19 minute read
Love – and Mushrooms and Zooms – in the Ruins
FINALIST, ALEX ALBRIGHT CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE
Love – and Mushrooms and Zooms –
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In the Ruins BY CAROLINE RASH
Rumor has it, the first living thing to emerge from Hiroshima’s blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.
It was mid-March, remember? The New Year’s Eve champagne bubbles had long burst.
I had just transitioned my ninth-grade English class to online learning. No more 5:30 a.m. alarms, but rather long hours staring at a computer screen, interspersed with terrifying transmissions from the White House Rose Garden. At first, we all had hope. On my laptop, I still have a folder labelled “Two Week Online Lesson Plans for Coronavirus.”
In this strange space, I began reading about matsutake mushrooms. An offhand recommendation from a friend. I ordered The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, a nearly three-hundred-
CAROLINE RASH’s poetry has been published in Connotation Press and an essay in Decider. She was a finalist in Peauxdunque Review's Words & Music Writing competition. She currently teaches high school English and is an Associate Editor for the South Carolina Review. She grew up between North and South Carolina and earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Clemson University and an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University.
The quilts featured throughout this essay were created by the author’s grandmother, Sue Holder Rash, of Boiling Springs, NC.
page volume that offers “what a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet.”1
I was curled up in my bed with another headache (I hadn’t yet realized I could adjust the blue-light settings on my screens). Australia was still burning. My grandmother, a normally healthy Scottish dancer, had just broken her femur in a freak accident.
Okay, I thought. Tell me about mushrooms – those rebellious, eukaryotic forest dwellers. Tell me how to live.
The Mushroom at the End of the World opens in Oregon, 2004, in an ugly industrial forest. Ethnologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing beckons us to follow her into a semi-legal encampment of Hmong, Japanese, Lao, and Mien immigrants who pick matsutake mushrooms. Why are we here? Where are the beautiful ponderosa stands that drew settlers and logging companies so many decades before? Of course the timber business felled most of them by the 1980s, but couldn’t they rebound after the conservation movements, dead owls hung from logging trucks?
In fact, due to the Forest Service’s policy of fire exclusion – a chimeric result of business and environmental interests that ended up serving neither – the great ponderosas could no longer reproduce. They are a casualty, collateral damage, of man’s myopic attempts to heal what he gutted.
And yet –
In place of the once-king ponderosa broadleafs, spindly lodgepole pines shot up, flourished, and “in this ruined industrial landscape, new value emerged: matsutake. [Lodgepoles grow quickly if not overshadowed by larger trees.] Matsutake fruit especially well under mature lodgepole, and mature lodgepole exists in prodigious numbers in the eastern Cascades because of fire exclusion” (30).
Unexpected collateral, unexpected openings. In other words, the beloved mushrooms are here not in spite of – but because of – human destruction.
By April, it is clear to everyone that “back to normal” is not a place we can go, that the virus will not suddenly vanish. It tears through bustling urban centers first.
I BEGIN TO THINK OF MYSELF AS
A MUSHROOM. ALL MY MYRIAD
CONNECTIONS AND THREADS HAVE
COME INTO RELIEF WITH THE CONCEPT
OF CONTACT TRACING.
Tsing notes that the logic of expansion, the “flourishing” into thicker and denser thickets can be, in reality, a step toward destruction; those happy pines that finally have their day in postmillenium Oregon will seed, and sprout, seed and sprout until they’re thick enough that just one ember can send the whole forest up in flames.
Indeed, the streets of New York City and Seattle resemble burned-through, empty forests.
What we see of the mushroom above ground is only the small fruiting of a vast underground organism. Beneath the soil, threadlike filaments called hyphae fan out into wide nets that connect and nourish parts of the forest we see, such as trees.
I begin to think of myself as a mushroom. All my myriad connections and threads have come into relief with the concept of contact tracing. Who of us truly understood before how connected we all are? My god, we think now, if I go to visit my friend, I could be contaminated by her boyfriend, who plays in a band with three other people, all of whom have roommates, who . . .
Of course, in the Before Times, the game Six Degrees of Separation hinted at this truth. We had some faith in it while putting out feelers for jobs, waiting for that one person to say, “Hey, my husband has a college roommate whose wife works there. I can put you in touch.”
Now touch is frightening. Our physical threads and pathways must sever.
Still, through the filament, the wires and electrical signals connecting us, comes news: a student’s mother dies; my friend, a performing artist, loses all his gigs for the next six months; my neighbor buries her husband, alone.
What is time anymore?
It lurches and bucks, then sits across from us and wins an endless staring contest. Time has
always been deep and uncontrollable, a pit across which we build rickety rope bridges from day to day, week to week, year to year. The ropes fray and break.
Tsing notes that [p]rogress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion. . . . Instead, agnostic about where we are going, we might look for what has been ignored because it never fit the time line of progress. (21)
Time becomes one more walk with my dog, one more glass of water, one more bottle of wine, two more zucchinis in the garden, three more red tomatoes. Trash and recycling on Thursday. The slow filling of a green watering can: I leave it that first day in the sink – because I am human, and I just can’t stand to be still for even one minute – and it overflows onto the counter and the floor.
My friend S— tells me she is reading a book of Buddhist lectures by Pema Chödrön called When Things Fall Apart. One of the very first pages: “Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”2
I feel like Narcissus staring into the Zoom screen during empty office hours, waiting for the occasional, unpredictable pop-up of a student’s name. “Do you need help with the classwork?” I ask.
I plan an ill-advised visit across five states to see my grandmother. When she was almost healed from the broken leg, her car was sideswiped while she sat buckled tightly in the passenger seat.
Tsing pushes back against the “selfish gene” paradigm (popularized by Richard Dawkins) that focuses on autonomous units – be they genes, human workers, or even a single species. In fact, she explains, some species only develop necessary traits through relationships/encounters with other species.
In this vein, the matsutake mushroom is notoriously impossible to cultivate in captivity, “plantation-style” (as standardized units) by the many interested parties who might turn a profit with this Japanese delicacy. The mushrooms are finicky, almost shy, peeping out of the wasteland. Inseparable from their symbiotic relationship with certain trees, slowly nourishing and rebuilding with all living things around them.
I am driving. Time becomes border signs: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, North Carolina again, and on back up. We measure the way by four hours on, four hours off, the time it takes to drink a twenty-ounce gas station coffee, miles per tank of gas, the length of a podcast.
My grandmother is too weak to teach me her art of quilting like last time, but I tuck a blanket around her and go back to her childhood, a time and place of two-room schoolhouses in lower Appalachia, before power lines sprouted one-byone up the mountain and connected her to the rest of the world. The time it took her to run from her parents’ home to the schoolhouse even before she was old enough to matriculate, the missing minutes of her naps on older students’ coats, the number of books she could read between each rumble of the mobile library bus.
I start to adapt. Whereas before I would leave the house before dawn, work indoors until 3:35 p.m., return home, maybe drive to the gym, cook dinner, and prepare for the next day – over and over and over – I now sleep until the sun floods my bedroom, have coffee sitting down, stand on the porch in my pajamas to feel the day’s temperature. Yes, like everyone else I am afraid to go grocery shopping, afraid for my students with unstable homes, afraid for my grandmother, afraid for my friends who suddenly have lost all income.
Chödrön describes entering fear as “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking” (2-3). Slowly my brain stops flitting from item to item on my to-do list. One day, I get curious about the plant my dog munches on; it’s called Jerusalem artichoke. Another day I look up the cicada killer wasps on my neighbor’s lawn. (If you’re feeling down, don’t investigate further; the things they do to cicadas are similar to what other wasps do to caterpillars, such horror that Charles Darwin said it made him question the possibility of a “beneficent and omnipotent God.”3)
Without the hundred distractions that normally eat into my class time, I find an entirely new reading of a Rita Dove poem we’re studying. Oh my god. I breathe into the computer microphone. This narrator might be performing a cover-up of childhood abuse. Look at these images, how ambiguous – they could actually be good or bad.
EVERY MUSHROOM PUSHES
THROUGH THE EARTH AT A
DIFFERENT TIME, IN A DIFFERENT
SOIL, WITH A DIFFERENT TREE.
SOME MIGHT NOT FRUIT
ABOVE GROUND FOR FORTY
OR FIFTY YEARS.
I am sitting at my dining room table recording the lesson for my students. My boyfriend, J—, is doing the same in our bedroom. We have to keep a door closed between our work. A few years ago, the first time I read this poem, it seemed like a simple childhood memory. But the windows are dark now, and I’m alone, reading slowly. I sit with the poem; it opens to me, suddenly, without preamble. My students will hear their teacher overcome by these words when they log on in the morning.
You’re a good teacher, J— says when I’m done. He overheard the part about the poem. But this isn’t the teacher I was in February. And my students aren’t the same students either. Some drop off the grid the day we dismiss in-person classes. I and a team of social workers and counselors will spend the next few months trying to find them. Others – released from the eye-rubbing darkdawn bus rides, rigid bell schedules, and ceaseless assessments – finally hit their stride.
Every mushroom pushes through the earth at a different time, in a different soil, with a different tree. Some might not fruit above ground for forty or fifty years.
I am looking at my bookshelves one night in June and notice The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It’s been on my to-read list for years. I know it is about grief – her husband’s death – and would soon be followed by yet another memoir of loss – Blue Nights – about her daughter’s death. I take it with me to bed.
As The Year of Magical Thinking begins, Didion sits down to dinner one evening with her husband, John. She reaches toward the salad bowl; he falls out of his chair, incapacitated by a massive cardiac arrest. The paramedics arrive, work on him for forty-five minutes in their dining room. She assumes he’s still alive, goes about the house gathering paperwork and checking off items he’ll want at the hospital.
He was dead the whole time. The rest of the book is her attempt to believe it.
Early in When Things Fall Apart, Chödrön tells a story of a man who sits in a tent meditating;
he has been unsuccessful in putting aside his ego thus far, totally distracted. This time, however, he is suddenly faced with a king cobra that rises out of a dark corner. The man stays up all night waiting in terror; finally at dawn he collapses in delirium, utter exhaustion, and goes to hug the snake.
The fear broke him. It opened him. For in that moment, “[h]e felt the longing of all the animals and people in the world; he knew their alienation and their struggle . . . that much intimacy with fear caused his dramas to collapse, and the world around him finally got through” (4).
I have seen loss break – and break open. You never know which it’ll be.
The pain from her wreck has made my grandmother quiet. They refuse to give her more pain medication because of, well, the opioid epidemic. The Sackler family and their pharmaceutical associates wrote a script for America – mostly rural working-class people – that said you don’t have to feel anything anymore.
My grandmother asks me to help her get to bed. We go into her dim bedroom in the back of the house; I get her cotton pajamas laid out and help her undress. She’s never needed help before; it was always her helping me.
I remember Chödrön: “Right now – in the very instant of groundlessness – is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness” (9).
I HAVE SEEN LOSS BREAK –
AND BREAK OPEN. YOU NEVER
KNOW WHICH IT’LL BE.
I rub some kind of icy-hot type of pain reliever across my grandmother’s skin, and time becomes each dip of my fingers into the jar, the minutes of spreading cool lotion on her back, hips, knees and ankles. She turns on the little TV at the foot of the bed, and I tuck her in like she tucked me in decades before. I hope she’ll be able to sleep tonight. Last night, she measured time by creaking trips to the restroom, diminishing minutes of unconsciousness – any little bit she could steal.
And yet –
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.
Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy (Chödrön 8).
Why do we speak of the times before February as having some kind of certainty? In January 2001, my healthy fifteen-year-old friend came to school one day wearing a T-shirt with a rhinestone horse on it. We talked at our lockers about her latest crush. That afternoon she collapsed on the way to her mother’s birthday dinner. A brain aneurysm. A few days later she was dead. Then – a student is shot and killed. My grandmother’s femur snaps. A husband collapses at the dinner table.
Of course, it goes the other way too: I get the call offering me a scholarship to one graduate school program – and accept – minutes before the other one calls. My uncle goes to the hospital for something minor and they catch a heart problem that should have killed him that week. Further back, decades and decades, my grandmother holds up a hand to shade her eyes and sees her soon-to-be husband exit a car to work alongside her in the fields.
Didion, an agnostic or reluctant Episcopalian, says she has dealt with such indeterminacy by finding meaning in geology, the ever-changingness of the natural world. This, she explains, is why she’s drawn to, and can recite with full conviction, the Episcopal litany: “As it was in the beginning, is
now and ever shall be, world without end.”4 Amen. She also takes comfort in domestic rituals – the family dinner, the coffee with two sugars, the dusting and decorating, the rhythm of each holiday season.
The matsutake pickers Tsing interviews find meaning in mushroom picking beyond profit; it connects them to childhood memories, to others in their community, to the earth. Across the sea in Japan, another ritual of tending the earth becomes popular. Satoyama forest restoration is an initiative based on the Japanese concept of satoyama: a type of landscape that includes both human production and natural habitats, notably in which human influence is an essential aspect.
Tsing notes that a satoyama landscape, in fact, requires humans to “make a mess,” allow for erosion and other seemingly negative qualities, in order to advantage pines. At first, it may look bad, interrupted, but the trees will come and then – the matsutake. We can’t cultivate it, we can’t make a factory farm of it, but if we make a mess, it will come.
I find myself waiting with the watering can, watching it fill. I sit on the porch and talk to my neighbors – a family – over the fence. I tell the mother at the last minute we are leaving for my grandmother’s house; we’ll be gone for over a week, and I worry about my garden. “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry,” she says.
In fact, I forget the garden, I don’t worry about it one bit. Driving in the darkness through Virginia’s deciduous forest makes me feel even more groundless, if it were possible; I’m worried about so many things, about the “plans” for school reopening, everything. Every single decision comes with an asterisk: * Subject to change.
I try to just drive, just sit with my thoughts, but there seem to be more wrecks this time than ever before. An awful tangle of metal, a full sixteen-wheeler tipped over in the grassy ditch. I don’t want to die. I’ve started crying; I need to pull over like when the rain’s too much for my windshield wipers. I don’t want my grandmother, or my students, or their grandmothers, or my friends, or anyone else to ever die. I know I’m throwing a fit. J— drives until we see a sign for a Red Roof Inn; he takes the exit.
SHE FILLS HER DAYS WITH A VERY
SPECIFIC KIND OF MEDITATION,
STITCHING QUILT AFTER QUILT,
BEAUTIFUL WORKS OF ART.
There is a plan for reopening my school. Every school, at this point, has a plan.
Everyone is running about, fretting and demanding and providing expert opinions. What if we paused, just for a minute as our watering cans fill? What if we grieved?
“Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment,” Chödrön writes. “[S]o do compassion and wonder and courage” (2). It’s still possible for us to attend to those around us. It’s still possible for us, as a society, to build and dream and love through this.
As Didion describes her life before John’s death, she has an epiphany: she always lived by a sort of dedicated uncertainty, improvisation. Those moments she felt most alive on a sudden flight to meet John, abandoning their marital “planning” meetings to go enjoy lunch with friends, the moment she and John swam into a Pacific cave that opened only when the tide was “just right” (209, 227). Then they had to make a perfectly timed exit on the current to escape the flooding cave; she had faith even in that: “Somehow it had all worked” (211).
My grandmother has been a widow many decades longer than she was ever married. That wasn’t the plan. She fills her days with a very specific kind of meditation, stitching quilt after quilt, beautiful works of art. She gave me a wall hanging years ago with an image of a woman pulling water from a well.
Is there a plan? If there’s a plan, I hold it lightly.
I saw a set of three mushrooms on my walk yesterday; they delighted me. Today they are gone, though the broad net of organism still must live beneath the soil, still lunches with the nearby trees.
I call my grandmother. The pain is abating some; she went to this doctor and that, and someone along the way did something right. I promise I’ll be back as soon as this mess is all over.
School begins. I’m anxious as always because there’s no way to get it all right. You clear-cut the broadleafs, the pines shoot up, you privilege the ponderosas, the mushrooms never arrive. There is no calculation of all possible outcomes. I’ll do my best with my human understanding.
I take comfort that learning is something akin to delight: indeterminate, both slow gathering and sudden bloom. The rocking of two chairs on a porch, the fruit of a tossed-out seed, the pause on a long walk home: “I wonder why?”
I rub my grandmother’s bruised and broken legs and remember how they carried her flying across the field toward a two-room schoolhouse. I ask her to tell me the story again.
What if we took this moment to truly attend to our world?
My neighbor – still a stranger, really – promised she would care for my garden. The night we return, in our road-tired rush to unpack and go to sleep, I forget to check it. That night I dream of the hot afternoon I took a shovel to the earth and turned it inside out, rows upon rows of it, a total mess.
The next morning I wake up and go out. One of my squash plants is dead – some kind of bug I’ll have to read about and fight next summer – but the rest are in full bloom. n
