the mushroom hunter

This is a story of fancy fungus, get-rich-quick schemes, and my mother, all jumbled together to form an anecdotal Swiss Roll of mediocre mental flavour and fleeting metaphorical mouthfeel. Enjoy!

I like eating fungus. At the organic grocery store I am often tempted by the exotic mushroom selection.

They are packaged in tiny dried portions, like rare spices, or piled in soft heaps with the prohibitively expensive price markers sticking out like tombstones. Chanterelles, pines, morels…so tasty and tender…ah, me.

I am constantly on a vegan glutton’s prowl for new flavors that aren’t soy-derived. I’d do or pay anything for a taste I like, because food is my primary vice and indulging vice is how I roll.

(Literally, sometimes: today I jumped on my bike to cycle 50 kilometers in the drizzle for a single slice of matrimonial cake served only at a particular store in Port Coquitlam. They didn’t have it.)

So when I don’t throw these mushrooms in my basket it’s not just because of the $20+per-pound price tag that is out of my Money’s Mushroom budget anyway.

It’s all well and good to walk the produce aisle and see a few rugged twists of chanterelles packaged up daintily, evoking gourmet appeal, but I know the story behind their harvest. I’ve picked those mushrooms. They taunt me into certain dismal remembrances of my hick upbringing.

I am more familiar with them heaped on newspaper and caked with dirt, like hillbilly trinkets, than sitting dehydrated in their yuppie-smug cellophane! Those heaps of bruiseful groundfruit, misted at intervals, and kept at a fussy degree of coolness by Whole Foods!

I know what you are. I’ve rooted in the dirt for you, painstakingly peeled back wet moss beds, been psyched out by puffballs and other trash fungus, and traipsed countless miles through anonymous forests combing the ground for the elusive glimpses of you, peering at me haughtily from your loamy domicile!

While growing up, I spent many hours up to my ass in wet brush, breathing in the cedar-scented fog of early morning while I was forced to search for these bastards.

(Maybe “early morning cedar-scented fog” doesn’t sound so bad, but I was a scandalously lazy child – or at least, very much in love with the insular comforts offered by Lurlene McDaniel novels and Enid Blyton. I’d rather have been at home, reading a book and breathing in the caffeinated, burning odour of my mother’s busted-ass Mr. Coffee instead.)

But no. I spent many, many Saturdays doing stupid shit like looking for mushrooms. Meanwhile my classmates went to jazz dancing class and figure skating, which they’d talk about exhaustively on Monday while I sat in morose silence. Clearly my world was a grey and sodden realm of dirty fingernails and wet flannel, while one slot over their world was warm and pink and filled with activities involving leotards and balloons.

The mushroom-savouring world has destroyed or developed much of its prime mushroom real estate (sodden, mystical forests primeval). So, though the price scheme has been driven deliciously high by the gustatory markets in Europe and Asia, many of these exotic mushrooms are harvested here in BC.

Chanterelle, morel and pine mushrooms sprout during our dreary autumn days, and a brisk cottage industry exists in getting them out of our moss and into the mouths of lusty foodies.

Yeah, bling mushrooms. You ain’t so fancy.

So mushroom picking is a big hobby with the rural resourceful, such as people living off the grid, or hearty outdoorsy types who are wandering around in the woods anyway. It is also a nice, under-the-radar source of income for people on the dole.

Come mushroom season, the woods in my hometown are crawling with welfare recipients inadequately decked out in jean jackets and Wal-Mart cordovans, looking to make a little bit extra.

Our mom also had the mushroom bug.

She is infamous for starting new things and then quitting almost immediately, citing boredom, allergies, antagonism from her fellow man, or her debilitating depression that only allows her to spend all day doing vague, undemanding things, like shopping or playing the piano, but not setting goals and aiming towards anything specific. So a hobby that only required a burst of passion annually was just her speed.

Plus, there was the lure of money that could be made!

She was terrible at it, but also terribly enthusiastic. A disheartening mix. Search and Rescue has had to go looking for her more than once. And in all her years of mushroom prospecting, my mom’s probably made about $50.

But these little factoids never dampened her ardour. Every time she cashed in her meagre bounty at the mushroom station she’d be tantalized by stories from the more seasoned hands, tales of mushroom jackpots and the modest fortunes made.

No matter how poorly we’d done, just hearing of what was possible would fan her flames even more. In the chilly, soil-smelling mushroom stations we’d conclude our long days, my brothers and me drinking the free flat pop or unsweet hot chocolate, waiting while our mom pumped tips from the more skilled foragers. Her eyes would widen in consternation when people arrived with hundreds of dollars worth of mushrooms and she’d pace on the periphery of their triumph, trying to glean details.

But her passion was not our passion. My brothers and I tended to discredit her various enthusiasms, dreading the jolt of their abrupt conclusions.

But there was no escape during mushroom season. Whenever it rolled around, mushroom season rendered Saturday mornings unbearable. Our mom, emboldened by the prospect of company to guard her from bears, or getting lost, would plan her most ambitious excursions. She had maps from the Ministry of Forests, she had a compass. She had hunches about hot spots and they were all inevitably far away.

She would jack us up about the veritable pounds of top grade pines waiting for us and how their soft white flesh could be translated into enough money to finance new video games and comic books.

She’d pace anxiously as we rolled out of bed and munched our toast sleepily, urging us to get a move on.

In the darkness of those mornings we would bundle into our warmest clothes. The method of this bundling was nothing like the chic layering that can be accomplished if you have the right sort of outdoor gear. I remember donning an itchy toque, and wearing several t-shirts and sweat pants and pairs of socks and finally draping this uncomfortable thickness in a flannel jacket with rolled-up sleeves. I didn’t have any waterproof clothes so I hoped a system of shabby layers would accomplish the same goal of keeping me warm and somewhat undrenched.

Despite her attempts to rally us, she knew better than to expect her complaining brood to muster any real enthusiasm for the job. But in her hunter’s zeal she hardly registered our lack of interest. As long as we were there, that was the main thing. She could then stay out a long time without worrying about us burning the house down. Plus our noisy presence scared off the bears she anxiously feared. She carried a can of pressurized oven cleaner to serve as mace just in case.

(It was always a long, dreary day ahead of us so when we stopped for gas at the outset, our mom would also allow us the rare privilege of picking out a few treats each, hoping to accomplish the same thing as a parent who sticks a soother in the mouth of a squalling baby. I would usually pick out a can of Pepsi and a comic book. At this time in my life drinking one can of Pepsi was enough to make me feel comfortably sated for hours, and a single Archie comic could be pored over interminably (the regular kind, not even a Double Digest). I think it was actually on a mushroom hunting trip when I first looked up from finishing a “Little Archie” in a dismayingly brief span of time, closing the book on the antics of Jughead and Mr Weatherbee et al. and staring blankly at the dripping foliage around me, realizing that if I planned on holding the world at arm’s length for any solid duration of time, I had to start investing in some serious literary bulk.)

We’d pile into our Datsun station wagon with busted springs and bald tires and use this inadequate vehicle to plunge miles up unpaved logging roads. Usually, on the way up, we’d pass other cars already parked alongside the ditch and their presence would goad my mother further.

“Shit, that’s where I was going to stop. Well, then we’re going to find a better spot ahead!”

Or, tauntingly worse, we’d pass 4X4 trucks wheeling down from the impossibly treacherous terrains our Datsun couldn’t navigate. This sight would unman my mother and she’d bang the steering wheel in frustration. The passing driver would mistake her gritted teeth for a smile of greeting and toss back a salute. As they passed she’d imagine she saw tarps covering mounds of top quality mushrooms, available to these men by virtue of their expensive trucks and their manly know-how of wilderness navigation.

“They don’t even need the money!” she’d cry. “They all work at the mill! They already have plenty of money! Oh, I wish I was a man!” As if it was gender and not competence that kept her from locating her own mythical golden acre studded with the soft fontanelles of valuable fungi.

Once we were stopped, our mom would double-check we all had our paring knives and plastic bags and whistles (to scare bears and/or alert Search and Rescue of our hapless wearabouts, should their efforts be required). She would take our bearings with her compass, or at least go through the talismanic motions, spending a long time turning this way and that, her eyes unreassuringly blank.
Meanwhile my brothers and I, useless entities one and all, would be moaning with complaint, shuffling with the impatience not to begin searching but to be done with it, and back home in the real world, with our Nintendo and comics and filched cigarettes. We’d stomp into the woods, fanning out, my mom taking up the lead with the same crafty, intent look as Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits…

Although we were poor, and rural, I rarely felt likea hillbilly or bumpkin or white trash, or any sort of easily-classifiable poor person. Our mom played the organ in the church and was a member of the CWL, which gave us an air of integration, if not respectability.

But on these fruitless mushroom hunting excursions I felt every inch a hopeless case, someone doomed to wait at the bus stop of life for a chance that wasn’t coming, a person with ratty clothes and bad luck, with the bum of her pants all dirty from sitting on rotten logs.

At the end of the day we’d emerge from the forest, hungry and soaked and as broke as ever. It was a surprising life lesson to see that our mother’s enthusiasm, a nearly palpable force, did not manifest itself physically.

I would have thought the power of her zeal would have drawn her to our quarry like a magnet. Leaving the forest empty handed, or with just a few specimens, got to be not just discouraging but embarrassing, bespeaking an underlying predisposition to failure that shamed me.

But then mostly everything did, at that age.