The Way Through the Woods Read online

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Barbara J. Haveland

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Norwegian as Stien tilbake til livet. Om sopp og sorg by Vigmostad & Bjørke, Oslo, in 2017, copyright © 2017 by Vigmostad & Bjorke, Norway. This English translation published in the United Kingdom by Scribe Publications UK in 2019.

  This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Cappelen Damm Agency, Oslo, for permission to reprint an excerpt “En annen sol” (“Another Sun”) from En Annen Sol by Kolbein Falkeid, © Cappelen Damm AS 1989. Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Long, Litt Woon, author.

  TITLE: The way through the woods: on mushrooms and mourning / by Long Litt Woon; translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland.

  OTHER TITLES: Stien tilbake til livet. Om sopp og sorg. English

  DESCRIPTION: First edition. | New York: Spiegel & Grau, [2019] | Originally published in Norwegian as Stien tilbake til livet by Vigmostad & BjØrke, Oslo, in 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2018059807 | ISBN 9781984801036 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9788241915956 (international edition) | ISBN 9781984801043 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Long, Litt Woon. | Mushrooms. | Widows—Biography.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC QK617.L63 2019 | DDC 579.6/163—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018059807

  Ebook ISBN 9781984801043

  randomhousebooks.com

  spiegelandgrau.com

  Original design and drawings by Oona Viskari

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover illustration: Oona Viskari

  Cover lettering: Nina Tsur

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Translator's Note

  One Mushroom, One Delight. Two Mushrooms, Double Delight.

  The Next Best Death

  Secret Places

  The Inner Circle

  Mushroom Misgivings

  Fifty Shades of Poison

  True Morels: The Diamonds of the Fungi Kingdom

  Senses on the Alert

  An Aroma Seminar

  The Unmentionable

  From Starter to Dessert

  Latin Class

  A Kiss from Heaven

  The Mushroom Code

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Still round the boat, still

  as stars when the earth is unscrewed and mankind’s words,

  fumbling thoughts and dreams forgotten.

  I place the oars each in its rowlock,

  dip and raise them. Listen.

  The little splash of drops in the ocean

  cements the stillness. Slowly, towards another sun,

  I turn the boat in the fog: Life’s

  dense nothingness. And row,

  row.

  —KOLBEIN FALKEID, from the poem “Another Sun”

  This book is a memoir of the author’s journey of discovery into the world of mushrooms and mushroom foraging. Although it contains descriptions of the author’s education in identifying mushrooms, this book is not intended to serve as a field guide or resource for identifying mushrooms and/or distinguishing edible from poisonous varieties, and should not be used or relied upon for such purposes.

  THIS IS THE STORY OF a journey that started on the day my life was turned upside down: the day when Eiolf went to work and didn’t come home. He never came home again. Life as I had known it was gone in that instant. The world would never be the same again.

  I was devastated. The pain of my loss was all that was left of him. It tore me apart, but I had no wish to dull the agony with painkillers. It was confirmation that he had lived, that he had been my husband. I did not want that to be gone as well.

  I was in free fall. I, who had always been in command and in control; I, who liked to have a firm grip on things. My lodestar was gone. I found myself in unknown territory, a reluctant wanderer in a strange land. Visibility was poor and I had neither map nor compass. Which way was up, which way was down? From which corner should I start walking? Where should I set my foot?

  There was nothing but blackness.

  To my surprise, I chanced upon the answers to these questions where I least expected them.

  The weather was damp, there was a light drizzle in the air, and the dead leaves that had fallen from the tall, venerable trees in Oslo’s Botanical Garden were starting to molder. There was no doubt that the warm days were over and a colder season was starting to encroach on our lives. Someone had told me about this course and I had signed up for it without giving it much thought. It was something Eiolf and I had talked about doing but never got around to. So, one autumn-dark evening I presented myself, not expecting too much, in the basement of the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.

  I needed to watch my step: I had already broken an ankle just after Eiolf’s funeral, and the fear of falling remained with me long after the accident. I had been told that it takes a while for a broken ankle to heal, but whether a broken heart could ever be whole again and, if so, how long that might take, no one could tell me.

  Grief grinds slowly: it devours all the time it needs.

  The course of bereavement does not run smooth; it progresses in fits and starts, takes unforeseeable turns.

  If anyone had told me that mushrooms would be my lifeline, the thing that would help me back onto my feet and quite literally back on life’s track, I would have rolled my eyes. What had mushrooms to do with mourning?

  Only later did it dawn on me that mushrooms had been my rescue in my hour of need and that seemingly unrelated subjects such as mushrooms and mourning can, in fact, be connected. It was out in the open woodland, on moss-covered ground, that I stumbled on what I was searching for. My exploration of the mushrooms’ terrain also became a ramble through an inner landscape, a via interna. The outer journey has been time-consuming. So, too, has the inner journey. It has been turbulent and challenging. For me there is no doubt that my discovery of the realm of fungi steadily nudged me out of the tunnel of grief. It eased the pain and became my path out of the darkness. It offered me fresh perspectives and led me, little by little, to a new standpoint. That is what this book is about.

  I had better start, therefore, with the beginners’ guide to mushrooms.

  MUSHROOMS FOR BEGINNERS

  A lot of people had signed up for the course. Some were in the flower of youth, others enjoying a second blooming. They came from all over the city. This was, it seemed, an interest shared by denizens of both the west and east sides of Oslo. As a social scientist I find this interesting. We are inclined to associate certain sections of society with particular sports or hobbies. Some leisure pursuits have distinctly middle-class overtones, while others are seen as the province of different socioeconomic groups. You don’t have to be an
anthropologist to discern this pattern in Oslo, although Norwegians love their image as an egalitarian nation. Given the choice, Norwegians would pick the photograph of King Olav V buying a ticket on the train to the Holmenkollen ski slopes as their country’s profile picture. And even though it is true that few other monarchs have ever traveled by public transportation, it is also the case that the Norwegian royal family is not generally given to taking the bus or the train. That particular photo was taken in 1973.

  There was something classless about the mushroom community that immediately appealed to me. I’ve been one of their number for some time now, yet I still don’t know what the mushroomers I meet do in their day-to-day lives. Talk of fungi crowds out everything else. Trivial matters such as religion and politics take a back seat. Not that there isn’t a hierarchy among mushroom enthusiasts: this field, too, has its heroes and villains, its unwritten rules and its conflicts, with plenty of scope for feelings to run high. Like all other communities, mushroom pickers represent a microcosm of society as a whole, although I didn’t see this to begin with.

  Mushrooms induce a blend of fascination and fear: they lure us with the promise of sensual delights, but with the threat of deadly poison lurking in the background. Not only that, but certain species grow in fairy rings and others have hallucinogenic properties. Delve into historical sources and you will find that down through the ages people have always been fascinated by fungi: mushrooms have no roots, no visible seeds, and yet they will suddenly spring up, often after heavy rain and thunderstorms, almost like the incarnation of the untamed forces of nature. The folk names for some fungi—Witch’s Egg, Devil’s Urn, or Jack-o’-Lantern, for example—suggest that mushrooms were once seen as having a whiff of paganism about them, of being uncanny, magical.

  For some, an interest in fungi is sparked by a fascination with their function as the recyclers of the ecosystem. Others are more interested in their medicinal properties. There is a lot of optimism surrounding research into the uses of mushrooms in the treatment of cancer. Norway has made its own contribution to medical science with the cyclosporin fungus, Tolypocladium inflatum, found on the Hardangervidda plateau, an extract of which forms the basis of an indispensable drug used in organ transplants. Some munch the phallic Common Stinkhorn, Phallos impudicus, or the equally priapic Dog Stinkhorn, Mutinus ravenelii, imagining that mushrooms can work wonders as aphrodisiacs. Handcraft enthusiasts have embraced fungi as new and exciting sources of dyes for wool, linen, and silk. For nature photographers, fungi present a riotous cornucopia: mushrooms come not only in brown and white but in every imaginable, and unimaginable, shape and hue. They may be stubby and springy, lovely and graceful, delicate and transparent, or so spectacular and bizarre that they seem like something from another planet. Some are even luminescent and can light up a forest path when darkness falls.

  However, most of the people I know who are interested in learning about picking wild mushrooms do so because they enjoy eating them. “Can you eat it?” is the question that the majority of those who don’t know much about mushrooms ask again and again. Despite determined efforts, commercial growers have not succeeded in growing the most sought-after mushrooms. So fungi could be said to provide the perfect antithesis to the regimented world in which most of us live.

  The antiquated name of the body that was offering the course had piqued my interest: the Greater Oslo Fungi and Useful Plants Society—it sounded like a sister organization to the Norwegian Women’s Hygiene Association. What sort of people got involved with fungi and useful plants? To be honest, I wasn’t sure what constituted a useful plant. And if you pursued that line of thought, what about useless plants? Was there a society for them as well? I didn’t dare ask this question in front of everyone else.

  The leader of the course had a knife in a leather sheath at his belt and a small magnifying glass hanging from a cord around his neck: both these items form an essential part of the serious mushroom forager’s uniform, although I didn’t know that then. Style, I would learn, is not high on a mushroomer’s list of priorities. When you go hunting in the forest, your clothing has to be practical and functional. Which is why, at first glance, mushroom gatherers can look almost like aliens, clad top to toe in Gore-Tex and slathered in lotions to ward off mosquitoes, midges, and deer flies.

  Like all good teachers, our instructor started by establishing how much his students knew. “So, what are mushrooms?” he asked. Many of the class members said nothing and tried to avoid the teacher’s eye. As did I. Surely that was obvious, everybody knew what a mushroom was. But the teacher was looking for a more scientific answer, and I had no idea where to start looking for such a thing.

  What laypeople, myself included at the time, think of when they think of mushrooms covers only a fraction of the fungi that make up the world of mycology. Mycology is the study of fungi. In the past, fungi posed a serious headache for science. Even Carl von Linné (1707–78)—known as the father of modern taxonomy for creating a system for the classification of every species of animal and plant, a system still used to this day—struggled with fungi. In the Linnaean system, they ended up in a subcategory of the animal kingdom entitled “Chaos.” It was almost as if the usual laws of nature did not apply to them. Since then, however, it has been established that fungi belong neither to the plant kingdom nor the animal kingdom: they form their own kingdom. The fungi kingdom.

  This was news to me. I had simply assumed that mushrooms were a weird sort of plant. We also learned that the members of the fungi kingdom are more closely akin to those of the animal kingdom and, consequently, to Homo sapiens, than to the plant kingdom! This is the reason that extracts from fungi are also used in human medicine: in vital antibiotics, such as penicillin, for example, and drugs used in the treatment of cancer. Now, there’s something they didn’t teach me in Malaysia. In the biology classroom at the girls’ school I attended hung large wall charts showing illustrations of plants with the names of their various parts written in elegant copperplate. Mushrooms had not been featured. I had been given something to think about the next time I picked up my distant relative the button mushroom in the supermarket.

  Most species of fungi are much smaller than the mushrooms we know, often microscopic. I am frequently asked how many different species of mushrooms there are, but the world of fungi is so vast that it is hard to say for sure. The question as to the number yet to be discovered and scientifically documented is a serious bone of contention among experts in the field. Some experts say two million. Others, five million. Researchers at the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum have attempted to produce a comprehensive record of all the different species of fungi found in Norway. They found that fungi account for almost 20 percent of the almost forty-four thousand species recorded in the country. By comparison, mammals account for only 0.2 percent.

  The mushrooms one sees in the forest are only a tiny part of a much larger organism. The bulk of the mushroom consists of a dynamic, living network of long, shoestring-like cells known as mycelium, which spread underground or through trees and other plants. What we see growing aboveground is the mushroom’s fruit, with the same relationship to the whole organism as an apple has to the apple tree, except that in this case the “tree” grows belowground. The world’s largest organism is a honey fungus: the Dark Honey Fungus, Armillaria ostoyae. It is found in eastern Oregon, where it covers a stretch of woodland corresponding to almost four square miles and is known colloquially as the Humongous Fungus. DNA analysis of hundreds of samples of this fungus’s mycelium has shown that it all radiates from a single genetic individual, estimated to be between two thousand and eight thousand years old. Above ground, the world’s largest species of fungus is probably the African Termitomyces titanicus. Its cap can grow to as much as three feet in width. One could be forgiven for thinking that photographs of people holding specimens of this mushroom over their heads like umbrellas must have been
manipulated.

  We only see a mushroom for a very short period in its life cycle. The rest of the time, it gets on with its life well hidden from us. When conditions are right, wild mushrooms drive upward from the mycelium network and break through the soil with a force that can lift rocks and split tarmac. Far from growing only in forests, mushrooms also spring up in public parks, along the roadside, and even in graveyards and gardens. Fungi flourish everywhere. Fungi aficionados not only believe that where there is life there are mushrooms as well as hope, but will go so far as to claim that fungi are essential to existence: no fungi, no life. In fact, there is even a YouTube video—one that is forever being referred to in mushrooming circles—explaining how fungi could save the world. They are strong in their faith, these mushroomers.

  The aim of this course for beginners was to teach us how to recognize about fifteen different species of fungi. So why not kick off the course with a quiz on the best-known mushrooms? Fresh specimens that had, only a few hours earlier, been living peacefully in quiet forests had been ripped out of their sleepy existence in the moist earth to be employed as educational tools, passed around in class, one after the other. I felt the fear of being the class dunce well up inside me. Of the mushrooms handed to me, the only one I recognized was the chanterelle, the golden beauty of the forest. Clearly, there was plenty to be learned here.

  Our first lesson dealt with the proper picking technique: we were instructed to take hold of the mushroom just where the stem, or stipe, left the soil and grip it firmly while we gently eased the mushroom out. It is also handy to have a knife with you, since mushrooms will sometimes lie hidden deep in a carpet of moss or stubbornly refuse to budge. A small brush is another good thing to have—a pastry brush, say, or an old toothbrush—for some first rough field-cleaning, something that is strongly recommended since it cuts down considerably on cleaning and preparation time at home. Apparently, there are those who find cleaning mushrooms a meditative process.