Boreal B[l]og

I left my campsite on Conmee Lake, deep in the Canadian Quetico, on a day threatening rain, a long paddle and some tough portages ahead of me. As I left the bay, I paddled by a tiny 18 inch tree growing out of a crack in the granite along the shore. Its few leaves absolutely loaded with color, as if to say, “I’m small, I don’t have great soil, but I am the most colorful spot on this shore.” It was.

On Bunchgrass Trail this past fall, 2 years after the Cedar Creek fire, part of the in-progress-for-a-long-time  Eugene to (Pacific) Crest Trail, I saw a tiny spot of green on a burned out stump several feet off the ground.  I stopped and looked more closely. Yes, it was real. Just a few centimeters of plant, growing out of wood, eight small leaves. All the green I had previously seen on Bunchgrass was scattered plant life by the trail. Everything else was black, brown, gray or whitish gray, sterile. 

Plant life on dead trees means bacteria are present to break down wood to recover nitrogen needed for amino acids and subsequent protein synthesis. Not everything was sterile here.

Two months later, I planted a white oak in Bethel Park. It had two leaves, each patchy green and yellow, but next year there will be several more. I thought about chlorophyll and took an intellectual adventure similar to the one I had last year when I studied tides, learning about the remarkable relationship among tides, gravity, and centripetal force, each inversely proportional to the radius cubed, squared, and first power, respectively.

Chlorophyll is life giving.  It is comprised in part of four pyrrole rings, a porphyrin, containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, with a magnesium atom present in the center, essential for photosynthesis. When chlorophyll degenerates in autumn, aromatic flavonoid and anthocyanin remain and we see their color. 

Across the divide to animals, oxygen carrying is done by heme in vertebrates or hemocyanin in earlier phyla. Heme, part of the substance hemoglobin, is another such porphyrin complex, the complex itself chemically identical to chlorophyll, except iron, rather than magnesium, is the central metal. Iron carries oxygen, to a lesser extent carbon dioxide, and has great affinity for carbon monoxide, CO, which is why we have smoke alarms, since CO displaces oxygen in heme.

Hemocyanin has a different type of chemical ring, still 5 sided, with another nitrogen, and copper is a the central metal chelated here. When copper combines with oxygen, it turns blue, explaining the blue blood of arthropods and mollusks.

There is another metal: cobalt. When it is present in similar metalloporphyrin complexes, we have methyl cyanocobalamin, the synthetic version we call Vitamin B12, essential for our existence. Here are chemical rings chelated with four different metals. I knew about magnesium and iron; l didn’t know about copper and cobalt. In some bacteria nickel has been involved, zinc chelation is an organic photosensitizer, and metalloporphyrins are extensively studied.

Iron is fascinating stuff. The Sun will never make iron, ending up ultimately as carbon and oxygen white dwarf. Larger and hotter stars, however, fuse smaller elements all the way to nickel, which quickly degenerates to iron. Fusion ends here; iron is stable.  Star size is a balance between heat expansion and gravitational contraction; when fusion stops, expansion stops, the star core collapses upon itself and explodes, a supernova, releasing energy that will fuse the other 66 natural elements. That’s where the iron in our blood came from. The Sun is not a first generation star; we are, as Carl Sagan said, made of starstuff.

The plant on Bunchgrass was a small speck of green, a magnesium electron transfer engine, made of star stuff, to make sugars and other carbon based compounds. There is a remarkable interconnected beauty of the universe and us.

And a small plant at five thousand feet.

See you on the trail.

The red mushrooms on the side of the trail stopped me. I had scouted Winberry Tie Trail two and a half miles to the divide, a height of land between Winberry Creek and the Middle Fork of the Willamette River watersheds. I had hiked uphill, through maples and mountain ash, to where the trail joined the the mile long divide trail connecting an abandoned road on the west to FS 5821 to the east. I scouted that, too.  Scouting is looking for logs or brush that need removal, checking the tread for erosion or other problems, in order to plan a future outing to address them. This trail was well known to me; I had just passed a rock wall we built near a rootball hole we filled in. It had rained that day and was muddy. I then encountered the mushrooms.

We recovered the trail three years ago, barely able to find it, after fifteen visits to clear logs (“logging out”), remove encroaching brush, repair tread, fix turnpikes, which elevate a trail above a wet area. We also logged out a dirt road which the trail crosses twice. I still remember being on my knees digging out every inch of a side wall of the trail for a hundred yards in a cold rain-snow mix, removing salal and Oregon grape.  I know this place. One visit this year with two power brushers and a power saw crew would have the trail in good shape for the next season, assuming, of course, no trees fall on it in the meantime. The tread was excellent, although there was new growth of salal. Nature is trying to restore the trail, too, to look like its surroundings.

I couldn’t identify the mushrooms, but I saw similar ones at the Pisgah Arboretum’s recent annual mushroom festival. I took a picture and continued to the Forest Service road, hiking back to the vehicle, noting no logs needing removal.

I’m no mycologist. In another life, I could find myself interested in mushrooms to learn their names, like I did wildflowers. My first identification was a Western Cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis crispa) on Crescent Mountain nine years ago on a wet, cold hike. They are distinctive.

I wrote to a Steve, a crew member, asking whether these were Giant Lobster mushrooms (Hypomyces lactifluorum).  He assiduously collects mushrooms on autumn trail work outings, putting them in a pack cover to carry home for dinner.

His answer was brief: where exactly are they? That was easy, I replied, since we had both used power brushers in this area. I told him he could drive to the upper trailhead and from there it was about a quarter mile up the trail, on the right. I could have said the west side, but that’s nitpicking. Keep it simple. 

The Arboretum show was excellent. I commented to one of the volunteers about the Western Cauliflower mushroom they displayed, and he lit up. You could see it in his eyes. It’s the look one has when asked questions about their field. I’ve seen that look in climbers, birders, pilots, athletes, botanists, and know if I am asked about math or eclipses, I light up like they do, becoming a different person. 

The man said, “I made a dressing for a stroganoff by replacing the bread with the mushroom,” using his hand like a ladle. He whispered conspiratorially, “It was the BEST dressing I have ever tasted.”

See you on the trail. If you forage, know what you are doing.