I was down in Riverside last week where there was no river and by 11 the temperature was in the 90s. Cossetted in my air-conditioned rooms behind tinted windows, all I could think about was that in Oregon the rains had started. As you know, we’d walked a long dry road, trees were dying, the forest floor was in classic ‘potato-chip’ condition where every step crunched. And the fires, and the smoke and dust in the valley. Then the rains came, soft and steady, familiar as grandmothers. And rains mean, among other things, mushrooms. Those in-between growths, fruit really, of unseen and often vast organisms that straddle our classification system—not plant, not animal, not yeasts. . . Emily Dickinson got it right:
The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants—
At Evening, it is not—
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop upon a Spot
As if it tarried always
And yet its whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay
And fleeter than a Tare—
‘Tis Vegetation’s Juggler—
The Germ of Alibi—
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie—
I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit—
This surreptitious scion
Of Summer’s circumspect.
Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn
Had Nature an Apostate—
That Mushroom—it is Him!
Surreptitious scions indeed: bright orange witch’s butter, shameless slippery jack, impeccably dressed fly agaric—the Northwest is particularly well-peopled with Nature’s Apostates. But until you meet some mushroom-besotted humans slinking through the undergrowth with plastic buckets in hand and leaves in their hair, who open your eyes to what lies just beneath your feet, mushrooms fade back behind the coffee dates, book reviews, household chores, and ballot measures that loom larger (God knows why. . .) on our horizons. If landscapes were literature, mushrooms would be its poets; generally a little unkempt although there are the crisp and natty types, a little vaguely defined, and often living on uncertain means of support. Always popping up amid the general debris of the forest floor as if they’ve been there all along, then disappearing in a day or so. And like poets, you don’t even notice that they’re not there until someone points it out. We spent years in New Zealand, for example, tramping the Southern Alps and camping in the coastal forests and discovered that way back when Gondwanaland was breaking up, someone checked the “no mushrooms” box on the New Zealand takeout (of course they checked a good many other boxes too— no ubiquitous television sets, no airborne pollution, no jet trails, no native mammals, no football. . ..) Little Blue Penguins on untrodden shoreline, yes. Vast beech forests, ditto. But Middle Earth doesn’t have the necessary mycorrhizal partners (tree root systems) to support mushrooms although some trees are now entering the country with root clusters carrying mycelia. In about two centuries, you might go hunting for mushrooms (unless the orcs get them) on the slopes around Mt. Aspiring.
So as I gazed at the San Gabriel mountains in the heat and the haze my thoughts turned to the Alsea drainage (sorry, I can’t be more precise than that– and please don’t ask again) where the rains were falling and where, most likely, my wife was slipping through the salal, heading for the more open slopes under the canopy in search of the chanterelles that announce themselves in bright choruses against the dark pine litter. Generally we get buckets and buckets of chanterelles, and wear out our desire before we exhaust the particular slopes we hunt on (remember, I asked you not to ask. . .). Since they are the fruit of the organism, picking as many as you see is like picking all the apples off your tree—the only harm is thrashing around in their environment, disturbing their soil. So it’s help yourself. The biggest worry is that you learn how to silence your ‘greed’ alert. Not a problem for mushrooms, but a problem for pretty much everything else.
Chanterelles are brilliant, no doubt about it yet the real trophies are the boletes— in particular Boletus edulis. They grow throughout the Northern Hemisphere and have been harvested for centuries. Pliny the Elder praised them, centuries of European cooks have lauded them. In fact their very name announces their status: Boletus edulis is Latin for edible mushroom. They own the concept, and judging from some of the more majestic specimens you see, they know it. Boletes pop up everywhere—Eastern hardwood forests boast over 100 species, out here we have at least 40. The choice species—king and queen boletes (the French call them cepes, but then again they would). They’re so gorgeous that even people who don’t particularly like to eat them love to find them. You feel as if you’ve received a trophy. Once I was chauffeuring a friend on her first time hunting and after hearing that we had found big boletes alongside Highway 101, she insisted we drive slowly enough for her to spot them. We drove very very slowly and were not popular.
So this weekend we’re getting a pre-dawn departure. By midmorning we’ll have beached the canoe (remember, you said you wouldn’t ask) and be wading through the underbrush, or sometimes even crawling beneath it, dragging our big plastic buckets and whooping. Back home, the food dryer is ready.