Before I share this week’s story, I want to acknowledge the tragedy of the eight people murdered in Atlanta on Tuesday. This newsletter is not a place where I synthesize current national news, but in this moment we are decisively called to participate in changing our culture—a confusing, simple, seemingly impossible, yet totally vital call. This has me thinking a lot about how important it is to seek out and share stories with nuance and specificity so that we don’t reduce or disappear people. I hope this newsletter and my work can tell stories that don’t neatly fit stereotypes and instead challenge cultural norms and portray real humans in all their complexities.
My friends Nancy, Stef and I are still selling copies of our zine, Inheritance Stories, and donating proceeds to LA Chinatown Mutual Aid, which is providing food, care packages, and financial support to elders in LA’s Chinatown, Lincoln Heights, and Solano Canyon neighborhoods. And last Friday, Paula Forbes published my piece A Brief History of Japanese American Community Cookbooks in her excellent Stained Page News. I think it reads differently than it would have two weeks ago—less a story of charming cookbooks and more of women actively organizing to share their sense of belonging and identity within their community and with a world that doesn’t always welcome them or recognize their humanity.
But now, to this week’s story. This is part two of a brief series about mushrooms—a topic I will return to again and again. Part one was a profile of Amy Peterson, my mushroom mentor and a third-generation Japanese American matsutake forager in Oregon. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, please do! Amy is a wonder.
Mushrooms live in my mind in the same liminal territory as the narwhal, a realm where fantasy and reality overlap, where the music of childhood unexpectedly keeps playing into adulthood. What we call a mushroom is the fruit of a much larger organism called mycelium—a network of spider web-like threads that spread underground. Mycelium is the vegetative portion of the fungus: Think of the roots, branches and leaves of a fruit tree. How large are mycelium? Dan Luoma, a professor at Oregon State University with a very well-kempt mustache, describes walking through the forest as walking on the backs of whales. Mushrooms pop up seasonally like apples grow on a tree. They are one of the few pleasures that can be reaped without extraction. Mushrooms facilitate reproduction by spreading their seeds, in this case microscopic, single-cell units called spores. One mushroom will drop as many as 16 billion spores during its lifetime, and these spores are easily picked up by the wind.
“Every breath that we take — from first gasp to last breath — we’re inhaling fungal spores,” says Nicholas Money, author of Mushrooms. “They’re always available; they’re always in the air; and they’re always trying to exploit the opportunities to grow and reproduce.”
The mushrooms I hunt and eat fall into a category called mycorrhiza (myco – fungi – and rhiza – root). These mushrooms, including matsutake, chanterelles, morels, and porcinis, exist in symbiotic interdependence with the roots of trees. Mycelium nourishes itself by absorbing nutrients from organic material. It secretes enzymes that break down its food into more easily digestible units (like our saliva when we chew). By decomposing whatever it feasts on and by increasing the surface area of the roots, mycelium makes it easier for plant roots to uptake gas, water, and nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. The mycelium acts as an extension of the plant’s digestive system. The trees in turn give it carbon obtained through photosynthesis. It’s a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship. Nutrients can move between plants through fungal networks, and research shows that along with nutrients mycelium transmit signals from the largest, oldest “mother trees” to the younger ones to maintain the overall health of the stand. The forest is acting like one large organism, connected through mycelial networks, concerned for its overall health rather than individual survival—a kind of selflessness that doesn’t correspond neatly to our understanding of the theory of Survival of the Fittest. Paul Stamets, a mushroom guru with a cult-like following (warranted by his expansive research on mushrooms, including their power to bioremediate polluted land) calls mycelium “nature’s internet.” He estimates that 95 percent of plant life depends on mycorrhizae. (Alicia Kennedy has written a great summary of why mushrooms are also a great sustainable food choice.)
Mycorrhizal mushrooms remind me that all life is interdependent. Our borders are porous. What’s happening on a small scale with a mushroom (giving and receiving life from trees and other plants) is true of all life on Earth. Our health and every (spore-filled) breath we take relies on the actions of plants, animals, and fungi all around us. Mushrooms offer a different vision of survival—not conquering or dominating but collaborating for mutual benefit.
We often use the dark language of human relationships and power dynamics as metaphors to talk about plants and animals, and vice versa: parasitic plants and parasitic boyfriends; fungi that colonize and colonizers who rape the land. There are Kings of the Jungle and financial predators. In a gentler turn of that formula, my favorite metaphor for group living when it works is a mycorrhizal network. We are all giving and receiving, and through those interactions, we become like one organism. Any multi-species system that take its holistic health in mind can fit this simple idea—the microcosm underground as the macrocosm of our lives.
In my experience, the best way to understand and appreciate the role mushrooms play in the natural world is by ingesting psychoactive mushrooms, which were decriminalized in Oregon this past election cycle (and legalized within narrow bounds for medical use). Mushrooms can have a powerful effect on the ego, erasing feelings of isolation and even selfhood. In her incredible essay on ecstasy, Jia Tolentino describes mushrooms as a drug that provokes “extraordinary interpersonal euphoria.” The hard lines between your corporeal body and the world dissolve. You become open to the magic of the natural world and your intrinsic place within it. The mushrooms give you a taste of what it’s like to be a mushroom—to be in symbiotic interdependence with living things all around you. The experience can also be other things. It is not predictable.
My first experience with psychedelic mushrooms was at age 20, with my mom at the Oregon Country Fair, the Mecca of hippie festivals. I ate the mushrooms around midnight, and it seemed as though my mom instantly vanished. Unsure what to do, I walked without purpose through crowds of strangers whose faces I couldn’t make out in the dark to the outskirts of the fair, where an old man was playing acoustic blues guitar to a small crowd of stoned, appreciative young people splayed on blankets. I sat down next to him and before long found myself singing, or thrumming, bass lines to accompany his guitar, oblivious to the fact that this is not something I had ever seen anyone do in my life, nor attempted myself. Bump, bump, bump, bump, buh-buh-duh-buh-buh-bump, bump, I sang as loudly as an upright bass would play it. For at least an hour I kept this up. As the night deepened towards two or three am, the guitarist finally decided to quit. He leaned towards me and said, in a Sam Elliot voice, “It was nice playing with you, little lady.” “It was nice playing with you,” I answered earnestly. I walked back to my tent feeling accomplished where I found my mom huddled in her sleeping bag still high and still awake. I told her about my night, and after a long pause, she began laughing uncontrollably. I began laughing too, unable to stop until my stomach hurt from being clenched and I couldn’t breathe. We both gasped for air, and then my mom started laughing again, and I followed. We continued like this until suddenly, unexpectedly, I was asleep. The next day, sober and completely drained of all my endorphins, I lay on a picnic table staring up into the Douglas fir canopy and feeling like human garbage.
I look back on my trip and a few worse trips with amusement, but they were not the ideal way to experience mushrooms. This is not an invitation to be casual with something that is not casual. After my first few trials, it took me many years to try again, concerned that every trip would lead me back “under the blanket,” as I call it, from a time I literally got stuck under a blanket. But that’s not what has happened. I have learned to set the stage and make sure that before I start I feel safe.
Recently, Corey and I traveled to the Southern Oregon Coast, to a state park on the Chetco River among a grove of Oregon Myrtlewood trees some 200-plus years old. Oregon Myrtlewood are an evergreen native to the Southern Oregon and Northern California coast. They have a strong eucalyptus aroma with leaves that look like bay and can be substituted for them in cooking. A short hike from the park is the northernmost grove of Redwoods. I ingested the mushrooms midday and walked through the Myrtlewoods to the Redwood grove, up and around the towering trees, among native rhododendron, lady ferns, deer ferns, and huckleberries. I walked back to the river and sat on the pebbly beach watching the water stream past. I became aware of how loud the river was and lost myself in hearing its roar. I watched sunlight glint on the ripples like on the scales of a fish and felt the sun warming my skin. I watched several cinnabar salamanders peddling among the rocks. I enjoyed the clean aroma of the Myrtlewoods.
Tripping on mushrooms, people think really simple thoughts that can sound so cliché when they have come down, but are, in fact, profound, just boringly familiar. The words lose their meaning on the side of a Bronner’s container (“we are all one or none”), on your uncle Doug’s t-shirt (“love is the answer”), on the bumper sticker of his car (“co-exist”). But when you truly integrate those words, it’s something else!
Archeologist John M. Allegro wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross in which he proposed that the New Testament was written as a way for fertility cults to pass down information about how to utilize magic mushrooms to commune with God, and subsequent translations rewrote the story for their own purposes. I first found out about it from this video where an interviewer asked Allegro, “I’m puzzled, are you really seriously suggesting that Jesus Christ was a mushroom?” “Put pretty blankly,” Allegro responds, “yes.” Allegro, who was famous for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, was discredited and humiliated for his blasphemy, but I love its goofiness. I also think it contains a kernel of ecstatic truth, which is that mushrooms help us commune with nature as divine. And what if we believed Nature was our God? How would we behave then? On the riverbank in Oregon, I remembered why it’s important to slow down and observe the natural world and how to sit in awe. In day-to-day life, most of our senses are not fully engaged, which protects us from the onslaught of experience, but mushrooms swing the doors of perception and empathy open. We are connected to a web of life. We are infinitesimally small, and the world is more vast, complex, and diverse than we will ever know. “All is one.” “Heal earth”. And then I fell asleep.
Earlier that year, on a drive from Boise to Portland, my dad insisted we visit the largest known living organism in the world. In the Malheur National Forest on the eastern edge of Oregon, a network of mycelium stretches underground for 3.4 square miles, an area as big as 1,665 football fields. Somewhere between 2,400 and 8,650 years old, this mycelial behemoth, jokingly called the “humongous fungus,” or Armillaria ostoyae, is something of a parasitic monster, killing conifers in its wake. (Not all mushrooms are mycorrhizal.) The mushrooms that sprout by the thousands are known as honey mushrooms because of their sweet flavor. We think of mushrooms as being a product of wet, mildewy forests dripping in moss, but much of the hunting that goes on, especially for commercial matsutake, is in the drier forests of central and eastern Oregon. In terms of mushrooms, the entire state of Oregon is fecund.
There are no road signs or landmarks to point you to the enormous patch of land sitting atop this mycelium, so we drove for miles where my dad imagined it might be. We parked, stomped our feet on the ground, walked through and around a burbling stream to a spring, and then got back in the car and drove to the nearest town, Prairie City, for dinner. That night we camped in the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness. As the sun set, we hiked up to alpine Strawberry Lake in time to watch the sun send its last rays on the namesake strawberry-colored iron-rich gabbro rocks towering above us. My mom says she fell in love with my dad because he opened up the desert to her. A child of rural, arid southeast Oregon, my dad collects knowledge about the far-flung corners of our state. “Your mom and I knew we wanted to have a little girl,” he told me, while we looked up at the mountains and shared a beer. “We came out here, took mushrooms, and conceived you.”