Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [68]
The porcini or cep mushroom, Boletus edulis, is at or very near the top of everyone’s list. They can grow up to a foot across and weigh more than two pounds, and they are virtually impossible to confuse with any poisonous mushrooms. Prior to the unfortunate incident, I found, cooked, and ate many very good-tasting mushrooms, some of them rated almost as good as Boletus edulis, and I found a few that might have been the porcini. I couldn’t be sure because they were well past their prime and most of the way back to being dust.
Wild mushrooms spring up overnight and are fit for eating for a day or two, three at the most.
There’s a house in my neighborhood with surveillance cameras and warning signs and big black Lincolns that come and go. The house is set way back and the lawn is huge. What if there were porcini mushrooms growing on that lawn? Would I black my face and come back in the wee hours? Could I train my dog to fetch mushrooms? Were those cameras real? Did the people in the house have a sense of humor? Did they like mushrooms? If it was a Mafia guy, maybe he remembered porcini mushrooms from his childhood and I’d be in the position of having to be damn sure and cooking them just right, hoping against hope they weren’t the bitter boletes. Bitter boletes aren’t poisonous, but they look like porcini and taste horrible. The Mafia guy would be trying to spit this bitter taste out of his mouth. “Porcini, my ass.” And I’d be going for a ride somewhere.
Collecting mushrooms sounds so gentlemanly.
While they say there are no surefire ways to identify poisonous mushrooms, avoiding the ones that glow in the dark and smell like death seems like a safe practice. Yet there are mushrooms that smell like rotting fish that cook up nicely. The fact that some of the very poisonous amanitas taste good goes against much of what I hoped to be true about life. I imagine some poor, fatally poisoned SOB talking to fellow mushroom collectors on his deathbed. “At first I didn’t think it tasted like much, but then …”
Ever since taking me to have my stomach pumped, Barb has had a negative attitude toward my fascination with mushrooms. I’ve explained to her that the mushroom I ingested only rarely causes fatalities and then it is usually in older debilitated people with kidney or liver failure. Debilitated older people with kidney or liver failure have no business eating wild mushrooms unless they are utterly and completely sure of their identification.
In the interest of being helpful I tried to give a neighbor some information about some edible mushrooms growing in his yard. “Sautée them in butter and a little garlic salt,” I offered. He was polite enough but didn’t seem likely to take personal advantage of his good luck. Nor did he offer to let me pick them.
When you walk through the woods, how much of the living matter there is animal, including bugs and birds and all? Two to three percent. Plants, trees, bushes, moss, grass, and flowers—most of what you see and think of when you think of a walk in the woods—make up 15 to 20 percent, depending. The rest is all a very quiet, nearly invisible world of fungi. The mushrooms you see aren’t so much the tip of the iceberg as dewdrops on top of the ocean.
The mushroom growing out of my neighbor’s stump was the Armillaria mellea or honey mushroom, so called because of its honey color rather than a sweet honey taste. Armillaria is in many ways the most successful organism on the planet. While most mushrooms are recyclers that break down dead or dying plants and return the raw materials to the earth, the honey mushroom will take down perfectly healthy trees and sometimes an entire forest. Most of the organism consists of small black cords that travel miles and miles and miles. The mushrooms you see are the flower of a much much bigger organism. There’s a single Armillaria that covers most of Oregon and some of northern California. In Europe there’s an Armillaria