A Would-Be Hunter’s Mushrooming Fear

Mushroom hunting isn’t for sissies. It’s much more dangerous than going after big game, no matter what that bully Ernest Hemingway said.

Sure, tigers and lions have big teeth and sharp claws. But hunters nowadays have rifles with infrared and laser sights; they shoot the poor animals at night while they are sound asleep in their little dens, with their little blankets of bracken pulled up tight around their whiskers. Where is the challenge in that?

Mushroom hunters, on the other hand, need skill, guts and thick rubber boots. They track a prey that, though stationary and lacking in intelligence of any kind, to say nothing of big teeth and sharp claws, is cunning. It hides in dark, nasty places. And once the brave mushroom hunter successfully navigates the dangerous bog and treacherous meadow, he finds himself face to face with the most devilish and duplicitous adversary in all the forest. The mushroom can be tasty or toxic, nutritious or noxious.

It is its own evil twin.

But we live in California, where dust mites and backyard weeds are on the endangered species list. What else is left to hunt but fungi?

With a short and pitiful rainy season coming to an end, and the opportunity to eat wild mushrooms drawing to a seasonal close, I decided to head into the woods. But, being a novice, I needed an experienced seeker to accompany me. After all, I wanted a lovely bowl of risotto with chanterelles, not a liver transplant.

Mushroom hunters, I quickly found out, are as elusive and hard to get your fingers on as their prey. This is not surprising, since both spend a lot of time alone and in the damp.

*

The phone book yielded only commercial growers, so I went directly to an expert.

“We do actually buy from a mushroom hunter,” said Edie at the Ranch House restaurant in Ojai. “We have gotten a lot of chanterelles from him this year.”

She gave me a number and I left a message on his answering machine. Later that night a man with a breathy, flat voice--think Col. Kurtz cum surfer dude--returned the call.

“I don’t want to be famous,” he wheezed.

There is no risk of that happening here, I assured him. He was neither amused nor assuaged.

“I don’t want people knowing who I am. I don’t want my name used. I want to be left alone,” he said, adding, rather enigmatically, “Truth is singular.”

Next.

Judy Willis, a board member of the Ventura County/Santa Barbara chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food. She sent me to mushroom hunter Antonio Gardella.

“It is the best chanterelle season in 20 years,” he said. “There has also been a huge crop of cepes and porcini. It is the most prolific year I can remember. I’ve been bringing in buckets full at a time.”

I could smell the butter sizzling in the pan.

While Gardella mostly prefers to hunt the wetter, damper terrain up north, he said he would be happy to take me into the hills of Ventura County. Next year.

“Chanterelles grow in the mulch under oak trees and there are plenty of oaks in Ventura County. Unfortunately, that is where poison oak grows, too,” he said. “I wore boots and heavy pants and rubber gloves, but I still got it, and I brought it back to my wife.”

By then it seemed quite clear that no one would escort me into the woods, so my best bet was to equip myself with the best information and then go out and find my own dinner.

The next day, I drove to Santa Barbara City College to speak with botany professor Bob Cummings, the area’s leading expert on mushrooms.

“Personally, my interest extends to all mushrooms, edible and poisonous,” he said. “But many amateurs are interested in the edible ones, and the hunt right now is definitely on.”

Over the next couple of hours, the cheery and helpful Dr. Cummings described in glorious detail the wonders of the fungal world.

“I want to get people to think about the fungi and appreciate a very interesting life form,” he said. “They are not only some of the worst things on earth, but also some of the best.”

He showed slides of gorgeous red and orange mushrooms that are psychoactive and will make you hallucinate, unless, of course, you eat one with a high percentage of muscarine. This toxin, present in many local fungi, will cause the body to attempt to rid itself of liquid, a horrifying event that can’t delicately be described in a family newspaper.

He pointed out lovely and delicious amanita caluptroderma, and its lovely and deadly cousins, amanitacq phalloides and amanita ocreata.

“They grow up and down our coast, often on people’s lawns,” Cummings said, adding “but while lots of mushrooms are poisonous, not all are deadly. I’m the person emergency room doctors call when someone comes in violently ill from eating a mushroom. They are relieved when you tell them they don’t have to call the organ donor hotline.”

*

Cold comfort to the patient who eats the mushroom that Cummings says “puts you in a coma for a couple of days. The lucky, or unlucky ones, depending on how you look at it, who don’t go into a coma, are doubled up in intense pain.”

He then got around to chanterelles, my fungi of choice. They are golden and ruffled and don’t look much like any other mushroom. Or do they?

“Oh, yes, there are false chanterelles,” he said, showing me some golden and ruffled look-alikes.

“With chanterelles,” he said, “you smell them. If they smell like pumpkins, they are chanterelles. If they smell like mushrooms, don’t eat them. And they have to have ridges, not gills.”

Ah.

He sensed a sea change in the room.

“If you are going to pick wild mushrooms, you need to take a lifetime to learn them,” he smiled. “Get familiar with one at a time. I’m an expert and I wouldn’t eat some mushrooms, even if I was certain they were edible, on a dare.”

I promised him I would start slowly, one mushroom at a time. What I didn’t tell him is that I will be picking it only after it’s been shrink-wrapped and placed on the market shelf. I also didn’t tell him that tomorrow I will be pursuing a new hobby. Something safe, like alligator wrestling.