Marrow Island (14 page)

“SPAWN?” I ASKED.

“Spawn.” Jen nodded.

We were in a nursery of sorts. A Quonset hut among the trees behind the barn, where Tuck left me with Jen to get back to his work. It was partially dug into the ground, earthen-floored, unlit, and ran at least thirty feet, with a door at each end. The doors were open, making boxes of light on the dirt, but we wore headlamps. The air was cool around my ankles and warm and heavy around my head, like in a greenhouse. There was a sweet, pungent, yeasty odor in the air, like fresh bread and soil. This was where they stored their spawn—young mycelium colonies of various species.

“I’ve been mushroom hunting,” I say, “and I’ve seen growing kits for oysters and shiitakes, but I’ve never seen mushroom cultivation like this.”

“So, mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the much bigger organisms,” Jen explained. I nodded. I knew this. “Before they’re mushrooms, they look like this.” She held up a gallon-size freezer bag full of what looked like moldy brown rice, small specks completely overtaken by soft white fuzz. “That’s alder sawdust from downed trees, inoculated with
Grifola frondosa
—maitake mushrooms. We inoculate the medium—sawdust, wood chips, sometimes cardboard or burlap or straw—and the mycelium overtakes it, rapidly, tiny white threads hundreds of miles long in some cases, bound up together. Spawn.”

“And this is how you—the Colony—has been remediating the soil?”

“Yeah.”

“Mushrooms?”

“Mushrooms. When they’re not trapped in a bag like this, when they’re in a forest, say, or a field, the organism can stretch for miles right there under your feet.”

“I’ve read about the use of microorganisms in oil spills—bacteria especially—but they work too slowly for broad commercial use after big spills.”

“How slow is too slow for the planet?” Jen asked. “And how much more harm did ArPac do when they threw dispersants all over the oil in the sea out here?”

“You’re right, obviously, I agree with you,” I said, walking down a row of stacked burlap sacks. “But, I mean, how many years does it take? And how do you even know that it’s working?”

“We regularly send soil samples for testing. Obviously, the entire island isn’t okay, yet. I mean, we’re not
done
. But given the right spawn, in the right conditions, we can create healthy, viable soil in six months. Sometimes less.
”
Jen took me outside to show me a mitigation field at the bottom of the goat pasture, where they covered waste runoff with layers of inoculated sawdust, straw, and bark. The whole was covered with burlap to protect it from the hot sun and watered if it started to dry out.

“It’s like a giant compost heap, but working three times faster to create soil,” she said. “We start with sterilized medium, inoculate them with the variety of mycelium best suited to the medium and conditions. We turn the pile every so often, until the materials are soil, ready to be added to the fields and gardens. The mycelium is then acclimated to the climate, the conditions; it infiltrates the existing soil, and the remediation process continues.”

“How?” I asked. “How
exactly
do mushrooms remediate? Are they digesting the heavy metals, the toxic chemicals?”

“Sort of. Yes. Some mycelia can break chemicals down into their elemental parts, rendering them less harmful. Mycelium produce enzymes to decompose plant and animal matter, and some of those enzymes also break down petrochemicals, plastics, complex chemical compounds created in a lab and unleashed on the world. Others can absorb heavy metals into the mushrooms themselves, so they can be removed from the ecosystem. It doesn’t all happen at once, but over time, with different applications and different mycelia, gradually the natural balance of interdependent plant, insect, and microbial life can return. It all starts with the mushrooms.”

“So you don’t eat these mushrooms?”

“No, not the ones directly involved in restoration.”

“So, what do you do with them?”

“We put the mushrooms through the process again, in the soil, with a fresh batch of spawn from some other species. Mycoremediation isn’t new and neither are the methods. We’ve learned and borrowed from others who have been studying them casually or on much smaller scales for decades. No one has ever had the opportunity to try something like this.”

She took me back to the hut and showed me more mycelia. Varieties they cultivated for food and medicine, and experimental species donated or exchanged with mycologists around the world.

My right ear was ringing; my headache hummed, and the light coming in from the far door made me turn back toward the recesses of the hut, where the bright white mycelium spawn, in their bags, in long wooden bins, seemed to give off a light of their own.

“Are you all right?” Jen reached for my arm.

“Yeah, I’ve just had this headache all day.”

Walking the path under the firs, I asked Jen how she first heard of Marrow.

“One of my professors at Evergreen had come out here. He was an ecologist, really into the microbial relationships. He was all charged up about soil remediation when he got back. And God. He said he felt God here.”

“God? This professor is a scientist?”

“I know. I’m an atheist,” she said. “I think he was somewhere in the Intelligent Universe camp, but he came back talking about God. I wanted to see for myself. Sister J. inspires different feelings in different people—for me, it’s not G-O-D. You’ve met her, right?”

I nodded. “I grew up Catholic; my dad’s parents were devout. They’re both gone now. And when my dad died, my mom and I just stopped going to church. I went to parochial school, an all-girls’ school. But I was never confirmed, and we don’t practice. I call us absentees.”

Jen shook her head. “Yeah, I can see how you might lose faith after losing your dad. Mine’s gone, too. But I was an atheist before then.”

“Are a lot of the colonists Catholic? Or were they?”

“Only about, maybe, a quarter of us. In the early days, there were more. There was a sort of radical environmental movement afoot in the Diocese, and Sister was the leader. She held meetings and gave talks on ‘earth ministry.’ When the archbishop told her she had to stop—you know, when the Church was investigating all the nuns for being social activists?—she walked away from her order. She said she had a higher calling to minister to the earth, not men. She gained a lot of supporters that way—outside of the church, too. Followers and benefactors.
‘Saints don’t follow orders,’
they say.” She turned to look at me, raised her eyebrows.

“Saints?”

“I don’t really believe in saints, but if anyone qualified, it would be Sister J. She put herself on the line. She did something she knew would get her kicked out of her order and her church, her whole life and community for twenty years, to try something no one had ever tried before.”

“The mycoremediation was her idea?” Wind snaked around our bodies and rattled fir needles onto the path and into our hair.

“She met a man who told her it was possible to clean up toxic soil with mycelia, and she knew of an island that needed to be cleaned up. It became her mission.”

Jen left me with Elle at the apothecary. We sat on the stoop, and she took my pulse at the wrist, first on one side, then the other.

“Does it have a center, or is the pain evenly spread?” she asked.

“It’s here,” I said, tracing the line of pain from my eyebrow to the bridge of my nose around to the inner socket.

She took my pulse again, her steady hands on my wrist, her head cocked to the side this time, like she was listening to my pulse.

We hadn’t met earlier; Elle wasn’t at lunch, no one mentioned why. She had been standing in the grass near the apothecary when we walked up, staring at something in the distance. She was tall and reedy, with short dark hair that curled over half her brow. She wasn’t what I thought she would be. I had had visions of an earthy woman in layers of flowing skirts and scarves, like a young Stevie Nicks. But Elle was boyish in a worn-out T-shirt and jeans, beautiful and androgynous in a way that both men and women probably found attractive. A small sea-worn shell, suspended from a silver chain around her neck, landed at her sternum. My eye was drawn to it, the chalk-white of the shell against the thinning white of the cotton.

“You didn’t sleep much last night?”

“No.”

“Okay. Come with me.” She stood up and disappeared behind the screen door, and I closed my eyes. The porch was shaded, but the meadow before it was blazing in the midday sun. My eyes prickled when I looked anywhere near it.

The cottage was cool and dark. I waited at the threshold for my eyes to adjust. There was a small living room with a wood stove, furnished with soft armchairs covered in pillows, a wooden table, and a bookshelf stocked with volumes on folk remedies and herbalism and Chinese medicine and nutrition. An amethyst geode the size of a human face rested in the center of the table. I squatted down to look and traced the crystal formations with a finger, rested my palm over the glassy curves. Elle appeared in the arch that led to the kitchen.

“I’ve just put the water on,” she said, not smiling, but not unkindly. She had a direct, gentle way about her.

In the kitchen, sunlight slid around the edges of a blood-red cloth in the window, but a cool breeze blew through the back screen. I walked around the room while Elle put herbs into a mortar and pestle at a worktable and the water simmered on an efficiency burner. In the place of a stove and refrigerator, there were dehydrators and drying racks, bundles of herbs hanging from them, mushrooms laid out to dry on sheets. The cupboard doors had been removed, and the shelves were lined with jars of herbs, labeled with names and dates. Each shelf had a label, too, indicating the family of herb stored there. There was an indentation in one wall that had once held a folding ironing board. The ironing board was gone, and the space now held small brown and blue dropper bottles of tinctures and flower essences.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Almost eight years.” Elle looked up and out the back door, which led to the edge of the meadow and the start of the trees.

“You’re Jen’s partner?”

She nodded, continued her work. Jen was loquacious, outgoing; Elle was more reserved.

“Did you two meet here?”

“We did. I came to apprentice with Margaret—Maggie. She’s our midwife, our medicine woman.”

“I met her this morning,” I said. “She was milking the goats.”

“We all do, sometimes.” She nodded. “Even Sister J.”

The water was starting to boil. She poured it over a jar full of the herbs she had prepared for me, screwed on a cap.

“It just needs to steep. Do you often get headaches?” she asked. She wanted to turn the focus away from herself.

“Just in the last few years.”

“Stress, maybe?” she offered.

“Stress?”

“Are you stressed?”

“No.”

She looked at me and nodded like I was full of shit. I turned away.

“Can I touch?” I was standing over a tray of dark blue fungi.

Elle looked up. “Of course.”

“What are they?”

“
Cortinarius violaceus
. Violet caps. About a week after the fall rains, we start collecting them.”

“What are they for?” I picked one up. It looked like a mushroom you’d buy in the grocery store, but it was the color of a varicose vein. I sniffed it.

“We’re not exactly sure about those.”

I looked at her curiously. She smiled for the first time.

“We only work with edible varieties in the apothecary. But part of what I’m working on for the Colony is understanding what each individual has to contribute to the health of the whole. In the beginning, we work with a combination of what we know and what we can intuit from what we know. We know, for example, that
Cortinarius violaceus
fruits in the early fall after warm rains. So, we might start by wondering whether they would be helpful for ailments induced by wet warmth, like certain kinds of rheumatism or influenza. Or we might wonder the opposite: if it might ameliorate ailments that are exacerbated by dry, cold climates.
Cortinarius violaceus
grows near conifers, but not just any conifers: it prefers the amabilis fir,
Abies amabilis,
which are rarer than noble and Douglas firs on the islands—and perhaps that has something to do with the sweet sap the amabilis exudes. Maybe the violet cap digests the sugars of the sap, and maybe it could be indicated for blood sugar regulation.”

“But there aren’t that many people here—how often do you actually get to test these hypotheses?”

She poured the tea through a strainer into a mug for me.

“It’s not an allopathic model; I’ll never be able to write a peer-reviewed paper or anything like that. But I don’t really care.”

She pulled a jar of honey from a shelf and set it in front of me with a spoon.

“Stir a good tablespoon of honey in the tea.”

I did and watched the honey dissolve into the murky liquid. I took a mouthful and felt the heat and scent flow to the back of my throat and bloom up into my sinuses and around my eyes. It wasn’t spicy, exactly, but it had the effect of a hit of horseradish, opening my nasal passages and making my eyes water. I swallowed and felt it cool my entire throat as it went down.

“Jesus Christ.” I started laughing. The sensation passed, and I was left with the honeyed, herbaceous flavor on my tongue.

Elle raised an eyebrow. “Just take sips.”

“What’s in it?”

“The strongest flavors come from the rhizomes of garlic mustard. It’s an invasive species but almost impossible to get rid of, so we found a use for it. We weed it from our fields and the wild spaces—when we can—and it becomes part of our medicinal collection here. There’s also wintergreen, yarrow, skullcap, fireweed . . . It’s a useful blend.”

“How sick do people actually get here? How often do you need to try a new treatment for rheumatism? Everyone seems relatively young and healthy.” I thought of Sister J. and her cough, but didn’t mention it.