It doesn’t happen every summer but when it does, it happens late – after most flowers have died and just as the vegetation is turning rank and decadent. A humid low pressure system will stall out over the Great Lakes leaving the whole region stuck indefinitely in a twilight of longing for the next cleansing rain, the next fresh breeze out of the north, and an end to fitful sleeping on sweat-sticky sheets. The woods slip into a fever dream and the ghost flowers appear.
Prolonged low pressure draws on the landscape's sources of moisture to infuse the woods with a dismal damp. Mornings begin as a yellow fog before grading into hazy pale afternoons where the sun hides herself save for a gauzy light in an otherwise hot gray sky. I was working up north and the weather had me in a foul mood. Sticky and sweaty and irritable, I would lie sleepless listening to a night-time stillness so complete that it played havoc with my aural depth perception. There! A twig snaps. A thud. An acorn dropping or a pine cone? A squirrel on the roof or a raccoon coming to raid the garbage…or a footfall of something larger? Then nothing. Nothing again.
In the steamy thick of the next afternoon, I found myself searching for aspens in the overstory - longing to see some wind movement in the otherwise hypersensitive and frenetic aspen leaves. Nothing. I was ignoring a dull headache and shuffling through a Gothic maze of dark sullen tree trunks so otherworldly mute that even the whine of a mosquito would be a welcome reminder that I was not, in fact, losing my by-now tenuous purchase on reality. With no sun, shadow is indistinct and so the middle distance quickly becomes impenetrable - a miasma of heat, haze, shade, and gloom. It was there that the deathly white apparitions caught my attention emerging ethereal among the moldering dead leaves of the forest floor, pale riders of the plant world.
Ghost flowers or corpse flowers, or Indian pipes as they are better known, are weird little plants that lack chlorophyll. They succor themselves by co-opting a symbiotic relationship between trees and soil fungi. Their roots invade the fungal mycelia and, vampire-like, draw their sustenance from sustenance that the fungus is drawing from the living trees. Without need of photosynthesis, they are creatures of darkness thriving in understories too shaded to support other plants. Save the silly Hollywood pretension of brain-eating zombies. Here is a real-live (?) entity that that has usurped the machinery of death and decay and bent it to its will. Ghost flowers are notoriously ephemeral and will dissolve into a grayish goo if picked. They are the ghostly evolutionary echoes of an ancient sun-loving ancestor. Their leaves have reverted into mere vestigial stumps and their solitary flower, a degenerate little bloom held in a mournful grim reaper pose. They often emerge in solitary small groups looking like a doleful phantom choir of silence.
Herbalists have noted that the ghost flower looks like a bare spinal cord holding aloft a brain and have taken this to indicate that ghost flowers have psychotropic properties. Consequently ghost flower tinctures are prescribed as antispasmodics and sedatives. One has claimed that the ghostly flower can alter the state of one’s consciousness and can dissociate the body from its fear and physical and emotional pain such that you are “Putting your problems outside you where you can see and work on them.”
I try to be skeptical but I have my own troubling association with the ghost flower. As a young man, I took a canoe trip with my future-wife’s father. I had purchased a wildflower guide at the ranger station before we paddled off and my future father-in-law and I made a friendly game of trying to identify as many different species as we could. Late in the trip we were camped at a river mouth and I paddled across one evening to look for wildflowers. Pushing my way through the riverbank tangle, I found myself in the dark understory of a spruce thicket. There among the mosses was the ghost flower. I verified it with the guide book and then paddled back to brag about my find.
For as long as I’ve known him, a signature character trait of my father-in-law has been a quiet, dignified, generosity. Hence I was shocked when he wouldn’t believe that I had found a ghost flower. Was it just too improbable? Did he think that the listing in the guidebook was a hoax? The argument escalated and then degenerated into sarcasm and mockery and I sulked off feeling attacked and hurt. Even now, I question whether I am remembering this accurately. My father-in-law is a good and honorable man and in the thirty-some years hence we’ve never had another serious argument and so the story sticks in my mind as an anomalous mystery. Did I miss-interpret something or…were our simple human minds ensnared in a spell brought on by proximity to this phantasm little flower of the dark and damp?
Happy Halloween.
Sources:
http://greenmanramblings.blogspot.com/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/...