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By Root 318 0

fanatics. Searching wooded groves and dells for the pods of pale leathery domes pushing though the forest floor, they found the rain had made for an especially good season. Most exciting were the golden chanterelles, which tasted like chicken when sautéed with garlic, Larry said. I knew not to eat the red toadstools with white dots—they were as poisonous as they were beautiful. Instead I preferred the puffballs, which in summer were round and white and edible, but by fall dried into a leathery sack that I liked to stomp on to release a cloud of dark spores. Sometimes we found artist conks, shelflike growths attached to tree trunks that had a smooth underside onto which we’d carve pictures, or we’d make prints from large-topped meadow mushrooms by laying the grooved underside on a piece of paper to capture its concentric lines of spores.

As we threaded the edible findings onto string to dry from the ceiling of the log cabin for later use we’d marvel that mycorrhizal fungi, the fancy name for mushrooms, were connected underground by a vast network of roots called mycelium, and the enzymes produced by this network were similar to those in the compost heap, breaking down the organic debris on the forest floor into food for the trees.

“If the soil is the earth’s stomach, fungi supply its digestive enzymes,” Michael Pollan, a modern-day colleague of Papa’s, explains in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “They stand on the threshold between the living and the dead, breaking the dead down into food for the living.” It was a concept that, to the child I was then, made perfect sense—the law of return.

Michèle often came by to join us at the campground, as did Nancy, who was now staying in the cabin behind Greg’s with her boyfriend, another Greg. One such afternoon in early June, when everyone was hanging around the cook shack before dinner, a new apprentice named Sandy rode up the dirt road on her ten-speed bike, nearly a month after she was scheduled to arrive.

“We were hoping you’d show up sooner rather than later,” Papa said when she introduced herself, forgetting in his usual urgency about the farm that she’d just biked across the country from San Francisco. By nature sensitive and shy, Sandy was most comfortable swimming, running, or biking long distances; in the flush of those activities she could be fully herself, without the weight of other people’s opinions. She had no idea of the effect of her long blond hair, strong body, and shy smile.

“Have you seen the new girl?” Larry asked Barry that afternoon after returning from work at the Nearings’. “Wow!”

Sandy originally sought to apprentice on a Mennonite farm, but my old friend Frank, who’d been her roommate in San Francisco and dated one of her close friends, told her about us. Frank wasn’t having much luck as an encyclopedia salesman, but he was a great salesman for our way of life. “You don’t want to go to a Mennonite farm where you have to wear a dress all day,” he teased her. “You hate dresses. The Coleman farm is cool. You’ll learn a lot.”

Sandy wrote to Papa, and he told her to come in May. She didn’t own a car, so she set out in April to bike the nearly three thousand miles alone, armed only with her favorite cutoff painter overalls, one pair of shoes, and a rubberized sleeping bag stuffed in her panniers. She met people along the way who gave her rides and took her in, but she mostly slept out in the open in her rubber sleeping bag, zipping it up against what seemed like the constant rain that spring. Even with the waterproof coating, water would leak in around the zipper and collect in the bottom as she curled her body around the puddle and tried to keep sleeping.

The life of the farm immediately took Sandy in. She sat around the campfire that first evening listening to Larry and Paul on guitar, Barry playing harmonica, Anner singing, and basked in the simple comforts of good vibes and laughter.

“Thank you, dear Franklin,” she whispered up to the stars.

The working days were another story. Perhaps because of her athletic vigor, Sandy was assigned the grunt