The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [186]
I hadn’t actually thought about the gardener’s worldview in this light till I’d spent some time mushroom hunting, which proposes a whole other way of being in nature. Hunting for mushrooms is an operation that superficially resembles harvesting—you’re looking around in nature for the ready-to-eat—yet you quickly discover that the two activities could hardly be more different. For starters, mushrooms are usually hunted in an unfamiliar place where you stand a very good chance of getting lost, particularly since you are looking down at the ground so determinedly the whole time. Getting lost just isn’t much of a problem in the garden. (Which is why gardeners looking to create that experience plant mazes.) And whereas in your garden the ready-to-eat tomato beckons to you, flashing red from out of the undifferentiated green, mushrooms definitely hide. Picking and eating the wrong ones could get you killed, too, something not easily done in the garden. No, gratifying human needs and desires is just not what mushrooms are about. Mushrooms, you soon discover, are wild things in every way, beings pursuing their own agenda quite apart from ours. Which is why “hunting,” rather than harvesting, is the mycophile’s preferred term of art.
1. FIVE CHANTERELLES
It was a Sunday morning in late January when I got the call from Angelo.
“The chanterelles are up,” he announced.
“How do you know? Have you been out looking?”
“No, not yet. But it’s been three weeks since the big rains.” We’d had a torrential week between the holidays. “They’re up now, I’m sure of that. We should go tomorrow.”
At the time I barely knew Angelo (we had yet to go pig hunting), which made his invitation to come mushrooming with him all the more generous. Mushroom hunters are famously protective of their “spots,” and a good chanterelle spot is a precious personal possession (though not quite as precious as a good porcini spot). Before Angelo agreed to take me I’d asked a slew of acquaintances I knew to be mycophiles if I might accompany them. (The Bay Area is home to many such people, probably because mushroom hunting marries the region’s two guiding obsessions: eating and the outdoors.) I was always careful to solemnly swear to protect the location of their spots. For some people you could see at once that this was an entirely outrageous request, tantamount to asking if I might borrow their credit card for the afternoon. Others reacted more calmly, yet always cagily. Angelo’s friend Jean-Pierre is reputed to have good chanterelle spots right within the Berkeley city limits, but he repeatedly found polite ways to deflect my entreaties into the distant future. Several mushroom hunters responded to my request with the same joke: “Sure, you can come mushroom hunting with me, but I must tell you that immediately afterward I will have to kill you.” What you fully expect to follow such a jokey warning (a warning I always parried with an offer to wear a blindfold coming and going) is some sort of conditional invitation, but it never arrives. Without ever exactly saying no, the mushroom hunter will deftly beg off or change the subject. I thought maybe the problem was that I was a writer, somebody who might do something as crazy as publish the location of a favorite spot, so I emphasized that a journalist would sooner go to jail than reveal a secret from a confidential source. This swayed precisely no one. I was beginning to think it was hopeless, that I was going to have to learn to hunt mushrooms from books—a dubious, not to mention dangerous, proposition. And then Angelo called.
Though I probably shouldn’t overstate Angelo’s generosity. The place he took me mushrooming was on private and gated land owned by an old friend of his, so it wasn’t as though he was giving