Will o' the Wisp

I never saw a fairy before that night—the most horrible night of my life. And that includes the time when I was maybe eight years old, and my older brother Tommy dared me to run around the house naked after dark, to prove I wasn’t a baby anymore. Then he locked me outside in the cold October night for six hours while he watched The Simpsons and ate potato chips on the couch.

(On the bright side, after I told on him, Tommy was never allowed to babysit me again. There are always silver linings.)

No, this night was worse.

Never in my forty-four years have I felt so much pain, and as my gut wrenched and cramped, and my tortured bowels all but poured completely out of me, I confess I entertained the wish that I would just die so the suffering would end.

(When I told this to my wife the following morning, she patted my arm with false sympathy and said, "Try childbirth, Honey.")

Sometimes I wonder if I actually did die, and this world I find myself in now is some strange version of heaven.

But I don't think that's the case. My family and friends are all still here, and they treat me as they've always treated me—except for the odd looks they shoot my way whenever I mention anything about fairies. If this was heaven, and heaven was a place where fairies did exist, then I wouldn't be the only one who sees them.

"My Dad is a lunatic now," I heard my daughter Emma whisper dramatically to one of her school friends, just loud enough for me to hear. This may very well be true; I'm not ruling out the possibility that I have, in fact, gone mad.

(Or, it could be what any teenager concludes about their parent once they reach a certain age.)

In any case, there was a time I may have been offended by the suggestion that my mental state might be out of my control, and is instead linked to the changes of the moon. Such a fanciful notion, for dreamers and tree-huggers, who take their omens from nature and project unfounded interpretations of commonplace phenomena upon the world around them, calling it intuition, all the while singing kumbaya and telling each other “Namaste” over wooden bowls of granola.

Gag me with a spoon. Show me the science, people!

But I rather like the moon, now. Ever since that night, I see that it is quite beautiful, more than just a glowing orb in the night sky.

It's hard to believe that I, Ernie Cromwell, the high school biology teacher, Mr. Science-tells-us-all-we-need-to-know, might now consider myself a dreamer. Am I really a moon-lover who believes in the whimsy of an ethereal realm?

I still shake my head at the idea; it seems an impossibility. And yet, it's either that, or I really have gone mad. Those are my new self-identity options. Because I've never been one for denial; I'm a scientist, after all. I can't ignore the facts.

Facts? Am I really calling them that?

Anyway, it's not the changing moon that caused my temporary (or perhaps permanent?) insanity, my seeing fairies and becoming besotted with the moon. It was eating that damned mushroom.

Before that night, the craziest I ever got was wearing my "I'm a Fungi" t-shirt to work on casual Fridays.

(Fungi, "fun guy," get it?)

Below the clever play on words there is a picture of my favourite mushroom—the oyster. Wearing this shirt every once in a while gives me the occasion to indulge my students in stories of my early forays into the world of mushrooms. They are well aware that mycology is my area of expertise and particular passion.

"Did you know the oyster mushroom is one of the easiest to grow for beginners? That's because they can thrive on many different substrates, and tend to out-compete other species that may also be present."

I ignore their rolling eyes and bored expressions, and plow on, "Oyster was the first type of mushroom I started cultivating for myself, when I was eighteen—not much older than you are now."

I pause, hoping the relatability will trigger some kind of reaction. One boy nods politely.

"But you know what? As much as I love mushroom farming—and I grow more than a dozen varieties now—nothing can compare to wild mushroom foraging. But, there are dangers.”

This perks them up a bit, and I continue, "There’s an old adage that goes, “There are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters. But there are no old bold mushroom hunters.""

I always emphasize the importance of correct mushroom identification. Many edibles have poisonous lookalikes, and if you aren’t 100% sure about it, don’t take the risk.

(“If it’s not a hell yes, then it’s a fuck no!” my daughter likes to say, for the shock value.)

I often cite a particular story of some mushroom expert who accidentally poisoned his entire family. Now I suppose I can speak the cautionary tale from my own experience. I’ll just leave out the bit about the fairies.

You see, my family was on holiday in Australia this past summer. It took us twenty-two hours of airplane, bus, and rental-car travel to arrive at our final destination, a secluded cottage nestled in the woods on the southern east coast.

The first thing I did when we got there, of course, was crack open a beer. My wife and daughters more wisely chose to have a nap, but seeing as it was nearly 5 pm I thought I'd stay up the extra few hours to sync-up with local time. Jet-lag and moderate beer consumption—these are my excuses for what happened next.

I decided to explore the place we would call home for the next three weeks, and wandered through the back yard.

(Naturally I was wearing rubber boots—or "gumboots," if I'm embracing the colloquial term—having researched the wide array of deadly spiders and snakes that Australia has to offer.)

Making my way to the woodlot path at the back of the garden, I felt for the pocket knife and paper bag I always keep on my person, just in case.

As luck would have it, I very quickly stumbled across (what I thought was) my favourite mushroom: the oyster.

Feeling a surge of comfort at the sight of an old friend in an unfamiliar place, I got down on hands and knees beside the half-rotted stump to harvest, and placed a few of them carefully into my paper bag.

It's lucky my family was asleep, otherwise I may have pressed them into sampling a taste of home. As it was, I fried up my bounty in butter and garlic, and ate it all myself, sitting in the back yard, enjoying the view, and feeling chuffed about my discovery.

You know, in some ways the world is a big place, I philosophized to myself, But even in the furthest reaches of a new continent, there are elements that connect us all together.

I washed down the last bite of mushroom with what was left of my second beer, then exhaled in satisfaction.

Ernie, I thought, this holiday is going to be just fine.

Fast-forward an hour, and you would find me in the bathroom, my arms wrapped around the "dunny" in a desperate embrace. And then sitting on the dunny. And alternating back and forth, back and forth, riding the torturous teeter-totter of purging from both ends. That toilet and I got to know each other quite well.

My sickness lasted well into the next day. By mid afternoon, I was finally able to fall sleep, and I didn’t wake up until the following evening, which was the third day of our trip.

Here's the lesson kids: always always ALWAYS double- and triple-check your mushrooms, confirming multiple attributes, even if they're a species you feel very familiar with. If you don't, you'll end up like I did, living through a night of hell. That's if you're lucky. If you're not... you won't make it out the other side.

For a fairy-less tale, this is where the story ends.

But, as you know, there was more:

As the afternoon faded to dusk on the third day, I roused from my healing slumber, still feeling shaky and hollow, but recovered enough to venture back outside.

It seemed a different world than the one I left behind. I thought my eyes were still under the influence of mushroom poison; the grasses, flowers, trees and even the rocks seemed to be breathing, expanding and contracting to their own living rhythms. The very air pulsed with vitality, and seemed to shimmer with dancing heat waves, in every subtle colour of translucent light imaginable.

The light of dusk is a magical thing, I realized. Then a particular glowing green light caught my eye, and I floated down the garden path once more. As I moved, the living air around me seemed to part like silky curtains, softly allowing me through. It was impossible not to move gently, almost with ceremony; to be hasty seemed a sacrilegious way to proceed through the beauty before me.

I walked slowly, my feet pressing the earth tenderly, as I made my way towards the green light. I soon found myself looking at the stump where I had harvested my mushrooms two nights prior. They had grown back, and the magnificent caps were emitting a phosphorescent glow.

"Ghost fungus," I said out loud, "Of course."

Innocent and oyster-looking by day, ethereal-glowing trickster by night. This is what I had consumed and suffered for; this is what transformed me.

The scientist part of me would have called it a day right then, if it wasn’t for the shimmering of the air, and the inner brightness that seemed to radiate from every leaf on every single tree in the forest, the radiance of each coiling fern, the breathing of every stone on my path.

My mind echoed with the scientist’s voice, which seemed distant to me now, and foreign, a rote regurgitation of some text-book fact:

Bioluminescence: light produced by a chemical reaction within a living organism. For the ghost fungus, it involves a light-emitting substance known as luciferin—from the Latin, “light-bringing”—which, when it oxidizes, releases energy in the form of green light.

I crouched down to get a closer look at the underside, and saw sleek silky gills travelling in close parallel with each other, fanning out in perfect balance, running from the stem right to the cap. From within the cap and stem glowed the other-worldly green light. It was an absolute work of art, and its mysterious beauty brought a tear to my eye.

Some ancient peoples thought the glowing mushrooms contained evil spirits, and they would destroy the bad omens before they could do any harm. Other folklore legends claim these mushrooms provide a lighted path for fairies.”

As soon as the thought flickered across my mind, I saw it.

The ghostly illumination within one of the mushrooms glowed brighter for a moment, and that internal aura moved up the stem until it emerged from the cap and hovered a few inches above it, and I swear I could discern tiny human-like limbs, and wings. The being glowed in a way that reminded me of a giant firefly, only the light was steady and unfading. After barely a moment, the fairy—for what else could it possibly be?—traveled off down the path ahead of me. Its beauty pulled me to follow.

My inner scientist gave a feeble last attempt at resistance, saying, “It’s late, you’re tired and still recovering from your culinary disaster. Go home, Ernie. Get some rest.”

Instead I smiled, and walked further down the path, following the magical light.