The Living Seam By Which The World Is Stitched Into Creation

Notes from a mushroom hunt.

I find myself thinking (and consequently writing) about mushrooms an awful lot lately.¹

Recently I wrote a lengthy missive on my first attempt at growing my own edible mushrooms. My logs are still stacked, dormant on the surface, but hopefully being digested from within by the fungal threads I inoculated them with, ready to begin fruiting under the right conditions. I’m eager to see the end result of that process; it’s always nice to learn that you’ve gotten something worthwhile right on the first try.

There’s a reason why your local grocery store probably only carries a few varieties of mushroom. (And it may be even fewer than you think: buttons, criminis, and portabellos are all the same mushroom, just harvested at different stages of the growing cycle.) Fungi are finicky things, and large-scale commercial cultivation has really only worked out for maybe a dozen kinds. Other, tastier varieties, like chanterelles and morels, are so specific in their needs that we have yet to master the art of growing them ourselves. Hence the price tag at the farmer’s market when you do come across them.

Despite my interest in foraging all sorts of things, and my interest in mushrooms, I have long avoided combining the two. It’s dizzying trying to make any kind of headway into a hobby where a single mistake could kill you, and in this hobby it’s very easy to make mistakes. To the amateur, lookalikes abound for nearly every edible variety of mushroom, and so many characteristics have to be checked and cross-checked to avoid becoming a tragic statistic that it’s hard to know where to even start without guidance.

But I have eaten so many morels in the last few years that I have begun feeling confident in being able to make that ID. The checklist for ensuring a real morel vs. a false one is short, and a mistake is going to land you more in the stomach distress category than the morgue category. That’s one hurdle cleared.

And another: The Michigan Department of Natural Resources puts out a GIS map called “Mi-Morels” that identifies locations where prescribed burns or wildfires have occurred in the last few years, which is one of the conditions that morels typically require to start fruiting. The map also shows the other major condition, forest type, as midwestern morels seem to have a heavy preference toward pines, especially if some of those pines have been burned. By zooming in and looking at the map key you can see what type of plants predominate in certain areas.

I obsessed over the map for a few days, hunting for the green shade of pine forest in the areas immediately surrounding a burn. Within a reasonable drive from Detroit, only one place looked remotely promising, with a large burn not too far from a “mixed pine” designation.

I ended up making two trips to this same place. The first time I struck out completely. I had gone with my wife and my dog, and also with the goal of shooting some content for the backpacking gear review site that I’ve been doing side work for. As it turns out, having that many additional demands on your attention is terrible for mushroom hunting. I saw few pine trees and none in the area of the burn we tramped through. I found no mushrooms of any sort, much less morels.

You get the idea: these guys can be really hard to spot.

You can’t do things like this in a linear fashion, with the invisible bumpers of a trail keeping you in place. You have to be willing and able to follow where your hunches lead, where the forest guides you. I know that might sound silly. But when I went back out the second time, with no company and no agenda, I immediately hit upon an enormous pine tree with a burned trunk that I had missed on my first excursion. There were no mushrooms at its base, but from there I spotted another burned pine, and from that one another, and so began leapfrogging my way through the forest in a manner that I felt instinctively was just going to work. I crouched, I crawled, I fought through brambles of raspberry cane. I got down and used a stick to search the leaf litter beneath rotting logs. So it went for nearly an hour, until I came to a spot in the forest that I just knew was right. I don’t know how else to describe it. I had seen some other mushrooms sprouting in the vicinity, and I was far enough from the center of the burn to find plenty of living pine and spruce trees with a thick layer of oak and maple leaves beneath.

Within five seconds of scanning the ground I saw a pair of yellow morels poking out from the litter. My subconscious knew it before my conscious mind did. My eyes were still moving past the mushrooms, but my body felt an electric jolt from somewhere inside and my eyes were wrenched back to the spot. I’m grateful no one else was around to hear the noise I made when my brain caught up.

I set up my camera and got out my sharp knife and sliced them off at the base. I placed them in a mesh bag tied at my hip to allow them to rain their spores down over the ground and so hopefully bring up more of themselves next year. And then I sat down, tingling from head to toe, talking to myself, to the mushrooms, to the forest, babbling my thanks and my amazement. From that vantage point I saw another pair, and another, and I harvested until my bag had nine mushrooms in it. I sat some more, and searched some more, but in an hour’s time I still hadn’t increased my haul. What’s more, from the first minute of that last round of searching I felt—that kind of feeling that’s like knowing—that there were no more to be had in the immediate vicinity.

Of course I didn’t get to stay too self-congratulatory about my possible magic intuition vis-a-vis fungi, or how well I’ve learned my lesson. The other day I spent three hours prowling the woods on a Montana mountainside, where there were several good-sized recent burns and nearly nothing but pine trees everywhere. I came up empty-handed. The distraction of being terrified by the possibility of a grizzly bear limited my range and certainly didn’t help my focus, which is at least proof of half my concept here, but it was still a colossal disappointment not to find a single one. I did find three false morels, which added insult to injury.

Regardless this has all the makings of a lifelong obsession for me, especially now that I have a spot to return to next year in the short morel season. (I even recorded videos of myself approaching it from two different directions so I can find it again next May.) Like the rest of my obsessions I find that participating in it makes me feel more present in the world, more connected to it. There’s a fitting description in the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake’s excellent Entangled Life, where he says that

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.

I like that a lot. It certainly makes me feel more tightly stitched into relation with other living things.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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1. Instead of worrying about whether that’s going to bore anyone, I’m committing myself to following my fixations wherever they lead me and trust my readers to follow, or not, as their preferences allow.