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The year:2001. I am seventeen. It is summer. The Baltic: Late evening light, calm waters, cool air. I am sitting by the lake next to Peter, with whom I am by now a little bit in love, and we are very quiet. Not the way we used to be, up to our knees in swamp water, hunting for tadpoles, scooping up shrimp in tidepools, fishing with sticks. We have already been swimming and are just waiting to dry off before meeting Martin and Johan and the others for dinner, towels draped over our shoulders, bare toes gripping the moss and rocks. They are awkward, these bodies, and they speak to us in strange new ways and he comments on things like the smell of my hair after showering or my small ears–things he would never have taken notice of when we were six… And I am often surprised to find myself thinking, in his presence, that he is a saint, which another part of myself knows, he most certainly is not. Here, he says. Now you are really going to know something, and he uses the word for know that also means to feel and my eyes get very wide and I am still. Do you smell that? He asks, and with that sly quiet smile of his, Follow me. Keeping the towel around my waist with one hand, I follow him away from the lake and into the woods. There.

Nature is often astonishing. That smell, the smell in the woods, the one that Peter and I felt together in the summer of 2001 was the smell of rotting meat. It is cliche to invoke Proust, and virtually empty to say that smells transport us in memory. And yet, when this does happen, it is so immediate and striking, that we say it again and again. Recently, in Harlem, in springtime, as I caught a whiff of someone’s garbage rotting on Broadway, I found myself in memory kneeling on the damp forest floor smelling that rotten smell, wrinkling my nose in astonishment, my friend Peter laughing with amusement and delight. But our rotten meat smell was not produced by a rancid carcass or an outdated beefsteak. Our rotten smell was produced by a singularly pornographic mushroom, which excretes this foul-smelling sticky mass to attract flies, which carry the spores and allow it to multiply.

This is a common stinkhorn, which was named by Linnaeus, in the Latin, Phallus impudicus (a shameless and immodest member, indeed). It is one of nature’s jokes– a play on imitation that, even while it disgusts us, we cannot help but find captivating, amusing, delightful. To the joy of young boys, this impudent fungus has the audacity to begin life as a cluster of egg-shaped white balls, from which it bursts forth to a full, mature height of about seven inches and, in a matter of days, begins to stink.  Even as we wrinkle our noses, we love this olfactory weirdness.

A pipe is not always a pipe, friends; just because you smell a rat, doesn’t mean there isn’t a snake in the grass. And if your Phallus smells like carrion, cheer up. It’s probably a mushroom.