Morels! They nearly covered the floor of the forest. So many it was like a carpet, a carpet of fungi. Could there ever be too many? Too much of a good thing.
Justin checked his guide for the umpteenth time. Yes, they were morels. They couldn’t be anything else. He’d passed half a dozen other species that morning, unsure if they were what he thought they were. Unsure if they were poisonous. You don’t want to take risks with mushrooms, no sir.
That’s what the hippy-dippy fellow wearing a bizarre safari helmet had said on the wild edibles walk. He called himself Elmo, surely not his real name. Elmo would kneel on the ground seeming to pray to some entity, spy on a plant, pick it up and tell the small group of foragers all about it.
“Urtica dioica,” he’d say delicately holding up a green stem between two calloused fingers. “Hold out your arms.” He touched the leaves to the forearms of the collected neophyte foragers. Moments later they were rubbing their arms red, a visible ouch to the touch of stinging nettles. Elmo laughed.
“It’s not funny,” said Justin. The leaves had touched both his arms. Elmo bent over and took a few curly green leaves from another plant and distributed them. “Rub these on the itchy parts,” he advised. The leaves left light green smudges but provided immediate relief. “Rumex crispus,” said Elmo. “Curly dock.”
He explained that he’d just brushed them with stinging nettle leaves. Stinging nettles made a wholesome tea and wholesome spinach-like vegetable. Drying the leaves removed the offensive stingers and formic acid as did sautéing, but advised wearing gloves for the process. Curly dock, he maintained, was a wholesome vegetable as well and antidote to the sting of nettles. Wholesome was an adjective Elmo used a lot though he never really described what wholesome meant. Still, the mostly women in the forager’s group nodded their heads in appreciation. Justin was getting tired of the term wholesome and would ask more pointedly what they were good for.
Here’s where Elmo came into his own. The fibers from nettles would be used by natives to make a strong cord – he stripped some stems with his fingers and braided them to show how it was done. “Doesn’t that hurt?” asked one woman. Elmo explained that if you went with the grain, in the direction of the stinging needles, they wouldn’t get you. At least, not as much. He went over other uses of that, and curly dock, and everything else they’d picked that morning, and, gloves on, collected a bagful for the wild harvest lunch the class promised. “This is so wholesome,” said Justin. Elmo squinted at him. “Yes, wholesome.” The women offered a collective yum.
The lunch was undoubtedly wholesome. The taste, however, was a mélange of bitter, watery, bland, and totally unfulfilling. The exceptions were the mushrooms sauteed in butter with some late-season ramps. The mushrooms were Hen of the Woods, maitake, and chanterelles, which Elmo explained that in addition to being wholesome sold for about $20 a pound at local farmers markets, if you could find them, and had a whole range of health benefits as did most species of edible mushrooms. Here he got serious. “Don’t screw around, right? Plenty of mushrooms are poisonous and look a lot like ones that aren’t. When in doubt, leave it.”
“So not so wholesome, eh?” said Justin.
“Not wholesome at all,” said Elmo who leaned over to pick an innocent-looking fungus. “Wanna a try one?” The foragers shook their heads. Elmo laughed. He held it up, sniffed it, licked it. “Magic mushrooms!” The foragers laughed, too, but their laughs faded to uncomfortable snorts and then diminished completely.
“Really?” asked a squat woman speaking from behind a veil of mosquito netting.
“It’s so stupid,” replied Elmo. “They grow like all over but they’re illegal. But they don’t make Japanese knotweed illegal. Go figure.” He collected several more and put them in a paper bag.
Justin cut several of the morels at their base and left enough to do what it is mushrooms do; release their spores to propagate the species. In a few days, this batch would be done, invested with bugs and slugs, rotting back into the ground from whence they came, and no one would know they were ever there. No one but him, and he’d return next season for a fresh crop and maybe bring along the pretty lady he met in the foraging course who raised her eyebrows whenever Elmo said “wholesome” and gave Justin both a smile and her email address.
What’s this? Near the morels were some young blewits, Clitocybe Nuda, aka wood blewits, and entirely delicious. Like many budding mycologists, Justin had taken to saying the scientific name for a species after using the common name to show off his knowledge. It was, he knew, an annoying habit to laypeople who could care less about mushrooms let alone the scientific name. But Justin had swallowed the mycological Kool-aid so to speak. Plus, he got a kick out of this specific species name, Clitocybe Nuda. It sounded rather risqué.
They turned blue when he picked them. Probably a coincidence with their name, he thought. He added the blewits to his collection after inspecting the underside for bugs. Clean as a whistle. He cut into it for further inspection and identification. Blewit for sure and sliced a small chunk for a taste. It was starchy and otherwise bland. A bit of salt and butter will dress this up. He took a larger bite, surprised that it was earthy, rubbery, and assumed it might be past prime. A bit of nausea set in. Whether it was from the humid weather, a lack of water – Why did I leave the canteen in the car? – or an expired mushroom even with an alluring name, Justin wasn’t sure.
There was another patch of morels that looked iffy. The pitted structure that made them so easy to recognize, had sunk in on itself and turned slimy. Justin got on his knees to get a closer look and fell sideways; he thought the mushroom was collapsing into the ground. When he looked again, it was as it should be; definitely a morel, a good eight inches high, a beautiful honey-colored thing, pitted and honey-combed. When he went to pick it, slugs and worms emerged from the pits, dozens of them. Justin crept away, still on his knees, grossed out and more nauseous now. Maybe it was time to get that canteen after all.
That’s when he saw the wolf. But it wasn’t a wolf. It was a fox, a large one, a dark one, dark grey with a black head. It was stuck in a hollow part of a dead tree, struggling to get out, its jaw biting at the air as if fighting off something. Justin froze to watch wondering if he should try and help, but those chomping jaws stopped him. Maybe it has rabies, he thought. Then the fox, or maybe it was a wolf, stopped moving. Dead. But it wasn’t dead, it wasn’t a fox or wolf. It was just the base of a large branch that had broken off, but, damn, it look like a wolf, or maybe a dog, that was trying to escape the tree that was trying to devour it. Weird, he thought.
In a clearing at the edge of the woods, he saw ostrich ferns. Their fiddleheads were supposed to be delicious. Justin opened his book, The Forager’s Harvest. There were eight pages, photos too, instructing on how to ID edible fiddleheads. And these before him, these budding ostrich ferns, these were textbook. Justin could almost taste their asparagus-like flavor.
Until one turned to look at him. And then another. Then the entire patch. The rose on their ostrich-like necks look at him, opened their fronds in silent squawking, and moved, agitated by the wind. Except there was no wind, none at all. The fronds were agitated, swaying in the ground, and watching him.
Justin backed away watching the display, wondering if green ostriches had escaped from some zoo. But it couldn’t be, not this many. He wanted to run, to scream. Then it stopped. The ferns were just ferns now, steady in the still air. He approached debating whether to harvest any of the fiddleheads when one turned to look at him, more aggressive than the others, its black eyes filled with hate. He backed off again. The ostrich ferns were once more just ferns. Still, it was strange as they started to grow, to reach up, their fiddleheads unfurling into shading fronds before curling back again. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, the fiddleheads were steady as they were when he first eyed them.
There was a stump in the shade by a rock wall that Justin walked to. The cool of the trees cleared his head. He dropped his bag of mushrooms and took out his fat book Mushrooms of the Northeastern United States and Canada. He hadn’t used this book very much until that morning; It was too technical, too dense, and the pages stuck together. So much for nearly new on Amazon. He’d dog-eared page 144. Page 144 was about blewits with the note Blewits is considered a fine edible. He’d read that right. When he put the book down to look more closely at the mushroom the block of pages swung open to 343, which highlighted Psilocybe quebecensis which looked rather more like the blewit he’d picked, and eaten, than the blewit on page 144. He read the details, Psilocybe quebecensis is a moderately active hallucinogenicmushroom in the section Aztecorum, having psilocybin and psilocin as the main active compounds. Native to Quebec, it is the most northern known psilocybin mushroom.
Justin heard a voice from behind him say whoopsie daisy. He recognized the voice; it was his.
Still, he turned around just in case. The stump he was on moved flipping him onto the ground. Under the influence of the most northerly hallucinogenic mushroom, some dizziness is a symptom so falling to the ground wasn’t surprising. The surprise was that the stump was not a stump but the truncated leg of an elephant, toenails and all. Justin was surprised how big they were, like peaches he thought. He was even more surprised to see the elephant’s trunk and tusks emerge from the rock wall, then retreat into it leaving a distinct image of a smiling Richard Nixon, arms waving with fingers in a victory vee, in its wake.
Whoa, said the voice. Justin half expected to see himself on a horse, but it was just his voice giving sound advice.
It was at this point that a wave of nausea overcame him resulting in a spout of projectile vomiting. The mushroom book had mentioned nausea could be a side effect but didn’t touch on the vomiting part let alone projectile vomiting. As unpleasant as the projecting was, the projectile itself was both a relief and inspiration. Justin recalled a scene from Yellow Submarine where a cannon shot out psychedelic images of flowers and sparks. The image brought a smile to his face even as he spat out the residual taste in his mouth. He was rather enjoying the experience.
He sat back down on the elephant’s lower leg which had returned to its original status and leaned against the cool stone wall, careful to make sure he wasn’t blocking Richard Nixon. But Nixon had left the scene. Justin looked around, seeing brilliant colors in the meadow that fronted him, breathing in the cool intensity of the pine forest that lay behind. It’s just a hallucinogenic experience, he reminded himself. It’ll pass soon enough. Sitting there he reopened his mushroom book to separate the pages that had stuck together and reexamined the fungi he’d collected that morning. He was about to toss away the Psilocybe quebecensis but decided against that. He’d used them for identification purposes in the future. Or another trip.
It could have been mere minutes, hours, or days, Justin wasn’t sure and didn’t care. He just sat on the stump enjoying the cool breeze – a real one – that had picked up and smiled at the now normal surroundings. The mushrooms had run their course. As he relaxed, an elderly couple walked by with their muddy retriever who sniffed at the grinning Justin. They looked at Justin, then at each other, and hurried off.
“Have a wonderful day,” said Justin waving as they walked into the woods.
The retriever turned. “You too. And go easy on those shrooms.”