In Which I Totally Debunk Myself

The other day, I opined that a pool in a tidal marsh looked like a portal to another world.

This spooky-looking pool. with its crisp clear edges and inscrutable depths, was nothing if not mysterious.

Can you tell how deep it is?  I can't.

If it were really a portal to another world, though, how would one enter it?  Surely not head-first, for the injury that may result.  No, instead, if I were to enter this pool, I would first put on a pair of waders, the kind that are held up by suspenders.

Then I would sidle up to the edge and, very gingerly, sit down, put my butt on the edge of the hole, and dangle my legs in the water.

Only then would I learn what my legs are to encounter.  Silt, I expect, velvety soft and yielding.  The question is how far I would sink once I put my weight on  that unstable surface.  It could be an unimaginable depth, in that watery marsh.

If these holes are filled by water from an underground water table, there may be no bottom.

And what if there were quicksand down there?  Does quicksand occur on Cape Cod?

If this truly were a portal to another world,  it would most likely be a portal to death by drowning.

But it's probably not even that.  It's probably just a deep, mucky hole with about three feet of silty mud on the bottom and a few feet of water on the top.

A reality-based counterpoint to my imaginings of another world.

Portals to Another World

These perfect little pools, plentiful in low-lying marshes, reflect the sky with mirrorlike clarity, but in their centers, purple-green layers of silt give way to a darkness of an unknowable depth.  That's why, in the crisply green and even edges of their perimeters, and the dark layers of silt at their centers, these pools take on an air of mystery.

..."Some of these are several feet deep, and have a spooky, antediluvian look," wrote  Whitney Balliett, in Weeset Journal, a piece in the October 3, 1983 issue of The New Yorker.  "Their bottoms are covered with soft, purple-green silt, [the silt itself] two or three feet deep."

Officially, these mysterious pools are salt pannes, water-filled depressions that occur in salt marshes.

Whitney Balliett says that they are also called pud holes, clam pools, or sloughs.  The first two names seem like a they are both a pretty earthy vernacular.   But slough?  That seems like a more technical term.  It would probably take a hydrologist or ecologist or geologist to determine what is a slough and what is a panne.

For now, I'd rather think of them as mysterious and murky.  Primeval.

Would You Eat One of These?

Would you eat one of these? 

I saw a group of these today on Cape Cod,  and  using this book,

...I was able to identify them as an edible, even delicious fungus called the black chanterelle or horn of death, also known as craterellus fallax.   To me, they look more like part of a Halloween costume than an edible fungus.  

Nevertheless, a web site written by Tom Volk of the botany department at the University of Wisconsin https://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/july98.html

 opines that this fungus, craterellux fallax, is

 "...actually a delicious edible mushroom. It's not prized for its flavor or texture, but mainly for its odor, which is very sweet (much like apricots,) and woodsy at the same time. [...] People who eat this mushroom generally like it in spaghetti sauce. I prefer it sautéed in olive oil and butter and eaten directly or in stir-fry. It dries very well and adds a great flavor to eggs cooked in the middle of winter...." 

 Yeah, that sounds great, but I'm not gonna try it.

Here on Cape Cod, with all this rain, it's mushroom season.  I found out today that gathering mushrooms is allowed within the Cape Cod National Seashore, and that in fact it's a very popular activity.  This information came from a guy named Jason, who identified himself as the supervisor of Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife's Southeast Management Area, speaking from an office in Buzzard's Bay.  https://www.mass.gov/locations/masswildlife-southeast-district-office 

Here's a published example stating the popularity of this pastime:  http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20081018/news/810180307

Tomorrow--now that it's stopped raining--we're going to go out and look.  I don't want to eat these things necessarily, I just want to see them and know what they are.  

Like this delightful little number, which I saw today:

 It looks like a product of equine digestion, doesn't it?  Nevertheless, I was able to identify it as pisolithus tinctorius, also known as the dyemaker's puffball, dead man's fist, horse dung fungus, or dog turd fungus. 

 You can't eat this one...aw, shucks!  But according to the Scientific American's blog, you can look inside one of these things and see a work of art:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/wonderful-things-the-hidden-beauty-of-the-horse-dung-fungus/

According to Scientific American, 

"The roundish objects are locuoles, packets of ripening spores that you can see in successive stages of readiness from the bottom (center) of the fungus to the top, where they metamorphose into powdery puffs of cinnamon spores. Pisolithus literally means "pea stone", and I think you can see how it got that name. They are embedded within a black matrix, through which they appear to bubble up like air in an aquarium in a beautiful textural mosaic of color. The black matrix is the stuff that dyers use to color cloth a shade of reddish brown or black, according to Volk, [referring to Tom Volk of the University of Wisconsin, mentioned above]  giving the fungus its common name."

I never would have been tempted to pull up one of them and bisect it lengthwise, as Jennifer Frazer, the author of the Scientific American piece, apparently did.  But now that I've seen how crazy interesting it is on the inside, I might just go do that.

How did I get so interested in fungi?

Last year at this time, as the trailing coattails of Hurricane Jose swept over the Cape, Joe and I went out to the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail, https://www.nps.gov/caco/planyourvisit/atlanticwhitecedar.htm for a walk after all the rain.  We had no idea that we would see the number and variety of fungi that we saw.  I wrote about it here:

http://stitching-it-all-together.blogspot.com/2017/09/mists-and-dark-mirrors.html 

One guy was running through the woods collecting them in a shopping bag.  I asked him how he knew what he was doing and he said he was going to look them up when he got home.  Good luck, I told him.

That experience led me and Joe to a mushroom collecting experience at Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery a few weeks ago.

 https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxvxBjTCLQbzHcwrklcQqtQjbDWW 

Joe Lenoce, a member of the Connecticut Mycological Society http://cvmsfungi.org/index.html  handed out paper lunch bags, inviting us to go forth and gather mushrooms and bring them back to him for identification.  He had a big tome with him, from which he was able to identify everything we brought him.

Did you know that mushrooms are officially fungi, and that the part we see above ground is only the fruiting body?  The fruiting body does its thing and goes back into the earth, but the below ground part of the fungus, called the mycelium, is perennial.  According to the BBC, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism-in-the-world, there is a mycelium in Oregon that is so big that it covers two square miles and is the largest living thing on earth.

A humongous fungus.

Soon we're going to follow this magical-looking path through Atlantic White Cedar Swamp and see what we can find: