Mushrooms

Inflorescences of Decay

Mushrooms are flowers of the dark - beautiful aromatic gifts from the mysterious, decomposing side of the life cycle. These fungal decomposers also generate many of the most biologically active substances in nature and therein lies part of their fascination too.  A great deal of folk medicine as well as modern pharmaceuticals have their origins in the rootlets of mycelium reaching into logs and fruits, composting all that is organic and making it over into its own flesh, for now, until another creature commandeers the energy being stored in the mushroom’s accumulating reserves - Pennicilium mold is just the best known example.  The common cavalier mushroom (Tricholoma flavovirens) growing under pines in sandy upland soils is eaten by Europeans (and a few courageous Americans) late in the season when there are few other mushrooms to be found, but in Cambodia, they are gathered from the highest mountains as a medicine to the arthritic. Mushrooms are powerful juju.

Some of the most intensely fragrant musk-like smells of the northern woods come from decomposing birch trees.  The various fungal growths on birches have their traditional uses and include the warty looking growth, which Russians call chaga (Inonotus obliques)  - used all across the northern Eurasian landmass to treat stomach cancer. Alexander Solzhenitsyn used chaga to cure himself of stomach cancer while imprisoned in the gulag. My father, when he was employed as a cancer researcher, assayed this fungus for anti-tumor effects and did indeed detect promising activity. But this took place against the backdrop of elections and a new administration was voted into office in Washington. Government contracts are the plums with which co-operation is rewarded and in this case the contract was not renewed, but went to other people at other institutions.  The chaga study was dropped before preliminary data could be further developed. The better results were actually with ulcers than cancer – and why not? What village herbalist could be expected to differentiate between an open bleeding ulcer or a cancer, either of which kills his patient with nearly identical symptoms. The Odawa healers of the upper Great Lakes use this fungus to treat hemorrhoids – problems arising just a little downstream on the same river of foodstuffs. I find the chaga fascinating both visually and as a living entity with its own beauty, which is at least partly a function of its power to heal one body and decompose another - two sides of one coin.

We do love to eat and we love our mushrooms.  Everything that goes in our mouths seems of particular interest from the first moment of groping around with our little sausage fingers and lips for a breast in that most basic of mammalian instincts. Eating is the most fundamental of needs and pleasures. The variety of sensual experience we crave in life is especially focused on food; got to have that great variety of tastes that titillate, spices that work the edges of discomfort, funky cheeses aged to the borders of putrescence, imported foods, wild foods, subtle tastes, seasonal fare; anything to keep it interesting. We mushroom hounds stake our fortunes to variety as well – to finding something good in every season. We also like things a little dicey; like to walk the razor’s edge and flirt with danger.  We sample among foods that others fear to touch; mushrooms that have been found to be toxic unless cooked; fungi that are poisonous to some and harmless to others.  The common beefsteak or false morel, (the ear of Judas in Czech), which I grew up eating often contains hydrazine – a toxic substance, which is usually driven off by the heat of cooking. There have been recorded instances, though, when guests have harmlessly consumed a scrumptious meal of false morels, while the cook lay dying in the kitchen from the vapors he’d been inhaling from the saucepan.

I have become much more circumspect about my own mushrooming after a close encounter with the greengill (Cholorphyllum Molybdes). The field guides list this handsome white mushroom, commonly found on lawns, as a fine eating mushroom for some people and poisonous to others. And they warn specifically, that these mushrooms never be sold in markets. Certainly, though, that warning could not apply to me, devoted mushroomer that I am. The greengills looked so good, growing there in the grass. I had to try them, and of course the gods do punish hubris. The tasty morsels set off an eight-hour bout of digestive troubles, as my body furiously expelled all liquids through every possible opening. Violent diarrhea set in and I vomited convulsively, alternately freezing and sweating, salivating, tearing, urinating - becoming dehydrated and exhausted.  I slept it off for another day and learned to be less cavalier about my mushrooming.

The dominant (if indirect) cause of most mushroom poisoning, though, is the blusher – a tasty Amanita.  Blushers are very similar to several extremely dangerous mushrooms whose symptoms only appear when it’s too late to do much more than to pray and watch your life slip away in agony. I suspect the attraction is akin to the Japanese consumption of puffer fish, whose liver contains a violent neuro-toxin. The truly masterful chef, when requested, can just barely nick the liver in preparation of the fish in an act of brinkmanship that gives the diners a distant brush with death. As the minute dose of tetrodotoxin enters their circulation along with the meal and goes to their nerves, the tingling and numbing sensation on tongue and lips, reminds the diners of the trust they have placed in the chef, as their meal becomes an unforgettable epicurean Liebestod.  Too heavy a hand and the poison will paralyze their muscles as, fully conscious, they eventually die of asphyxiation. There is no antidote. Sex or death, poisoning or sustenance; you never know which it will be.

The position of dispassionate observer disappears with the intimacy that eating elicits. Colorful and aromatic forest floor decomposers take on new dimensions of meaning when they are violently poisonous, hallucinogenic or good to eat. Seasonal use of nature and its gifts takes us out of doors to gather that which will not wait for a convenient moment, but whose time is now. And now is something that can never be revisited nor replaced. So, may we enjoy our toadstools and wake up to do so again.  Bon appetite.

Ladislav R. Hanka   
August 2006

But who ever left well enough alone and so you go home and etch it into copper  - deep -  all the way through in places - eh?  And you move over from Blusher to Fly Agaric because they too are cool and you take an impression and work some colored ink into it and draw back into the etching made from a drawing, maybe add a lamprey because it just so needs a blood sucking fish among all the sinuous roots that found their way into those micro-rhizal relationships and some deer tracks and ferns .....