Ghost Pipe

On tapping your network for the things you need

We got to Michigan last Tuesday, bringing our month on the road to an end. It was mostly a great trip but by the end we were desperate to be able to just put our stuff down somewhere and know that we could leave it there indefinitely. So it was nice to turn the key in the door and step into a place that we knew was, finally, ours.

Since then we have been living in a state of disarray: some boxes half-unpacked, others stacked up to make a coffee table, every human need becoming an exercise in Hey do you know where…? We’ve both wanted a break, but in a situation like this a break just creates more work and more hassle. As a result we’ve been feeling understandably stuck and out of sorts as we try to simultaneously recuperate from uprooting our old life and chip away at the endless list of tasks required to begin our new one.

For many years the best remedy I’ve found for feeling stuck and out of sorts has been to go hiking, so on Sunday we drove out of the city to a place called Proud Lake and spent the morning tramping around the wooded trails there.

Coming around a bend, a flash of white on the forest floor caught my eye. It was a small stand of ghost pipe, a bizarre little plant that most people assume is a fungus. They’d be forgiven: Monotropa uniflora has no chlorophyll and doesn’t photosynthesize. It’s a mycoheterotroph, a plant that feeds by plugging into underground fungal networks that transport nutrients between the roots of trees. That makes the relationship parasitic, technically, but it doesn’t harm the host fungi—they’re just a necessary conduit to get the ghost pipe what it needs in environments where it would otherwise be difficult for a plant to thrive. The flower often grows in shady patches where the sun doesn’t reach, flowering after rainstorms.

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I only know a few people in Detroit. I have not moved to a new city in almost a decade, and there’s a lot of distance between who I was at 22 and who I am now. When I first moved to Seattle I said yes to basically everything—a beer or coffee or a hike— with whoever asked, because everyone who did ask was a potential friend. Some of those relationships never saw a second hangout; others turned into some of the most important ones in my life. But I’ll be 32 next month and I lack both the will and the stamina to try that hard to make new connections. I’m excited to make new friends as the opportunities arise, but it will be a more selective and cautious process this time around.

It’s no surprise, then, that for the past week we’ve been leaning on our small handful of Detroit friends for, well, everything. Where to eat and where to shop and where to drink and where to be outside. We are new and we are tired and so at the moment we have little to contribute to the lives of others. We just tap into the network and take what we need as we navigate this uncertain period of our lives. That’s not how I’m used to living my life, but I am working on being okay with that for a little while. If it’s good enough for something as captivating and noteworthy as the ghost pipe, it’s good enough for me.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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