Up pop the aliens of autumn – not very mellow mushrooms
Mushrooms are back. Mushrooms by the hundred under the pine trees up on the hills. Brown ones, white ones, blackand-grey ones, ribbed ones and slimy ones, ones like cups and ones like rockets, ones like umbrellas and ones like footballs, and evil red-and-white ones. It must be autumn.
Two hundred years ago Keats called autumn the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Fair enough as far as it goes. Last week in the harbour here we had mist as thick as shaving foam. Looking down from the hills you felt you could walk across to Purau. And we’ve got mellow fruitfulness too, if the possums haven’t got to it first. The possums at my place have stripped the peach tree and the apple. But they ignore the mushrooms, just as Keats did. Not very mellow, mushrooms.
For nine-tenths of the year we are mushroomless. Then up they come, overnight. They shoulder aside soil and stones, a foot of pine needles. They can split asphalt. They won’t be stopped. And the earth seems suddenly different. What’s going on in the soil we walk on? How did it harbour such horrors? What else is down there?
Mushrooms are cross-grained, strange, perverse, unlike other things. They come when the birds and the flowers are going; they rise in the fall. But in some ways they are too much like other things. Fleshy and hairless they seem naked, anatomical, obviously sexual. They make us think of inner organs, the bits that only surgeons see, our secret offal, our tripes.
And, sure enough, the few varieties we’ve domesticated, the ones on sale all safe and trustable in boxes at the supermarket, are closer to meat than vegetable. To bite on a button mushroom is like biting on a fried lamb’s kidney.
You cannot call them beasts. They do not move or hunt or seem to think. Yet neither are they plants. They have no roots or leaves. They don’t do green. Rather they are alien and other, the stuff of buried memory. They are as at home in our subconscious as they are in the forest. It seems that we go back, the mushroom and ourselves, that we’ve got history.
Officially mushrooms are fruiting bodies. The term feels sinister, and blackly paradoxical. It smacks of fertile graveyards. And what the fruiting bodies sprout from, as everybody knows, is fungus. Could there be a better word for fungus than fungus? That f, those u’s, that n and g, they sing of spongey menace. Fungus is like nothing in our sunlit upper world of air and plants and birds and beasts. Fungus flourishes in darkness and feasts on decay. It has no mouth or mind, no front end or back, but it’s keen to consume. It hunts out dark dank places and gets to work. Fungal infections bloom between our toes. Fungal nasties fester and breed in the groin. As a youth I got ringworm of the inner thigh. There are no worms in ringworm. It’s a fungus.
A fungus in the state of Oregon is the biggest living thing in our solar system. It is miles across. It is thousands of years old. It eats trees. Very slowly. And yet it is just threads, a mass of threads. You cannot kill it. You can hack bits from it, but it doesn’t know or notice, is unaffected, keeps on growing.
Many mushrooms are edible, perhaps most of them, but we don’t for one minute trust them. Anything so associated with decay, that feeds on decay, that effectively is decay, has to be suspect. We call the ones we won’t eat toadstools. Not frogstools because we think well of frogs. A kissed frog may prove a prince. A kissed toad’s a toad. Toads have warts and bad associations.
And what names we have given to toadstools – stinkhorn, witches butter, death’s cap, vampire’s bane, destroying angel, dead moll’s fingers. As a kid I was haunted by the fly agaric, the classic toadstool, red with white spots. I didn’t have to be told it was poisonous. Its colouring shouted at me in a language I knew without learning. Here was a touch-me-not. I had a nightmare dread of being forced to eat it.
I found three in the woods this morning, three huge fly agarics, each inches across, like shelves of flesh, their skins scarlet, their underbellies yellowing white. The child in me hit them with a stick. They fell apart, crumbled like cake. And my gorge rose at the sight. Autumn, but not very Keats.