EPILOGUE

THIS COMPOST

Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world.

—SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI

AS A CHILD I loved the autumn. Leaves fell from a large chestnut tree and gathered into drifts in the garden. I raked them into a pile and tended it carefully, adding fresh armfuls as the weeks went by. Before long, the piles grew large enough to fill several bathtubs. Again and again, I’d leap into the leaves from the low branches of the tree. Once inside, I’d wriggle until I was entirely submerged and lie buried in the rustle, lost in the curious smells.

My father encouraged me to immerse myself in the world headfirst. He used to carry me around on his shoulders and bury my face in flowers as if I were a bee. We must have pollinated countless flowers as we shuffled from plant to plant, my cheeks smeared with yellows and oranges, my face scrunched into new shapes to better fit inside the pavilions that the petals made, both of us delighted with the colors and smells and mess.

My leaf piles were both places to hide and worlds to explore. But as months went by, the piles shrank. It became harder to submerge myself. I investigated, reaching down into the deepest regions of the heap, pulling out damp handfuls of what looked less and less like leaves, and more and more like soil. Worms started to appear. Were they carrying the soil up into the pile, or the leaves down into the soil? I was never sure. My sense was that the pile of leaves was sinking, but if it was sinking, what was it sinking into? How deep was the soil? What kept the world afloat on this solid sea?

I asked my father. He gave me an answer. I replied with another “why.” No matter how many times I asked “why” he always had an answer. These games of “why” would go on until I exhausted myself. It was in one of these binges that I first learned about decomposition. I struggled to imagine the invisible creatures that ate all the leaves, and how such small beings could have such enormous appetites. I struggled to imagine how they could devour my leaf piles as I lay submerged in them. Why couldn’t I see it happening? If their hunger was so fierce, surely I would be able to catch them in the act if I buried myself in the heap of leaves and lay there quietly enough. They always eluded me.

My father proposed an experiment. We cut the top off a clear plastic bottle. Into the bottle we placed alternating layers of soil, sand, dead leaves, and finally a handful of earthworms. Over the next days I watched the worms wind their way between the layers. They mixed and stirred. Nothing stayed still. Sand crept into soil and leaves crept into sand. The hard edges of the layers dissolved into each other. The worms might be visible, my father explained, but there are many more creatures that behave like this that you can’t see. Tiny worms. And creatures smaller than tiny worms. And creatures still smaller that don’t look like worms but are able to mix and stir and dissolve one thing into another just like these worms can. Composers make pieces of music. These were decomposers, who unmake pieces of life. Nothing could happen without them.

This was such a useful idea. It was as if I’d been shown how to reverse, how to think backward. Now there were arrows that pointed in both directions at once. Composers make; decomposers unmake. And unless decomposers unmake, there isn’t anything that the composers can make with. It was a thought that changed the way I understood the world. And from this thought, from my fascination with the creatures that decompose, grew my interest in fungi.

It is out of this compost heap of questions and fascinations that this book has composed itself. There have been so many questions, so few answers—and this feels exciting. Ambiguity isn’t as itchy as it was; it’s easier for me to resist the temptation to remedy uncertainty with certainty. In my conversations with researchers and enthusiasts I’ve found myself acting as an unwitting go-between, answering questions about what people are doing in different, far-flung fields of mycological inquiry, sometimes carrying a few grains of sand into the soil, sometimes a few clumps of soil into the sand. There is more pollen on my face than when I began. New whys have fallen on top of old whys. There is a bigger pile to leap into, and it smells just as mysterious as it did at the start. But there is more damp, more space to bury myself, and more to explore.

Fungi might make mushrooms, but first they must unmake something else. Now that this book is made, I can hand it over to fungi to unmake. I’ll dampen a copy and seed it with Pleurotus mycelium. When it has eaten its way through the words and pages and endpapers and sprouted oyster mushrooms from the covers, I’ll eat them. From another copy I will remove the pages, mash them up, and using a weak acid break the cellulose of the paper into sugars. To the sugar solution I’ll add a yeast. Once it’s fermented into a beer, I’ll drink it and close the circuit.

Fungi make worlds; they also unmake them. There are lots of ways to catch them in the act: when you cook mushroom soup, or just eat it; when you go out gathering mushrooms, or buy them; when you ferment alcohol, plant a plant, or just bury your hands in the soil. And whether you let a fungus into your mind, or marvel at the way that it might enter the mind of another; whether you’re cured by a fungus, or watch it cure someone else; whether you build your home from fungi, or start growing mushrooms in your home, fungi will catch you in the act. If you’re alive, they already have.