In the Mushroom

To forage is to look for things that aren’t lost. Birding, mushrooming, hunting agates in the wet sand at ebb tide or arrowheads in the sagebrush along the edge of a dry playa—everything I’ve spent time seeking has been right where it belonged, indifferent to whether it was found. If I failed to see birds when I could hear them or gather mushrooms when I could smell them, I considered it a failure to live in the right relation to my senses. The most apt phrase I know for the necessary state of attunement comes from psychoanalysis. The analyst, in Freud’s idealized therapeutic environment, cultivates “evenly hovering attention”—hard to cultivate, harder to maintain, no matter how early one starts.

I was introduced to foraging early, not long after I could walk. My great-aunt Jara would take me by the hand, and as we ambled, she pointed at each mushroom we came across, mixing nicknames and Latin names: Russula, cep, amanita, slippery jack. My mother’s family came to the United States as refugees from what was then Czechoslovakia. As in so much of Eastern Europe, mushrooming is cultural, the people mycophilic. From one family trip to the beach, I remember stumbling on a big “king” bolete, Boletus edulis, just feet from the driveway. There was something unnerving about it, every day fuller, rounder (yes, they can be phallic). I lay in my little trundle bed and wondered at its swelling. When my parents separated, we stopped visiting the beach as a family, and for perhaps 25 years I didn’t think of mushrooms except on holidays, when I saw my great-aunt, a shy person who had given me a gift I never thanked her for. But then, on a hike with a friend at Oregon’s Fort Stevens State Park, I felt my way back into the pleasures of this kind of attention, mist beading on the smooth caps of boletes, Russulas, and slippery jacks and pooling in the shallow, wrinkled cups of the lobster mushrooms, named for the red color of the cooked crustacean. I had discovered again something I could do for pleasure and distraction, and distraction was what I was always seeking.

For as long as I’ve lived a conscious life, no matter where I am, even in my own bed, I have been nagged by the feeling that I don’t belong, as if I have no right to be anywhere. A trespasser in my own life, living from one period of absorption to the next. Most of these distractions have been idle, for pleasure; the failures to find what I sought were not losses. Mushrooming, however, I did for money. Was it the fall of 2007? Or 2008? It was a painful period, the details hazy. Since 2000, my father had been ill with his second cancer, and though it was a cancer he could, according to the oncologist, “live with and not die from,” my old man felt so much self-pity, flirting with Oregon’s assisted suicide law, that he was nearly impossible to help and impossible to pity. And around the same time, I had given up painting, the thing I loved doing most: gave away the finished works and took the unfinished ones to the dump, cleaned the studio, folded the easels, boxed up the paints and brushes. I didn’t like who I was when I painted, but it still throbs like a phantom limb, that life I gave up. I was on the verge of losing the few friends I had. Most of my old friends had partners and children, while I had neither, and had kept the wild habits from our bachelor days. Now I was the guy eating dinner alone at the bar, eavesdropping. Having never thought I’d see 30, I spent whatever money I had. That autumn, again without a job but still in possession of a car, I remembered the mushrooms, and headed out of Portland on Highway 26.

I’d been at it more than a week, almost a hundred hours of driving, stopping, bushwhacking, driving again, when late one frustrating day, already miles farther from the city than I had hoped to go, I braked hard to take a sharp right and rolled on rough pavement along the Necanicum River with the windows down. The sweet smell of rotting porcini is penetrating and unforgettable. Is it, as the connoisseurs say, the smell of fine old Bordeaux or Burgundy? Old wine might deserve the epithet “mushroomy,” but deliquescing porcini have a fresh, piquant stink. I pulled onto the shoulder, the smell overpowering, and got out. Where pavement met gravel, I found it: a rotten Boletus edulis, fat, soft stem within an inch of the macadam, and another perhaps three feet away, both stuck with the leaves blown off nearby trees that were giving up, their growing season over.

Two days later, I left home before dawn, drove straight to this spot, and scouted by headlamp but found little. Paths worn in the duff. That little patch of ground next to the fast-flowing river had been walked many times over the years. Yet among the roots of tall, scaly-barked western hemlocks were four to five pounds of fresh chanterelles, and another couple of pounds with dry brown edges. Though I found no fresh ones, those rotting porcini were the great prize, promising riches. Back on the highway, I hadn’t gone far when I passed a graveled shoulder wide enough to park two cars. Across the highway, the flattish ground was littered with old trunks and shaded by tall hemlocks. It looked like old logging slash that nature had reclaimed. Yet I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a so-called beauty corridor—a euphemism for a strip of unlogged timber, to preserve the impression of unspoiled forest for the tourists, with the land beyond clearcut—or whether this might be a grove of mature trees home to fruiting mycelia. I turned around, drove back, turned around again, and parked.