Ty Phelps
One afternoon, before all this, I wrote about gray. Gray will go places. Gray is the faded snow of a Wisconsin February piled high in a shopping mall parking lot, speckled with exhaust. It’s certain eyes in a certain light, or, occasionally, the Big Lake, or wolves, though their shading is more of a confluence of black and white and in-betweenness. Like the granite that heaves itself out along the North Shore, Precambian bedrock birthed 2.7 billion years ago. Or lichen that clings to the rock, or Usnea, another sort, the Old Man’s Beard, climbing grayish-green in the trees.
You can follow your gray thoughts and arrive in these ghost woods, each tree a universe of messy living, each wisp of the Old Man’s Beard a fractal thread to somewhere else.
Lichen is the world’s weirdest construct. This is science. Part algae, part fungus, two biological kingdoms combining into a single living organism. They’re debating if bacteria is in the mix too, which would bring the kingdom total to three. Lichen is like if humans were also trees but were still humans but were really trees, cellulose-and-lite blending into some newness, lungs and limbs and photosynthesis on a razor’s edge of liminal life, a stuck-between, a spread-across.
Old Man’s Beard is the color of a long, lonely Sunday afternoon where time stretches out in front of you and you’re too sad to nap, too despondent to talk, too brain-tired to read or write or create. It’s the color of all the time, right now. Or it’s possibly not.
Have you seen it? It’s beautiful. The way it clings, wispy, to tree trunks. It grows in tassels, up to twenty centimeters long. Some think it kills trees, but really it’s taking advantage if a tree loses its ability to create leaves; then there’s more light for the algae part. This is merely how things work. The world is often less beautiful than we want it to be, though sometimes it is better, too.
The Old Man’s beard isn’t nefarious, though it resembles will-o-the-wisps hovering in the forests. But it doesn’t try to lure you away from your mother, or your lover, or your soul. It is content with its duality in a way so many of us are not. Why is it so hard for humans to be more than one thing at once? We need poets to emerge periodically, muddy and wild, to remind us that this is possible.
Lichen reproduces asexually, but this fact does not necessarily have any bearing on its proclivity for pleasure. Does the Old Man’s Beard curl its tendrils around itself? Does it care about friction, in either the physical or metaphorical sense? Does it whisper love notes through the rumor mill of forest-floor mycelium?
I want the Old Man’s Beard to become the new decorative gourd. Hung like garlands in homes during holidays. Subject to viral McSweeneys’ articles. Clumped inside cornucopias. Spilling out as a bounty of hope.
Ty Phelps is a writer, teacher, and musician. He won The Gravity of the Thing’s 2016 Six Word Story Contest, was a finalist for Gigantic Sequins flash fiction contest, and has published work in Writespace and the 1001 Journal. Ty is an MFA candidate at VCU.