An incident in Manawatu

Two skinny men sit on a low wall by Memorial Park, a block away from my house, drinking V and smoking. The smoke catches in my sore throat as I walk past, but I smile and say hello. One smiles. The other says, “Keen for it?”

I laugh nervously, taken aback. “I mean it,” he says.

“I don’t think so.” I keep walking.

“Come on, love,” he calls after me.

The man is probably feeling isolated in lockdown too, looking for connection, and he’s most likely harmless. But I feel angry as I walk on. Now I’ll need to find a new walking route to avoid the park.

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mushrooms” uses fungi as a metaphor for women rising up from obscurity to claim their rights. I like the thought of the mushrooms coming up through the soil, slowly and quietly, to stake their claim to the ground.

A friend who also lives alone messages me. No one has contacted her in the couple of weeks since lockdown began, and she’s feeling lonely. She’s been out fungi foraging; she sends a photo of herself smiling, dog by her side, holding a bagful of huge field mushrooms.

On my morning walk I find small white mushrooms growing on the school field. I’m not confident in my identification skills but I’m 95 percent sure these are edible. I pick one and send my friend a photo.

“It smells like a mushroom,” I text, “and it looks like one. But I’m still nervous – they say you shouldn’t eat them unless you’re one hundred percent sure of your ID.”

They also say that if you eat wild fungi, you should leave some of them so that people will know what killed you.

“Definitely a field mushroom,” she texts back.

Before going to bed, I place the mushroom gill-side down on an old envelope. By morning, it has created a beautiful dark-brown spore print. That means it’s edible.

I decide to give it a go. I fry it, and it’s delicious.

I start reading about fungi from mycology websites. The mushrooms and toadstools that grow above ground are the fruit of a larger organism called a mycelium, made up of hyphae – tube-shaped filaments that spread through substrates such as soil, manure or rotting wood.

Plants use hyphae to communicate with each other by transporting nutrients and water, and by sending chemical warnings about pests or diseases. We’re connected to fungi through our dependence on them for beer, wine, bread, medicines and pesticides, as well as the edible mushrooms we get from the supermarket or greengrocer.

I find a puffball that’s been prised out of the soil and split down the middle; it looks as if it’s been used as a football. When I pick it up, the mushroom smell is intense. I take the damaged puffball home, then look at fungi identification sites to work out if it’s edible. Apparently, it’s more than that: it’s Calvatia gigantea, the holy grail of fungi finds. The only inedible thing it can be confused with is a football, says one site. So, it’s a definite ID. But I’m still a bit nervous. And it looks so much like a human skull, with a stalk attaching it to the soil like a spinal cord attaching a head to a body, that I can’t bring myself to eat it. I toss the puffball into the corner of the garden and leave it for the bugs.

On my walk today, I go down to the river, where I find a couple of fungi that look like frilled parasols. I look them up when I get home. They’re Coprinus comatus, or shaggy ink caps, so named because they can be used as ink, but also known as lawyer’s wig: non-native, widespread globally, and edible if you eat them when they’re young, soon after picking.

All the same, I can’t quite face them, especially as the larger one has started to liquefy in the plastic bag. I leave the bag on the porch outside, planning to empty the contents into the garden later so they might colonise my front lawn.

In the morning, the liquefied ink cap has left a great black stain on my porch. I try to scrub it off, but it won’t budge. If the apocalypse is coming, at least I’ll have the means to document it, in mushroom ink, for anyone who may survive.

A mildly abbreviated chapter taken from Heart Stood Still by Miriam Sharland (Otago University Press, $35), a collection of essays set set in the heart of Manawatū, based on her journal entries throughout the 2020 Covid lockdown. The book is available in bookstores nationwide and through Bookhub, the fast and easy way to buy NZ books.