Aside from three mountain bikers, we’d seen not a soul on the loop.  We just emerged from a dark, wet canopied stretch.  The creek rushed at the low point of the hike, the dog plunging and pouncing in the whitewater.  The end of summer hung in the air, trees flush with quivering leaves and dappled light as we climbed the last mile.  Too far from the trailhead to hear the road traffic, the birds were quiet.  It had been a nice hike despite the week’s rain.  I’d forgotton to pack my Salomons, stepping gingerly, worried my spongy Sanaks would give on the slick rocks.

Gypsy stopped first, alert, wary.

Cheryl was behind, on a stretch of trail not far from where we’d once taken a wrong turn, preoccupied with ferns.  Something about them reminded her of ferns past.  I used to be the lagger, zooming in on dew drops or blue lupine, but these days, the dog is all I can manage, so I let her trot if she has the energy.

She’d just sniffed out a languid baby squirrel, ghostly gray, when, around a huge tangle of root where a toppled oak unearthed holes big enough to stow a body, I saw him.  He was sprawled across the trail on his elbows peering into a camera.  I thought maybe he’d found a water snake or nest of bees.  He saw me and stood, Nikon dangling from its strap.  A cut square of gray foam, the old kind with peaks and valleys once used for packing, clung to his bare knees before falling.

The man had a large brow.  Cheryl would later describe him as Neanderthal.  He reminded me of the lion in Wizard of Oz when he first appeared, bounding from the woods, angry and menacing, right after Dorothy says, “I don’t like this forest.  It’s dark and creepy.”  On his round head perched a gray baseball hat, starched peak with a grayed-out US flag, thick hiking boots.  He made eye contact like a drill sergeant, squinting when he spoke, and he spoke in long rambling phrases, pausing, checking if you followed, a window for contribution.

“This here is a finger-stalk mushroom, common to these parts, nothing special, over there, let me show you the branch mushroom I found, where is it, lost my place, it’s got to be here somewhere, called ramentacea, a Spanish fella told me, I think Hispanic or Latin.  Mexican.  Anyway, he knows Spanish, the language all about prefixes.”

He paused for what I took to be my turn.  I had nothing, stuck on “all about prefixes.”

It was courtesy to reciprocate, but I sensed neediness.  Conversation felt compulsory.  Was ram- even a prefix?  I searched for a word that started with ram- .  Although the consequences of engaging this oddball were top of mind, the word “ramification” would only come later.   By now, Cheryl had caught up, and Mushroom Man, as Cheryl would call him, turned to her.

“There it is,” he said.

“What are we looking at?” Cheryl said.

“Aristodea ramentacea.  It’s a mushroom with fine, intricate branches, higher evolved, funny, what you learn from people out here, their stories, I learned something from a godless man, camping not far from here, haven’t hiked this trail, not lately, used to all the time.  Funny who you meet, their stories.”  He squinted at me.

Again, stumped.  Who was camping:  him or the atheist?  Maybe they bivouacked together, symbiotic buddies, like white fungus on a bat’s nose, nature’s chance, formed in the dark, the godless and god-fearing rubbing sticks together and around the bend, we just might find their tent and pentagram scratched in the dirt under a cross.  I could’ve asked where he was camped.

Most of the mushroom body — the mycelium — grows hidden, a network of filament underground, only its spore-bearing fruit exposed.  What you see of the ‘shroom is the tiniest fraction — the tip of the iceberg, eleven percent, a gross misrepresentation — a vanishing bit, though crucial to evolutionary survival.  The largest organism in the world is not the sperm whale, not the Sequoiadendron giganteum, but the mushroom, Armillaria ostoyae, or honey fungus.  I kept the fun fact to myself.

Mushroom Man turned to Cheryl, “I used to be a birder, thousands of pictures of birds, now thousands of pictures of mushrooms, I’m a naturalist.  My wife bought me this camera, all the pictures I was taking, she said, you’re obsessed again, we should get you a nice camera.  I have a good eye. Birding, it trained my eye for color and movement.”

It seemed an imperfect time for a joke about the color and movement of mushrooms.  I could’ve asked if he had an Instagram or blog.  You’d be surprised how many mushroom podcasts have sprouted recently.  I wondered how one might organize thousands of pictures of mushrooms.  Family, genus, species?  Or color: white, off-white, dead-white, gray?

If you were to classify an organism on its food-making ability, mushrooms and humans would group together for what they lack, chloroplasts.  Green.

“I see one,” Cheryl said, locating the finger-stalk.  Alone, the stalk rose six inches from a bed of dead leaves, diameter of a thumb, palm-size cap, color-drained, dutifully decomposing without fanfare, an unlikely object of attention.  “That’s a big one.”

He said, “I document mushrooms.  Thousands.”

Could this man lack friends?  Who lies alone in the woods waiting to ambush someone conversationally?  Could a curve shape exist — an inverted U — to describe the relationship between conversation skills and friend count?  Plot number of friends on the vertical axis, desire to converse on the horizontal.  Those who talk too little with few friends, and those who talk too much with few friends, each found on parallel but extreme stems of the inverted U.  Maybe the best personality type, my wife’s, on the peak — trust and confirm; as opposed to my distrust upfront or his upfront trust.

“Cool,” Cheryl slipped her phone from a compartment in her yoga pant.  “I have lemon yellow mushrooms in my garden.  Let me show you.”

They stood shoulder-to-shoulder.  The dog panted on her belly in the cool dirt, watching.  The dog makes eye contact with everyone, a masterful friend-maker, but the man only squinted.

Maybe he belonged to a Facebook group of fungoid foragers.  All personalities find refuge in social media, the talkers and trollers, stalkers and posers.   I wondered about his wife.  All I could picture was a peach-colored inflatable, dark wig, propped on a chair in a double-wide.  Cheryl would be more charitable, saying later, “No, no.  She bought him a camera.” 

I scanned the forest floor, half-expecting a spade to reveal itself poking out from the detritus.  Cheryl swiped.  I anxiously waited for mushroom man to strike: a wrist grab, chokehold, box-cutter from nowhere.  I imagined myself crouching barefoot, martial arts-like, having kicked off my shoes for purchase in the dirt or grade-school intimidation, brandishing a long-handled shovel.

The Hat Thrower fungus is the fastest living thing on Earth.  It casts its spores at an acceleration rate 20,000 times the rate of free-fall.  The fungus is toxic and can take down a bison.

Cheryl said, “Flowerpot Parasol.  It’s poisonous.  Do you have the Seek app?”

The man said, “Poisonous, no mushrooms aren’t poisonous, they’re toxic, but how about that, you’ve got one toxic toadstool there — Leucocoprinus birnbaumii — latin name, but you wouldn’t have much use for latin, would you?  Toxicity, same thing as poisonous for some people, when you think about it, all about the dosage, water, chocolate, even innocence, a mushroom called Amanita virosa, you might know the common name —Destroying Angel — will hurt you if you get too close and touch it.”

I remembered my dog, still a puppy, eating a stick of butter I’d dropped, wrapper and all.  I had to leave for work, fine leaving her to her own devices.  Cheryl cradled her and delivered her to the vet.  The vet said it was a good idea, based on her body weight, and induced vomiting.  The wrapper was never recovered.  I kept this story to myself.

Mushroom man said, “I wore gloves, trust me, I was careful but somehow it got on me, my wife saw my face, I wasn’t feeling so good, flushed, you know, red, she said you’ve been handling those mushrooms again, haven’t you, take a shower already.  I took my shirt off and saw a birth mark in the mirror, big as a melon, right back here, like a big birth mark.”

He twisted his torso, pulled up his shirt as if still looking.  His skin was doughy and unblemished.  I wondered how many mushroom pictures my wife could possibly have, just then recalling the bright orange mushrooms in the mulch around our patio.  They attract greasy snails.

Not finding a mark, he continued, “But I’d been smoking pot, you know, seeing things, so I thought maybe I was just paranoid, hallucinations, what have you, and later the bullseye got bigger and redder and my wife said take some Benadryl and I chased it with brandy, okay, but the mushroom, I never touched.  I stood too close.   And it got me.  It got me good.  Now I never hike without it.”

Cheryl slipped her phone into its compartment and stepped away.

Mushroom man’s propensity for conversation kept growing with reciprocation, a smile, a nod, all I could summon, but add Cheryl to the potting mix and that was more than enough, he’d creep, like a fertilized fungus, hunger stimulated, extending its tendrils to feed off the living.  Insatiable.

The man’s ramblings were captivating in a way, and I wondered what lie deeper in his untrained mind.  He was not without joy, like a breathless boy telling stories, no hint of ego.  He seemed too disorganized to have his own Instagram or blog, but I was likely projecting.  I have hundreds of wildlife photos on three different computers, three different image file formats, some inadvertently in duplicate, triplicate, stored by vacation or year or favorites.  I have a blog with no discernible theme.

Facebook has acknowledged Instagram is harmful to teenage girls self-image.  As for the 60-year-old demographic, could Instagram’s harmful effects be compounded when loosed upon a regressed, mushroom-addled, pothead?

“Thank you for sharing,” he said sadly, sensing an end.  “The people you meet, the things you learn.”

As if a switch thrown, he perked up.  “I’ll tell you a story I just heard, a man, I guess he didn’t believe in God.  He and his kind spent a long cold night camping some time ago, summoning spirits, a Ouija board-type situation.”

“Ooh, I like ghost stories,” Cheryl said.

Mushroom Man continued, “They had to break camp when a spirit shook their tent so they hid in their car when it grabbed the handle of their car.  Devil worshippers, they tried to enter their car, the car wouldn’t start.”

Cheryl said, “Who tried to enter?  A ghost?”

“You tell me.  Something.  It tried to get in.  It rocked the car.  The engine roared, the wheels spun in place, the only thing that moved, a cloud of burnt rubber, the wheels seized, the doors opened wildly, slammed shut, opened, slammed, then everything stopped.  In the moonlight, the car glowed that glow-in-the-dark green.  The color shifted red, the interior of the car ablaze in a darkroom red, the red of hell-fire.  They couldn’t unlock their doors.”

Cheryl said, “Trapped.”

“Like caged rats.  The car shook, little bounces at first, then big.  They hit their heads on the roof.  Someone broke a window and they escaped into the woods.”

“The devil worshippers got away?”  Cheryl asked.

I couldn’t follow the story, were the satanic cult members the campers or the people who came upon the campers?  Did people even come upon the campers or were they spirits aligned with the forces of darkness?  I shot her a look.  She bent to the dog and said, “Let’s go, Gypsy girl.”

The dog trotted beside me, too tired to lead.  I tugged her leash, not letting her sniff the trailside grasses.  So close to the car, I steered her from the muddy patches, something about the squish triggers her inner wolf to leap and bite.  This was not play time.

Cheryl said, “Mushroom man was a little creepy.”

“You think?”  I said.

“That stuff about devil worshippers.”

“I thought you liked that.”

“I did.  But he had a big head.”

We’d parked on the shoulder of the road, a downhill stretch where cars roared past.  The wall of sound was unnerving.  I had the dog on a short leash.  She was tired, and I lifted her into the back seat.  The car faced the wrong way, no shoulder for a u-turn, so I drove downhill in a direction away from our cabin and pulled into a drive to reverse course.  

Cheryl said, “Let’s go into town.  I bet the Blue Ridge Olive Oil Company sells that infused truffle oil.  I’m in the mood for popcorn.”

As the car labored up toward the trailhead, a large pickup pulled out of the parking lot.  I saw fingers lift from the steering wheel, a wave, the driver was Mushroom Man.  Hard to tell, but seated behind him in the extended cab, I thought I saw a figure, a lion’s mane of dark hair, kind of stiff.

Sapro- comes from the Greek sapros, meaning “rotten, putrid”.  Saprotrophic mushrooms feed off the dead.

Cheryl hadn’t noticed the truck.  “The ferns reminded me of a terrarium I had as a girl scout,”  she said.  “What kind of naturalist doesn’t have the Seek app?  I guess I’m a naturalist too.”  She removed her seatbelt and turned, “What?  What do you see?  Gypsy is fine.  She’s tired.  Forget town, let’s go to the cabin.”

I was fine with that.  Narrow sidewalks bustling with weekenders wanting to talk to me.  About my dog.  It was a few turns and some miles before I stopped checking the rearview.