I really don't know what I would have done, if not for the spores. It wasn't that I was completely lonely; I was stationed close enough to Rock Lake that I made a few friends, mostly women who visited for tips on getting the most out of their vegetable gardens. But a shared interest in sustainable agriculture really wasn't the same thing as a relationship, and I could tell pretty early on that my little trickle of visitors would dry right up if I told any of them that I was a lesbian.
I thought I was handling it, that first year. I came out to the Brumba Wildlife Refuge in the spring, when there was plenty of work to do and plenty of activity to document. I surveyed dozens of fungal colonies, I took snapshots of lichens and mushrooms breaking down old-growth forest and compared them day by day and week by week, and I spent my free time turning my garden into a work of art. I thought I could get by just being social with the church ladies who stopped by. Then the winter hit.
That first winter was...I'm not going to lie, it was bad. Six months with too much free time on my hands, nothing to do but tramp out to the same few spots every day and document snowfall. Six months to think about how cold my bed was with just me in it. Six months of going out to the bar every night just to be around other human beings, knowing that if I so much as touched a woman's hand the wrong way, everyone would know about it by morning. Six months of aching, desperate loneliness that had me thinking about quitting the forestry service and hitch-hiking back to Providence if I had to.
And then came spring. And the wind that brought the spores.
I was tracking the weather that whole time, part of the same five-year study that had me taking samples from every fungal colony in the surrounding hundred miles to discover how they propagated themselves. I know they blew in on a strong gust that came out of the north, perhaps as far as the Northwest Territories. I can only imagine how long the spores were down there in the permafrost, waiting for the ice ages to end, waiting for human beings to quit dicking around with cave paintings and start the Industrial Revolution. Waiting for that one warm spring when the greenhouse gases were good and thick and the frozen earth finally melted around them long enough to eject their spores onto the breeze. Waiting for me.
Okay, maybe they weren't waiting for me personally, but it sure felt that way. I came home late one afternoon from a hundred mile round trip to visit a few dozen dead trees, and here was this little patch of bright red puffballs clustered not twenty feet from my front door. It was like they knew who I was and what I was doing so far away from home, and they wanted to make sure that I wasn't alone anymore. Like they sought me out specifically.
Not that I thought any of that at the time. At first, they were just a species of puffball I didn't recognize. I took pictures of them and sent them off on my creaky dial-up modem back to the home office in Fargo, and then I put on a dust mask and prodded one of them until it belched up a cloud of spores that I gathered into a test tube and took to my little greenhouse to cultivate. I pried the empty puffball out of the ground and set it aside, hoping to examine it later. I was excited, of course. Who wouldn't be, finding something so new and bright and fascinating after a solid year of drudgery? But it wasn't until the next morning that I really began to understand what I had found.
The dissection proved to be the turning point. Keep in mind, I am an expert on wild fungus. I'm not lazy or careless, and I know that inhaled spores can be dangerous. I was wearing my mask, I was wearing latex gloves, and I had squeezed all the dust out of the puffball the night before to make sure I wasn't dealing with a lot of active spores to begin with. I was ready to handle just about anything known to science.
But these spores were beautifully, wondrously unknown. The second my scalpel touched the puffball, it exploded in a cloud of musty-smelling dust every bit as thick as the one I squeezed out of it when I first found it, one that went straight through my filters like they weren't there. I gasped in surprise, so startled by the sudden smoky haze that I didn't even realize I was breathing them in, and that was when I felt it. The communion.
It wasn't communication. I want to stress that. I didn't hear a voice speaking to me, I didn't even get feelings or impressions. It was more of an understanding. A sense of complete comprehension about what the spores were, and what they could achieve. What they could give me, if I opened myself up to the possibilities they offered. It didn't feel like a compulsion to me at all. I just knew exactly what I needed to do, and once I knew, I was eager to begin.
Please understand, my behavior-my mind-it wasn't altered at all. Not like the others.
