Mycophilia Read online

  After breakfast, I went outside to wait for one of the four idling yellow school buses that would take us to the hunting grounds for the competition. I stood against a building to escape the wind—it was a chilly 55 degrees—next to a couple who were doing the same. We started talking. Al Nighsonger is a biker with all the trimmings: leather jacket, jackboots, a long gray ponytail, a smoker’s cough. He represents another type of mushroom hunter—one I’ve met in the commercial morel forests in Montana: hard living, off the grid, a live-free-or-die outlaw type of man. His wife, Dee, is a steady, self-confident woman with a lovely melodic voice, a former Iraq War air force gunner in a soldier’s cap.

  “You come with us, and you’ll find mushrooms,” Al promised. “We’ll look for you on the golf course.”

  We did indeed go to a golf course—which troubled me: The thought of searching for morels on a trimmed green seemed unsporting, like an Easter egg hunt on a lawn. We all bundled out of the buses, negotiating walking sticks and wicker baskets, and Tom Nauman, a stocky, bearded fellow, clambered atop an ambulance parked near the clubhouse to explain the rules: At the end of 90 minutes, a siren will sound, giving notice there are 30 minutes left in the hunt. After 119 minutes, a siren will sound twice, notifying hunters they have 60 seconds in which to turn in their mushrooms to officials. (At this point, the assembled group started looking at one another in confusion.) Sixty-one seconds after the final siren has been sounded, hunters will be penalized 10 mushrooms for lateness. Anyone more than 10 minutes late forfeits his or her mushrooms. No pooling mushrooms, no getting unauthorized help. No damaging the fungus that lives belowground.

  Hunters take off across the golf course at the Illinois State Morel Mushroom Hunting Championship.

  Then, after a few words about how big the hunt had become in its 12 years of operation and, to my relief, some general directions regarding the elm woods beyond the range, Tom pulled the trigger of his starter gun and off we all ran, a rather undignified crowd of 300 flapping across the grass in our rubber boots. Al and Dee headed west into the woods, and I followed.

  Dee disappeared right away, but Al led me along, a 16-ounce can of Busch beer in one hand, smoking cigarettes the whole time, pointing with his lit butt at one tree or another. In the Midwest, given the right temperature and rainfall, morels may be found in abundance under dying elm trees. And due to Dutch elm disease, a fungal blight, there are a lot of dying elms.

  “You’ll find morels under that there elm,” he said, pointing at a dense thicket. While Al sat on a stump, I crawled under, my clothes and hair tugged and ripped as I pushed through. But sure enough, I found morels. I knew they were growing under a dying elm, but the undergrowth was so thick I couldn’t see the tree. I could only look over my shoulder at Al, who gestured for me to keep going, keep going, with a wave of his hand, and I obeyed, crawling like an infantryman through the nettles and briers. Using this technique, Al and I found about 35 hard-won morels, and then the siren blew and we had to head out of the woods. Because we shared a bag, I couldn’t submit our morels for competition. Actually, everyone was grousing that there weren’t many mushrooms, although most people seemed to have collected a few pounds in the 2 hours we hunted.

  An auction followed the hunt, and somewhere in the middle of it, the hunt winners were announced. I didn’t care about the $200 prize money for the most morels collected, but I did covet a trophy once I saw it on display: a tacky plaque shaped like the state of Illinois with a little resin morel attached. (And indeed, as the young man who won the trophy took his check, there were some intentionally easy-to-overhear comments suggesting he had colluded with other mushroomers and they were set to blow their earnings collectively at the bar.) Biggest mushroom (6 inches tall) and smallest mushroom (½ inch tall) also won prizes, although I knew an even smaller mushroom had been found. On the bumpy bus ride back to the fairgrounds, a young lady held up an absolutely miniscule specimen for me to inspect, but when we suddenly hit a rut, she dropped it.

  Hunters from around the state brought mushrooms to sell at the auction, and they were expensive: Prices varied from $50 to $90 a pound-about what high-end gourmet shops in New York were charging that year. The auctioneer, a fellow in an emergency orange coat and motorcycle boots with spurs, held up half-pound bags of morels for everyone to look at. One fellow, a trotter jockey from Florida with a blond crew cut, filled a cooler with 16 pounds of these pricey mushrooms, peeling off 50-dollar bills from a wad of cash as thick as a steak. Dave sat next to me at the auction, and he explained that some hunters soaked the mushrooms to make the bag heavier. At one point, a shaggy pale-eyed dude from Los Angeles shuffled over and asked if I was the New York reporter who was just there to have fun, and then proceeded to tell me he always finds morels after he’s done a good deed, and that he didn’t want to come out and say it, but he thought it was due to divine intervention.

  I’d heard stuff like this before. Hunters who stumble upon a great patch of mushrooms have been known to wear the same clothes again, thinking they bring them luck. Some hunters carry a small basket so as not to alert the mushrooms, or pretend they are not really hunting at all, just walking in the woods, acting casual, so as not to jinx their chances. “Never say the M word in the woods,” they’ll warn, and never pick the first morel you see, because they send a signal underground to the other morels and then they’ll all go into hiding. There is certainly a feeling of inevitability when you do find them—almost like it is your destiny to find that mushroom. After all, many fungi live underground. They are by their very nature mysterious. But on the other hand, one of the trophy winners was a PhD in mycology, so obviously he enjoyed an edge based not on superstition, luck, outwitting the mushroom spirits, or by agreement with God, but because he’d taken a lot of biology courses.

  After a pork chop sandwich—a delicious though architecturally challenging meal as the bone was still in—Dave took me to a spot he’d scoped out beside the river earlier in the day. We hunted a sandy bank of dying elms across the road from river wetlands. It was strewn with the kind of garbage that people chuck out of their cars—I kept expecting to stumble over a corpse, and was jittery enough to jump at the sight of a naked, discarded baby doll haphazardly buried under a sprinkling of damp pine needles. But mushrooms don’t care about the aesthetics of their place, sometimes they even seem to prefer beat up and run-down areas, and true to form, this one was blanketed with blond morels. I picked about 3 pounds with Dave, and we talked about mortgages and colleges and all the stuff that preoccupies middle-aged people regardless of how cool their sunglasses are.

  That night at the Harbor Inn, I did an inventory: a hefty 4 pounds of nice-looking morels that I distributed among four pie boxes I’d brought along. There was a steak house within walking distance, and after convincing the waitress to restock a salad bar that looked like it had just returned from a transatlantic flight, I ate. I was ravenous. It was $4.99.

  The next morning, I had a tentative plan to hunt with Al and Dee at their spot “where no one else ever goes,” but as I couldn’t get hold of them early, I signed on for the morel hunting tour with Tom Nauman. I balked at the $75 price tag, but Tom said it was way worth it, plus I’d get some swag. While I waited for our group to convene in the arts hall, I perused the morel merchandise. There were morel-themed refrigerator magnets, salt and pepper shakers, napkin holders, statuettes of all sorts, T-shirts, hats, aprons … I almost bought a pair of resin morel wire earrings, but when I tried them on they looked like misshapen beige warts hanging from my earlobes.

  About 20 of us took a bus, driven by a bottle-blond driver who told me repeatedly how she could never stand to live in the rat race that is New York City, to a lovely farm. We scrabbled under bramble, through woods, in and out of fields, Tom pointing out dead elms with no mushrooms under them, all the while talking about how many hits the Morel Mania site had gotten that spring. Tom had told us to look for morels at the base of elms whose bark was shearing off, and I saw one tree
that looked promising. Indeed, I circled it, and found a few morels at its base. As I checked the leaf litter for more—mushrooms will often come up at the drip line of a tree, a circumference determined by the tree canopy—a young couple approached with vexed expressions. “We saw this tree from 50 yards away,” he said, his eye on my small cache of mushrooms, and she nodded. I shrugged and left—I think I had all the mushrooms anyway—but I felt a little like I’d been accused of stealing someone’s cab.

  Luckily, Al and Dee were hanging out in the fairgrounds parking lot drinking coffee when we returned. I couldn’t get my freebies fast enough—a bottle of water and a thin volume called Find the Tree, Find the Morel, written by a teenage wunderkind on the Illinois hunting scene—before I hopped in my car to follow them to their mysterious grounds.

  We passed the airport in Peoria and pulled into a military installation. Dee showed her pass and, after yucking it up for a few minutes with the baby-faced boys holding automatic rifles, drove us to a beautiful moist forest deep within the base. What they’d said was true—we had the woods to ourselves. However, the forest was at the end of a firing range, and practice was going on. Guns popped and crackled and bullets whizzed overhead periodically, buzzing through the high branches, nipping off twigs. I hunted with my shoulders bunched around my ears, trying to make my head a smaller target. “Oh, that’s just the police practicing,” said Dee, utterly unperturbed. “Now if it were machine gunners, I’d say walk low.”

  We found many pounds of big morels, and Dee told me that she and Al had gone hunting on their wedding day, which was in May. Sitting in the plane, my bag stuffed with pie boxes brimming with morels, I thought about my flight over, how I’d felt the lone mushroomer then, and how different my experience in Illinois actually was. Were the people so nice because of a kind of morel brotherhood? I don’t know.

  Maybe it’s just Peoria.

  So began my period of attending mushroom forays with specific targets in mind. A mushroom I especially coveted was the candy cap, one of several closely related Lactarius mushrooms, which refers to the pearl of milky juice (mycologists call it latex) that seeps out of the stem and cap when you pick it.

  Years earlier, I had tasted a candy cap at a public relations event hosted by the chef and author Jack Czarnecki. He made a sweet compote with the mushroom and served it over cheesecake. The candy cap was a revelation to me: redolent with the smell of maple, marvelously silky and spongy in texture, earthy and meaty and sweet. When you eat a candy cap, your skin smells like maple sugar. When you exercise after eating a candy cap, your sweat smells like maple sugar. When you make love after eating a candy cap … well, I leave that to the imagination, but … yes. Candy caps are native to northern California, and although you can purchase them dried from wild crafters and distributors through the Internet, I was hungry to find them for myself.

  That’s why I signed up for the SOMA Wild Mushroom Camp in Occidental, California. SOMA camp usually takes place over a weekend in mid-January. I’d paid $300 and checked off my packing list, which included a sleeping bag, compass, and “favorite whistle,” among many other items not usually owned by people who live in New York apartments, then flown across the country to spend 3 days with 160 fungal-minded people. The SOMA camp (SOMA is an acronym—and a double entendre—for Sonoma Mycological Association and the holy drink of the Indian sacred text, the Rig Veda) had occupied a Christian summer camp that squatted amid young redwoods and rocky outcroppings; the cabins, shower houses, and dining/meeting hall all transformed from one obsession to another. Everything at SOMA camp was mushroomy: the names of the cabins (my travel companion and fellow New York Mycological Association member Arlene Jacobs and I were, coincidentally, assigned to the Lactarius cabin), the mushroom-shaped nametags, the mushroom paraphernalia for sale in the public space. It was like a Trekkie convention for mushroomers.

  On the walls were sign-up lists for classes like “Introduction to Mushroom Dyes,” “Toadstools, Mushrooms, and Beyond,” and for the forays, and a map of the United States stuck with pins representing our hometowns. Arlene, a former chef de cuisine at Jean Georges in New York, is a petite woman with short hair and tidy, efficient hands. She’s good at all sorts of crafts, and she put her name down for Mushroom Paper Making and Botanical Drawing. I signed up for the longest forays, ready for the deepest woods, hoping for the most bountiful hunt. And as we were eagerly writing our names down, ensuring our spots like college students jostling for a seat in a celebrity professor’s course, we eyed the other participants: about 50 middle-aged people in jeans and camo and khaki carrying straw baskets, as well as a smattering of bearded mountain men in suspenders and plaid. Arlene and I were the only people wearing black.

  A small foray was organized for that afternoon, and while I waited in the parking lot beside the vans, a man in huge hiking boots with red laces and a moustache that lay on his upper lip like a sleeping baby hedgehog struck up conversation. He told me he was a leading expert on Arctic polypores and that he was reporting on the camp for a food magazine. Naturally I asked him which one, but when he told me and I blinked vacantly, he didn’t say another word, just got in the front seat of the van and closed the door.

  We drove about 10 minutes north to Westminster Woods, a forest with wide, hard trails that must have been tromped all summer long by young Christians. And though we looked, and I looked until the final whistle to return to the vans, it was too dry and cold for mushrooms.

  It was a rather dreary start to the weekend, but we were cheered after a few glasses of wine in the afternoon and a first-rate class on mushroom salads with the chef and gleaner Elissa Rubin-Mahon (Dungeness crab and roasted chanterelles, Thai-style grilled oyster mushrooms with mint). By the time we had ambled around to the ID tables, we saw that others had had more luck foraging. There were easily 40 different species on display, each coded with either a place-setting symbol (which indicated it was edible) or a skull and crossbones, and as we lingered, listening in on the open and easy sharing of mushroomy information, I realized that there were two castes of people at the camp: those who were interested in fungi primarily from a biological standpoint and those who were interested primarily from a culinary standpoint. In the first group were men who rather aggressively corrected each other’s identifications, as well as nerdy scientific types who inspected the samples with magnifying glasses and rolled the Latin names of the mushrooms over their tongues like sour balls. I am of the lower caste: a belly feeder, interested in hunting for the pot.

  Mushrooms breaking through asphalt

  Setting aside the obvious problems with poisonous mushrooms, there are a few guidelines to eating wild edible mushrooms safely. First, know your mushrooms. As Gary Lincoff likes to say, “Any mushroom is edible once.” Eat only one species at a time the first time you eat them (combining species will make it harder to determine which one you are having a bad reaction to). Eat only young, very fresh specimens. Mushrooms should not be eaten raw. Mushroom cell walls are made of chitin (pronounced ky-tin), the same stuff that crab shells are made of, and it’s hard to digest. It is actually a 1-4 linkage of glucose—kind of like a very thin, crispy candy. But it is supertough stuff: Chitin’s strength, along with turgor pressure (that’s when the contents of a cell push against the cell wall—sort of like your flexed muscle pushing against your skin), gives mushrooms the ability to push through the earth, even through solids like asphalt. It’s a wonderful adaptation, but we don’t have the stomach enzymes to digest it. Chitin, however, is broken down when you cook the mushroom. Cooking also releases nutrients that are trapped in the cells. Plus, eating raw wild mushrooms could give you worms.

  The next morning, our first full day, Arlene and I attended the foray we had come so far to join. The camp population had swelled overnight, the weather had warmed up, and the forest we visited, Point Reyes, was spectacular. Candy caps are symbiotic partners with a variety of plants: The fungus grows on the roots of huckleberry, tan and live oak, and conifers,
all of which share this forest with redwood trees. I’d never seen redwoods before, and walking in that deep, grand forest, coming upon a grove of huge trees with dozens of mushrooms growing in the middle, was as magical as anything I’d ever experienced as a child, when such encounters were full of mystery and meaning. A young biology student with enough facial hardware to set off an airplane security alarm pointed out my first candy cap, the fungus Lactarius fragilis. They are small, cinnamon colored, and smell like maple syrup, and I promptly became hyperfocused on collecting them—as many as I could. At the same time, my greed and gluttony, those vices that propelled me from one patch of mushrooms to the next, were somehow smothered under the greatness of the trees, the somber quietness of the woods, the diffused green light that made the forest feel like a dream.

  I returned to camp with about 5 pounds of pristine candy caps. Already, the whole trip had been worth it: the expense, the hassle of arranging to have the kids picked up from school, everything. I tried to be as low key about my haul as I could because I was afraid someone would ask me to share, though I did want one of the top identification dogs to check them out in case I had included an LBM (little brown mushroom) of bad repute. My mushrooms garnered more attention than I would have liked—despite the fact that the ID tables, by day 2, were laden with mushrooms—but no one asked for any. It was an indication of my inexperience and naiveté that I was even worried: Mushroom hunters never ask to share.

  In the afternoon, Arlene and I attended Lawrence Millman’s lecture “Making Fire with Fomes—Cree Indian Divination” and discovered the moustached Arctic polypore expert was the fellow I had inadvertently insulted when I didn’t recognize the magazine he was writing for. His accomplishments, which he shared during his introduction, were impressive. A member of the Explorer’s Club, Millman has written 11 books, including A Kayak Full of Ghosts, and has adventured in many places, writing articles and such. The lecture, scheduled for 1 hour, quickly threatened to run overtime, what with digressions into the trials and tribulations of camping by oneself in the tundra, so we went to peruse the sample tables where Dr. Else Vellinga explained that mushrooms are identified three ways: by their morphology (what they look like), by examining their spores with a microscope, and by analyzing their DNA.