How My Love For Mushrooms Began..

My fascination with fungi started pretty early, I grew up on a small farm on the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State, a temperate area with moderate rainfall and large conifer forests. A good home for fungi. Living with my mother and sister on a small chicken and rabbit farm of 5 acres, I had carved out trails through the forest behind the barn. I spent many of my days playing with my dog and walking the trails behind the house. My earliest memory of an interest in fungi was an old stump, a hardwood, probably a big leaf maple, with huge clusters of beautiful yellowish mushrooms growing all over it. They fascinated and captivated me. They touched a part of me that harkened back too the darker enchanted parts of Disney movies, of mysterious and magical woods. The mushrooms cascaded down the stump forming large plumes of thick fruiting bodies clustered together. I really had no means of understanding what they were, this was in the mid-1980s and unless you had a foraging guide or a mushroom identification guide there were little places to find out about which mushrooms were which. Years later I deducted that they must have been sulfur tufts (Hypholoma fasciculare), a poisonous mushroom that is really common on dead hardwood in the area. It must have been around the same time that I started to notice all kinds of different mushrooms, and my interest was observed by my grandmother. 

She had an interest in wild mushrooms, as well as collecting butterfly specimens. She was taught about mushrooms by her stepmother, a gal named Toshi who came from Japan with my great grandpa following world war II. She told my grandma of the old times in the old country, picking mushrooms high in the mountain forests, a very special mushroom called Matsutake. My grandma related stories of her memories of her stepmother hanging these mushrooms that she had foraged on strings in the windows to dry. She very much impressed on me the uniqueness and importance of the pine mushroom. My next memory is about mushrooms was about my grandma, living in a apartment complex for senior citizens, and taking me across the street to the forest behind the local Junior high. In the forest we collected a couple of mushrooms that we found trail side, put them in a basket, and carried them back to her apartment. She produced a couple of old field guides which had pictures of mushrooms, mostly in black and white. We didn't take time to look through the keys, we just kind of looked at the photos and compared them to the mushrooms sitting on the table. We had a vague idea of what they were but we're definitely not sure enough to try eating them. She was however familiar with chanterelle mushrooms. A few years later, she bought a small piece of property in the southeastern Olympic mountains near Lake Cushman. A beautiful area on the edge of a protected national forest. During late summer I would stay with her for a couple of weeks and ride my motorcycle around on the long dirt roads. One day she handed me a basket and told me to go out into the forest and try to find some large orange mushrooms growing under the brush. If I found anything that looked like that bring it back and she would help me to identify them. I left and it wasn't long before I found mushrooms matching her description. Excitedly I plucked them from the ground and filled up the bucket rather quickly. When I got back to her place she was astonished to see the beautiful and large golden chanterels that I had found. I remember the look on her and her friends face, the excitement that they had was infectious. It was from that moment on, when I was 13 years old, that I really caught the mushroom fever. Ever since then I have been frequenting the forests around my town. I started to notice small similarities between the different forests that I would find the same mushrooms in. The trees, the plants, the flora, all of these subtle things combined would lead me to new mushroom foraging areas. I discovered that the local library had some mushroom foraging guides, so I helped myself to them, sneaking some of them into my backpack and stealing them. I would thumb through them with amazement in secrecy. I was shy about the hobby. I was forming my personality based on some ideas of what it looked like to be cool, and mushroom hunting and scientific things definitely didn't fit that mold, so I kept it to myself. But year after year every rainy season I found myself trudging through the brush looking for not only chanterels, but matsuake and various other prized edibles that I had only heard about up to that point, like the lobster mushroom and the chicken of the woods. I was probably 16 when I found my first matataki, one year after my grandma's passing. When she passed away all of her field guides were passed down to me, which still are on my shelf above my most prized mushroom altar. 

 When I was 16 I was introduced to another kind of mushroom, by this time I had been drinking on the weekends and smoking pot and a couple of friends asked me if I would like to try magic Mushrooms. Of course I would. It was late October and I snuck out of my bedroom window of the rambler farmhouse and ran up the road to meet my friend who had a small yellow Toyota truck. We swung by Parkview terrace, a low income neighborhood and picked up a couple of friends and headed to a place called the lakes, a retirement community in Gig harbor Washington that had sprawling green lawns that were well manicured. We snuck around the gates at night with small flashlights in our baseball caps inverted to collect the small slimy brown mushrooms we found growing in the moonlight in the lawns. The two guys who had some experience with mushrooms, Jake and Roy, called these mushrooms blue ringers. Everybody at that time knew what blue ringers were. A small brown hallucinogenic mushroom that grew in fairly big clusters in really nicely manicured green lawns. This was the mid-1990s, and all of the new housing tracts had lawns made of imported sod, the sod was inoculated with the mushroom mycelium. When the rains hit in the fall the mushrooms exploded, inviting teenagers to trample through the newly laid lawns of housing developments across the Puget sound. That night we picked probably 3 lb of blue ringers, stuffing them all into a large 2 gallon juice container and we piled into the truck and headed back to my friend Roy's house whose parents were out of town. We dumped all of the mushrooms into a large cooking pot and just barely covered them with water. We simmered the mushrooms and the water for about 20 minutes and poured cups of tea. 3 lb of mushrooms to 4 lb of tea made some pretty dark sludge. I can still remember the taste and the smell today. We drank the cups quickly, not knowing what to expect. The next few hours was one of the most powerful and life-changing experiences I ever had. People seemed to be speaking in tongues, I got stuck in a time loop, repeating the same motions, saying the same things over and over for what felt like hours. At one point my friend Richie and I went to take the colander of the strained mushroom pulp outside to dump it into the bushes. We hardly made it to the edge of Roy's lawn when we realized that we were probably going to get lost, we were severely confused. As time went on the powerful effects of the mushrooms continued to get heavier and heavier. Richie lost control and started breaking the screen door on Roy's house. Roy and Jake tried to settle him down and reason with him but he seemed to be speaking in tongues, completely out of control of himself or his actions. I remember Jake pulling up a political vote sign from the street side and poking Richie with it until he corralled him into his truck. Once Richie was in the truck he didn't have the wear with all of the figure out how the door handles worked so he sat there speaking gibberish and breaking the mirror in his hand. I remember going out and trying to talk to him, telling him I had to get home before daylight because my mom was going to freak out. There is no hope in getting him to drive me the 5 mi home at 4:00 a.m. So I started walking, I walked for at least an hour till I got home and crawled in my bedroom window. I slid the window shut, eyes bulging and dilated, and slid into my bed just before my mom tapped on the door and told me it was time to wake up for school. And she opened the door a rush of cold air met her and she gasped. she remarked on how cold it was in my room, there seem to be a layer of frost on everything because I left the window open all night. I got up that morning and took a quick shower and got dressed, dreading how I was going to get through the day. I went to school that day, 8th grade in junior high. I remember dozing off during a couple of classes but for the most part I did all right. I got through that day and never got in trouble, my mom never knew about what had happened that night. Richie made a full recovery, we all did, and we all remembered that night fondly, with a new respect for hallucinogenic mushrooms. Most field guides would describe those particular mushrooms, blue ringers or Psilocybe stuntzii, as being mild or weak, but when taken in a large enough quantity there anything but mild. 

All three of the other guys from that night have passed away, I'm the only one left with the memories of that experience. I will forever remember those guys, and that night, a night that concreted my fascination with fungi and led me to a life where an obsession for fungi has only grown like the mycelium have a great mushroom.