As Busy as a Fungus

It's easy to learn from nature, as long as you know what you want to learn

The silver maple in front of my home might be 100 years old, maybe older. I’ve been here for 30 years, and it was already knocking on three feet in diameter when I moved in. There’s another silver maple around the corner that must have a diameter of six or seven feet, as if multiple trees grew together so long ago that you can’t even tell they once were there. Using a little imagination (and if you look hard enough) you can detect the fusion; mostly, though, it is just an enormous and impressive tree.

I’ve always been jealous of people who can identify trees. Put a gun at my head, and I could rattle off maybe 20 or 30 different tree names. I can identify far fewer by sight and only two “maple” and “oak” by leaf. Bird calls and tree names top the list of things I’ll probably never get to learn. They’re two or three slots too far down my to-do list to devote real time to memorizing, but I try and take note of either when I can.

It’s been more than 20 years since my neighbor, Keith, a professional tree guy, told me the one outside my front door was a silver maple and showed me how to tell. It isn’t as if the silver maple is tough to identify, but knowing the details of both an easy and difficult-to-identify anything is part of being an expert.

Keith had stopped to chat. He has a preternatural ability to stop only when it’s mutually convenient and never tarry, moving on when the conversation is over. Knowing he was a tree guy, I asked him about the tree in my front yard. I had to write a journal for my environmental ethics class and was stuck for something to say.

The only thing I despised more than forced journaling at the time was environmental ethics and for the same reason: they were both trite and excruciating. I was learning the hard way about class and professor selection as a thirtysomething undergrad. This philosophy class bordered on cartoonish in that well-considered and clearly ill-informed insights all had equal weight.

The journaling assignment wasn’t even to “journal.” Instead, we were to “go out in nature (whatever ‘nature’ means to you) and note your observations and/or feelings. If it’s a poem, that’s fine, too.”

Christ. More than two decades later I still cringe at the thought.

If I wasn’t a single father then, I was about to be, and finding time between work and kids to get out in real nature had proven difficult that first week, so I had to go with the “whatever ‘nature’ means to you” approach.

Let me just take a second to clarify that I believed then and now that there’s not a nature “out there.” People are natural beings and by definition what they do is natural, but for clarity and sanity here I take “nature” to mean open green space.

What nature meant to me that day was how little I understood what I was looking at. How could I go out to find nature when I didn’t even know the name of the tree in my front yard? The story was good for 500 words and set the tone for the rest of the “journaling.”

I remember almost nothing else from the class beyond the fact that it revived my decades-old interest in Thoreau. Actually, just in Walden. I was in college, where, as my friends on the right keep discovering to their shock and horror, students trade American educational apocrypha for knowledge, so I wasn’t as sparkly eyed over Walden as I had been in high school. Still, the book was my introduction to the idea that there are epiphanies waiting for us in nature.

Since environmental ethics was an all-As, “no wrong answers” class, I used the opportunity to get reacquainted with transcendental thinking, letting nature teach me how to be a more natural creature. Observing trees and grass long enough that birds and bugs eventually appeared as if in a magic eye picture, reminded me we’re all pointlessly scuttling along with no proper sense of why.

I honestly can’t remember one word of the garbage I wrote for the journal, but for all the shit I talk about that class and professor, I still habitually “look until I see” when I’m in nature.

Nature, for me, has mostly been relegated to my fish pond and the back park, where I walk the dog. My home abuts a baseball field complex with swing sets. We call it the back park to differentiate it from the park diagonally across the street. I live in a park-heavy section of town.

During the spring and fall, the grass between the girls softball field and the boys baseball field is fairly covered with tiny spiderwebs, puffs three- or four-inches in diameter that capture the dew. In fact, the dew can make them pop against the green background, conveying an ersatz permanence.

They’re gone by afternoon and back the next morning.

I claim to be from the youngest generation that forgets there’s an internet. I’m notorious for just supposing why things are until they stop making sense. Then I remember that there’s probably an answer online. Of course, the problem with “learning” from nature is once you decide there’s a lesson in something, you’re bound to find it.

From the first time I saw all these tiny spiderwebs on the ground, I waxed poetic about the grass spider’s toil. How he spent all night on a web that was destined to be ruined by noon, only to start the next evening, carefully weaving in the hope of not going hungry, desperate in its hope to capture a meal before the sun and wind destroyed the night’s labors.

But there were hundreds of little parachutes on the grass, maybe a thousand, and never a spider to be seen.

One recent morning, for the first time in my memory, I noticed them on the mens softball left field fence. They were beautiful in the post-dawn light, shimmering with dew. Finally, I looked up which spiders make webs on the grass.

The difference between asking my neighbor the tree expert about trees and asking the internet (the everything expert) about spiderwebs is that all the stupid questions Keith had answered in his career informed his response. He knows the difference between a question that is, as the science folks say, not even wrong, and a legitimate one. Plus, he can discern what information you’re “really” looking for if your question is too dumb to countenance.

The internet doesn’t. The internet gives equal weight to every question and answer. Plus, the more dumb questions that have been asked, the more important dumb answers must seem to it. Still, eventually I hit upon the right level of dumb question to get a meaningful answer.

There’s a spiderweb-y organism that only lasts only as long as the morning dew called Dollar Spot fungus and, according to the first two pages of Google images, it either looks a lot like a spiderweb or only barely like a spiderweb. Still, context clues tell me the webs that so had captured my imagination out in the fields for all these years were fungus.

Confusing a naturally occurring fungus with a meticulously constructed, tiny spiderweb diminishes my self-satisfied insight about scuttling on one small point: from the outside, it’s hard to tell a Sisyphusian labor from a natural chemical imbalance. The best we can do is scuttle around the meticulously constructed, tiny spiderweb that holds our own reality together and pretend we’re doing it for a reason.

PostScript

I’m doing a review-along in the chat if you’re interested. Since “review-along” is a word I made up, I’ll tell you that I’m making observations and pulling quotes from a book I’m reviewing. Click below to follow along.

Again, this is a great time to suggest you get the Substack app and create an account.

More fun with video

I’m back to doing my “Best sentence of the day” posts to Instagram and YouTube.

I’m going to start doing notebook dumps there as well, and (if all goes to plan) I’ll embed those videos when I finally get around to writing the stories that the notes are supposed to have reminded me of.