I spent whole months staring into a microscope, immersed in rootscapes filled with winding hyphae frozen in ambiguous acts of intercourse with plant cells. Still, the fungi I could see were dead, embalmed and rendered in false colours. I felt like a clumsy sleuth. While I crouched for weeks scraping mud into small tubes, toucans croaked, howler monkeys roared, lianas tangled and anteaters licked.
To see fungi within roots you have to boil them in an alkaline substance to ‘clear’ them and then stain them using a blue dye. The dye is poisonous and a pain to handle, but the indigo washes that it makes are quite beautiful. Emerging from the microscope was a bit like surfacing after a dive. I spent so long in these rootscapes — full days looking down the microscope for weeks on end — that I would see root forms when I closed my eyes. I even had indigo-drenched dreams, in which I felt that I was looking at everything through blue tinted glasses.
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