Mushroom Weather
It has rained for three days, and then, on the fourth, it stops, and the man who has agreed to take me into the woods looks at the sky with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose lottery numbers have come up. "Now," he says. "Now we go." I do not understand, at this point, why we could not have gone yesterday, or why the rain was apparently essential, or what precisely we are waiting for. I understand only that he is treating the weather the way a sailor treats a tide, and that I am about to be shown up, comprehensively, as a man who has never in his life known what the forest was doing. We go the next morning, early, while the light is still grey and horizontal and the leaf-litter is soaked and the whole wood smells of something I can only describe as brown — wet earth and rot and fungus and last year's leaves breaking down into this year's soil. He moves slowly, scanning the ground with his head tilted, and within about four minutes he has bent down and ...
