Hello, long lost readers and friends! The intensity of summer heat is behind us, and I am finally starting to feel settled and calm. My ambitions for this newsletter were so bold—so much writing, so many topics to unfurl—and then I started working on my book, which is still holding the largest portion of my mind. But this newsletter continues to stay in my thoughts.
As we enter a season when so much time is spent in darkness, I feel ready to say hello again and share some writing that has come to me almost like the rains. Thank you for staying with me, sporadic and scattered as I may be. Because the time for chanterelles in Oregon is RIGHT NOW, and this year is especially bonanza, here are some reflections on one of the things that makes me feel most alive.
In my earliest memory of hunting for chanterelles, I’m squatting on squishy fir needles. (I would have been four, maybe five years old, so I didn’t have to stoop very low to reach the ground.) I’m chasing chanterelles from one to the next, always able to look up and find another golden bit poking out. The raw pumpkin and ripe earth smell of chanterelles is all around me. At some point, I realize I’m circling a big tree.
This would have been on Larch Mountain, very near Portland, where my parents and I hunted each fall. My parents were self-taught foragers, and they stuck with golden chanterelles, chosen as the Oregon State Mushroom because they’re so prolific under second-growth conifers. Chanterelles have easily recognizable traits—white to golden yellow in color, gills like rivulets of water that stream down onto the stem rather than stopping at the base of the cap, and a meaty and dense rather than hollow stem. (Their closest look-alike has a hairy asshole at the center of its cap, so that’s a dead giveaway.)
On weekends from September through November, my partner Corey and I fill our spare time with hunting. We get in our abused Camry and drive out of the city into the mountain forests. Under the trees, I begin to roam. With every mushroom I find, my eyes begin scanning for the next. I move through the forest without a charted course, zigging and zagging based on what feels natural. In the forest, I let my ego dissolve—no one’s eyes are on me, and I am distracted from the things that usually occupy my mind because I am focused on looking for bits of gold.
Time moves like liquid. A period without finding mushrooms slows like a sluggish river on a flat expanse, a period of finding mushrooms speeds up like steep rapids, turning an hour into minutes. I love the adrenaline rush of wanting and then getting, the pride of being skilled and having gone to the right spot at the right time, like the person who always knows where the party is. I have never wanted to hunt animals, but my reward system is responsive to the hunt. (My friend John calls the feeling of a successful hunt the “mushroom high,” in seeming obliviousness to psychedelic mushrooms.) Hunting for mushrooms turns me into a more focused, sensory, and intuitive person.
After a hunt, we cover our dining room table in newsprint and heap the mushrooms on top. Their wet aroma fills the house. Seeing this pile of gold, I often exclaim, “I’m rich!” feeling a Scrooge-McDuck-diving-into-a-pool-of-gold kind of rich. Then, while brushing away dirt and pine needles, I’ll linger over their beauty. Wild mushrooms look surreal and extraterrestrial, sometimes bulbous, perky, droopy, billowy, and always beautiful. I’m endlessly tickled by the way chanterelles can sometimes look like a balled-up fist and other times like a lithe flower, the way morels look like honeycomb and some oyster mushrooms look like dicks, the way a porcini—Italian for “little pig”—is a perfectly plump fairytale toadstool on which I can easily picture a frog taking a seat, and hedgehog mushrooms really have an underbelly of teeth like hedgehog quills.
What comes next isn’t better than the hunt—it’s contiguous with it: eating. Like meat, mushrooms are high in protein and glutamate, one of the chemicals responsible for umami, a flavor sometimes called savoriness, which lights up our taste buds and makes our mouths literally water with desire. A friend who had a load of chanterelles asked me for advice on what to make and I found myself texting an obnoxious Bubba Gump-style list: chanterelles sautéed with eggs, chanterelles sautéed with garlic and linguine, chanterelles fried with ground pork over rice, chanterelles stuffed in a grilled cheese sandwich, quesadilla, or a taco, chanterelles in miso soup, chanterelles steamed in a pot of rice with sweet potatoes, chanterelles steamed in a pot of rice with chicken, tempura’d chanterelles, chanterelles in tom kha soup, chanterelle risotto, pickled chanterelles.
There are liabilities to hunting where we do. One is heartbreak. One of our spots is very near one of the massive fires that swept Oregon forests last fall. In the future, as fire season returns, our spot could easily go up in smoke. There’s also the possibility of timber harvest. In Oregon, it’s illegal to clear-cut along major roads because of the blight, but all that does is keep stripped hillsides out of sight. I may arrive at my favorite spot one October day, and all the trees and everything that lives with them will be gone.
Another liability is gun-fire. Shooting ranges are often nearby, and the boom of artillery repeatedly interrupts the quiet. I’ve grown disturbingly used to that. But twice I’ve had terrifying encounters with armed people. The first time, many years ago, a young family—everyone so young! and so very blonde: two young parents with three young children—stood in the decommissioned logging road we walk to reach our mushroom spot shooting at a log. The log was about the size I would imagine a large sleeping grizzly bear would be. If their bullets missed the target—and some of the kids were under 5, so let’s assume they would—they would fly into the open forest where we hunt. I was with two friends, Emi Takahara and Stef Choi—both very not blonde—and we were terrified. But we brokered an agreement. They would give us 15 minutes to run down the path beyond their reach. Why this made sense is beyond me. When we returned with our haul a few hours later, they were gone.
Only a few weekends ago, in the same spot, my dad, my partner, a friend and I encountered a man setting up flat metal targets about the size of pieces of paper hanging from metal coat hangers in the road we walk. A woman sat in the bed of a truck nearby near an American Flag drinking an enormous iced latte. We were returning from our hunt, so we approached not knowing they might have been shooting in our direction. I had lagged behind because I couldn’t stop gathering, even as I walked to the car, so I wasn’t there when my dad confronted the man. My dad told him how unsafe it was to shoot down a road rather than into a hillside; that there were certainly safer places nearby to shoot; that we share the forest and need to keep all forest uses in mind; and that if the target shooter were to kill someone, and I quote, “it would ruin his day.”
I have never spoken to someone who is armed like that, probably because I am not a 75-year-old white man who looks like Santa Claus. Nor do I think they heard him nor that the first family cared about us as we ran past them. I’m not sure if our humanity is reaching each other, in both directions. This spot in the remote forest is where I encounter a gun culture I am usually sheltered from. It’s terrifying, eye-opening, dangerous, and, somehow, not quite enough to keep me from coming back.
What is it that allows the particular style of eccentric person I’m so drawn to to overlook the paramilitary neighbors, the long drives, getting wet and chilled, sometimes getting “skunked,” as my friend Amy would say, which means coming home with nothing but a bunch of pine needles in your shoes? If it were just for the flavor, we could save ourselves the trouble and go to the store. If it were just to be in the forest, we could take a hike. If it were just the thrill of the hunt, we could take up hunting or play video games. It’s the place where all those things overlap, but also something more: the combined elements of ritual and sensory immersion.
When I go to the same places over and over again with the intention of searching and seeing, they open themselves up. I notice what’s the same and what’s different. I build a familiarity with the land. Every time I hunt, I feel useful and awake; I feel like I am creating the life I want to live and becoming the person I want to become. It’s an important renewal that comes every year with the rains. I do not escape the real world and its tragedies in the forest, but I do renew my love for the land where I live. Our home is not just inside the walls of our abodes; it’s in the forest, too, and we do share it, in so many ways, with armed neighbors and mushrooms, geckos and weirdos.
Love this, Lola. You're reminding me that I better get out there and hunt mushrooms before the rain turns them to mush!