Prospecting

There’s a break in the fence where I can sneak into the woods to hunt for mushrooms. 

This sentence is so storybook perfect I can hardly believe it’s part of my life. But it’s true. Along the path from the farmhouse, after the big barn and the fallen oak, but before the metal barn and its enormous oak still standing, there is a spot where I can duck under the barbed wire and move from pasture to forest in the blink of an eye. It feels like a magic trick. Like another world hidden in the back of an old wardrobe. Like time travel. 

I’m waxing poetic. Let me back up. 

When my husband and I decided to move to Kentucky to renovate the old farmhouse my father in law had bought in the 80’s, we knew we were taking on a lot. The original floor boards from 1880-something are uneven enough that walking across them can trip the seismic sensor in the oven and shut off the gas. The basement floods regularly. The house doesn’t have a single room where all of the windows and doors both open and close. And we’re about two miles back from any publicly accessible road. 

We’re not alone though. There’s a several foot long black snake known as Granddaddy (gender unknown) who lives under the hearth and has been known to drape across the mantle above the woodstove. I’ve only seen the skins myself, but they are impressive. More often than not, one must evict a few spiders if you wish to shower solo, and throughout the summer, nearly every rafter bay on the porch is home to a bird’s nest.  But there are worse places to sip your morning tea than an avian maternity ward. And besides, the porch alone has more square footage than our Oakland apartment that we left in February. So does the vegetable garden, which we dug in last month, and which I need to weed more assiduously. We haven’t bordered the beds yet.

I often joke that here at the farm, “inside” and “outside” are theoretical concepts to which not all creatures subscribe. Like “pasture” and “forest” these human divisions seem to matter mostly to those of us on two legs. Creatures on four, or six, or eight, dozens, hundreds, or none at all, are untroubled by such things. 

On our first full day here, my husband, Win, and our family friend, Sally who co-owns the land with my father in law set about getting the water running to the house again. One of the property’s many springs is tapped behind the house to provide water through our pipes, and it also generously fills the tanks for Sally’s 200 head of cattle who graze this acreage. The cows have the river while the water’s out, but we don’t have such a convenient alternative so we head down to the spring box to see what we can fix, praying we don’t need to dig up the pipeline. While Win repairs the decoupled PVC (thankfully a quick, above-ground job) Sally shows me some of how the water works, since troubleshooting is bound to be in our future. Of a smaller concrete cistern she advises me to brace myself if I need to open it. Not only is the lid incredibly heavy (lift from the knees, ok?) but apparently there’s often snakes or salamanders inside. “Don’t get startled and drop the lid- you wouldn’t want to have to climb back up this hill with a broken foot.” Sally laughs. Noted. Assume snake. Proceed from there. I am deeply grateful for Sally’s presence. 

I look around the forested glen shaped by the flow of the spring, arched over with dozens of varieties of trees, and wonder what else is around. For all the poison ivy, there’s lambs quarters too. Hickorys hiding amongst the Trees of Heaven (or Hell, as is more common parlance around here.) And in humidity like this, there’s gotta be mushrooms. I hardly know where to start. 

Most mornings, if I’m up early enough to beat the heat of the day, I take the dog for a walk. Put on pants and boots, sunscreen, bug spray. Fill a water bottle, grab a hat and walking stick. It is a relief to not need a face mask, though I bring a hanky just in case, and, in hope, a bag for foraging. No leash, no wallet. She bounds ahead and I follow behind, each stopping to explore whatever grabs our interest. 

She follows the trails of rabbits as I photograph butterflies on clover. She pants in mud puddles while I wipe the sweat off my face hoping I’m not taking the sunscreen off too. And lately, I’ve been ducking under that break in the fence so that I can hunt for mushrooms; chanterelles, specifically. Cantharellus cibarius. The conditions are right. Lots of rain and hot days. Largely undisturbed forest floor. It’s the right time of year and patch of earth. They should be here. But where, exactly, is “here” on 537 acres? 

Chanterelles are a popular choice for beginning foragers like myself. They’re relatively easy to identify, and unlike another forager favorite, the fiddlehead fern, their season lasts for months. The main lookalike for chanterelles are Omphalotus olearius, or jack-o-lantern mushrooms. They’re not deadly, but the gastric distress involved in eating one is something I’d very much like to avoid. Fortunately, there are some key differences. Chanterelles are yellow to golden while Jack o Lanterns are more definitively orange. Jack-o-lanterns only grow on wood, while Chanterelles grow directly on the forest floor. Chanterelles have deep ridges that are not true gills, and the paths of them are forked. Jack-o-lanterns have true gills and a cap distinct from the stem. And apparently they glow in the dark too. I have seen neither, truth be told, but the internet has armed me with this information (which I here pass on) and I feel surprisingly confident in my ability to tell them apart should I find one or the other. Mostly because I have a community I can send pictures to. 

It is a great tragic irony that for the majority of human foraging history there has been no internet, and now that so many of us have it at our fingertips, we hardly ever forage. The whole reason I know that chanterelles are in season right now is that when we first decided to move to Kentucky, a state in which I have not a single friend, I started putting out feelers for community. I joined a Queer Kentucky facebook group. One for Kentucky gardeners. And one for Kentucky mushroom enthusiasts. In early June my feed started to fill with what can only be described as hauls of chanterelles. “Went for a walk, got 8lbs!” a table full of bright yellow ruffley nuggets pictured. Post after post of gleaming mushroomers and piles of chanterelles. It felt like a gold rush. 

I moved to California about ten years ago, from upstate New York. In some ways, I was running from grief; I’d buried three grandparents, two aunts, and an uncle in five years; and in other ways I was running towards a community I didn’t yet have, but knew I could build. My grandfather always told me that if you wanted to see the future, look at California. The future I wanted to live in looked like an Alison Bechdel cartoon, or at least like a place where holding hands with my girlfriend in the grocery store wouldn’t be cause for commentary. And so, I headed West to strike my fortune.  

Back in Oakland, I could hop into the car and drive twenty minutes to the Berkeley Bowl and take my pick of exotic mushrooms from their produce section. Oysters, lion’s mane, Emperor’s club, enoki, nameko, hedgehog, wood ear, porcinis, and plenty of chanterelles. Here, the closest major grocery store is Walmart about 40 minutes away and they might have brown mushrooms in. 

Similarly, I never lacked for queer community in the Bay. I was surrounded by neighbors, friends, co-workers, our whole Frambly of renegade misfits, artists, makers, thespians, gamers, Ren Faire addicts, activists, revolutionaries. For the most part, my decade in California was exactly the world my collegiate self longed for and far beyond the dreams of my teenage self. It took a global pandemic, the loss of three jobs, entire industries shuttered, the constant threat of fire to turn our heads back East. I’m trying to remind myself that haven took some finding. It took some building. Patience. 

One of the factors that keeps chanterelles absent from Walmart displays is that they are mycorrhizal fungi that develop only in the presence of plants with which they can form symbiotic relationships. In other words, they’re bad candidates for captivity and thus, industrialization. In the wild, chanterelles can grow near maples, oaks, beech, poplar, pine, fir, and possibly more, but they’re always found in forests because they depend on the tree roots for survival. The trees too are dependent on the fungi and the mycelium network to transfer phosphorus, carbon, water, nutrients, and even information about threats and predators. Plants, fungi, even algae have had their own internet for millennia; we just don’t know how to get the signal. But that doesn’t mean we’re not part of the network, or that we don’t live by its grace. It’s still there. 

Someone’s mama used to know these woods and could have told us where the chanterelles are hiding. Morels too, from what I’ve heard. But she’s long gone and likely part mushroom herself now. So much can be lost in one generation of silence. And so much more history of this land that we may never know. The house we live in has been through many incarnations. A school, a home, a shell, a dream, alight with laughter and near abandoned for grief. We’re here to restore. We’re here to recoup. We’re here to find the connections like gold embroidered on the forest floor.