms are poisonous to some people in some circumstances. Other people eat the same mushrooms safely with gusto. And even as some delight the tongue and some poison the body, others send the mind on strange journeys, another gamble between sensual delights and mental dangers. Nothing is certain except the gamble. 

          But the inconsistency is understandable. God was rushed.