Putting the Fun in Fungi

Position: 46°11’37.5″N 123°58’28.5″W

One of Oregon’s autumn fixtures is the annual Portland Book Festival. Hundreds of readers head downtown and take in the perspectives and wisdom of both local and internationally known writers. Staged interviews are congenial and leave plenty of time for audience Q & A. This year’s top proof-of-erudition word was ‘palimpsest’. By my count, more than half the authors managed to slip it in at some point during their 30-minute turns in the spotlight.

Headlining the festival was Richard Powers, the best-selling author of The Overstory and most recently, Playground. That meant he was popular enough to fill the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall for an extra $5 a seat. No small feat. I came away intrigued, amused, and muttering under my breath, “Damn, but he’s a smart guy.”

Pinball Wizard

The Overstory has been waiting patiently on my ‘to read’ shelf for about six years. Carol loved it and recommended it to me. Moistening my thumb a couple of times, I started the book. Its rich prose indicated it was something more special than my usual diet of Danielle Steele read-alikes. It looked like my kind of book, and I wanted to devote an appropriate amount of attention to it. Something that navigating the seven seas kept getting in the way of. Coming away from this year’s book festival I knuckled down and walked steadily through the 25-hour long audio version. Powers had loaded one of life’s mental pinballs and I finally put it in play.

Patricia Westerford, a dendrologist, is central to the book’s narrative and was, for me, its most intriguing character. A little Googling nudged the pinball and bumped into Dr. Suzanne Simard, on whom Westerford was based. Simard is a Canadian forest ecologist and scientist. Her memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, combines her discoveries of how forest ecosystems in British Columbia function with her coming of age story.

Foraging

While waiting for a copy of Simard’s book from the library, our friend Lauren had serendipitously arranged for a spot of mushroom foraging at the Oregon coast. Despite the apparent risks, fungi foraging has turned into a popular activity here in the Pacific Northwest. The rangers at Fort Stevens State Park host a free two-hour instruction and guided walk through the fall months when mushrooms are most abundant. By November, the foraging season is winding down, but we needed to shake off the stress of the election and a field trip seemed like the perfect antidote for political malaise. It was like hitting a drop target in pinball. The game was on.

Standing behind a picnic table laden with a variety of recently harvested mushrooms, the rangers began by explaining mushrooms are the fruit of fungi. There are three main types, each with distinct roles in the forest’s ecosystem. Colloquially, you have cleaners, networkers and parasites. If that sounds like your co-workers, you’re not far off.

• Saprophytes are the cleaners. They feed and grow on dead organic matter, breaking it down and decomposing it.
• Mycorrhizas are the networkers. These fungi connect the forest’s root system and symbiotically exchange carbon, sugars, water, and other nutrients. Mycorrhizal networks look a lot like neural networks. Or the hub and spoke system favoured by airlines. Trees send and receive messages along the networks with astonishing speed.
• Parasites are just what they say they are. These fungi find a weakened host and accelerate its decline.

LBMs

If the rangers hoped to inspire more foraging for edible mushrooms, I’m not sure they succeeded. Warnings and caveats flowed steadily. Avoid, they said, the thousands of unclassified LBMs (little brown mushrooms). Instead, stick to the very few easily recognisable ones.

Distinguishing a delicious chanterelle from a poisonous false chanterelle takes all of your senses. Look at its structure, they said. Assess its colour, its characteristics, its surroundings. Touch it. Smell it. Taste it. Then spit it out. If you have any doubt, throw it away and look elsewhere. Stoner prizes like psilocybin often sit next to its deadly identical twin. Every child knows the white spotted red fly agaric (amanita muscaria) from watching cartoons like the Smurfs. It’s so attractive it is responsible for 90% of poisonings.

Into the Woods

Setting off for the understory, my mental pinball caromed off a bumper. Our group of 20 participants or so spread out in the damp woods with the rangers close at hand answering questions. In moments my senses dialled in the earthy smells. Hummocks with broad ferns held the promise of dangerous spies ratting out hidden boletes. Although it was late in the season, pocketfuls of hawk’s wings (good for dying wool blue) lay around. Lots of LBMs, a couple of psilocybin and a half dozen slippery jacks also turned up. Mostly, though, the experience of walking off trail with an objective shifted my perspective about getting wet to my knees thrashing around in the brush. Now, it was fun.

We finished our day with a walk on the beach 300 metres to the west. A couple of days later, Finding the Mother Tree turned up in my Libby account, flipping the pinball back in play. Simard mentions saprophytes and parasites, but spent more time describing the vital, collaborative role mycorrhizas play in the forest. How they help old trees nurture their young and carry messages across great distances. Having just foraged in the woods made visualising her words much easier. I learned that humans and trees share at least 25% of their DNA. And because poisonous mushrooms are often neurotoxic, I wondered if they shared synaptic enervation like humans using similar chemicals. The jury hasn’t returned, but it seems like they do. TILT!

The Big Picture

As winter closes in, wet and rainy, the leaves have all swept from the trees. Our daily five mile walk takes us along a bike path. The mix of conifers and deciduous trees along the trail seems like the right kind of relationship for a healthy ecosystem in the heart of a city. In a couple of weeks of unanticipated study and pinballing around I developed a new appreciation for my surroundings.

If, as my friend Jan suggests, we are indeed entering the post-enlightenment era, then perhaps we can step back from extrapolating minutiae and appreciate life in the context of its vast and complex systems. After all, doesn’t a pinball score lots more points bouncing around with only a gentle nudge now and then?

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