Look like Chigger Thicket, Princess Shingles Overhead unblinking: ridgeback, rock face, Lichens, steadfast, pursue their wonderfully odd and ancient lifestyle and I am becoming something new. I can’t help it now, noticing their different forms and colors.
Actually, I’ll never walk anywhere without lichen – between the boards on my porch, on every tree (look close!), even thriving on that old junker someone’s hauling west on US 421. I will never walk this way again without wondering. As everlasting and as changeable, evolving, as this gradually eroding ridge.
ICHOR POD TORCHLIGHT II PATCH
How old is it, that 7 cm patch of speckled gray on the rock face half way up Lumber Ridge, staking its stark black divide between the creeping yellow patch adjacent? How long have they been growing there? Ten years? A hundred? Nine hundred species of lichens in the Smokies (at least!) making infinitesimal advances, making spores or little baby lichen granules for the next boulder over, the next bare patch of bark – stable, solid partnerships of mycobiont/photobiont as old as stone. Still the two together create a world neither could create alone.
ICHOR POD TORCHLIGHT II FREE
But fungus tweaks its algae to make them spill more sugar, and no algal cell is ever free to leave. Algae get a scaffold for stability, a moist enclave, protection from the sun. Fungus need’s sugar from algae’s photosynthesis to live (or some fungi hook up with cyanobacteria). In school I learned lichen = symbiosis, mutual give and take, but there’s evidence of some darker biochemical power-brokerage at play. Let them mingle, though, and they create miniature cityscapes, ramparts, pastorales wilder than the dreams of Seuss.īut that fungal/algal friendship – it’s not all long-stemmed roses and dark chocolate. Separate them, fungus and plant, separate kingdoms, and the textbook shows their single forms: flask of gray goo, flask of green. How do they do it? Fungal hyphae, infinitely winding threads coil to embrace their chosen algae, held in their arms like waifs. But slow down, kneel, look close and learn, understand a fragment of what is happening here and has been happening for too long to grasp. Trees I’ve passed a dozen times, these stones, did they always look like this? Oh sure, no doubt those gray-green blotches scattered here & there just so sparked some cryptic synapse of recognition: lichen.