Wide Eyed Read online

  A GIANT LOVES YOU

  FEATURING MARC BOLAN

  A pair of salamanders circle a mushroom then lick it. Funny, since salamanders only eat nymphs, worms, grubs, and flies. I wasn’t expecting to see them at all on this frigid canyon hike. But there they are—brown, orange, and bumpy—nibbling at the soft brown gills lining the cap’s underside.

  When I crouch, I notice they’re shivering. A frosty spray off the puddle to the left has built fuzzy ice beards on their chins. Frozen twigs and clovers look like miniature ice sculptures.

  One salamander whips his tail up at the mushroom and snaps off a bite. It falls onto the ground where he can eat it gracefully. Still, he twitches and tries to claw the cold off himself, as if he’s hallucinating from advanced frostbite.

  His companion is wounded, possibly from a recent owl attack. Maybe they ruffled the grass while crossing a meadow. An owl swooped down, extended its talon, but missed and slashed his head from ear to ear.

  I scoop up one of the critters to pet its belly. They’re slow when cold, like tarantulas and snakes. Normally I like catching salamanders with my boyfriend Matt. He can make them magically appear. He’s a salamander magnet. “You found it,” he always says. But I know they smell his ankles and calves then paddle out of their wet caves toward his woody scent. He smells like forest. My own smell is no fun. It can’t compete with the mixture he exudes: pine and dirt, with a little something rotten mixed in.

  One rock star who thought a lot about salamanders was the late Marc Bolan. He was the most fantastic singer. Back when he was Tyrannosaurus Rex, Marc Bolan wrote a song called “Salamanda Palaganda” about Aztec ancestors visiting him while he rested by a river. The chorus goes:

  Salamanda palaganda, oh palomino blue

  Salamanda palaganda, June’s buffalo too

  Apparently salamanders in England are blue. Marc Bolan spent a lot of time singing and dreaming beside streams, so I deem him a reliable source of British river life information. You can tell by his songs that he was attentive to animals and universal truths. That’s part of what makes him so lovable.

  Matt looks a lot like Bolan, but he’s more handsome. He also likes lying beside streams and visiting visionary relatives. His Cherokee great-greatgrandmother once came to him in the form of a tree. Her wrinkles were the tree’s bark. She sorted some things out for him then took off. How cool to be related to trees, he told me.

  The salamanders in Southern California are brown-reddish-orange, the color of an overripe Bosc pear. Except for their bright-orange underbellies, they camouflage well in oak leaf compost and sycamore twigs. However, the first mature salamander I ever met was yellow, and his head was heart-shaped like a living Valentine.

  I don’t know much about anything, except being lonely. When I’m alone, like now, I realize how much Matt and I have discussed the fact that being alone isn’t a bad thing. He says it’s good because you can experience supernatural things and more easily communicate with animals and plants. I’m sure he’s right. Once I saw a leaf on the end of a branch start glowing and make itself into an arrow. When I went the way it pointed, I found a nest of blue jays. Their antics entertained me all afternoon.

  The salamanders who love my boyfriend’s smell are California Newts, Taricha torosa. They’re amphibians who lay eggs just below the surface of a stream. California Newts can afford to spend time out on the shady forest floor. I used to wonder why they go to the hassle of giving birth amid torrential currents. Then I found out their eggs need cold water to gestate.

  Every time I question why animals act differently than we do, I feel so stupid and anthropocentric. Maybe the water is a lubricant. Picture it—eggs covered in a silvery mucous just sliding out your birth canal. The river would soothe your feverish, leathery skin. It would fill in the holes and distended tubes, dampen your itchy back bumps—not to mention quench your thirst. Still, in the next chaotic moment, when newborns swarmed around you, wouldn’t you be worried they’d be whisked away downstream? I mean, how would you secure your babies? After doing some research, I found out this tricky situation isn’t as tricky as you’d think, thanks to these special sticky egg sacs that bond everyone to rocks like the caulking in shower-tile cracks.

  Salamanders have it all figured out.

  Last week before he left town, Matt scored Marc Bolan’s first two records. One has a great, bongofrenzy version of “Salamanda Palaganda.”

  “Bolan’s such a hippie,” he said.

  “Yeah, isn’t that song being played backwards?” I asked.

  We talked about how glad we were when the band changed its name from Tyrannosaurus Rex to T.Rex, and Bolan laid off the bongos. When T.Rex added an electric guitar for the album Beard of Stars, the music got more intense. Bolan’s curly hair is so beautiful on that cover, and his powdered face makes him look rococo. Handsome overkill. Bolan must have known bliss.

  Medieval bestiaries claimed that salamanders had the ability to withstand and even extinguish flames. Roman naturalist Pliny propagated this legend by writing, “Salamanders are so cold that they put fire out by the touch, as ice does.”1 Benvenuto Cellini was a Renaissance artist and colleague of Michelangelo. He once saw a lizard “sporting about in the midst of the hottest flames.”2 He was sitting near a campfire in his family cellar (?!) at the time. What a sexy lizard to perform fire-dancing! On the other hand, how lonely was Cellini to see animals flickering in his bonfire?

  The Vatican used to store the sudarium (that famous face-cloth from the tomb of Jesus Christ) in a fireproof material known as “salamander wool.”3 This was later proven to be asbestos. Many ornamental granite and limestone salamanders grace cathedrals throughout Europe. Matt loves gargoyles. I wonder if he’d love stone salamanders.

  Some people think salamanders are algae-ridden bottom slitherers. No way. Look at their round snouts! I would kiss them, but I’m afraid I’d get them sick. I get horny when I see one swimming into a crevice after crawling through leaves at the bottom of a pool. How pretty is that? Their curvy tails are spermlike, and their skin is so soft (out of water) that, I hate to say it, they feel like penises.

  In The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1716, it was recorded that,

  A salamander on being thrown into the fire … swelled and vomited a store of thick slimey matter, which did put out the neighboring coals … thereby saving himself from the force of the fire for two hours … and afterward lived for nine months.

  If placed in danger, salamanders can secrete juices stored in their backs. I’ve seen them sweat while sitting in my hand, although it could have been residual water beads. Chamouni, a man known as the “Russian Salamander,” thought he could exude magic sweat, but he died in 1828 while being roasted in an oven beside a leg of lamb.4

  On a hike about a year ago, Matt picked up a salamander and tried to hypnotize it by rubbing the underside of its neck. I wished I were the salamander, small enough to sit in his palm. The salamander struggled, but I would’ve fallen asleep. There’s something about wanting to be small for your heartthrob. I strive to feel cute and tiny, like a surprise present. I feel jealous of creatures less than ten inches long. It’s not that I don’t want to have presence. It’s not about disappearing. If you’re small and a giant loves you, you’re safe. You’re the mouse in the matchbox bed.

  FUNGUS MENTAL TELEPATHY

  I’ve seen the Flaming Lips perform lots of times, but only once did the drummer, Steven, send me psychic messages to marry him. I felt lust recumbent in the dark, smoky air. His brainwaves were overpowering— during “It’s Halloween on the Barbary Coast,” they visually matched the colored laser beams that twirled through the club’s thick fog. I sensed that each colored ray was an attempt on Steven’s part to get my attention. Meet me backstage, a blue light said. I am in need of a wife, a red light suggested. After the band played their last song, my friend pulled me toward the exit. There was no time to get sidetracked, groupie-style. We had a transaction to make.
r />   I was on a business trip to Boulder, Colorado, delivering these psychedelic mushrooms called Psilocybe semilanceata, a.k.a., Liberty Caps. This was a lucrative deal during the fall months, following heavy rains. I lived in Eureka, a small city in the California Redwoods. Every November the city held a mycology festival, and people really got into hunting mushrooms. Since the psychedelic varieties were coveted, a fierce competition arose as soon as the rainy days arrived. The clouds would pile up, the sprinkling would begin, and the first thing I’d do was run to my bedroom to set the alarm clock. If I slept in on hunting day, the patches would be stripped, and my chances for earth-flavored mushroom tea and a few hundred bucks would be as decayed as the fungi’s rotting, fleshy caps.

  There was this great spot out toward the coast, a clump of shrubs that enshrouded perfectly perky brown shrooms every season, batch after batch— they were so good and fresh, plus the ground my friends and I had to slither across was so dirty in a delicious, pure dirt way. It was the kind of place where we could yank out a carrot and not rinse it off before sticking it in our mouths because the dirt added flavor and minerals.

  This special dirt was on private property, so we had to crawl under a wire fence. Everyone would fold up their T-shirts to make a kangaroo-style pouch on their stomach, fill it with mushrooms, then tie it back with twisted T-shirt knots on either side, the kind of knots little girls make when they’re imitating Daisy Duke or the Dallas Cowgirls. Since we were belly-bound, we scooched up the pouches like puffy mushroom bras so they wouldn’t get crushed. If there were stray mushrooms left on the ground, we filled our hands as we started to crawl away. On the way out, we chucked some leaves over the gap we’d made under the fence, as if we were bunnies sneaking out of a veggie garden. This part was similar to a Peter Rabbit story, but if we’d got caught it would have been more serious, so we didn’t fool around.

  The limit was three people to a trip, two guys and one girl. I think the guys assumed girls might ruin something. I felt honored when I was along. Gathering shrooms was my favorite thing to do. Plus, on some hunts, I went along with this guy who knew all the species; he’d teach us about Death Caps, the brown ones that looked magic but weren’t, the furry, shaggy Ink Caps, and the stunning, red-and-white polka-dotted Fly Agarics (the kind gnomes sit on). I saw caterpillars or titmice hopping around in the branches above our heads, so there was critter magic down there under the tangled twigs. Mushroom world is fairy territory.

  Occasionally we drank mushroom tea before we left so we would be more in tune with the shrooms and they could call us to them with their fungus mental telepathy. The guys believed if you drank the tea you could think like a mushroom, which would cause you to gravitate toward the patches. Once I actually thought I had spores so I pictured where I would have dropped mine to reproduce. I imagined what it felt like to live my whole life hidden by leaf debris. The mushroom-thought theory worked so well that I wondered why anyone would go searching in any other state of mind.

  The day after the Flaming Lips show, my friend Jim and I took a trip to the Denver Natural History Museum, where we saw Aztec daggers used for cutting out human hearts. One knife had a mushroomshaped handle with a little frog crouched on its tip.

  “Look at that crazy frog. It’s so weird. It’s, like, sitting on a mushroom,” I said.

  And Jim said, “Cool.”

  The conversation, which could’ve been educational and enlightening, was a dud. I felt like an ignoramus for not knowing what kind of mushroom the handle was fashioned after. The Aztecs were expert botanists; I was sure the mushroom on that ceremonial tool bore great shamanic significance. I was a poseur, a hippified stoner with a mushroom-amulet necklace (the swirly colored kind on hemp rope) who knew nothing about mushrooms except how to trip out on them. The only minor mushroom knowledge I had, beyond identifying three psychedelic species in the field, came from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mushrooms,” which has a mysterious, sinister tone. It’s about a mushroom colony breeding beneath the ground’s surface. Plath’s mushrooms grow Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly. By the end of the poem, they’re powerful, almost evil, when they tell the reader: We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foot’s in the door.

  On the airplane back to California, I decided if I was going to be into mushrooms, I had to start learning some hard-core scientific information. I purchased David Arora’s seminal All That the Rain Promises and More … a book known by every real mushroom connoisseur. The cover shows a bearded man in a tuxedo holding a cluster of oyster mushrooms and a trombone. Inside there’s a picture of a dog whose hair has been dyed with yellow “shroom mush.” Right after I got this book, a girlfriend of mine found some Witches’ Butter, a rubbery orange fungus that’s ruffled like lace and has the chewy texture of seaweed, growing on an oak log. We used the book to identify it. Now we both snap photos of any shelf fungus we locate and mail them to each other for our fungi photo albums.

  Thus, my knowledge of the plant kingdom Thalophyta can be attributed to that trip to see Aztec daggers. For example, I know that the clumps I used to dig up are known as thallus, and the reason the guys told me to pull the mushrooms out by the stems or stipes was to preserve the hyphae and mycelium below, from which new mushrooms can bloom season after season. I also discovered that psychedelic mushrooms are most potent when in a mature stage of fructification and the caps, or pileus, are darkbrown and tender.

  Clients often ask me what makes mushrooms psychedelic, so I’ve memorized the molecular structures of psilocybin and psilocin (the chemical that psilocybin breaks down into). Psilocin causes the psychedelic high; scientists think its chemical similarity to serotonin, a natural human neurotransmitter, is what makes psilocin cause hallucinations. Oddly enough, serotonin occurs naturally in the Panaeolus genus of mushrooms. Humans share molecules with mushrooms! Perhaps depressed people could eat Panaeolus instead of Prozac or Xanax.

  Here’s a diagrammatic breakdown of the principal active constituents in entheogenic psilocybes. All mushrooms containing these chemicals will produce a blue stain when laid on paper.

  Rereading Sylvia Plath’s poem now, I feel I should reinterpret her words correctly through a mycological lens. The “toes” and “noses” that “take hold on the loam” are the carpophores and basidiomycetes, or the fruits and the spores. Her “soft fists” that “insist on heaving the needles” describe gilled fungus in the button stage hidden behind their universal veils. In a new and exciting way, I love the way Plath’s mushrooms Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow, / Bland-mannered, even though that is only a half-truth; saprophytic fungi actually require nutrition derived from decaying organic matter, just as the lignicolous mushrooms (the kind that live on wood) need that special dirt and log vitamins to thrive and reproduce.

  I sometimes wish I could write Plath to explain my discoveries.

  One recent Friday night I had some mushroom tea brewed from dried Psilocybe cubensis and spent the evening alone.

  I can step into a vortex of minutiae. My apartment has teal green walls covered with miniature paintings and small tchotchkes stowed on every shelf. My current favorites are a half-inch-tall ceramic Jawa mounted on a broken cuckoo clock, and a quarterinch plastic Fly Amanita resting beside a one-inch squirrel holding a mini acorn. One night alone with a mug of mushroom tea can turn this situation into a microcosm of amazement.

  After I’d examined the squirrel’s hair patterns (the way they swirled in bristly waves over his hindquarters) and its nose, which was smaller than a pinhead yet meticulously tipped in black, Sylvia Plath’s book (the one with the mushroom poem in it) started glowing yellow on the bookshelf. It looked as though it were pushing itself off the ledge into my hands. I opened it and proceeded to listen while the poem was read to me in the voice of a woman whom I believed to be Sylvia Plath in the afterlife. Her voice had a low, Lauren Bacall quality. As the poem’s lines were recited, I visualized each stanza while making scientifically accurate associations. Each wo
rd in the poem—bedding, hammers, earless, crannies, nudgers— began to seem like the microscopic reproductive units called spores, which are discharged from mushroom gills and dispersed on air currents. The letters that formed the words became akin to mushrooms themselves, which, by the way, are actually the fruits of the fungus—a thing that gives birth to other things.

  Life forms such as mushrooms appear immortal because they are basically impossible to eliminate. When you pick a mushroom, the spores that float away will encourage more mushrooms to grow. Dead mushrooms generate life. Look at letters arranged on a page, and they too become a growing puzzle: of words, that is. The more I eat mushrooms, the more I feel related to mushrooms. We both communicate with the dead, in a way.

  Sylvia’s ghost deduced from my half-formed thoughts that I wished to share my fungi learnings with her. She in turn taught me that words, like mushrooms, are capable of communicating to the living what the dead are trying to say. Don’t write to the dead, Plath taught me. We’ll come for your thoughts when we want them. Though I don’t sell mushrooms anymore, I do read books written by deceased authors. One can learn a lot from a ghost, and vice versa.

  LADY OF THE LAKE