Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

“Holy shit, Tuck, what is this?”

“These are wood-eaters. Psilocybe azurescens, ” he said. He squatted down next to me, carefully lifted away old needles around some of the mushrooms, and showed me what they had been growing from: the wood of fallen trees, now almost dust, almost soil, but with that same silky white web running throughout.

“ Psilocybe? They’re psychedelic?”

He shrugged, gestured around the forest floor.

“That’s one use for them. They also happen to be miracle workers,” he said. “The mushrooms are just the fruit that grows from the mycelium. They can go on for miles just under the soil, taking up what’s there — vegetation, animals, mineral — breaking it all down, leaving soil the plants can thrive in. We’ve been inoculating different parts of the forest with different species, watching to see which species naturally occur, which to add. But it all depends on the rain out here. We’ve been waiting for a good rain to start the fruiting season. You came just in time.”

He wanted to show me more. I followed him across the creek and on for a quarter mile, toward the refinery, until we were within sight of the old chain-link and barbed-wire fence at the property line. He walked up to a cedar, the bark no longer umber and fibrous but scraped away, ashen. But at the base of the trunk were large white tufts of another mushroom, like sea sponges tossed under the tree.

“Sparassis crispa,” Tuck said. “Cauliflower mushroom. These trees were some of the first inoculated. Sarah Chen, one of the research scientists Sister J. convinced to come here, she and her students from Evergreen started the experiment. They wanted to see if they could expedite the soil restoration with the help of mycelia. Mycelia don’t just digest vegetation. It can break down bone, fur, feces, and — it’s been known for some time — plastics, petroleum and crude oil, industrial chemicals like hexane, even heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, cadmium, vanadium…”

While he talked, Tuck stooped down and ran his hand through the duff below the trees.

“They started with soil at the Colony; hauling in inoculated sawdust and wood chips from a mushroom farmer on the Nisqually Indian Reservation. They built mitigation fields one by one, layering dead, contaminated trees and plants, the mycelium starter, soil. The mycelium breaks everything down, creating new soil, clean soil.”

My phone was in my back pocket. My battery was low, but I started taking pictures of the mushrooms, the trees, the revived plant life around the creek. I turned and the refinery appeared on the screen, through the trees. It was a beast. Concrete slabs and metal pipe works, now charred and broken, rusted, scattered over a grassy expanse of a few acres between the fence and the blacktop surrounding the refinery itself. I thought I could see the path the fire took, over those two days that it burned, from the shattered machinery at the hot center, out through the corridors and windows, along the weedy edges of blacktop, through the fence.

I couldn’t take a picture of it. I looked past it, to the water. We had hiked half the island to get here, and I could see Orwell, Waldron, other islands, hazy in the distance.

“Living trees burn slowly,” Tuck was saying. I had tuned him out again. “Many of these trees you see, the ones that are blackened, they were still alive inside for some time. Eventually they suffocated, with no way to photosynthesize.”

I turned away from the refinery, looked up to where the tops of the dead trees met the sky.

Suffocation, the word wrote itself over and over inside my skull.

MALHEUR NATIONAL FOREST, OREGON

MAY 2, 2016

WE’RE EATING FANCY burgers and drinking craft beers at the hotel restaurant in Prairie City. It’s still my birthday for a few hours.

We talk about work for the entire meal. It’s not unromantic; we’re interested in the same things: ecosystems and how humans use and interact with them. Public lands attract all kinds, mostly the decent people. But all populations have a fringe. For park rangers, the fringe is everything from well-armed anti-government militants and poachers to nature-worshipping spiritualists and Bigfoot enthusiasts. But day to day, the bulk of Carey’s work involves preparations for the next “big one”—the next big fire. In the last five fire seasons, every one of them has seen a fire that was larger and harder to fight than the previous season’s worst. The pattern has put them on notice.

He tells me stories about being a smokejumper, parachuting into remote, roadless locations to fight fires. I have seen his scars, the burned patches of arm and leg that look like topographic maps. Some of these stories I’ve heard before, but I like listening to them. I can run my hands over his scars, feel the texture the fires have woven into him, but the stories come from a part of Carey I can’t touch.

I’m supposed to be working on my own story. I have an editor waiting for new pages. And I do write — I tell Carey — I am writing. But I’m not writing about then; I’m writing about now . I write what we had for dinner the night before and how we both farted all night and opened the window though the screen was shot and the mosquitoes came in. So we closed the window and swore we’d go a month without eating any beans at all.

“That’s what you write about?”

“It’s what I want to write about,” I tell him. “It’s like this: every day I start in the present, and I think back, one day at a time.” I’m drawing in the air, as if I’m connecting dots on a line, right to left. “But I’m also cooking oatmeal, or hanging laundry out on the line, or hiking up a mountain. I’m tired of looking back.”

I drink my beer. Carey’s waiting for me to continue, but I’m waiting for him to catch up and come to the conclusion on his own.

“Okay,” he says, chewing, swallowing, “so, the story of today just keeps heading off into the future, and your story is in the past.”

I beam at him. You get me, I’m about to say.

“But”—he puts up his hand—“and I’m asking because I’m curious, not because I’m objecting to what you’re saying. But doesn’t writing require pausing, sitting in one place? You can’t stop time, but you can be still.”

I chew a mouthful of burger.

“I’m having trouble being here and there at the same time.”

After the check, Carey tells me we are going to stay the night at the hotel. He booked a room, not just dinner reservations. I didn’t pack anything, but Carey has: toothbrush, paste, a pair of jeans and a shirt for the next day. The only thing he didn’t pack for me was clean underwear.

In the room there’s a bottle of wine, a huge piece of chocolate cake, and a gift, wrapped neatly in newspaper. It’s a watch with GPS tracking.

I sit on the bed, looking at it. I feel chastened.

“You don’t have to wear it every time you leave my sight,” he said. “It’s just to be safe. When you’re out there alone.”

I can’t look at him.

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Luce.”

“It’s a tracking device, Carey. Like I’m an endangered species you’re studying.”

“Jesus, I didn’t mean it that way. I have one for work, Lucie. You could track me down in a tornado. I don’t know where you are, ever.”

He wants to touch me, I can tell. But it will hurt him so much if I recoil or, worse, if I don’t respond at all. I know this about him, I can feel this about him, as I sit on the bed, three feet away. I am like a wild animal.