When I close my eyes during mushroom season, I see golden spots tucked between decaying oak leaves. I imagine the bulging pine duff under which lies a magnificent porcini. I see the the fog rolling in off the Pacific, engulfing me and my basket in a fairy-strewn pine forest; the places I seek are solitary and enchanted, dank and musty.
I like eating mushrooms a lot less than I like gathering them. I have heard golf described as a good walk spoiled. If I could turn that expression around somehow, I might be able to better describe the pursuit of the fruiting bodies of subterranean mycelia. It is a myopic ramble through the alamedas immediately adjacent to major trails. These are the same places where poison oak and blackberry thrive, where rattlesnakes slither after sunning themselves on the sunny path. There are burrs, snags, and ticks; there are signs forbidding it, nearly everyone you talk to tells you a story about someone who got sick and died from eating a tasty-looking mushroom. Don't touch it! Weirdo. Hippie.
The first few times I go out each season, my eyes tire quickly from the strain of continuous looking. Soon, however, they adjust and become a reliable tool - and the only one I need. I carry a cheap, dull, wood-handled knife made in Czechoslovakia. My grandparents come from that faraway place where it is anything but strange to hunt wild mushrooms, and the knife is a kind of charm left to me by my gnomic grandmother. She was the first to turn me lose with a basket, when I was still close to the ground and armed with better than perfect eye site. She was a wise and beneficent employer. Each of my hunts is dedicated to her. She lives through me, elevates me in those out of the way places that bring me sanity in my ever more crowded life.
