The Way Through the Woods Page 2
A SELECTION OF NORWEGIAN MUSHROOMS
The first thing to do when you find a mushroom, we were told, is to check how it looks under its cap. What is under the cap provides relevant information for determining which species a particular specimen belongs to, information that will reveal whether it is a member of the bolete, tooth, polypore, or gilled fungi—all groups covered by the beginners’ course. Once you know the answer to this question, the next thing is to ascertain which genus it belongs to, and then which species you have in your hand.
First we were handed a real live bolete fungus—an Orange Birch Bolete, Leccinum versipelle. One of the main distinguishing features of bolete fungi is the underside of the cap, which both looks and feels like a sponge. We learned that no bolete fungus native to Norway is poisonous once it has been heated, a fact that was carefully noted by everyone. This soft, spongy mushroom feels weird to the touch and reacts oddly too. Fingertip pressure on the pore surface can alter the color of some bolete fungi, causing them to turn blue. This tendency to “bruise” is one way of identifying certain species. Today, even when I can recognize an Orange Birch Bolete without pressing the stem, it is still tempting to do so. There is a childish glee to be had from seeing the mushroom turn blue.
As a child in Malaysia, I would spend hours playing with a plant that drew in its leaves and closed up whenever it was touched. My friends and I would then wait patiently for it to open—so that we could touch it again. The same procedure every time, but we never tired of it. On the contrary, we thought it was great fun. I now know that this plant is called Mimosa pudica and that pudica is the Latin word for “shy.” It is usually found in shady spots, under trees or bushes. The Norwegian Orange Birch Bolete reminds me a little of this Malaysian plant. Through them, nature seems almost to be communicating and playing with us in a simple, wordless dialogue.
We were also introduced to tooth fungi, which have “teeth” or “spines” on their underside. The species Hydnum repandum is known in English as the Hedgehog Mushroom. Some people scrape off the spines before cooking the mushrooms because loose spines can look like little white larvae in the pan. But this is just an optical illusion. The Hedgehog Mushroom is one of the “five safe mushrooms,” which is to say edible mushrooms that have no sinister look-alikes. It was the first time I had heard the term “safe mushrooms.” These I would have to remember.
ORANGE BIRCH BOLETE, Leccinum versipelle
The instructor then moved on to the polypores. The Sheep Polypore, Albatrellus ovinus, another of the five safe mushrooms, belongs to this group. The Sheep Polypore has a rather deformed and lumpy appearance. If you turn it upside down, the underside looks like a pincushion with lots of holes pricked in it. When cooked, the Sheep Polypore changes color, from white to lemony yellow. The color change undergone by some species when heated is an important detail, since it provides another key to the identity of a mushroom. The Orange Birch Bolete, to which we had already been introduced, also changes color when heated, from white to dark blue. The world of fungi was unquestionably even stranger than I had imagined when I walked into that class.
Among the gilled fungi—that is to say, fungi with gill-like structures on the underside of their caps—we find many genera, including both the most dangerous and the tastiest. As a beginner, I realized how important it was to learn to recognize the most common ones. Russulas are members of this group and are often very brightly colored. They could almost be called the flowers of the mushroom world, coming as they do in so many vivid tones of red, purple, yellow, gray, blue, and green. The very name “Russula” is enough to make the mouth water. The etymological dictionary suggests that the Norwegian word for Russula, kremle, may be related to the dialect word krembel, meaning “small or fat thing,” which is a pretty good description of Russulas in general.
Milk caps are also gilled fungi but they exude a milky fluid when cut. The milk of some milk caps is actually colored: the Saffron Milk Cap, Lactarius deliciosus, and the Orange Milk Cap, Lactarius deterrimus, both exude a carroty-red milk. This helps the mushroomer identify them as among the five safe mushrooms. I saw now that this was a far more colorful world than I had thought. There was a lot more to mushrooms, it seemed, than the bland off-white or dirty brown shop mushrooms, Agaricus bisporus, sold alongside the tomatoes and cucumbers. Although there are many theories, no one knows why mushrooms come in so many colors.
My interest was piqued in particular by another group of gilled fungi, the various edible Agaricus species found in the wild. We were told that these tasted much, much better than the standard supermarket mushroom, a farmed Agaricus, but that this genus can be a rather tricky one for beginners. For one thing, some kinds of edible Agaricus species are easily confused with poisonous look-alikes. I was very keen to discover how these wild Agaricus mushrooms tasted, and whether I would ever be able to tell the various different species apart. I jotted down notes as fast as I could and had soon filled several pages.
In addition to edible mushrooms, the course syllabus also covered the most common or infamous toxic fungi. Not surprisingly, the whole class found this subject most intriguing. We learned about the mushrooms that the Roman emperor Tiberius Claudius was poisoned by, served to him by his own wife, Agrippina, in A.D. 54. The toadstool familiar from fairy tales, the Fly Agaric, Amanita muscaria, which is also a fixture of Norwegian Christmas decorations, is a poisonous mushroom, though not nearly as toxic as the deadliest fungi found in Norway. The Destroying Angel, Amanita virosa, is a striking snow-white mushroom with a slender stem and a ring around the stem, and unlike the Fly Agaric, it is deadly. Some Asian immigrants to Norway have learned the hard way that the Angel’s snowy beauty is deceptive, since this mushroom looks disconcertingly like another mushroom that is regarded as a delicacy in Asia and which many immigrants from that part of the world know of from home. Another poisonous mushroom we were told to watch out for was the Death Cap, Amanita phalloides. This mushroom is reported to have a mild and not unpleasant taste. As with the Destroying Angel, ingestion of it can be fatal. But how do we know that this mushroom is mild tasting when it is deadly? I wondered. No one asked this question aloud; instead we all sat in awed silence.
As a simple rule of thumb, we novices were admonished to avoid any wild mushrooms that were entirely white or entirely brown on the cap, the underside, and the stem. Other than that, the course leader and his assistant had few basic tips to offer us. We were told that there was no easy way of knowing whether a mushroom was poisonous or not. Mushrooms simply have to be learned, one by one. Period. Our teachers were very clear on this point.
When the course leaders divulged their favorite mushrooms, I was astonished to find that the popular chanterelle did not appear among their top-five lists. Their ideal mushrooms included instead the Sheathed Woodtuft, the Horn of Plenty, the King Bolete, the Saffron Milk Cap, the Prince Mushroom, the Tawny Milk Cap, and the true morel. These lesser-known cousins of the chanterelle had names straight out of fairy tales. They seemed both familiar and alien. If one reeled them off one after another, it sounded a little like a piece of modern poetry. Nothing rhymed, but, for just a nanosecond, you felt you were on the brink of understanding something.
HEDGEHOG MUSHROOM, Hydnum repandum
The chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius, is a mushroom with a funnel-shaped cap, as its genus name, Cantharellus, meaning “little goblet,” suggests. Unlike most other popular mushrooms, with its golden apricot color the chanterelle cries out to be found. For those who enjoy a more challenging hunt, chanterelles are almost too easy to find. Later I was to get to know mushroom pickers who would walk straight past “ordinary” chanterelles in the forest. And if the chanterelle was mentioned, it was almost apologetically (“Oh, of course, chanterelles are all right every now and again”). Compared to other mushrooms, the chanterelle also has a long season. In Norway the first ones appear as e
arly as June, a secret that mushroomers keep to themselves.
THE ADRENALINE RUSH
After an evening of theory, the next item on the program was a field trip. In Norway the outdoor life is tantamount to a religion, and Sunday hikes in the woods are almost obligatory. For an outsider, though, such an outing can be anything but a walk in the park. The uninitiated can find the forest a daunting place. It is alarming to discover, when the same clump of mushrooms shows up for the second time, that you have actually gone around in a circle. It is very easy, I find, to be lured deeper and deeper into the dark forest and suddenly find yourself alone and surrounded by huge trees, with no obvious way back. At such times it is not hard to imagine that you can hear the trees whispering to one another that they are going to catch this little mushroom gatherer with their long branches. It’s an ominous scenario for anyone who wasn’t born with hiking boots on their feet and hasn’t been taught that a walk in the woods is the best cure for a bad mood.
In Malaysia the tropical rain forest is not a place for Sunday outings. The concept is unknown there. And if anyone were mad enough to do such a thing, they would have to go armed with both mosquito repellent and a sharp parang—at the very least. But no one does this, because it is a dangerous activity, one involving risk to both life and limb. So the Norwegian tradition of getting out into the great outdoors had come as something of a shock to me. No one taught us expectant young people from all over the world, on an exchange year in the country, how to crack the Norwegian forest and mountain code. I had to figure it out for myself, stretching my comfort zone in the process. So it was good to go mushroom picking in a forest with our two course leaders, both of them certified mushroom professionals and very used to walking in the Norwegian woods. I couldn’t help giggling the first time I heard the term “certified mushroom professionals.” Prior to that, I had only ever heard the word “professional” used in connection with scientific, academic, or legal matters. It had never occurred to me that you could also be a professional in something like mushrooms.
On these organized field trips, one also learns how the appearance of different species of fungi changes in situ, from pinheads to full-grown mushrooms. Some books on fungi only contain illustrations of perfect, fully grown specimens, which is no help when it comes to knowing how these mushrooms look at all the different stages in their life cycle. Time takes its toll on everyone and everything, including mushrooms.
How did I become hooked on mushrooms? This question can be answered with a story from my very first mushroom hunt with the teachers from the beginners’ course. Just after we entered the forest, I spotted a clump of eight or nine Destroying Angels. They looked so virginal and innocent, but still I went cold inside at the sight of these deadly mushrooms. It was incredible to be able to use my newly acquired skills straightaway. Knowing what not to eat from the wild made a warm thrill of achievement run through me. And then I found some Horn of Plenty, well camouflaged by dead leaves and twigs, a delicacy that was identified to me by the course leader. I was a little surprised because these mushrooms were gray and black in color and, to my mind back then, did not look like something one would eat. Which just goes to show how wrong you can be when you are working with assumptions rather than knowledge. Never before had I taken a course in which the lessons learned could immediately be put into practice. I was extremely impressed by the teachers from the Greater Oslo Fungi and Useful Plants Society. I went home with a basketful of edible mushrooms, pleased with my haul and myself.
As I became more familiar with the main genera of mushrooms, I gained a slightly more structured view of the complex fungi kingdom. I began to believe that maybe one day I would feel confident about identifying the 15 species covered in the course. I had learned that the syllabus for the mushroom inspector’s exam covered at least 150 species. When one passes the exam, one becomes a full-fledged mushroom inspector. But how was one ever to become fully conversant in 150 species when it was hard enough recognizing 15? It seemed an impossible task.
A walk through the woods is a very different experience when undertaken armed with new knowledge, however limited it may be. Suddenly I was seeing mushrooms everywhere, fungi that I would simply have walked blindly past before, blending as they did into the landscape. Now they were popping out at me in 3-D, as if I had been given special glasses with which to see them. I also learned a lot about Norwegian flora—such as the fact that blue wood anemones are lime-loving plants. If I come across blue wood anemones, there is a good chance that nearby I’ll also find mushrooms that thrive in lime-rich soil.
Once I had recognized my first mushrooms, the exotic Norwegian woodlands began to make more sense to me. As time went on I found myself longing to go there, to those dark-green forests. Nowadays, I scan the forest floor to gain a quick overview of the terrain as I walk along. Are there any interesting specimens here? I wonder. If you want to find mushrooms, you have to turn off your cellphone, switch to mushroom mode, and simply be there—in the woods. Since then I have read that a walk in the woods can do wonders, not just for body and soul as the outdoor evangelists preach, but also for the brain.
We have all known what it is to be fascinated by something as a child: to be so lost in watching ants hard at work, for example, that you don’t hear the call for dinner. The mushroom adventure is every bit as spellbinding. I switch off from all the day-to-day trivia on a mushroom hunt. The hunter-gatherer instinct is kindled and I am instantly transported into a unique enchanted world. My concentration is sharpened and the tension mounts: will I find that mushroom treasure or not? And when I do finally come upon a perfect chanterelle or two or three, I’m likely to catch myself exclaiming, “Oh, gosh, aren’t you gorgeous!” or even “Come to mamma, darling!” But just as often I am fooled by a yellow birch leaf that, for a moment, makes my heart beat a little faster at the thought of possibly finding gold in the greenwood. Usually it proves to be neither gold nor mushroom, although on one occasion my laser gaze did spot some stray banknotes in the middle of a pinewood. It’s amazing what you can find in a Norwegian forest if you just keep your eyes open.
Professional athletes talk about “flow,” the sense of control achieved when there is a balance between skills and challenges. When they are entirely immersed in the moment and the body is in tune with the activity, mind and spirit are bombarded by positive impulses. With the focus and fixity of purpose come joy and excitement. Then they are “in the zone.” The term “Zen moment” has long been used to describe what happens when, after much practice, you are able to give yourself up to the experience of existential timelessness and placelessness. In many ways flow and Zen are related experiences. You are contained within a bubble of happiness. The world can go on without you.
Unlike the athletes’ sense of flow and the monks’ Zen moment, the joys of mushroom picking were something I experienced while still new to the game, without any of the athlete’s obligatory ten thousand hours of training or the monk’s rituals under my belt. I’m sure that, even for amateurs, skiing, sailing, and other sports and hobbies call for a lot of basic training before one can hope to experience a similar high. But when it comes to mushrooms, you don’t need any great skill to feel that rush of adrenaline. All you have to do to experience the thrill of mushroom hunting is to take a little walk with a mushroom expert. The mushroom high is easily won, a sort of “flow light.”
Since I became bitten by the mushroom bug, I have discovered an invisible, parallel world right at my feet, one with its own unruly logic and wayward vitality, a magical world I would once have walked straight past, all unwitting. Sometimes, when I find mushrooms, time seems to stand still. I experience both flow and Zen. The sense of gratification and of being at one with the universe brings me both inner contentment and happiness. At such moments only one thing matters: being exactly where I am and doing exactly what I am doing. At such moments I don’t think about what I’m going to have f
or dinner or what people think of my hairstyle.
Gathering mushrooms is, among other things, a tactile experience. First you feel the degree of resistance in the mushroom. Some obstinate fungi dig in their heels; others seem as if they are ready to leave the forest and come home with us if we merely smile sweetly at them. I love the moment when, after a little careful grubbing about, I finally have my golden prize in my hand. To me it feels almost like scraping my way to the winning number on a scratch card, a cheap thrill in more ways than one.
There is, of course, a sense of mastery that comes with more knowledge and more practice in exploring a forest. What I didn’t expect was the feeling of euphoria. My heart leapt the first time I found a delicious edible mushroom on my own. Was this happiness? It was staggering to actually feel an emotion I thought had gone for good when Eiolf died. It was like being given an intravenous shot of multivitamins. Elation bubbled out of every cell in my body. All at once a slender, golden beam of light pierced my soul. Was it possible to feel a delight so scintillatingly clear when everything seemed so vague and hopeless?
HORN OF PLENTY, Craterellus cornucopioides
Find one mushroom and there’s a good chance that you will find another nearby. The thrill of discovery is cumulative: one mushroom, one delight; two mushrooms, double delight.
As the world of mushrooms opened up to me, I began to see that the path back to life was easier than I had thought. It was simply a matter of gathering delights that flash and sparkle. All I had to do was follow the mushroom trail, even though I still didn’t know where it would lead. What would I find in the great unknown that lay ahead of me? What lay beyond those hilltops and mists and turns in the road?