Dandelion, tenacious Sow's Thistle, shy Wild Ginger. Yet despite a feeling that my existence would be justified should I actually find a. Bastard Toadflax (more ...
Which are you? You may be a Utilitarian or an Accountant— and you may be waiting for The Right Moment LORELEI NORVELL Originally published in MUSHROOM, THE JOURNAL OF WILD MUSHROOMING, 2(1) [Winter 1983– 84]: 5–7), this 2016 revision includes colorized cartoons.
It is my firm conviction that amateurs who join mushroom clubs and thus scuttle about the fringes of professional mycology fall loosely into two categories: Utilitarians and Accountants. Utilitarians generally back into mycology, motivated by a desire to use all that free food over which they stumble while hunting, fishing, farming, or reluctantly accompanying their Ukrainian grandmother (prone to making inexplicable darting motions under bushes) on her weekly constitutionals. Utilitarians are practical to the extreme: “If those things are edible, let’s eat!” Of course mushrooms, being what they are, prove not to be all that safely snarfed up. With the law of survival of the fittest all too frequently giving the nod to mushroom over ingester, it is a matter of sheer self-interest that propels Utilitarians toward mycological study. And after vainly thumbing through various field guides and keys, some people are bound to become interested in the nature of the prey itself. At heart, however, the guiding principle of the Utilitarian remains simply, “Is it good to eat?” Accountants, on the other hand, are genetically compelled to pigeonhole everything. (Between you and me, I suspect all accountants are born Virgos.) Controlled by some perverse quirk of fate, these people are doomed to spend their lives in uncelebrated obscurity, vainly endeavoring to impose order upon chaos. The fact that this order must frequently be artificially contrived is irrelevant. It all began in the summer of 1970 when we purchased six acres of field and forest. Brimming with pride of ownership, I decided to Name everything on the property. It took me only one year to ascertain that we had 135 species of wildflowers. They and I became
such close friends I was permitted to call them by their common names: Good old Dandelion, tenacious Sow’s Thistle, shy Wild Ginger. Yet despite a feeling that my existence would be justified should I actually find a Bastard Toadflax (more from the sheer poetry of the name itself than from a rarity of occurrence), I saw that the days of my naming flowers would soon be limited by an all too exhaustible supply. So I sidled over to the fauna and other flora. But despite an errant raccoon ambling across our driveway and a great horned owl leering suggestively at our cats from a dead alder snag, there was a decided ebb in the Naming of Things, fauna-wise. And after taking two days to identify 23 species of native trees and shrubs, my attention focused fleetingly on the ferns dotting our hillside. I tried valiantly to make them seem absorbing, but a fern is a fern is a fern, and while we may have seven or eight species, they proved to be, I’m sorry to report, rather dull. That left mushrooms, mosses, and lichens, flora-wise. Well, I mused, if it had taken two days for trees and one year for flowers, then it should only take around six months to name all those mushrooms and then move on. Well, I mused wrong. What I had not considered was how elusive my quarry would prove to be. Not catching them: No, they just stood quietly and let me pick them. And after I brought 40 or 50 specimens inside and placed them on their sheets of paper, they just lay quietly and dropped their spores. That is when I discovered the First Ultimate Truth of Mycology: Mushrooms are individuals. They are unique, and each one is different from the other. This meant that Margaret McKenny’s THE SAVORY WILD MUSHROOM (in the days before Daniel Stuntz’s revision) was less than helpful. Because none of my mushrooms looked like the pictures. I did finally track down the Honey Mushroom (sort of) but none of those in my collection of alleged honeys looked like the pictures in Miss McKenny’s book. Or even like each other. My husband, happy to see I wasn’t mooning about unoccupied in his busy hours, gave me the just published MUSHROOMS IN NORTH AMERICA by Orson K. Miller. Here were hundreds of glorious color photographs. By comparing photos and by beginning to read the descriptions, my total of named species rocketed from one to twenty. It was then, on looking at the remaining thirty small, inconspicuous, drab, and unnamed stragglers, that I discovered the Second Ultimate Truth of Mycology. It was definitely disheartening: All unidentified mushrooms are brown and drab, and each one looks like the other.
Great. Already a year past my know-it-all deadline and obviously not very far advanced in Naming, I could either throw up my hands in disgust to retreat in embarrassed disorder or I could befriend someone who knew something, anything, about these elusive beasts. And so it was that a mushrooming father of a friend directed me to the Annual Mushroom Show. There I was greeted by hundreds of mushrooms, all neatly propped in boxes and all neatly tagged with names by obviously knowledgeable experts. But what’s this? No Honey Mushroom? No Fred Chicken Mushroom? The labels instead bore the unpronounceable Latin variants (which I knew existed but had studiously ignored): Armillariella mellea, Polyporus (Laetiporus) sulphureus, Fuscoboletinus ochraceoroseus .... Throwing caution to the winds, I approached a dignified grey-haired lady to ask, “Why aren’t their common names on the mushroom labels?” Drawing herself to her full height and fixing me with a glance of withering scorn, the lady informed me in clipped tones that common names were inconstant fickle creations that changed from region to region, while Latin remained inviolate, perfect, and constant. (Note: even grey-haired ladies can be mistaken, but that is an entirely different story.) Suitably chastened, I joined the Oregon Mycological Society. Joining it was no easy task in 1973. At the show I had cautiously approached the Book Dragon who sold books and guarded membership information. Because the society’s roster had grown so unwieldy, only serious mushroomers need apply. After a judicious and piercing examination of the hapless subject before him, the Book Dragon grudgingly mumbled “Beaver Building,” “the fourth Monday of every month,” and “7:30” through his beard Easily cowed, I waffled on going. But my husband, fearing he had a borderline agoraphobic on his hands, urged me out of the house and into the ramshackle building across town, which shielded the society from the curious gaze of a prying public. Alone and quailing, I entered. The wrong room. Six impassive men, undoubtedly the local parole review board, sat around a table, deliberating. An icy silence descended upon my semi-audible croak of “Mushrooms?” An eternity ensued. Then a contemptuous jerk of six heads indicated “downstairs.” If they had any truck with mushrooms, they weren’t about to admit it. I slunk out and down toward the sound of increasing tumult and hilarity.
On opening the door I was greeted by tangled clots of people all intent on examining mushrooms, buying books, prying microscopes from the clutches of the Micro-Guardian, churning about in the library, drinking coffee, and speaking Mushroom. Edging up to the nearest person, I spluttered, “I’d, uh, like to become a member. Where...?” After some blank stares, I was guided through the pandemonium to the treasurer who hurriedly but cordially divested me of my vital statistics and initiation fee, handed me a membership list, and injected me back into the maelstrom. Then the gavel sounded. We sat. The business meeting began The Business Meeting. Now there is probably nothing on earth so precisely designed to induce boredom and benumbed resignation in an individual than a business meeting. Minutes of the previous meeting are read and exhaustively discussed. Corrected. Approved. (And not always in that order.) The same lengthy process oozes around the treasurer’s report, except that periodically someone is provoked to question the disbursement of 49 cents. New members and guests and announced and welcomed: a succession of hapless isolates are forced to stand and nod while everyone claps (or not). Then come the committee reports: show, identification, toxicology, custodian, book sales, hospitality, Christmas party. After the senses are sufficiently dulled, old business— complete with wrangling and points of order—flurries about. Then new business. After the business meeting, we were compelled to Mingle. I retreated instead to the library, which acquainted me with the librarian and greatly enlarged my capacity for naming things, since I had to do something with all the esoteric books that fell into my random clutches. Then came the Program. For me, that was the turning point. A medical mycologist presented a truly absorbing slide show on those nasty little denizens of the fungal world, the Fungi Imperfecti. Both horrified and fascinated by the results of visitations of fungi on man, I was hooked. For this sort of information I would endure, and even sporadically come to enjoy, the business meeting. But first I had to alert kindred spirits to my existence. Joining a mushroom group where you know no one when you have only a nodding acquaintance with five mushrooms can be a frightening experience. The Oregon Mycological Society is fairly typical of many quasi-scientific organizations where there may be only one interest in common. The society was filled with friendly people who shook my hand and welcomed me. Then they waited. I was not proficient in Mushroom yet. I couldn't dazzle in Latin. Knowing only my own property, I couldn’t confide the latest place to find a sought-after delectable (my property is sadly lacking in the production of esculents). For that matter, I didn’t even eat my finds, which made me definitely something of a weirdo. And, while I am not unfriendly, large groups of convivial strangers gathering for potlucks and parties tend to daunt me. So there I sat during the business meetings, embroidering away in an attempt to keep my hands from the throat of the fifth reiterator of why we shouldn’t permit the membership access to the stereomicroscope. I sat, embroidered, and waited for the Program and the Right Moment. The Right Moment turned out to be a year later at the annual mushroom show. I volunteered for any and everything. Materializing at 6:30 AM on show day with my baskets of insignificant mushrooms (not an edible in the bunch), I took mushrooms from baskets to identifiers. I wrote down names, misspelled them, researched them, and then
corrected the identification labels. Buttressed by library work, I was even able to identify tentatively some of the more obscure members of the mushroom world (which remains my forte to this day, as no one knows enough to challenge me). And when the show opened, an equally foolhardy soul and I set up an identification table for the public where we answered questions, talked Mushroom, and made periodic dashes to our experts for resigned confirmation or convulsed snickers. After the show I totaled the number of genera and species displayed, typed their sonorous names alphabetically on lists, and then began organizing, correcting, and retyping the official labels. Such monastic devotion to the Great Goddess Mycology did not pass unnoticed. The next year the powers-that-were placed me in charge of the annual show. Now, after ten years of hard work, I have managed to become acquainted with most of the names. And if I am lucky, one time out of six I am actually able to match immediately the name to the mushroom that some eager neophyte holds questioningly before me. I dazzle with Latin, which drops trippingly off my tongue, while I compile lists do research, and then correct lists. I labor far into the night, and my husband, less than delighted with all this misplaced enthusiasm (“... but there’s no money in it!”) has been moved to proclaim balefully, “You know, if you’re not careful, you’re going to turn into a very crazy, very weird old woman.” But I don’t care. The rest of the names are just there, almost within my grasp. And to keep my perspective honed razor sharp, all I have to do is go outside and grab that little brown mushroom that’s been growing in my lawn since 1973.
I still don’t know the name of the damned thing.
1983 EDITORIAL NOTE: Lorelei Norvell is a contributing editor of MUSHROOM. 2016 AUTHOR NOTE: Alas: as our lawn has been swallowed up by our forest and as no photographs were taken of the enigmatic mushroom that graced our lawn for ten years, the species (probably a common Gymnopus) must remain unknown.
