Oyster Mushroom Photos Held Pending Written Confirmation That the Elm Is Dead

"That elm is standing," opens the first reply, and forty-one comments later nobody has said a word about a single mushroom.

The thread began at dawn with three photographs of shelf fungi on a hardwood trunk, a two-line question about substrate, and a harvester who goes by Wetweather_wren. By nine the conversation had left the fungi entirely and moved to arboriculture, where it has lived ever since, arguing about bark adhesion.

The opening replier, fourteen years in the society, twice the foray schedule, establishes what he calls standing credentials: he has personally documented thirty-one dead elms and can tell a reader how many of them still had leaves. Wetweather_wren answers with her own, which she lists numerically. The trunk in her photographs has lost most of its bark on the shaded side. She has supplied a photograph of the bark in her hand. The replier would like the bark in writing.

What follows is the genre the board calls substrate arbitration, conducted at the volume usually reserved for property lines. A canopy photograph arrives, taken from a neighbor's second-floor window, showing crown dieback that the first replier reads as storm damage and Wetweather_wren reads as decline. A retired surveyor weighs in on trunk lean. Someone's brother-in-law, described as "essentially an arborist," provides an opinion relayed in three paragraphs of a comment that has been edited four times.

Vera Pike is asked to mediate around comment nineteen and accepts, which both parties describe afterward as a decision she made unilaterally.

I sketched the trunk section before reading any of it, the visible ring of remaining bark, the way the shelf caps emerge from a seam where the wood has gone soft, because the drawing takes longer than the arguing does, and because both sides in this thread are describing the same trunk from different ends of it.

At 11:40 p.m., Wetweather_wren posts the answer: a photograph of a stump, taken from above, with a hand-drawn arrow added in marker pointing at the center, where the wood has gone through to a dark, spongy middle. The arrow is emphatic. It is also the only arrow anyone in the thread has produced all day.

The reply directly beneath it reads: "Spore print?"

Nobody responds to it either. The next three comments return to bark adhesion, one to the neighbor's window, one to a request that the original poster confirm the elm's death in writing before anyone commits to an identification. The thread is locked at seventy-eight comments with the resolution tag, which on this board means only that the moderator got tired.

Wetweather_wren's three photographs are still up, unremarked upon, fourteen hours on. The stump holds its arrow. Somewhere between the first reply and the last, the question the thread was convened to answer, what is growing on this wood, and what would it take to be sure, became the one question the thread could not ask, because it had already agreed to a quarrel it could finish.