Marilyn & Me: A Timeless Love Story

By Jack Underhill

A joyous, loving memoir of two people discovering one another after fifty years apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack Underhill
• Release date: Oct 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9780982969366

Jack Underhill

Jack Underhill lives in Borrego Springs and Minneapolis, whichever is warmer or drier at the time. He's worked as an opal miner, magazine writer and publisher, television news director, and wood cutter and sawyer. When he was younger he ran with the coyotes at night and raised chickens by day. Till he went broke.

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PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

I FIRST MET MARILYN IN A DREAM

I stopped in Alturas, California, to buy some groceries. This was six months before I met Marilyn. I’d driven in along a stretch that seemed a favorite place for rutting squirrels and prairie dogs to play in traffic, the road upholstered with their hide and guts. Instead of slowing down my car and giving the critters on the highway a fighting chance to see me coming and stop humping long enough to get out of the way, I drove right over them and cursed myself for being a homicidal maniac.

On the bulletin board of the store was an index card advertising a cabin for sale in the mountains south of town. I was now a free-range chicken so anyplace was as good as another. It is 1990.

The owner was a hairdresser a few blocks away. We talked by phone and I offered to rent the cabin until it sold. He liked the idea, said to come over and we’d kick it around. So I went and we did. He said what he wanted for it and that was reasonable, so we set a time after work to drive up and see the place. He had to close up the shop because his wife would be leaving to pick up their child at daycare. He was around thirty-five and had a tonsure at the crown of his head perfect as a silver-dollar, shiny scalp surrounded by a mop of thick auburn hair, natural, not shaven in. Besides, who’d shave it in except a monk?

I found a motel room, then met him at the shop. We drove the twenty miles up into deep woods, finding his cabin in a clearing with a few others nearby. Fully furnished, the place had belonged to his mom and dad—they were dead and it was his. He and his wife worked too hard at the salon to get up here anymore so he wanted to sell it. I said I needed a place for three months and told him enough about my family situation for him to understand what I was about. I needed quiet, privacy, full-time wilderness, and sunlight, lots of it.

He took that further than I meant it and said to at least keep my shorts on because there was a woman living in the cabin over there who looked out her window a lot. She didn’t have anything else to do since her husband died.

There were stacks of firewood, a shed with tools and workbench, a spring nearby and, if I was into it, there were Indian artifacts scattered around. What brought the pioneers up here had brought the Indians before them: the game, and water, and cool breezes when it was hot in the valley.

After a few weeks I stopped eating, the idea being that it’d bring clarity to mind over what had gone so wrong, and what it was in me that’d caused it. Taking blame for what goes wrong is not necessarily noble. It’s also a lazy man’s way to step around the need to deal with a personal shortcoming that, if he’d take the time to deal with, could open up new ways to behave.

I kept freeze-framing the possibility of change by doing a mea culpa at every hard spot I came to. Instead of finding what it was in me that’d played a hand in breaking up my beautiful family over the past year, I bailed out. I couldn’t deal with the hysteria of the kids’ mother. Where had that hysteria come from? I didn’t want to know. This was the second family I started and lost. So the idea of a good, long fast was appealing. Maybe I’d even die and then be free from having to look any deeper into me than the fifty-something reflection in the mirror.

Sleep is hard to find when fasting. The body shifts into survival mode where ideas and memories not linked to survival are prohibited and habeas corpus suspended until further notice.

After two weeks of taking in only spring water I was still forcing myself out on walks because once I stopped going out, I knew I’d get comfortable and ease into death. I didn’t particularly want to live, not if it meant coming face to face with what it was in me that kept creating these tragedies of abandonment.

Toward the end of the third week I could still walk a mile or two, but slowly. I wasn’t any smarter or more intuitive. I felt okay but the dreams and insight I’d hoped for didn’t come. The books I planned to read still lay there. I found arrowheads on my walks, and an obsidian hatchet and potsherds. I took the key Tony was holding for one of the owners in the area and went in to look around. I imagined I was catching snippets of conversation from the summer people. Bottles of liquor were framed and mounted like trophy heads on the walls and the kitchen was a bar with counter, cash register, brass foot railing, and stools. I sat on the sofa and joined in on the talk I was hearing.

One day I came back to my cabin from a walk and there was a fresh rainbow trout lying in a puddle of water on the kitchen counter next to the sink. My breath caught and I just heaved out these big sobs, hanging over the little fish someone had left there. This was a message, not the food itself because it was too holy for that—but it was a message to get food soon.

After a sleepless night I got in the Buick and started down the mountain. I swung round a bend and there was a weasel or ferret in the middle of the road that had just jumped on a field mouse and, at that moment, I saw a hawk dive and catch the ferret in its talons and lift them both away, at first along the road in the direction I was going and, when it could get the altitude, lifting away over the trees.

I bought eighty pounds of field-ripened melons from a produce road stand and returned to the cabin. I sat on a stump in the open glade with my melons piled around me and we had a good talk as I carved, scooped, and ate. They were all eager to be my next meal: Hey, you think she was good, try me. I’m even sweeter and not as soft. I was hungry again in an hour and pretty much ate all day, slept, and woke up famished.

After five days the melons were gone and, with no one to talk to, I drove back into town to a Chinese restaurant for some steamed vegetables and rice. I’d gone twenty days with only water. I hadn’t solved any of my troubles, hadn’t identified the broken parts, and hadn’t dreamed any tutelage. But I was happy. And skinnier. I’d shrunk to a 34-inch waist. I sat in a café in Alturas on my way out of town and the waitress I’d talked with a month earlier didn’t recognize me. I was a new customer to dance her eyes upon. You remind me of someone who came in here once…

When I came out of the motel near Bakersfield the Buick Regal sat on its hubs. I looked around to see if it’d happened to anyone else, then went over to the office. The desk clerk said he didn’t know anything about it.

I said, I didn’t either until I walked out of my room five minutes ago.

He said they weren’t liable, the sign says so. He pointed at it. I’d been looking for a little more concern like Aw, gee, no kidding? Took all your wheels and how could that happen? Isn’t that the pits?

I asked if he’d call the police for me.

He said he could but, they never came for things like this.

What do they come for? I asked.

Beatings, killing, stuff like that, he said.

Oh, I said. He seemed pretty unconcerned.

It’s not my problem, he said. There’s a wrecking yard outside Bakersfield a few miles over there. Maybe you can find some replacements.

I hitched a ride over and described the model and year. The man said he’d look around. Ten minutes later he returned in his golf cart with four wheels in the back.

You’re in luck, he said, big smile.

I asked for a ride back to the motel after paying and he said he’d have the boy drive me.

Putting the wheels on the car, they looked familiar. The last one had a kind of swastika design on the tire wall where it’d rubbed against a curb. No, that wasn’t it. It’d gone flat as I was driving a few months ago in Alturas and had that mark on it when I stopped to change the tire.

I knew as I worked that this was a pretty potent sign not to go to Bahía de Los Angeles in Baja. Safer to stay here. But I didn’t want safer. With my stolen wheels back on, I headed south.

I picked up a Mexican woman at the turnoff to Bahía from Highway 1. She was going to clean some houses in the village, she said. She lived over there beyond that ridge. She hitched into Bahía three times a week. We talked in her language and it felt better. I like Spanish and Spaniards and Mexicans, anything Latino.

The light was startling as we drove east in the late afternoon. We came over a rise and there was this cluster of islands far off, catching the light in a way that made them extra three-dimensional and radiant as if they were alive.

The woman said the government had big hopes for Bahía: they’d put in a mile-long landing strip and planned lots of highrise hotels and a connecting toll road across the peninsula to a port on the Pacific side so people could ferry their boats back and forth from the Sea of Cortez without having to go around the tip of Baja.

I’d heard Bahía was this quiet little paradise of fishermen and low-key life—now I was expecting Acapulco. But when we came down the hill overlooking the bay it was really no more than a sprawling marina with trailer parks and a few low buildings as cornerstones of hope for the tourist center being designed in Mexico City. I dropped her off and found a plain room with bed, rickety chair and table, and a pitcher of water and wash pan.

It took half an hour to walk the town in all four directions, another hour to walk the marinas and trailer parks, and it was getting dark by the time I returned from the air strip, which turned out to be exactly that and no more, a wide asphalt strip already crumbling. There were no foundations for a terminal, not even those promissory signs: Soon Opening, Terminals A-F, Restaurants, Condos, Nightclubs, Rental Cars and Aviation Tower, or Rent to Own.

Across the Sea of Cortez from here was the village of San Carlos that the Mexican government had been developing over forty years, and the land itself had refused. The waters refused. The spirit of the place and the people refused. A Club Med came and went. A hurricane came and blew down everything the government had put up, and took away the ancient terraced camper park overlooking the port.

When the movie Catch 22 was made in San Carlos, things tilted away from the land’s power to keep things as they were. Things had been improved for the movie company. There was a two-mile-long four-lane going into San Carlos along a tropical-treed boulevard next to a deep bay edged by crescent beaches. Ahead were jagged castle rocks. One was called the Caracól with a small village on top, the other a signature landmark called the Tetas de Cabra, looking either like the teats of a goat on her back or the fingers of a drowning man reaching to heaven as he sinks away, depending on your mood.

In Bahía, mariachi music played with country and western through the night, braying laughter and boozy singing, slamming of trailer doors, boat motors starting up, sometimes a crystalline phrase of Spanish blessing the desecration of a place imagined by the gods in mellower times. I like squalor and chaos so I could’ve joined them easily at another time but I was in freefall, an empty man with no desire to kill fish or drink myself into a stupor with good-timing guys and gals. I wanted to do that alone. Sometime. Not now.

I took off early the next morning. Along the road back I saw a turnoff north that cut thirty miles off my getting back to Highway 1 and took it. The road was narrower than the one I’d come in on and along stretches were big boulders in place of shoulders. If you ever got a flat, there was no way you could get off the road. Where there were no boulders there was a sheer drop to the desert floor. Back then the Mexican highway departments didn’t plan roads with drivers in mind, only vehicles. What happened to you was your business—their’s was roads.

I passed another old American car, an Olds 88, just as big and heavy as mine, with Baja plates, but when I passed him he passed me back right away. He had a bigger engine. He settled in ahead of me and slowed down to where we were doing twenty. I fell back. He fell back. I needed a long run to pass him but there was no way to pull over, and when I stopped in my lane he did, too, just ahead.

He got going first and I hung back until he was far ahead enough for me to make a run. As I came up on him at ninety he floored it and we were abreast, but there wasn’t the power to pull ahead and he wouldn’t let me fall behind. I couldn’t see his face. He had on a dark hat, but I could see big teeth in a big smile.

A big truck was coming toward us fast on the straightaway. The smile stayed there. Now we were doing ten miles an hour side by side and he had me covered. On both sides of the road were boulders. I pushed the accelerator to the floor and so did he. Just when a head-on was inevitable he let me squeeze around him, we clicked bumpers and molecules of paint from the Buick line-danced with molecules of the Freightliner.

The Olds pulled around me again and slowed to thirty, so I followed him obediently until he turned off at a Y. He touched the brim of his hat in salute and there was the smile again, still no face.

I met Marilyn in a dream on the Pacific Crest Trail, but only realized fifteen years into our marriage that I’d seen her even before then.

I was in the wood business in those days and had a small sawmill and firewood and fencing business out on Airport Road in Santa Fe. Our main thing was hand-adzing trees into round roof beams we call vigas in New Mexico, or finishing saw-milled beams that we used a broad axe to shave the mill marks from. In the olden days a round tree was made square entirely by hand-adzing. Now we create the illusion of it being handcrafted by using those same ancient tools.

The best trees for this were Engelmann spruce from way high in the mountains. When they die the bark beetles and other critters don’t attack them because the cambium layer doesn’t taste good and the scaly bark clings too tightly to the wood. So the tree slow dries over the years with minimal cracking. An adzed Engelmann viga is a pleasure to look at, eight or ten of them holding up your bedroom ceiling, herringboned in between with peeled aspen saplings. You don’t have to read to fall asleep, you just marvel at this primitive roof above you in your half-million-dollar casa on the banks of the Acequia Madre where the poor Santa Fe farmers used to live. They built houses for less than what a pair of decent shoes cost these days, and had money left over for getting a new blade forged for the hand plow. Realizing this can make a fella sleep deep and peacefully.

I was driving the logging truck up the Santa Clara Peak one morning in February going for a load I’d decked earlier in the week. It was light but the sun hadn’t come over the Sangre de Cristo across the Rio Grande valley. A dusting of snow had fallen and mine were the only tracks on the dirt road.

A car came around a bend headed toward me just as the sun rose behind me, a yellow Volvo station wagon with a man and woman up front and two children in back. They waved as they passed, all smiles, beautiful people, radiant in the new sunlight. They zoomed past and I followed their tracks ahead of me, wondering what they’d been up here for. They were dressed for summer in bright colors, yet it was below freezing. Had the car broken down? That was the only explanation I came up with because this main road ended at a deep canyon fifteen miles on near Pedarnales Mesa through deep snowfields. There was a one-track, very rough road carved out of the lava, put in a century ago for horses hauling trees. The road wended down to a village that even a jeep couldn’t make it over at this point. Any other logging roads branched from the trunk road I was on.

A few miles along, I came to where their tracks ended, or began—depending on how I looked at them. There were no wide melty spots you usually see where a car has been parked in the snow for awhile, or footprints. The tracks just appeared as if the car had touched down from flying along.

Here’s the spooky part. When I met Marilyn in 1991, I was driving an old Buick Regal. When we moved from the trailer court at Lake Morena to Regner Road in San Diego, she showed me a classified ad for a used Volvo station wagon at a good price. She suggested I sell the Buick and buy the Volvo, as there’d be more room in the station wagon for the kids.

I ran an ad and a German student came by and paid me in cash that I used to buy the Volvo. I’d never had one before, and never particularly liked their looks. I didn’t think of myself as a Volvo person, which I thought to be dependable, no-nonsense Nordic types who went for solid and honest craftsmanship in their cars, tools, and wives.

But this Volvo was different, long and sleek, with a turning radius where you could do a U-turn on a two-lane and still clear the far curb by a good margin. It was silver with black leather seats, a terrible radio by tradition, and a reputation for running 200,000 to 300,000 miles. The car got good mileage, had abundant power, and made me smile just to sit there at the wheel, sniffing its good leathery smell and feeling safe and cozy.

The time we moved to Montana with the kids I hauled it on a flatbed trailer behind the U-Haul, and we explored the valleys and mountains aplenty in that fine car. I loved that Volvo and much later rebuilt it to give to Marilyn’s son, Jonnie, repairing all the things I’d become used to in the 100,000 miles we put on it. Maybe what I’d seen that faraway morning on Santa Clara Peak in my logging truck was a greeting from the future from a woman I’d not yet met, still busy in Owatonna raising her first family, and from my youngest children who were yet to be born, in a car that hadn’t yet been designed and built, driven by a me that I was yet to become.

Santa Clara Peak is sacred land. The Clara pueblo Indians still drive up there for holy ceremonies in their pickups and hike back to shrines only they know of that their people have maintained for a thousand years. The time I’d found those three decks of abandoned spruce way up there I borrowed a bulldozer from Bob Gibbons in Apache Canyon, the operator he sent was Guillermo, and he hauled the dozer in to clear the trenched logging road back to the decks. He told me he used to cut wood up here back when he was a wino and smoker of weed, something he gave up when he met the woman who became his wife, and she told him, That stuff, or me, and meant it.

One day Guillermo saw a few pickups park and some Indian men walk up a slope toward the tree line. They were there a few hours before returning and driving away. He knew about their shrines and that they were kept energized with very old artifacts that he could sell to unethical collectors for a lot of money, so he went to rob the shrine. While climbing the slope, lightning struck out of clear sky, close enough to where he could smell it and feel the heat. He waited, started again and this time the lightning struck next to him. When he came to, he tumbled down the slope running back to his truck. He told me this story in exchange for the one I’d told him about the time up there with Neil Lane when the two storm fronts collided with one another above us and dropped a tornado on our heads.

When Guillermo and I told Bob Gibbons about it, he said he and his crew were spending the night in a ranger cabin on the mountain when a storm hit with such power that when they went out in the morning the old road to the cabin was covered with blow-down debris, and a new one opened where the tornado lifted out a swatch of trees.

It was Bob who sold me his milling equipment and a Bobcat loader when he went into the adobe-building business on the eve of the mass migrations of the elite from both coasts to Santa Fe. When he started his wood business he’d gotten the contract for clearing the ties of an old, narrow-gauge track line near Apache Canyon where he lived. He pulled up and loaded the nine thousand or so ties himself. He said that one time cutting trees he was driven into the ground like a spike by a hammer when a tree fell on him and has never been the same since, the main reason he’d moved on. He said he was lucky it fell on his head. He and his mother and brother started the home construction company and were the only ones building true, adobe pueblo-style homes on four-acre lots east of Santa Fe. This part I know to be true, but his being driven into the ground by a falling tree or the tornado cutting in a new road and covering over the old with the scything, only he knows.

After Bahia in 1990, I returned to San Diego broke and still broken. When everything goes to hell I get a backpack and find a trail, doesn’t matter where it comes from or where it’s going.

Back on the Pacific Crest Trail, I hiked for days with an eighty-pound pack from the Mexican border forty miles into the mountains on my way to Canada. A young woman came loping along and passed me, huffing gently. Then came a man, then what looked like a street person all raggedy, wearing beat-up leather shoes. Then came a few runner-type guys of the sort dropped from the womb in a starting position, then a long line of them. One said they were doing a fifty-miler. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

At the water and juice table at the Sierra Club Lodge five miles along, I stopped to ask a man about this. He said this was a running club he usually competed in but’d torn a tendon and was helping the runners by passing out drinks and slices of orange. He was over eighty.

I said, You mean you guys run these races every weekend?

Yep, and he said lots of times they ran in the city where there are plenty of trails and bike paths, but it was good to get out into the country too.

I said, You mean these runners will run back to I-8 and drive back to town after covering fifty miles?

Yep.

I said, There was a man who looked like a homeless person, long, tangled hair and beard, came by me. Is he a regular?

Oh, Ted, yeh, he runs with us. He’s sixty-five, I think. He won a few weeks ago, not much of a running style but he can move when he wants to.

This unhinged me. My whole worldview shifted. In my youth, for a person to run five miles was, what? Well, if you were a hard-core transcontinental Indian or the Kenyan Abebe Bikila, or Roger Bannister, sure, some sort of esoterica for the gifted; but where did this sudden athletic ability among street people and octogenarians come from?

What was I doing while this was going on all these years? Did a few athletes break through some sort of impossibility standard that we took as ultimate truth when younger, and open the doors to longer, faster, heavier, and higher?

In the wood business I cut and worked trees all day long, muscling 300-pound logs onto the flatbed and chaining fifty of them down at a time. I felt I was It. Now there’s a street person in his sixties running a Sunday fifty-miler on the PCT for fun. I’m not It.

I sat cross-legged by the campfire cooking some quinoa, no sound except the popping of wood. There wasn’t much left of me. I ate and crawled into the tent, zipped the flap shut, and got into the bag, wearing my clothes. It was February in the desert mountains. I’d done ten more miles on the Pacific Crest Trail and was seriously staved in.

In my sleep I meet a woman in a white pleated gown. She is tall, broad-shouldered, her hair a brassy blonde. We aren’t communicating with words but I’m getting that she is the Connector. She brings people together on earth who otherwise wouldn’t meet on their own. Though she works in this dimension she is not of it.

There is no time here. She seems familiar. The eyes. It’s a face I’ve always been drawn to in women, starting with Bailey Mott’s when we were three years old in Oswego, New York. I’m trying to place this woman but there is nowhere to take it, I don’t have that kind of memory connected to me right now. We are connected through the hearts and it’s enough.

I don’t understand what she’s saying, it’s not that kind of talk, but know something is coming into me about her and our destinies. I want to fall to my knees and ask her to take me back to wherever she comes from. I don’t want to stay here. She smiles. She can’t.

She introduces me to a weasely little man with thin mustache and slicked-back black hair in a black three-piece suit. He works for her, connecting people through accident. He has started going too far, putting in more suffering than is needed to bring the people together. He has been doing this increasingly. She tells him to stop it. He says he will and then he’s gone.

She looks into me and I awaken lying flat on my back, naked with the tent door flaps pulled back and the sun directly in the middle of the entryway. I am here and still there for a while until I get my bearings. I get up, not remembering getting undressed or tying the flaps back. I eat some cold quinoa, pack and start along the trail toward Canada.

That was no dream. And who was that? I swear I’ll never forget it. By afternoon I’ve forgotten it.

I get rid of half the weight of my pack, storing it in a hole I mark with a stone duck. I won’t come back for it but some hiker might see the duck and investigate. There’s rice and quinoa and hummus flakes. There’s some dehydrated campfire dinners. I leave some pots and pans and clothes to get the pack down to absolute survival weight. I’ve lost forty pounds over the last few months, lost a wife, kids, business, and money, along with betraying everyone close to me and everything I thought I stood for. I am unlovely meat and bones and don’t have the energy to live. Or didn’t until I met the Connector. Something happened last night but I can’t remember what. I didn’t remember what it was for months.

It started to rain the other side of Warner Springs and it rained for a week, ending a six-year drought. Higher up in the mountains above Palm Springs this was snow that closed the PCT until spring. So I called Frank and Barbara Coates from a payphone back in Warner Springs and asked them to come pick me up. I met Frank in the New York City in the early sixties when we were actors.

We missed connections so I hitchhiked to their place in San Diego and lived on their boat Morning Star for two or three weeks. Down and out at the San Diego Yacht Club.

One day they said they might like to take their boat out now and then, how would I feel about that? At their house I met Tom from Texas and he told how when he came to town he was penniless and he went to a roommates finder agency and they hooked him up with a divorcee in La Jolla on the beach. He became her boy toy. She gave him a new car, had his clothes tailored, they moved among the rich and famous, boated on her yacht and, when she grew tired of him, sent him off with a stipend and the car.

I went to the agency and told Joanne that was what I was looking for. She remembered Tom and the divorcee. She spoke instead of a woman in her mid-fifties in Ocean Beach who boogie-boarded, taught college, and was a home healthcare nurse.

I said I was thinking more mid-thirties over La Jolla way with a beach house. She said this gal looked mid-thirties and did have a house on the cliffs just south of La Jolla. Ten miles south as it turned out. She was divorced, vivacious, and a whole lot of fun. She wrote down the name and address along with that of another woman renter in Lemon Grove.

I went to Lemon Grove first and arrived in the midst of an argument on the front porch between a man with two suitcases and a woman with none. She was yelling at him and pointing toward the street. He was doing shoulder shrugs with the suitcases and yelling back. She grabbed one of the suitcases from his hand and heaved it onto the lawn. He said something and she took a swing at him. He went to pick up the suitcase and she noticed me halfway out of my car and waved for me to come on over. I got back in and drove away.

The other woman whose name I’d been given was hard to connect with. I spoke with her son, Jonnie, who said she was hard to reach because she had three jobs. There went my tailored wardrobe. I left Frank’s number and went back to Morning Star. I left a message with Jonnie a few days later that I’d be by at noon the next day.

She was coming out the door to go to work and only had a minute to show me the room because I was late. It felt good in the house. The rental room was about six by ten with a narrow bed, small desk, and window facing west. There were two bathrooms for five people and I’d be sharing hers. We looked at a quilt on the wall created by an artist in Morgan Hill, showing a circle of seven men and women as if they’d jumped from a plane to skydive, but without parachutes. They were sewn three-dimensionally in different fabrics and one was sewn together from all the others’ personal fabrics. This was the Cristus. He was the only complete one, the others were missing limbs, and one of them his head. The artist was Barbara Baumgarten. Her conception was titled World, the story of humanity in one cover.

Marilyn said again she had to go on house calls and I told her I’d think about the room and call her. She later said she had to bite her tongue to tell me not to bother. Instead she said she usually took only women renters but, since Joanne had made an error in sending me, she’d let me rent the room for a month while I looked for something more permanent. She said primly that her women boarders all locked their doors at night, and I said primly that I did, too.

CHAPTER 2

THE CONNECTOR

Marilyn and I first spotted the mushrooms on a walk along the river in 2007. We had been married fifteen years. These were alien-looking, gray but with a greenish hue along the north side of some of the caps. I knelt to get a closer look and they were really foreign-looking. Marilyn warned me not to touch them, but I had to.

Once on a mushroom-collecting field trip in Grand Marais we found mushrooms amazing in their variety in the woods behind the high school. Some of them were like dangly white lace and delicious to eat, some blue-tinged with reddish veils around their white stalks, others like yellowish grapevines with tiny umbrellas instead of grapes, radiant orange amanitas with snowflake sprinkles, spider webby ones with dark things looking like egg sacs, and a beautiful cotton white creature that is girdling birches in the north and killing the tree with viruses that normally can’t get in. Marilyn found one so rare and complex our teacher couldn’t identify it, and he’d been mushrooming since he got back from Vietnam.

These four mushrooms looked dangerous. You know how certain things in nature carry markings of lethality? I wonder what he’d think of these clustered together and the odd markings