The Mighty Mushroom
A brief discussion of my quest for Adirondack fungi.
Whenever I venture into the vastness of the wilderness that runs right up to the back of my Adirondack cabin, often with my wife alongside me, my dog, Charlie, our 5th Gordon Setter, who possesses as much energy as all 5 of our past Gordon Setters combined, tearing out ahead of us or just leaping over downed timber in mad, circling dashes…just because, I find myself spending more and more time looking down along the trunks of fallen trees or up the sides of birches hoping to spy some new (to me) fungi—and ideally one that is edible.
My fascination with mushrooms began the first fall of owning the cabin, when the forest floor erupted with all manner of strange and wondrous things. Near our dock, giant, brownish mushrooms sprouted, and after awhile I realized with relief it was their pungent, fishy smell they emitted as they turned into black blobs I would catch whiffs of occasionally, a bit unsettled by where the smell might have come from (my neighbor’s 60 year-old, makeshift septic?). All along the trail up to the cabin from the waterfront, I found the white-stalked, “Ghost Pipe”—not technically a mushroom but a chlorophyl-free flower. Yellow Caps (a poisonous amanita) were everywhere, their bright, nearly fluorescent yellow seeming as if lit from within. I found their cousins, the deep brown “Death Cap” and the infrequent red amanita of Mario Brother’s fame—all with their speckles of white flakes adorning their shiny crowns.
I have now downloaded a mushroom ID app on my phone, which sometimes offers a bit too broad a range of possibilities based on my photos, and I’m starting to collect several books and visiting websites to help me in my late-mid-life quest to become a “forager.”
After my first year of snapping lots of photos, often just for the sake of it, to capture their strange, evocative beauty, the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi brought my fascination to a different level, filling in and giving voice to the things I had already begun to love about mushrooms. And number one is their unexpected, incongruous otherworldliness. Where one day there is nothing but a leaf-strewn forest floor, the next an Orange Moss Agaric has populated a patch of moss, it’s tiny, long stalk and orangish crowns emerging from the rich green tendrils. A little research, and I discovered they form a symbiotic relationship with the mosses they inhabit. They are so slight and frail and lovely, and photographing them you lose the experience of seeing them first just as dots of color amidst the deep green, until bending low, zooming in.
I’m also fond of mushroom names—both their latin and common names. Recently, I discovered one called a “Lurid Bolete”! While not terribly deadly, “gastric upset” the main consequence, I loved hearing that it was easy to confuse it with the highly poisonous boletus satanas (yes, Satan’s Bolete). Another striking ‘shroom with a great name is the Salmon Pinkgill, and it is a bright pinkish, salmon color. These are quite common in the nearby forests, and sadly, “likely toxic.” Their Latin name is also impressive: “entoloma quadratum.”
I have found Beech Rooters, Painted Boletes, Pinecone mushrooms, Creamy Russulas, Common Earth Balls, Reddish Brown Bitter Boletes, Common Laccaria, Short Stem Russulas, Cleft-footed Amanitas….
Recently, I spied a huge growth of what I’m pretty certain were Elm Oysters 20-30 feet up the trunk of a large elm tree. Excited to finally find an edible mushroom in great quantity, I tried to toss sticks up to it, hoping to lop off a lobe or two for dinner, but sadly, my aim was terrible, and Charlie was nearly impaled several times, though thrilled nonetheless at this new stick chasing game—(“For some reason he’s just throwing the stick straight up in the air, and it comes crashing down! Cool. I’ll play along!”).
Still more recently, I finally, after much searching, scanning the trunks of every yellow and white birch in sight, found a tree with several outgrowths of the famed Chaga mushrooms very near the cabin. These black “cankers” form mostly on birches, “healing” over scars from lost limbs and other damage and establishing a long, parasitic relationship with the tree. I’ll leave it to you to read more about Chaga on your own, if you wish. It has become known as the most medicinal, healing mushroom of them all. I have removed a softball sized chunk, scraped away the black, crusty covering to reveal the brownish-orange, cork-like center, chopped this into small chunks and left it out to dry, and soon I’ll add some to my coffee grinder and make a magic tincture that will allow me to live forever.
Still, however, I have up to now only eaten one mushroom that I found in the Adirondacks—a large, lovely, impossible-to-mistake-for-something-that-will-kill-you fungus: a Lion’s Mane. I found it within 100 feet of the cabin, growing on the stump of a long-dead elm tree late last fall after bushwhacking into the deep forest on a cold day. It was a large white ball of what are often described as clusters of “fungal icicles.” I was adorned with plenty of blaze orange, since deer hunting season was in full swing—looking like a strange bolt of fungi-colored oddness myself. This was the day I had followed a series of beaver dams deeper and deeper into the woods, bushwhacking through the forest till I “discovered” a very large beaver pond, whose most striking feature was a moss-covered peninsula that housed a very large spruce. It was the perfect spot to lean against the spruce, seated on the soft moss, and, like a mushroom myself in a kind of symbiosis with the land, to absorb the quickly descending sun, look out across the pond, and listen to the immense silence.
I cooked up my find, my first-ever edible ADK mushroom, with some fresh carrots and felt as if I were imbibing a part of the wilderness itself—and I was, for it had sprung up from its mycelial web that spreads far beneath the tree I found it on, deep into the heart of the Adirondack soil.
*all photos taken by me in the Adirondacks
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Such fine writing 👏
I for one do not trust myself to be 100% certain that any mushroom I pick in the wild won’t kill me on the spot, no matter how long I study the damn things:) But carefully chosen ( by someone else) champignons sautéed in butter, herbs, and a touch of sherry with a slice of warm baguette on the side, and a nice Cab to wash it all down…THAT is heaven!