We’ve had a wet autumn, and mushrooms are popping up all over the yard. It reminds me of the times when I’d see wild mushrooms and salivate and go out and collect them. And it reminds me of the time when I almost wrote my obituary after eating mushrooms.
During the summer of 1979, I was the park naturalist at Interstate State Park in St Croix Falls, Wisconsin. I had spent three summers as the naturalist, and I knew the Latin name of every tree, flower, fern and moss in the park. And if it was edible, I’d cook it up. I had the complete set of Euell Gibbons books starting with Stalking the Wild Asparagus. He was the guru of edible wild plants and famous in America for his Grape Nuts commercial – ‘Ever eat a pine tree. Many parts are edible.’ So I was determined that summer to eat my way through Interstate Park.
When autumn came, I was presented with a whole new supermarket of yummies. It was the long Labor Day weekend which marked the end of the park’s naturalist program. I had already started university but came back to the park to give walks and talks to the large Labor Day crowd. On my last day I found some colourful mushrooms in a pine forest and whipped out my copy of Smith’s The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide. In my mind they were unmistakably the edible Boletinus pictus (known as Suillus spraguei since 1986) and I picked a bunch and dropped them into my satchel and drove the four hours back to the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point.
I was hungry when I arrived home and I remembered my fresh mushrooms. I cleaned them up and sliced them and made a white sauce. The Boletinus turns all black on cooking, so they didn’t look too appetizing. I made some mashed potatoes and ate them with my mushroom gravy. Boletinus is quite gelatinous so it was like eating slugs, but I was hungry. In fact the mushrooms didn’t fill me up.
Thankfully one of my roommates was busy baking over the long holiday and had a tray of brownies cooling. No one was home at the time but my roommates and I shared food so I was sure no one would bother if I had one. They were tasty brownies indeed. We were into natural foods at the time and cooked with coarse whole wheat flour and used carob instead of chocolate. So I appreciated the fact that these brownies had plenty of texture. You just can’t stop at one brownie though, so I just helped myself to one more. But I was so hungry, and I vowed I’d make another batch for my roomies so I had another and another.
I had an exam the next day, so I grabbed my satchel and ran off to the library to study. I went to the top floor and found a quiet area all for myself.
As I immersed myself in English Literature, I couldn’t help but notice that the words on the page starting dancing. I blinked and shook my head and tried to read some more. But I couldn’t focus. I looked outside the window and thought the building was swaying. My head felt like it was swimming. I was floating, swirling. English Lit had never had that effect on me before.
But then it dawned on me.
I was suffering from mushroom poisoning. How could I have gotten it wrong?? I was sure those ‘shrooms were Boletinus pictus and they were edible. But could they have been the deadly Amanita muscaria which also has a reddish cap? No way. I was a much better plant taxonomist than that. My pride was on the line. How embarrassing if a young botanist would end up in hospital for misidentifying a mushroom. But I wasn’t sure, so I pulled out my journal and started writing notes just in case I dropped dead at any moment. At least some one would know what killed me.
I couldn’t continue to study so I walked back home having a most remarkable feeling of walking straighter. Maybe the poisoning would just pass through me I thought, and I’d be fine in the morning. My roommates still weren’t home, so I crawled into bed and just gazed at the ceiling and watched it swirl and swirl and swirl. I figured I’d give the local paper a headstart and write my own obituary, but I couldn’t take my gaze off the ceiling nor could I lift my head.
But then it dawned on me.
I never took an interest in drugs while I was at university. I was in the minority in the 1970s on US college campuses. Pretty much every party I’d go to we’d sit around, and someone would light a joint or a bong and pass it around. When it came to me, I’d just pass it on and not take a hit. I was a Rocky Mountain High kind of guy. If I wanted to get high, I’d go for a walk in the forest, watch a sunset or paddle down a river. I didn’t need drugs to get high, I had Mother Nature and I was forever high. So now in my fourth year at university I was proud to say that I had never conformed with my peers and gave into drugs, and I had never been high on pot.
Until Labor Day of 1979, that is. As I lay there watching the ceiling swirl, a smile started forming on my face as the realisation sank in. I wasn’t dying of mushroom poisoning.
I was high as a kite off pot brownies!
My face couldn’t contain the huge grin I had. My confidence in plant taxonomy was restored and I saw wild mushrooms dancing and I was sure I could correctly identify them all now.
As I watched the dancing ‘shrooms I heard the deafening thumping of feet on our wooden staircase. My roommate entered the house and went straight to the kitchen. ‘Who the hell ate all the brownies,’ he yelled. All was quiet in the house. No one confessed. But as he explored the house, he soon got his answer. When he looked in my room, he saw me lying on my back fixated on a blank ceiling and with the widest grin a human face is capable of wearing.
[Suillus photo courtesy of Jimmie Veitch (jimmiev) at Mushroom Observer under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported]
