In an evolution that surprised even me, I came this past winter to rave about fungi.
“Certain mushrooms can glow in the dark,” I said to more than one friend.
“What do you think is the world’s largest organism?” I asked those same friends. When they did not guess within a pair of half-seconds I said, “It’s a fungus that’s 2,200 acres large.” They gaped, like I still gape.
The fungus, the Armillaria ostoyae, actually sprawls beneath 2,384 acres in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. Its underground network, called the mycelium, grows beneath tree roots but also bridges the gaps between itself by threading rhizomorphs through the soil so that the nodes of the mycelium reach one another. After the fungus’s discovery in 1998, researchers tested bits of its infinite underground flesh to estimate that the organism is somewhere between 2,400 and 8,600 years old.
And the Armillaria ostoyae expands still, unseen in the soil, indefinably large and old.
It is one thing to read this from a page and recount it at a dinner table. But it is wholly another, I should’ve realized, to walk through the Duke Forest in the uncertain springtime and watch not only the tree roots snaring the path but also each decomposing log or stump lying like grayed burial mounds in the leaf litter. That is where our mushrooms—morels, chicken-of-the-woods, chanterelles—actually live, in the knotted and pockmarked shadows of oak and pine corpses. To find mushrooms in their damp blip of season, you need to be attuned to them (and more than a little lucky).
Parse the Earth for Its Maker
My wife very graciously heard my mushroom ravings many times. She mostly seemed glad to hear me behold knowledge of ecology and biology, as though it were a heavenly tablet given at last to man. She, the amateur birder and gardener, already knew the natural world as a place of wonder. I’m still catching up.
Because, I’ve realized, I need a certain scientific literacy to meet Creation. I have working eyes, ears, feet, and fingers, but to be sincerely curious there’s an extra devotion necessary.
It helps that I’m writing a novel of the wild, which spurred my first questions about the mountain passes of western North Carolina. Those led me to Mountain Nature: a Seasonal History of the Southern Appalachians by Jennifer Frick-Ruppert, the light textbook where I found for the first time that total understanding of Creation is also not necessary.
Mountain Nature best teaches a certain impression of the southern leg of the Appalachian mountain range, which spans 600 miles and 35 million acres from Maryland through northern Alabama. Frick-Ruppert hasn’t written the exhaustive and definitive ecological resource of the region. But nor has she only written a “friendly and informative companion” for tourists, as her introduction modestly suggests.
Instead, Mountain Nature maps the seasonal history of its subtitle. After defining the term “cycle” as a natural phenomenon, the book begins to explore the Southern Appalachians with a full profile of the “Cycles of Spring: March, April, May” and continues the three-month chapters through the end of winter in February. Frick-Ruppert writes that the book shouldn’t happen another way, since cycles are crafted into the structure of every environment: “natural cycles occur at all scales of observation, from the motions of celestial objects to those of infinitesimal particles.” Her preferred metaphor for their combination is that of a symphony—“some vast musical score” meant to “provide order, vitality, and charm to our world.”
This structure offers an oblique look at this insular environment, one which better uses the land’s own system of growth, life, death, and regeneration. Foregoing the tidier overview nicely divvied up among plants, fungi, amphibians, insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles, Frick-Ruppert takes the better approach in her cyclical structure. That usual species-by-species overview is a segregated system which the Appalachians (and most other environments) don’t naturally replicate. And to the senses, this structure also suggests the impression and wonders of living in the Southern Appalachians through a full year of the landscape, not just parachuting into a static chalkboard where all the facts are arranged.
The ecological insights across the book’s season profiles are wondrous to me, a novice-initiate. Reading it opened a fount of inspiration—wonder at the intricacy crafted into every flower petal, their every pollen-bearing stamen, every drop of the sweet pitcherplant’s inner liquid, every croak of the punctual spring peeper, and every inch of the mychorrhiza fungus embedded in the roots of mountain trees. Tactile poetry and shimmering beauty, biological systems and atomic physics, joined in the creatures and Creation we rarely think to see.
Parsing the earth and its intricacies to behold its Maker has a long history in the Appalachians, including even the daring scientists who appear in Strangers in High Places by Michael Frome.
He writes of William Bartram, the Quaker botanist who explored western North Carolina’s mountains as he sought and documented the plants of the British colonies of the 18th century. “[Bartram] believed the essence of divinity to be embodied in the plant, a humbler, simpler creature, therefore closer to the heart of God,” Frome writes. “Or, as Bartram would say, ‘Perhaps there is not any part of creation, within reach of our observations, which exhibits a more glorious display of the Almighty hand than the vegetable world.’”
So too did the Swiss geographer Arnold Guyot, who in 1859 formally mapped much of the Southern Appalachians for the first time, seek God in His handiwork. Guyot had once aspired to ministry, though Frome writes that “his love of nature-science gained possession of him—perhaps, more properly, we should say that he determined to search the core of religious truth through nature-science. ‘It is a strong faith that our globe, like the totality of creation, is a great organism,’ he would write later, ‘the work of an all-wise Divine Intelligence, an admirable structure, all the parts of which are purposely shaped and arranged and mutually independent, and, like organs, fulfill, by the will of the Maker, specific functions which combine themselves into a common life.’”
These two men, the first of Philadephia and the other of Neuchâtel, sought God through their unquenchable curiosity about what He’d made. Much of Frick-Ruppert’s work in Mountain Nature draws from their work almost two centuries ago, and so their seeking is something I inherit also, in my little shivers over the green-slimed stinkhorn mushroom.
Because mine are shivers, rather than the encyclopedic understanding I’m not sure I would want.
Mountain Nature has the sensual learning rather than the encyclopedic. Frick-Ruppert describes all the wilds of Southern Appalachian by their looks, sounds, and smells. They are more like neighborly characters than data defined minutely, which is still a key understanding. It is a humble understanding, I’d say, the best kind of ecological understanding. Appreciative, knowledgeable, but never possessive.
“If a recent rain has left puddles in the leaves, dozens of the tiny creatures can be found floating on the surface tension of each puddle,” Frick-Ruppert writes of the springtail. “How the tiny springtails manage to find enough heat to crawl over snow is a mystery.”
I want to know the springtail as its neighbor and confidant, as a fellow creature springing from the same genesis. Its insect world is alien to me but still close and personal, the way that the seething mouth of a bay on the Atlantic is alien and known to the thin tributary inching through tidal dunes toward black-watered wetlands.
The poet Paul Pastor, who himself wrote a stunner of an essay on the oyster mushroom and its predatory mycelium, used the words “vast and inhuman Presences” when I asked him about the place of the wild in his writing. “In encountering each of them,” he wrote via email, “I have encountered a way of being that is different than mine, yet intimately related to mine.”
The bond between man and Presence is “our common Creator,” Paul said. His choice image for our relation was water flowing down to earth by gravity’s pull, likened to our need to seek “the lowest place” of humility as Christians as we seek Christ, Himself “the Water of life” as Paul recounts. The image made him rhapsodic, even by email. “Such correspondences do more than supply me with a figure of speech or a metaphor to make a point,” he wrote. “They point me to the logic on which our world has been founded; they give, as living images, and shape something in my spirit.”
What is given? “A spiritual reality becomes present in all rain, in every stream,” Paul wrote. “Every time ‘humility’ is mentioned in the liturgy, I see the waterfalls.”
What of the Natural World Possessed and Enslaved?
The familiarity between man and wild has a vein-thin threat to Creation within it, for we can certainly learn the natural world in hopes of possessing it. Appalachian hunters of black bears, for instance, make a point of knowing a bear’s habits far better than the bear can. Understanding the bear’s clumsy foraging habits, child-like instinct to climb high trees in fear, and meandering plod from berries to stream to roots serves them in killing it with hounds and a rifle.
To be clear, I don’t hold hunting as unqualified evil, especially since hunters in North Carolina (and elsewhere) helped usher in conservation laws because they wished to preserve the lands they loved and the animal populations they hunted there. The wish to know the natural world primarily to then enslave it is more central to large-scale environmental exploitation than to hunters, though the latter group has its disrespectful crudes alongside its respectful sportsmen.
That enslaving instinct is our sin against God who creates what we would enslave, and it’s crystallized most horribly and hauntingly in (where else) a poem—“The Bear,” by Galway Kinnell.
Its persona hovers between hunter and beast, beginning the instant he has smelled enough of a scent to “know / the chilly, enduring odor of bear.” His recognition of the animal in only “some fault in the snow” is familiarity, but his response is hateful.
“I take a wolf’s rib,” the persona begins:
I take a wolf's rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears.
This cruel gambit, set in the known path of the bear, is not a trap. It is a deceiving fatal wound. And when the hidden wolf’s rib is eaten, the persona hunts the doomed bear who swallowed it: “I set out running, following the splashes / of blood wandering over the world.” For seven days, the persona follows the bear into his own starvation without once mincing the meaning of his pursuit: “I lie out / dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.”
But the inevitable kill isn’t the poem’s point. At sight of the bear’s “upturned carcass” ahead of him, the persona isn’t sated. He approaches the “scraggled, / steaming hulk,” its “narrow-spaced, petty eyes, / the dismayed / face laid back on the shoulder,” and he cuts open the bear’s corpse to eat and wear its remains:
I hack a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink, and tear him down his whole length and open him and climb in and close him up after me, against the wind, and sleep.
This is possession, so literal that the persona’s hate becomes a nightmare he cannot escape. He dreams of “lumbering flatfooted / over the tundra, stabbed twice from within” and unable to prevent his bleeding. In time, by the poem’s final stanza, the persona must flee forever in the bear he wished to enslave—itself now his prison:
the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry by which I lived?
The seven-day structure of the hunter’s perverted creation and the repeated and’s between verbs (the syndetic parataxis common in the Old Testament) recall Genesis, the birthplace of our relation to Creation: where God commanded man to subdue the earth. Subdue is likely what Galway unmakes in “The Bear,” as he takes the verb to a haunted and horrid extreme. That the persona knows the bear’s smell, preferences, and movements like his own doesn’t stop him from defiling it (Galway’s version of man subduing the wild).
But the dominion of Genesis 1:26, which informs the word subdue, lies closer to stewardship than selfish possession, as theologians ancient and modern attest. The steward knows the value of what he’s been given, is not arrogant enough to believe it his own, and draws near to his gift to care for it. Familiar, humble knowledge for both care and appreciation.
It sounds like the beginnings of love, doesn’t it?
Paul the poet mentioned the word when he described how “all Christians, and Christian writers in particular, ought to press themselves against nature in its wild state.” Love, he goes on, comes by way of poetry: “Poetry, for me, is an outgrowth of that pure and dangerous wildness. In that way I experience it as something more basic than a supply of simile or metaphor. It is something both foreign and familiar. It is a place for the practicing and sharpening of attention, and for that type of attention that can become love for the poet. This is the essential poetic skill--to see, to name accurately, to cherish.”
He named the purpose of my ecological curiosity long before I’d realized it. Seeking to know plants and animals is the beginning of kinship, the beginning of actually seeing them. Seeing has long been the spur to my own poetry. A sight—seen and searing like a bolt—contains the resonance I need to start a poem.
But my poetry is not the reason to see and cherish Creation. To treat it as “a supply of simile or metaphor,” as Paul calls it, would under-value it. No, my reason to cherish what God made and sustains is His call of stewardship. That cherishing the natural world has untold pleasures is just sweetness like honeysuckle scent on the air.
Ecological curiosity, then, is the duty and joy. It ought to animate my heart to love and humility at God’s feet, just as my human neighbors ought to animate my heart to love and humility. (It ought to inform my vision of societal treatment of the environment, though those thoughts aren’t well-mulled enough for public display.) It ought to enchant my heart, down among the refreshed spring grasses where the violets are returning through the soil.
I’m a novice-initiate, as I’ve said. But I hear the wrens and the jays where they forage in the pines, and the dogwoods are on the stroll from their cotton-white February toward plumped-green April. I wonder whether the oaks will mast in a great cloud of seeds for the new season, or if the erratic cold will prevent it. I dream of the bears and mychorrhiza deep in the coves of the Appalachians, to cherish them. That fungus, in its trees’ secret root nodes, breathes out the nitrogen of growth, and I think of what it is to cherish this smallest detail as life-giving, the way a tree must.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again with new poem readings and with my last public book review, this time of Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy.