Not Dark Yet

They say it was bat shit that almost did him in, something he might have breathed in while riding his motorcycle on a gusty spring day, or maybe at a rest stop before a show in Memphis, or maybe while he was taking a walk in the woods. The fungus is called histoplasma capsulatum, and it grows on bird and bat droppings in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valley, when the air is thick with pollen and the rivers are stagnant with muck. If it gets into your lungs, it can swell the sac around your heart, make it hard to breathe, give you a stabbing pain in your chest, and eventually, if left untreated, stop your heart entirely. That’s what almost happened to Bob Dylan in May of 1997.