Bio-luminescence: The Glowing Wood Chips

This past weekend, DH and I were up north at "our" cabin.  It's really his mother's cabin, and before it belonged to his mother, it belonged to her parents.  And before her father built it, way back when she was a child, the land it is on belonged to her grandparents and her great-grandparents before them.  Her ancestral family was one of the first to settle in that particular county of Michigan, and traces their lineage back to French fur trappers.  But DH calls it "our" cabin because some day in the hopefully way distant future, when his mother passes away, he will inherit it along with his three siblings.

The reason we were up at our cabin was because his mother's eldest sister passed away last week.  She had been ill for many years with I don't know what (first, decades ago, it was diagnosed as Parkinsons, but in recent years the family had been told that it wasn't actually that particular disease), and had lived in a nursing home for the past couple of years.  A few months ago she was put in hospice care, and for the final week of her life, the whole family was on a death watch, just waiting for the dreaded phone call to come in  (her daughters and several of her siblings who lived nearby took turns being with her round the clock, but the rest of us went on with our day to day lives and waited for the official phone call).

So, when the call did finally reach DH, he and I made plans to get time off of work to travel up north for the funeral.  That is how Sunday night found us at our cabin.

Our cabin has neither electricity nor running water.  It is rustic.  Almost a mile off the main road, it is accessible only by a two-track.  Water is obtained by operating an outdoor hand pump on a well his grandfather drilled way before DH was born.  Bathroom facilities are a little square blue building that currently resides over a pit that was dug only about a dozen years ago.  Prior to that it sat about 30 feet further southwest on a different pit that eventually wasn't very deep at all.  Hence the new location over a new pit.  Lacking a crescent moon on the door, it is otherwise your stereotypical one-holer.

In this century, the cabin has undergone some remodeling and an expansion.  Instead of being two bedrooms, able to sleep about six people not all that comfortably, it now has two bedrooms with a double bed in each, plus a large bunk room with beds to sleep an additional ten people.  In 2011, Christmas with DH's siblings, brothers-in-law, nephews and mother (in addition to DH, DS2, DD1, DD2, and myself) was spent at the cabin, and every bed was full.  A few people, the less hardy (or fearful of mice), slept at DH's mother's house down the main road.

This summer, the dining area of the cabin is having knotty pine tongue-in-groove paneling installed on the ceiling and walls.  It not only looks wonderful, but it ties DH's grandparents strongly to the new additions.  In the dining addition (it was built in 2008), the paneling going up is made from trees they had planted in the 1950's; white pines that needed thinning by the turn of the century, and were selectively cut down by DH and our two sons, plus his brother, their mother, and a few friends.  His grandparents planted the trees, three younger generations harvested the trees, the trees were milled into lumber, DH and his brother ran the boards through the planer and the shaper to create the paneling, and his mother and DD1 stained the paneling.  Now, in the past month, DH and his brother have spent a few days installing the paneling in the cabin.

Earlier in the summer, when DH was up north for the planing and shaping of the boards into paneling during his week of vacation around the Fourth of July, he had chopped a little at an old rotting stump that sits only about eight feet from the front stoop of the cabin.  The stump has been there for years, slowing rotting away, and DH likes to chop at it when he can.  His goal is to eventually get the stump down to where it is no longer a tripping hazard in the dark.  (After all, the last thing you want to do on an outhouse run in the middle of the night is find yourself face-down on the other side of the stump with some severely stubbed toes and maybe wet shorts).

That night in July, after he had chopped at the stump, he did make a middle of the night outhouse run, and in his mostly-still-sleeping stupor, he saw something just outside the cabin door that made him rush back inside and wake me from a sound sleep.

"Something is out there!"  He told the very groggy me.  "Get up and come see!"

Now, it is not unusual to see deer at the cabin.  Before we bought this little place here, the cabin is where we went every whitetail hunting season.  Nor is it unusual to kick up turkey or grouse, although usually not after dark.  Coyote and bear tracks abound, and one year there was frequently found a large set of canid tracks we think may have been a wolf or two checking out the area.  We have occasionally seen black bear during the early morning or dusky evening hours.  We have also, many more times, sat out at the fire pit late at night, and conversed with the coyotes.  DD1 is a talented coyote caller.

So, even though it was three a.m., I threw the covers back and got out of bed.  What I saw, when I stepped out on the stoop, was faint blue lights at ground level.  Dozens of them, glowing dimly, and not moving.

"What is it?!?"  DH asked.

I was fully awake now.  Fully awake, and excited.  And also knowing exactly what it was.  Knowing what it was, and not quite believing that I was actually there, actually seeing it.

"It's foxfire!"  I exclaimed.  "I read about it a couple of times."  (Most vividly in Gary Paulsen's book Winterdance).  "But I've never seen it."

Until now.  Boy, was it cool.  And boy, was I overjoyed to be awake at 3 a.m. on a warm July night.  The unearthly blue glow, in spots all over the ground before me, was something to experience.

"Foxfire?"  DH repeated.  "What is it?"

The scientific naturalist part of me took over.  "It's bio-luminescence.  It's microbes, fungi I think, that emit light.  It's all the wood chips you made chopping at that stump today.  They must have the microbes in them and that's what's glowing."

"Fungus?  Are you sure?"  DH, the guy with the bachelor's degree in a science field, sounded pretty doubtful of my knowledge.

"Yes.  It's foxfire.  At least, that's what they call it in Appalachia."  (My father's side of the family is from Appalachia for almost 200 years now.)

He still didn't quite believe me, but it was a sight to behold.  So much so, that the next morning he told his mom all about it.  That night, however, there was no glowing anything.  We checked.  Several times.  And the following night, still nothing.

Back at home, I made use of my electric home with internet capabilities, and looked up bio-luminescence.  Yep, I was right.  Glowing fungi, microbes that lived in the rotting wood of the stump, that after DH had turned that rotten wood into dozens of little chunks and exposed the fungi to the air, emitted a pale light for a limited amount of time.  Light so pale that it could only be seen in the pitch black darkness of a night at the cabin, where, deep in the woods with no electricity, there are no interior lights making an ambient glow outside.

This weekend, when we went up for his aunt's funeral, DH took a little time to chop at that stump in the middle of the day.  That night, when there was no campfire glow (it had been too windy to light a fire), and when we'd decided to head in the cabin to go to bed because it was full dark outside, we noticed a faint glow.  And then more.  And more.  The darker it got (the sky was filling with clouds and blocking out the moon and stars; storms would hit before morning), the more ghostly blue-white glows we noticed on the ground in front of the cabin.  The foxfire was back, in the fresh wood chips DH had chopped from the stump that afternoon.

Even though it was nearly eleven o'clock at night, DH got out his cell phone (which intermittently gets signal at the cabin) and called to his mother's house a few miles away.

"Get out of bed!"  He told her.  "Throw on your robe; I'm coming to take you for a ride.  There's something at the cabin you'll want to see."

Now, usually you'd think twice about calling an almost seventy year old woman after her bedtime.  And unless it was an utmost emergency, you wouldn't tell her to get out of bed and go for a ride.  Especially three days after her sister died.  But, well, DH and I get our not-quite normalness from somewhere, and I think a good shot of his came from his mother's side of the family.  Because when we drove up to her house five minutes later, she was standing outside, clad in a robe and slippers with curlers in her hair, waiting anxiously at the end of the driveway.

"What is it?"  She wanted to know.  But DH just said "You'll see when we get to the cabin," and wouldn't tell her what was waiting that was so important that he'd gotten her out of bed.

When we arrived back at the cabin, you could not see the foxfire because of the headlights on the car.  DH instructed his mother to get out, and after he shut the car off, he lead her over right to the middle of where the wood chips were scattered.  Once the headlights went off, the glow of the foxfire shone out of the darkness.  It was an eerie thing, standing in the middle, looking down at all these small lights, yet feeling like you surely must be looking up into a galaxy of stars because nothing on earth could look like that.

We stayed there, in the foxfire, for a good twenty minutes before driving DH's mom back home to her bed.  In all her life, she had never seen anything like it.  She asked us what it was, how it was made, why it was there.  DH even picked up a piece and handed it to her, the glow now looking like it was levitating as she held it in her hand.  She and I each picked up more pieces, and we waved our arms around while holding those wood chips in our hands, drawing designs in the dark air like little kids playing with sparklers.

Foxfire.  Bio-luminescence.  Glowing fungus.  It makes the old young at heart, and the night seem not so much like a time to be tired.

After taking his mom back to her house, DH and I sat up for several more hours (after two a.m.).  We talked about bio-luminescence (two science nerds, we are!).  We broke one of the wood chips in half and conducted an experiment on how long the fungi needed to be exposed to oxygen before they started to glow (about an hour for the first faint light, two hours and it was nearly half as bright as the surrounding wood that had been chipped out of the tree in the afternoon).  We tried to figure out ways to take a fresh chunk of rotten stump home after the funeral to chip up and show DD1 and DD2 later in the week.  We discussed getting a piece for DS2 to take with him (and chip and glow) on his upcoming road trip back to his college to visit friends and canoe-teammates and Outdoor Adventure Program co-workers at the end of this week (he is on a 6-month co-op assignment and will not be taking fall semester classes).  We even came up with a plan to ship a chunk to South Carolina, to DS1 and K2 and K3 so they could see the foxfire.

But, in the end, it isn't as easy as that.  Foxfire doesn't turn on on demand.  There are a number of conditions that all have to be right at the same time, for the fungi to grow and multiply, and turn on their bio-luminescence.  Temperature, humidity, the dampness of the wood chip, the amount of time exposed to oxygen; those all have to work together, or all you have is a chunk of punky wood and people thinking you've gone off the deep end.

No glow; even the camera, in the dark with the flash turned off, made too much light.

Just looks like a chunk of wood.