Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir

by Mark Vonnegut Md

When you walk through the woods, how much of the living matter there is animal, including bugs and birds and all? Two to three percent. Plants, trees, bushes, moss, grass, and flowers—most of what you see and think of when you think of a walk in the woods—make up 15 to 20 percent, depending. The rest is all a very quiet, nearly invisible world of fungi. The mushrooms you see aren’t so much the tip of the iceberg as dewdrops on top of the ocean.

The mushroom growing out of my neighbor’s stump was the Armillaria mellea or honey mushroom, so called because of its honey color rather than a sweet honey taste. Armillaria is in many ways the most successful organism on the planet. While most mushrooms are recyclers that break down dead or dying plants and return the raw materials to the earth, the honey mushroom will take down perfectly healthy trees and sometimes an entire forest. Most of the organism consists of small black cords that travel miles and miles and miles. The mushrooms you see are the flower of a much much bigger organism. There’s a single Armillaria that covers most of Oregon and some of northern California. In Europe there’s an Armillaria that stretches from Tuscany to just outside of Barcelona. I don’t want to make people worry and it seems on the face of it wrong to conceive of a mushroom as having intent, but it makes basic good sense to be careful about being too sure what a thousand-mile-long, three-billion-ton, contiguous, ten-thousand-year-old organism that eats forests and can cross mountains and rivers is and isn’t up to. Mushrooms have six genders, one that is sort of male, two that are sort of female, and three that are something else.

Somewhere in high school I came across Mark Twain’s statement that it shouldn’t be held against someone if they know more than one way to spell a word.