Lessons on Foraging

Once we reach the burn scar, we walk with our heads down, looking for the fungus that grows after fire, in the most disturbed earth, the black-capped convoluted morels—mushrooms that cannot be cultivated, the fungus that fetches hefty sums in expensive restaurants. Looking down at the ground is its own relief, not because of the hot sun, but because I'm now dealing with something new, another manifestation of aging that no one talks about, one more mundane than the brain tumors I have recently been diagnosed with. The singed pine needles and charcoal earth camouflage my floaters, providing relief from the spray of tiny black dots, the smashed-on-windshield bugs, the cobwebs and gray amoebas that now obscure my field of vision.Two summers ago, the Caldor Fire burned over 200,000 acres, roaring into California's Lake Tahoe Basin where I have made my home these past 25 years. While we were evacuated, we watched a video posted by first responders: The hillside above our house, where we are now morel hunting, was engulfed in orange flames. We had been glued to our security cameras, the twice-daily Cal Fire updates, the weather forecast, and the air quality index, which hovered at about 500, the most hazardous air—so toxic it was literally off the charts. At times the red blob on the active fire maps seemed to cover our neighborhood, and we thought we'd surely lose our home; the fire had already destroyed more than 800 homes and structures on its path through the mountains and into the Tahoe Basin.Because of the changing winds, some lucky rain, and the efforts of firefighters, not one house in the basin burned down, a kind of miracle, though we're now left with wide swaths of charcoal forests, jagged black teeth climbing mountainsides and biting into the Sierra blue sky—it's a hard landscape to get used to, but I suppose, we can get used to anything.We hiked from our house—my husband and I—on a trail frequented by walkers, mountain bikers, dogs, and horses. We then crossed the creek, heading off trail up the hillside brambles and over downed logs across smaller creeks. The dry pine needles crunched below our boots as we climbed the ridge toward the burn area. I bent down to pick up a long pinecone. “Sugar pine,” I said. My husband looked back and nodded. We were still in the mixed conifer forest that had been mostly spared. Incense cedar, ponderosa pine, fir—some hollowed out and blackened by spot fires or by lightning, but the rest still full, green, and healthy. Crimson snow plants erupted red and sensual from the forest duff, a sign of late spring, of morel season.We caught the charcoal smell of afterburn before we were among the blackened trees. My breath caught, even though I had hiked and cycled and skied through parts of this fire scar time and again over the past two years. It doesn't matter—each time I feel the stone of sadness drop from my throat, sliding into my stomach and settling there.This is our new normal, this fire-ruined landscape that will never look as it once did, not in my lifetime anyway. We scrambled through a thicket of mountain alder and manzanita, and entered the burn area, where the soil is scorched black and the tree bark, a charcoal dust. Without the shady forest canopy, the sun blazes hot in this burned-out place. I keep my eyes cast downward, looking for morels, which hide themselves so well among the blackened earth and rusty pine needles. I almost forget about my floaters, but not quite.There was a stretch of time in my late 40s that felt unbearable—coming into the latter part of life when parents and friends die, where our own bodies begin to betray us in ways we could not have imagined. At the time, I believed I had entered “the bad news line,” which was what I called it when my mother and dear friend Ilyse were diagnosed with cancer at about the same time, when each died, and then my in-laws both died in quick succession, too. I believed that my time in the bad news line would end, and soon enough, I would step back into the good news line.But here's the thing: As we get older, the good news line gets shorter and shorter. I'm 54 now, and this past year has felt like one reminder of mortality after another, though maybe that's what aging is—getting used to the inevitable downward slide. About a year ago, I started having troubling neurological symptoms: double vision, migraines, and vertigo, which marked my entrance into the healthcare wind tunnel. When I was young, I believed I would never become one of those people who talked about my ailments, but when the words are doubling on the page, when my husband suddenly has two heads, it's hard to talk about much else. I'm now that person I never believed I would become.After brain scans and bloodwork, echocardiograms and heart Holters, sleep studies and specialists, I've been diagnosed with not just one brain tumor, but two—a meningioma and a pituitary adenoma. The brain tumors are likely benign, incidental findings, meaning that when they start looking, they find things that have nothing to do with the symptoms that sent you to the doctor in the first place. It feels like a lot sometimes, but I also know my 84-year-old self, if such a self exists in the future, will look back and laugh at my 54-year-old naiveté, and she will say, “Sit down, sister. You ain't seen nothing yet.”I also know things could be so much worse—among the scarier things that could have been causing my symptoms are cancerous brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, and myasthenia gravis. I've been on an anti-inflammatory diet now for about a year, and symptoms are improving, so I believed I was stepping back into the good news line. But then a few weeks ago, I knocked myself out, gave myself a concussion, and am now seeing spots.“Here's one,” my husband calls, pointing to the blackened ground. I hurry over and we stand still, knowing morels grow in clusters; where there's one morel, there are many. We refocus, softening our gaze, and the morels start appearing, as if they are just now emerging from the earth. Sometimes it takes a lot of looking to finally see something that's always been there. Like a handhold when bouldering. Like an incidental finding. Like a tumor lodged between the hemispheres, a tiny rock climber clinging to the brain's falx cerebri.We slice the flesh below the convoluted head of each mushroom and then drop them into our paper bags. We're giddy, as if we've finally been let in on a secret that had been whispered behind our backs. It's a bounty, this grouping of morels, scattered in the crater that once held a giant lodgepole's roots. The wind picks up, and I know that could mean falling trees. We're underneath hazard trees, blackened and branchless, that could topple at any time. It would be a swift end, devoid of the deathbed rattle. No smells of urine and disinfectant. I want to tell my husband I would be all right with such a death, the falling tree, in case it happens. I decide he already knows this. We walk on, the crunch of burnt earth complaining beneath our boots.It was my fault, the concussion that is, or at least it feels that way to me. We were leaving for Hawaii the next day, which meant an early flight, and whenever I have to rise early, I have trouble falling asleep, as if I'll miss the morning by giving into the night. I had bought some pot gummies for a friend who lived in Hawaii, assuming he couldn't legally get them there. I'm not much of a cannabis person because it makes me forgetful, quiet, and tired. Perfect, I thought, for sleep. I ate half a gummy about an hour before bed.The vertigo started when I was brushing my teeth, so I held onto the bathroom counter with both hands. I felt buzzy, lightheaded, and dizzy. The back of my head broke my fall onto the slate floor.My husband says I was only out for about five seconds, and he helped me to bed, which I do not remember. My glasses had fallen off my face, and my husband accidentally stepped on them, crushing them. These weren't just any glasses, but my father's 1960s eyeglasses—a prized possession—one of the only things I have left from him aside from his old typewriter and a copy of Shakespeare's collected works. But I wasn't thinking about my glasses when I came to; instead, I asked again and again, “What happened to me?” According to my husband, I fell. I nodded and then asked again. He kept telling me, and I kept nodding and asking.With a dent in my head and an old set of glasses, I set off for Hawaii the next morning. I did not know that one should not board a plane with a head injury. I did not know that sometimes a small brain bleed hemorrhages at altitude. I only knew I had whiplash and a headache. I did not know that after a concussion, you should rest your recently knocked-around brain. That you should take care of this most vital organ, the one that makes you, you. Instead, I worked on the plane, reading a book manuscript and then writing a review. I sat by the window to better see my work. I didn't know to stay off screens, away from bright lights.We arrived in Hilo during a rainstorm, a deluge, the water pouring off roofs and flooding roads. I hoped the rain would wash away the events of the previous evening, would erode the shame I felt for taking the gummy and making my vertigo more dangerous, for allowing my head to break a fall on a slate floor. For being responsible for hurting the body I had been trying to diagnose and to heal. For doing everything wrong.We stayed in a jungle hut made of corrugated steel, bamboo, metal screening, and hard plastic. One “wall” could be propped up on hinges, opening to the green tangle of palms and vines, letting in the sounds of the night—rain, crickets, and coquis. Lightning sprayed into the small cabin, thunder exploded overhead without even a second between flash and sound—the white light and resounding ka-boom all at once. My head hurt, but everything else was lovely.In the morning, I followed a path through the jungle to the ocean. The rising sun reflected a hallway of yellow light on the dark blue ocean. Waves crashed against the shoreline, the hardened molten lava and fine black sand. The surf break was strong at this point: a loud, rhythmic power, sending salty spray into the early sun. Under palm trees, memorials lined the one-lane road. A stone mosaic frame displayed a photograph of a young woman with the name Coral painted beneath. A wooden cross tilted with the remnants of a plumeria lei; a small wood wall was decorated with wilting orchids. I had fallen and knocked myself out, yes, but I was here, very much alive, and I was grateful. I took a few photographs and then followed the trail back through the jungle.I noticed the spots as soon as I returned to our little glamping hut. Had a swarm of gnats followed me from the shore? I tried to wave them away, but they persisted, bouncing around as I moved my eyes. I covered one eye with my hand and then the other; my right eye was clear, but my left eye seemed to be full of debris, insects imbedded into my field of vision.What followed was a lot of Googling, frantic texts to my emergency-room doctor friend Jason, and a phone call to a Hilo eye clinic. From my Internet search, I learned that I most likely had an acute posterior vitreous detachment, where the gel-like substance that gives our eyes their shape had detached from the back of my eyeball, and apparently this is something that normally happens gradually as we age, but mine peeled off all at once because of the fall, resulting in a spray of floaters.Now I was really angry with myself. I had damaged my eyesight with one bang to the head. The real danger, though, was that the retina can tear or detach as the gel pulls away, requiring emergency surgery or else blindness. I asked my husband, “If I lose sight in this eye, will I have enough peripheral vision to ski steep chutes?” That's what I was worried about: skiing. Is this the place where I tell you how I am aware of my extreme privilege? That many people around the world experience retinal tears and detachment with no access to healthcare. That my whole life has pretty much been lived in the good news line, relatively speaking. But of course, in the midst of this, I wasn't feeling lucky in the least, especially when the floaters, accompanied by flashing lights, developed in the right eye as well.The Hilo eye doctor confirmed my self-diagnosis of acute PVD (post vitreous detachment). Even though the internet had told me floaters often last forever, I asked him when they would go away, hoping the internet was wrong about that. The doctor answered my question with a sorry look before shaking his head and saying, “Sometimes they settle a little and you don't notice them as much. Or else your brain might get used to them and filter them out. Or . . . ”I was looking at the handsome eye doctor through a million black pinpricks with larger specks like spiders dangling from webs in front of his face.“Or they might never go away,” I finished his sentence.He nodded and said, “Most people get these eventually. It's a normal part of aging, though most of my patients are older than you. You just got them all at once, likely because of the head trauma.”A gel in the eye that eventually detaches seems like a serious design flaw, but then again, so much of aging feels that way to me. We act as though we're built to last forever, but each body part has its own expiration date. I had known about the gray hair and the wrinkles, the loss of muscle tone and teeth, but no one had ever told me about the development of fine peach on my and the on my or the hot and the I developed them, I had never known that eye floaters were normal in the aging eye doctor didn't find retinal or a detachment, which came as a relief, and I to see just how lucky I had Sometimes as and it takes a to see things as they really I was about I felt a of on the of my time I stepped on I looking for a but a small black spot on the of my so I to see a was in the before so when the doctor my a I was both and He I would to have it and I should for to pick me up after the I was I his good and on the of the I home in called my parents to what had and I telling my that I couldn't I had something so I said, you I thought only and had than with me, as I thought he my said, “If you a in real That's nothing to the things you will then my was and he knew a or two about the ways things go in the though he ever his own with in them. I would only find out much that I was complaining about a he was Instead, I thought my had been and I didn't know he had in this But from where I these with my glasses and my field of vision now a I can see more a is nothing to everything that has and will to recently to see my I in down on looked but when I asked how she was she said, then she told me that so many of friends were serious were many said, all get these and These But the now is that they to get are never a look on face, as if this was something no one had ever told she into a and she said, of older and we don't know what we're it's We don't know we're something for the last time after it's I did not know that the jungle walk to the would be the last time I would see a without floaters my field of Had I known might I have just a little It seems to me that we to act like everything we experience is for the very last time, because at some it will But what a it is to experience the of is something I might not much about if I lived through through the of parents who both early, through my own brain tumor was that the eye doctor had my but still, I my eyes that next morning to the gray and a of floaters, and this was my first is how I will I don't want to like this. I had never such a thought and it me, so I started to though my husband is always to my he that morning, he came sat on the bed, and held my He didn't tell me that having floaters was no did he I was He didn't say, be He sat and he to me and my He came to my little at the I him said, know this could be so much and that I'm so I feel for feeling I told him I the of vision without floaters or at the very least, I to go back in time and feel for something I did not know I would soon He nodded and me a there it that very I was through a in time I take for the rain on the the through the the kind of my The to rise from that bed, walk out the and for across the earth, the black lava like The air full of and the new a and green, life really from I told the I take it all I want to just like few ago, I was having with and I was trying to a about how our so I something about how if you don't have your you don't have One of my looked me in the eye, and she said, not You can still have a even without your had I knew but I didn't know the I knew she had a husband and a little she and friends who was a and had just and finished a very much had a the on very full life she died, having everything right up she had husband and I walk with our heads down, our for and are black with the smell of charcoal to our We keep our eyes on the scorched and in the of fallen trees, but we don't find more morels, so we it up and start heading our toward The beneath our boots and the on smells like early I feel a of relief my as we the burn and back into the forest though we for the burn area, we're only about a from a reminder of just how the came this time, a reminder that our are full of and even if we don't them as I looking past the floaters, seeing the this knowing it's a landscape I'll eventually get used I I don't want to in any line, even if I'm good it's the last time I'll experience this one and to miss it I around for something