Mushroom Tourist

For the last twenty years, I have mushroom-travelled. Which is not to say that I went on magic mushroom trips. No, just that whenever I travelled, I would go for walks - solo ones I researched in advance and ones with friends to their favourite walking spots - and while walking, I would look for mushrooms.

Some people use travel as a way of broadening their horizons; I use it as a way to add more mushrooms to my repertoire. It's become my way of being in the wider world: when in doubt, walk under the trees and look for mushrooms.

And then take pictures of those mushrooms and post them to social media, because I want people to feel some of the same connection I feel in those moments. The same pleasure.

During the three-plus years of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became harder to travel as widely as we were all used to. The concurrent climate crisis, as evidenced by grinding drought, wildfire smoke and stunted crops, also made me reconsider how much and how often I wanted to travel once things got back to some kind of normal.

So I tried to sightsee in my home place - my yard, my neighbourhood and my city - while also travelling within the prairie provinces between variant outbreaks.

This is my mushroom diary from these years, though really it is more like a bundle of picture postcards from me to the world. Or a stack of flash cards where the test I'm cramming for is surviving the world.

March 28, 2021

Went for a willowy walk in Assiniboine Forest today, where I also found a pre-bent hoop of dogwood whose red-orange almost matched the orange-red of my long sweater-coat, an enormous conk - a shelf-like bracket-shaped fruiting body of certain fungi that grow on trees, that are hard like trees - and some other small mushrooms nearby .

[The splitgill mushroom or Schizophyllum commune is small and grey-white and furred. It is the mushroom you would expect the White Witch to be wearing as decoration on her person/robes/carriage in Narnia. I found it clustered along the entire length of a young trembling aspen.]

April 11, 2021

I found a mushroom that has it all, including a moustache of pixie-cup lichens and moss. It was the only mushroom I was able to get close to, as it was right next to the boardwalk at the Brokenhead Wetland Interpretive Trail. (This was my first time there, though I'd heard about it for years!) There were various lichens and mushrooms everywhere in the white cedar swamp as well as red carnivorous pitcher plants glittering in the sun but I very carefully stayed on the boardwalk. I was grateful to have the opportunity to walk in this place, that it was made available to me. Some of the time I lay down on the boardwalk so I could see mushrooms better, but that's as close as I got .

[A polypore, which is a mushroom with pores for dispersing spores instead of gills, with bands of green and brown and cream, with silvery-green lichen and forest-green moss blurring the distinction between mushroom and tree. You can see the dark soil here, how it is crossed with brown conifer needles.]

April 25, 2021

My partner Mike and I took our AstraZeneca vaccine hangovers to Little Mountain Park, looking for late prairie crocuses. In the whole park, we only found three, and only when we remembered to look in the same spot as last year. Their translucent lilac is what gets me, I think, inflates me like a hot-air balloon, but it should go without saying that I am always on the lookout for mushrooms. When it's unseasonable, my best bet is always the more durable mushrooms that grow on wood instead of from the soil.

[A stack of creamy mushrooms on a downed log, like a plate full of pancakes plunked down in front of you.]

May 24, 2021

We drove out to the Belair Provincial Forest yesterday to look for morels. Found a bunch of false morels (Gyromitra spp.), abandoned cars, tiny wild strawberries, emerging bracken, new-to-me wildflowers and six drive-home ticks instead.

[Gyromitra is also known as brain fungus, which goes a long way to explaining what this palmful of gorgeous deep-brown mushroom looks like. Also: experimental chandelier/airship.]

May 29, 2021

Mike and I finally found morels, likely Morchella americana! At Belair! But only a squat handful after two to three hours of wandering, the woods a new-to-me mix of conifers and trembling aspen. Still, it was very nice to go out looking for morels and then to find morels. (Mike spotted them first, the bastard .)

[Imagine three mushrooms with brown-black honeycombed heads and stems that are simultaneously beige and taupe. Dust them with soil and sand and you're there.]

June 19, 2021

Drove out to the Brokenhead Wetland Interpretive Trail again to ogle orchids, pitcher plant flowers and mushrooms. I had never seen so many wild orchids, from the big showy pink and white ones to tiny subtle ones you'd hardly notice if you weren't looking for them. White cedar swamps are new-to-me and sooooo cool. By which I mean interesting but also having a mineral feeling that oak/aspen parkland lacks.

[A pale brown polypore on a cut log on the ground, which holds a diversity of new green and a browned cedar frond .]

July 20, 2021

I found a mushroom on a stump along Wolseley Avenue near my house. It doesn't look like much but it's been so dry that I haven't spied a single mushroom all summer so I thought I'd better take/post a pic to remind myself that they exist. (I exaggerate but not by much, given how yellow/dead the surrounding grass was.)

[A cluster of past-their-due-date oyster mushrooms - usually a choice edible - on a broad grey stump just inside someone's property line. The edges of some caps split, others withered.]

August 29, 2021

Two tiny lawn-shrooms, picked and placed on the stump of my mother-in-law's rosy pink crabapple. She was surprised that I wanted the apples but settlers have been making cider from Manitoba's native crabapples for generations. I made applesauce from its fruit for ten years, boiling them whole and straining out the cores. At first, I dumped everything in a colander and used a spatula to extrude the applesauce but I asked for, and got, a food mill for Xmas, from my mother-in-law, I think!

I am not very interested in Christmas, which is to say the birth of Jesus Christ, but there's no escaping it in Canada. Carols on the radio, Secret Santa gift exchanges at work, emails from my generous MiL, asking for our wish lists. So I use the word "Xmas," which to me means the secular aspects of the holiday.

All of which is to say: I have picked crabapples from this tree's lower branches, bent so low with fruit so that I could put out my hand and pick, and branches almost beyond my reach. My daughter, Anna, was always so drawn to the ladder, those times I dragged it under the tree, to get me and my hungry hands higher.

[Two tiny mushrooms, one white and one yellow, their gills impossible but also sort of like birds' wings, lying on a weathered grey background.]

September 13, 2021

I find a bustling mushroom metropolis. I am staying at St. Peter's Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan, working on a poetry manuscript and we have decided to go for a walk en masse. A gaggle of poets, looking at shaggy manes popping up on the lawn and elm oyster mushrooms growing from the cut edges on trees, at the abbey's gloriously productive gardens - flowers and vegetables, shrubs and herbs - and its aging trees. We listen to the sheep bleating from a distant pasture and geese honking from the pond, to our soft exclamations at finding ourselves here, swamped by fall sun. While the others exclaim over the abbey's honey house, I find a mushroom in the understory. It is past its prime, but then, so am I.

[The underside of a pale mushroom with grey-and-brown gills, in the midday sun, teeming with small pale insects, travelling up and down and through the gills.]

September 19, 2021

A Leccinum mushroom, with its polypore cap and scabrous stalk, from today's walk in Assiniboine Forest. They are suddenly enormous and everywhere, which is my favourite mushroom trick.

[I stood the bolete up on my hand, like a magic trick, to reveal the creamy white pores of the cap and the bulbous cream/black stem.]

September 23, 2021

Another day, another mushroom, this one an elm oyster or Hypsizygus ulmarius on a tree in Omand's Creek Park, which is the halfway point in my local walk, the Wolseley/Wellington loop. Some people call that route "The Full Rachel" after a runner who lived in Wolseley and loved that run. (Now I want the route I take most often in Assiniboine Forest to be called "Ariel's I-only-have-an-hour"!)

[A gilled mushroom the size of my fist growing from a branch scar on an elm, its stem textured, its gills purest white. I especially like that it looks like itself but also like a marble sculpture.]

October 3, 2021

So I found what appears to be a lobster mushroom (Hypomyces lactifluorum) but it is really the sun, fallen and rustling in the oak leaves at our feet .

[This unusually shaped lobster mushroom - round and flat instead of bent and furled - is mottled with deep reds and pale oranges. It is surrounded by dying grass and the olive of aspen leaves, fading from lemon yellow after falling to the ground.]

December 27, 2021

Winter mushrooming isn't as varied as other times of year but I still look for them...