Hoarded Ordinaries

Although the autumn equinox doesn’t happen until Saturday, it already feels like fall. In addition to piles of pumpkins and rows of chrysanthemums, the Virginia creeper is ripening, its leaves turning red while its berries turn blue.

Compared with last year, this year’s crop of creeper seems to be turning ahead of schedule. We’ve already had our first frost with another forecast for Friday; it seems in keeping with September’s equinoctial temperament that an overnight freeze is enough to set our fences on fire.

Although the hillsides themselves haven’t started to turn, some of the shorter, scrubbier trees that fringe them have. On Saturday’s walk down Airport Road in Swanzey, NH, I noticed one field dotted with reddening saplings while the next was still entirely green. The leaves of Virginia creeper are red and their berries blue, and goldenrod is lending a splash of color: a fitting overture to the symphony of color that will surge and crescendo over the coming weeks.

I think my neighbor’s cat is getting a bit too comfortable with my car, which lately has been serving as a makeshift Kitty Throne. Whenever I’ve found Miss Bling’s hood and windshield dotted with cat prints lately, I’ve assumed little miss Tara had claimed it as yet another perch from which to taunt poor oblivious Reggie. But yesterday I caught one of Tara’s house-mates in the act of using Miss Bling as a virtual heating pad, arching and curling to get the heat of her cooling engine on just the right furry spots.

As you can see from her expression, Kitty wasn’t too happy to have me shooing her away to reclaim my wheels.

Today’s Photo Friday theme is Bright, so here’s an eye-popping glimpse of a neon orange fungus I spied at Goose Pond a couple weeks ago. This year has been a particularly fecund one for fungi: there have been mushrooms of all shapes and sizes popping up everywhere, and last week I even saw an old, dead mushroom covered with furry mold. When you have fungus sprouting fungus, you know you’re living in an especially ripe time.

Last night I finished reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the final section of which includes an account of several mushroom-foraging expeditions Pollan pursues as a neophyte mycophile. Pollan’s book is a delight regardless of your diet, for it’s chock-full of intellectually enriching food-for-thought. Wild mushrooms pose a quintessential omnivore’s dilemma, Pollan explains, because we can safely eat some but not all of them. Faced with an odd, neon orange fungus, does instinct scream Eat or Don’t Eat? In the case of less colorful species, how exactly do you distinguish an edible chanterelle or morel from a toxic lookalike, and would you trust a field guide to steer you true?

Pollan initially chooses not to eat a chanterelle he identifies with several field guides; later, he willingly eats another specimen foraged with an experienced friend even though he admits the latter technique isn’t as scientific as the first:

As the case of mushrooms suggests the omnivore’s dilemma often comes down to a question of identification–to knowing exactly what it is you are preparing to eat. From the moment Angelo handed me that first mushroom, what is and is not a chanterelle suddenly seemed as plain to me as sunshine. I knew right then that the next time I found a chanterelle, anywhere, I would recognize it and not hesitate to eat it. Which is peculiar, when you consider that in the case of the chanterelle I found in my neighborhood, a half dozen authoritative field guides by credentialed mycologists had failed to convince me beyond a reasonable doubt of something I now was willing to bet my life on, based on the say-so of one Sicilian guy with no mycological training whatsoever.

The eating of mushrooms, Pollan suggests, is more a matter of lore than it is a matter of science. Old World mycophiles like Angelo didn’t take botany classes to learn which mushrooms they should or shouldn’t eat; instead, mushroom foraging would have been something you learned from a family member who took you into the woods to give you an old-fashioned face-to-face lesson without any books.

Although I’ve eaten and admired plenty of wild mushrooms, I’ve never gathered any on my own. I don’t know anyone well-versed enough in mushroom lore to lead me true, and trusting my life to a field guide seems risky. As someone who knows how difficult it can be to identify wildflowers, I recognize that fungus ID is even trickier…and even when you know how to identify normal mushroom specimens, what do you do with a freakishly deformed fungus like this one with its oddly split stem?

Unlike Pollan, I’ll willingly sidestep the Mycophile’s Dilemma by being content to look at the colorful and diversely shaped wild mushrooms popping up everywhere these days. I snapped this photo of a pair of freshly sprouted mushrooms at Goose Pond last week because I thought the one on the left looked just like a miniature pumpkin…but just because this fungus looks like a mini-pumpkin doesn’t mean I’ll assume it tastes like one. Sampling an unknown lookalike just doesn’t seem like a very Bright idea.

Yesterday I took my first-year Thinking & Writing students along the Ashuelot River to draw: it was too lovely a day to sit inside a windowless classroom. As my students sketched a grassy field, river, and surrounding hillsides–the same circle of hills that Henry David Thoreau loved when he passed through Keene on his way to Canada–I sketched two of my students standing on the bridge over the Ashuelot, their heads down as their hands worked steadily.

As a teacher, I’m always looking for a teachable moment, and I want to create a memory I hope will resonate in a young person’s consciousness for the length of their days: Nature Matters. When, after sketching, we turned to talk about Thoreau, excerpts of whose 1851 journal we’re reading incrementally with each day of ours corresponding with a day of his, one student observed that Thoreau in his journal jumps from topic to topic because he was always making connections.

It’s exactly this kind of connection–this sort of a-ha moment–that I’m aiming for in this class. I want my students to make connections between what they see and what they read, to notice (as Thoreau does) the changes from last year to this as well as the remarkable continuity between Thoreau’s September and our own.

On September 12, Thoreau wrote about a flock of pigeons–in 1851, they would have been native passenger pigeons–that perched so motionlessly, they looked like painted decoys. Passenger pigeons were colorful, so I understand why Thoreau thought them painterly, and they are now extinct, the sort of bait station Thoreau described being one of the factors contributing to the birds’ eventual demise.

Thoreau’s September was full of birds that are now extinct, but I know from experience the morning mist of which he writes with an almost rhapsodic reverence, dubbing September “the season of fogs.” Do any of my first-year students wake up early enough–perhaps on blurry-eyed walks to 8 am classes–to see the morning fog that connects our September to Thoreau’s? Without cars, my first-year students have no way to go to Goose Pond on a chilly, mist-enshrouded morning, so the season of fogs is one they have to read about, trusting either Thoreau’s testimony or my own.

Being older than my students, I know how slippery memory is: I know how quickly today becomes yesterday, last month, last year. This time next year, my students will be in other classes, reading other books for other professors; will they remember lessons about rats and refuges or a sunny September afternoon spent sketching in the open air rather than discussing books in a windowless classroom?

Whether or not they remember–whether or not they spark to and resonate with the kind of connections I’m trying to make with them–I know I’ll remember our sunny afternoon along the Ashuelot, having sketched the scene by hand and by heart.