I was walking around the grounds of my apartment complex today (yes, it has real estate holdings sufficient, I think, to be referred to as “grounds”…not maybe in the pastoral landed class sense, but substantial, with lawns and communal gardens and all) when I came across a possum. An o-possum. Like a big gray rat with a white face and pink lips. I believe they are marsupials, and I am pretty sure they’re supposed to be nocturnal. This one was out in the middle of the day in plain sight on the lawn. Even weirder, it wasn’t doing anything—just standing there, all four paws on the ground, staring at, well, nothing.

I stopped and watched it for awhile, trying to figure out what its deal was. Had my camera with me, and I thought about taking a picture—but in the end, possums just aren’t very photogenic. Especially this one.

I wasn’t any more than ten feet away from it, and it didn’t even acknowledge me. I had a stick with me, as I usually do, and I banged it against a tree to make some noise. I shouted at it. No reaction from the possum. It just stood there, staring at whatever it was staring at it. And twitching. And there were flies. A whole bunch of flies.

It was at this point that I started to get the sick feeling I had experienced this moment before: in zombie films, where the soon-to-be-dead idiot approaches his girlfriend who has been hunched over in front of the sink since he got home, puts a hand on her shoulder asking what’s wrong, turns her around, and….

Yeah.

I left the undead possum to go about its business of communing with the ancestor god or the hive mind or whatever, and went to report the incident to the ladies at the leasing office.

I think they called animal control. I haven’t heard anything since. I did see some people standing around outside waiting for the bus. They didn’t look like zombies. I dunno. The wife isn’t home yet.

This is going to be one of those long, rambly posts that touches everything. So you might as well go get a cup of tea. And maybe not come back. I leave that to you.

My first encounter with the myth of Johnny Appleseed was a big white hardcover picturebook which I swear was called The Joy of Giving, but which I can’t find anywhere on the eeenternets, so maybe I imagined the whole thing. It told the life of Johnny Appleseed in the simplest, most sanguine terms, with cuted-up illustrations and a talking inanimate object sidekick (a shovel, I think). He wore a pot for a hat, dressed in muddy overalls, and hiked barefoot, with a big walking stick and two cloth bags slung over his shoulder: apple seeds and oatmeal. He walked until he was tired, ate supper out of his hat, built an orchard, then started walking again. And now we have apples everywhere, in pies and cider and the American dream.

It doesn’t get simpler than that. And when I turned six or seven and graduated from Mac and Tab Are Friends to that, believe me, I was sold. If I could figure out what the heck that story was actually called it would go on my Jay Ridler Top 100 books lickety split. Along with all the rest of the sappy picture book biographies in that series (each one of which had its own unique variety of inanimate object sidekick).

Sappy and cheeseball though it is, it occurs to me that the talking inanimate sidekick thing–at least as used in that series–is actually a magic realist trope. Everything else about the story dealt in a more or less accurate—albeit syrupy-sweet—manner with the real life of some inspiring historical figure. Madam Curie talked to X-Rays, as I recall, and Louis Pasteur talked to germs. It was awesome. And Will Rogers talked to his lariat. No, really. It’s just taking one element of a story and blowing it up to magical stature via hyperbole in order to grab the fancy of a reader who might otherwise be less than interested. This is why magic realists get accused of pandering and their readers of exoticism. But why the hell else would I have cared what happened to the boring old whitebeard Louis Pasteur if he hadn’t been fighting these big germs that looked like Napoleonic soldiers with bayonets?

It’s apple-picking season. In a couple weeks I will drop off several five-gallon glass carboys at my local orchard to be filled with fresh-pressed, unpasteurized cider. The big Mac tree behind my apartment has been producing apace since August; I’ve been eating at least one a day since then and am now physically invincible. As my affair with the cliff the other day clearly demonstrates. Today, I ate three different varieties of wild apple: a kind of Golden Delicious/Macoun hybrid from the tree outside my work at lunchtime, a hard, mild Spy variety from the edge of a field in Graves Farm Sanctuary at the beginning of my evening hike, and a spicy Macintosh variety from the same field at the end.

Mulling over the last one as I meandered back to the car, I thought of Appleseed. His position in the American myth is unique, closest perhaps to Thoreau (at least among its real, breathing representatives, as opposed say to Longfellow’s Hiawatha) in terms both of pacifism and unabashed love and appreciation for nature. Appleseed has a magnanimity towards the human race that, to my mind at least, the other great naturalists lack. On the the other hand, he is completely un-unique as an unconcerned, if well-intentioned, spreader of colonialism.

Still, I don’t think I can deny being deeply influenced by that spirit–and by Appleseed as a hero–even if there is a bit of hypocrisy involved. Little kids are impressionable, I know. As a six year old I was probably equally enthralled with the story of Helen Keller and her talking water pump or whatever. But not nearly to the degree that her legend can rear up out of a country breeze and hijack my head for a couple of hours.

This is where the dangling spider-threads of my newly adopted fake religion, pseudopagan pantheism, make themselves felt. I am irrevocably a creature of New England. If I ever leave here, I’ll still be that. Which means, because of the legacy of Appleseed and those like him in the oblivious colonialist sense, that as deep as my druidy roots ever reach, they will always have been founded upon a tamed and friendly Nature. I can wander around like an idiot falling off cliffs and getting lost in thickets in the dark without a lot of fear of retribution. No wolves, only the occasional wee black bear to go “aww cute” and scare off, and no place to get lost or horribly crippled where a mere half-mile of excruciating crawling won’t get me to a friendly human dwelling with phones and hot running water. Whenever I meet a serious wilderness enthusiast from west of the Mississippi, I seem to end up getting the same gentle ribbing about being so irrevocably enamored of the nurturing-yet-pansy green hills of my home, even to the point of disregard for real wild things like the Rockies, Yosemite, Olympia. And they’re not wrong. But I can’t help it.

I can’t stand new development. I get very angry when trees get cut down and old farmland gets paved to make way for giant box stores I will never enter and couldn’t even dent with a shoulder-fired missile. And yet at the same time I feel, a bit guiltily, that I owe a lot to Johnny Appleseed. He (or his myth) made what remains of the Western Massachusetts wilderness into the Eden that it is, where I can wander around ignoring trail signs and topography, picking apples and taking meticulous photographs of mushrooms with no regard for life or limb. I could probably live for weeks in the woods this time of year just on apples. Presuming I didn’t get gunned down by hunters. Without him, or the spirit of agricultural imperialism he exemplified, that wouldn’t be possible. My whole philosophy of existence pretty much wouldn’t be possible.

If only I were Erin Hoffman, I could distill all this verbosity down into a heartwrenching 20-line poem that cuts to the quick, sell it, and maybe put it out of my head.

Instead I’ll spend the next year or so mulling over the tragic extinction of the American tall tale, how the sterilization of popular culture into malls and box stores and wax-coated, nasty, gas-chamber megamart apples has utterly exterminated any earnest belief in the old kinds of myths, and the only way to resurrect them is in clinical laboratory examinations such as this. And maybe, If I’m really lucky, six months after that, I’ll have written a story that touches on these sad notions briefly in passing and ultimately fails to do them justice.

If you’re here, you’ve no doubt noticed the new and improved Mossy Skull layout 2.0. It’s bigger, easier to read, has more pictures and more/better stuff in the sidebar. And the theme css is a lot cleaner and easier to comprehend, and the php jives better with Wordpress 2.6 (even though I am still stubbornly running on the safe and reliable 2.3.3). Though that doesn’t really affect you, valued reader, since I am still not sharing it.

I am, however, taking suggestions if you have any.

(Save vs. magic for half damage?)

This hiking staff was handmade for me as a gift more than ten years ago by my friend Michael Purpura. It was sturdy, springy and surprisingly lightweight. There was a half-inch bolt screwed onto the business end to prevent it from splitting, which over time and heavy use buried itself deeper and deeper into the wood. Near the head was an etching of dragon taken from the frontispiece of one of the books in Weis and Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle. (Can’t remember which—Dragon Wing? Hand of Chaos? And yes, I was indeed a big ole serial fantasy junkie once upon a time. You were surprised?).

This staff has traveled with me over countless country miles. It has gotten me many weird looks from passersby. As related in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of Weird Tales, it once helped me scare the scare the living bejeezus out of a little old lady. Yesterday, it saved my life.

Or at least it saved me some broken bones.

I was hiking part of the Robert Frost trail south through Mt. Toby Reservation just before sunset. I wanted to get back to the road before dark, so with my usual disregard for rationality, I detoured west down the face of a steep cliff. I made it about halfway before an earthy ledge I was standing on gave out underneath me. I fell fifteen feet and landed in a thorn bush. If it weren’t for the staff, which I shoved into the fork of a tree as I fell past it in an attempt to break my fall, I would probably have plowed right through the thorn bush and kept on going. As it was, I survived with only a bunch of stinging red cuts and scratches all over my knees, back and forearms.

Thank you, stick. You served me well. Now go on to a better place.

Once I saw off the splintered parts, I’ll turn the rest into stakes for the garden.

“Oh, no, I write,” he answered; “it’s now, only now that I write, since I have been watching her. I do nothing but follow the reading of that woman, seen from here, day by day, hour by hour. I read in her face what she desires to read, and I write it faithfully.”

“Too faithfully,” Marana interrupts him, icily. “As translator and representative of the interests of Bertrand Vandervelde, author of the novel that woman is reading, Looks down in the gathering shadow, I warn you to stop plagiarizing it!”

Flannery turns pale; a single concern seems to occupy his mind: “Then, according to you, that reader . . . the books she is devouring with such passion are novels by Vandervelde? I can’t bear it. . . .”

Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a collection of broken-off novel openings threaded together by a narrative about a frustrated, second-person Reader making his way deeper and deeper into an absurdist conspiracy whose goal seems to be to reduce all works of fiction to broken-off openings, for the purposes of fostering a state of perpetual political upheaval. It’s at the same time the most blatant and the most guileful work of metafiction I’ve ever read, and the fact that I didn’t just give up reading after the third aborted cliffhanger in a row is a testament to the power of Calvino’s stylistic virtuosity. Every time, my annoyance at having vested myself in a set of characters and then been yanked out of their narrative is outweighed by my desire to get drawn into the next set of characters—I’d rather read another broken-off Calvino opening than a complete one by anybody else. Especially since every new story is written in a slightly different style from the last, though they move in what almost seems a logical progression, and all treat with similar themes centered around the problem of attempting to immerse oneself in the life and story of a stranger.

Every one of these novel openings includes some kind of love triangle—sometimes several—with varying degrees of metaphorical and literal desire. The framing narrative has at least four. We get a variety of settings and situations: academia, war, revolution, political intrigue, idleness, religion, crime. And the really enlightening thing, the lesson I take away in terms of how to go about accomplishing this sort of thing in my own writing, is the opportunity to observe what changes and what stays the same between openings, how much variety he can pull off when in fact altering relatively little.

“Alex Zinnober,” I introduce myself. “I don’t know if I can be called a lieutenant. In our regiment, ranks have been abolished, but orders change all the time. For the moment, I’m a soldier with two stripes on his sleeves, that’s all.”

“I’m Irina Piperin, as I was also before the revolution. For the future, I don’t know. I used to design fabrics, and as long as there’s a shortage of cloth, I’ll make designs for the air.”

“With the revolution, there are people who change so much they become unrecognizable, and other people who feel they are the same selves as before. It must be a sign that they were prepared in advance for the new times. Is that the case?”

She makes no reply. I add, “Unless it’s their total rejection that preserves them from changes. Is that your situation?”

“I . . . You tell me first: how much do you think you have changed?”

“Not much. I realize I have retained certain points of honor from before: catch a woman about to fall, for example, even if nowadays nobody says thank you.”

“We all have moments of weakness, women and men, and it isn’t impossible, Lieutenant, that I may have an opportunity to return your kindness of a moment ago.”

How does the dialogue contribute to all this? Aside from the fact that it is uniquely occupied with the question of understanding and the perpetual incompleteness of understanding, desire and the impossibility of completely achieving of desire, Calvino’s dialogue does what good dialogue does in other strongly-themed, character-driven stories that do have endings and middles. Which is to say, at least two things at once: develops character; shows us facets of the central idea, interpretations, to which we would otherwise not have been exposed; illustrates desire and the obstacles, both internal and external, to achieving that desire. At times it provides or withholds information for purposes of building suspense or furthering plot—and there is a surprising level of suspense throughout, considering every plot is aborted in its infancy.

“Cimmerian books are all unfinished,” Uzzi-Tuzii sighs, “because they continue beyond . . in the other language, in the silent language to which all the words we believe we read refer. . . .”

“Believe . . . Why believe? I like to read, really to read.” It is Ludmilla who is speaking like this, with conviction and warmth. She is seated opposite the professor, dressed in a simple, elegant fashion, in light colors. Her way of living in the world, filled with interest in what the world can give her, dismisses the egocentric abyss of the suicide’s novel that ends by sinking into itself. In her voice you seek the confirmation of your need to cling to the things, to read what is written and nothing else, dispelling the ghosts that escape your grasp. (Even if your embrace—confess it—occurred only in your imagination, it is still an embrace that can happen at any moment. . . .)

Hen of the Woods aka Maitake. Edible and delicious.
Grifola frondosa
Oak and red pine forest, Satans Kingdom, Westwood, MA

Yellow-Orange Fly Agaric. Mind-shatteringly toxic.
Amanita muscaria formosa, in false button and full veil stages.
Under hemlock in the bed of a recently-dried puddle, Graves Farm Reservation, Haydenville, MA

Yellow-Tipped Coral.
Ramaria formosa
Rotten birch, Graves Farm Reservation, Haydenville, MA