Year of the Mushroom

Monkey Bread mushrooms

Here’s an understatement—this summer was rainy. If it was not raining, it was spitting or misting or down right pouring. We had deluge after deluge. The park flooded so many times there are spontaneous, ugly dams in all the creeks and the whole area reeks of river mud. Trees fell, mold grew, basements got mildewy, even the car smells faintly moldy because so much water washed over it or bounced up into it from the driveway.

And the mushrooms grew like crazy.

Buttermilk Pancake mushroom

Up at the lake, on the first day of sunshine in weeks, I decided to read in the hammock. As I lay there, listening to the waves and the breeze through the trees, a putrid stench kept wafting over me. Finally, I disentangled the dog, gently tilting the hammock until he could jump out, and went in search of my dad.

“There’s something dead near the shed,” I told him. “We have to find it before one of the (3) dogs does.” But our search didn’t turn up anything. Later we took a walk and could smell the ‘carcass’ up by the road and decided it must be higher up the hill than the shed. Still later, I was standing on the deck and the smell filled my head strongly again, perhaps because it was wafting up between the boards, which meant there would be no routing it out for disposal, the Boston terrier being the only one who can fit under there.

The next day, when it was back to raining lightly, I took the dog for a walk around the “circle,” which is mostly connecting dirt roads (read sand roads; dirt is scarce up north) except for a short stretch along the paved main road. I smelled the same stench numerous times and realized it couldn’t all be dead animals (whew!), but must in fact be decomposing mushrooms. I’d overlooked dozens of those as a possibility as my eyes I scanned the yard for a carcass. We do have fox, mink, coyote, eagles, and possibly bear and bobcat up north, so I assumed the remains of a turkey or small critter was decomposing somewhere. But it was the mushrooms!

Birdbath mushroom

One the size of a birdbath rose up a few days later. Others ranging in size from a peppercorn to a thimble to a deck of cards emerged here and there. Some were delicate. Some looked like rubber or plastic or the consistency of movie-theater Dots. Others were mushy or woody. Some grew in tight groups and some stood alone. They poked through leaves, wearing them like skirts or hats. They clung to trees and downed branches. They grew in between steps and under ferns. They were everywhere. And in seemingly every color: orange, red, yellow, white, gray, black, red, brown, rust, purple, etc. We drove past a neighbor’s house and I said “Look, someone left a soccer ball out so long, the black has worn off.” It turned out to be a puffball mushroom we should have eaten the day it got that big.

Puffball mushroom

I’m sure all the Morel hunters who didn’t manage to find much during the unusually warm dry spring were very disgruntled to see so much fungi bounty in the summer. My sister, who is to morel hunting like hogs are to truffle hunting, was completely trumped this year—after I convinced her to overnight me a box full of them, she found only 3 in as many weeks. However, later in the season, friends collected bags of Chanterelles for stir fries and cream sauces. There were whole stands of the elusive Indian Pipe.

Indian Pipes

Squirrels and chipmunks nibbled on all sorts of varieties we wouldn’t consider edible. Slugs and other creatures bored through still others. Shelf fungi lined trees top to bottom, and lichen bloomed rampantly, so thick it started overlayering itself on all sorts of surfaces.

See text for vernacular

When we got home, where it had also been raining for 2 weeks, Henson and I discovered all of the mulch in our neighborhood was sprouting dog pecker mushrooms (or stink horns, as more genteel people call them) all along his favorite pee-mail routes. It’s continued to rain more than shine for the better part of a month and the wind is full of leaf mold and mushroom spores. The air in the woods is dank, the atmosphere is gloomy, and those of us who can, lift our spirits and remark on the loamy smell of the land.

Nesting mushrooms

All photos were taken by me. Please do not copy or reproduce in any manner.