I'm a Fun Guy

Fungi have always amazed me. When I was a kid in the ‘80s, I learned about wild mushrooms from a survival book that I got from the library because I was afraid that Reagan would get us into a nuclear war. Thankfully, few wild mushrooms grew in my grandmother’s yard, or I’d probably be dead.

I did cook rose hips from her rose bush, but I drew the line at cooking slugs. My uncle Paul was the mushroom hunter, who knew a spot where Hen of the Woods mushrooms grew. Italian-Americans guarded these spots carefully; my grandfather actually went to his grave without telling his. My uncle visited a neighbor who was in the Veteran’s Administration nursing home, who’d had a spot and no children to pass it down to. Every few months after a good rain, he would go and harvest some funghi, fry it in a pan with olive oil and then steep it in a rich marinara sauce, and give away the jars.

I’ve had Hen of the Woods—and maitake which is similar—at fine restaurants, but nothing tastes as good as his did. We don’t get a lot of oak trees in the Pinelands, so there are fewer Hen of the Woods to be found; the only one I’ve seen in the wild was at a dog park, so unlikely to be harvested in a state that you’d want to eat.¹

Two types of fungi that you don’t want to eat, but are delightful to observe, are stinkhorns and birds nest fungi. These were both in our suburban backyard, likely transported in commercial mulch.

This is a Wrinkly Stinkhorn, which grows practically overnight, then exudes a stinky syrup that attracts flies, which spread the fungi’s spores. Job done, they then deflate like a flaccid dingus, and dissolve into the soil.

Other types of stinkhorns are called The Devil’s Dipstick, or Dog Dick fungus, because of the resemblance.

Fluted Bird’s Nest fungi are very cute, but most photos hide their diminutive size. These are all smaller than a dime, perhaps even smaller than the fingernail of my little finger. I recognized their speckle of growth and used the macro lens on my phone to take these pictures. This month’s rain also brought several amanita that resembled giant puffballs at first, but I knew about their tricky murderous ways.

I’ve had puffball, and it’s flavorless to me. Lion’s Mane is similar; give me an earthy mushroom like morels! King Trumpet mushrooms in stores are a favorite. You can get them inexpensively at Asian markets like Huong Vuong and H-Mart; about half the price of other grocers.

At farmers’ markets, bearded young men often sell mushrooms they’ve foraged. I know people who’ve gotten sick. I trust these guys about as far as they can throw me. (I say that because in my wrestling days, I used to throw people, and I do not trust them that far.)

That’s because I went to a mushroom foraging workshop at a local arboretum and the experts taught me how difficult it can be to identify them. They recommended a spore print before eating; you tap the mushroom on paper and compare its spore patterns. I can barely tell some actors apart, and you want me to bet my life on spore patterns? No thanks, I’ll buy cultivated.

That workshop visit also led indirectly to my marriage. When a mutual friend was trying to set up her cousin on a date, she chose me as a go-along so it wasn’t obvious; one of her selling points was that I “did stuff” like hunt for mushrooms, visit craft breweries, and hike. (This was the early 2000s when such activities were not mainstream, at least in the New Jersey suburbs.) So the funghi paid off.

Now when I go to the farmers market, half of the vendors are from afar, even though many of the actual farms are closer. And the bearded young white men have tattoos of sawed-off shotguns below “Pride” in Gothic lettering. They didn’t cause any trouble for the Jamaican couple selling jerk chicken, or the Mexican man selling tamales and elote. Tattoo removal can be costly, but it made me leery of remaining in this country. But where to go? Ireland, the rest of the EU, and the UK all have their own problems, inflamed by social media bot farms and media owned by doddering fascist billionaires.

I’m privileged to have choices, but right now they all seem like possibly jumping from the pan into the fire. At least some of my neighbors feel like members of terrorist hate groups should be afraid to show themselves in public, as this graffiti attests…

1. That is, free of dog urine. There’s so much in this park that you can smell it on the walking trails long after the morning’s dog walkers are gone.