POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

You May Have Noticed . . .

that there are numerous emergent stories that I'm not blogging in the morning these days. Sometimes I'm being lazy, but sometimes I'm working on digging up the good stuff for The B-Cast, and it's either a matter of my being busy or just not wanting to tip the hand regarding the program. Today's one of the latter.

I did get out into the woods for a couple of hours today, though, and found some very interesting mushroom specimens. After the recent rains, too, there's been another though much less robust eruption of chanterelles. It's nice to get out there. Clears the head.

Anyway, I came across some more chanterelles while looking for another type of mushroom entirely. Chanterelles grow where there are lots of pine and fir needles, and since I was looking for a kind that is much likelier to be found among deciduous trees, I spent most of the time away from the areas that would yield chanterelles, until I stumbled on two clusters of them. The places where I found them weren't the same places that I would have the first crop around. Apparently, the micro-environments where I might have found them earlier have been supplanted. Exactly why that might be is unclear to me, but I recalibrated anyway.

If you find mushrooms in the wild, you tend to get a gestalt feeling for where you might find them again. It's a very complex calculation that depends on a lot of factors, but you develop a second sight for where they may be. Due to the fallen leaves, and the fact that they're smaller right now than they were earlier, it's harder to pick them out. Sometimes you're just beguiled by a leaf that has a similar color. I picked many that I wouldn't have picked earlier, because they would have been too small, but it was clear that the fruiting bodies at this point are poking up and drying out much more quickly than before, and developing a kind of fungus upon fungus. It's possible that the bluish stuff that grows around the edges has adapted to parasitize the chanterelles while releasing the spores more widely.

It's been my experience that once the harebells droop, there's not a lot of chance of finding chanterelles, or at least I had thought so. Harebells I associate with places where it might be possible to find chanterelles, so seeing the blackened remains of the harebells actually put me off looking for and seeing chanterelles, and really that's one of the dangers of such associations. If you get them wrong, you are in danger of missing out.

I found lots of other funghi that I'll have to identify from my books, but I was particularly after was the hen of the woods, which is the mushroom equivalent of monkfish--extraordinarily delicious as well as ugly. I never go out looking for giant puffballs, though I'm always deeply disappointed when I find one that's past its use-by date, and there have even been a year or two when I haven't encountered any. They're so large, so rotund and so white that it's hard, really not to see them, so I never go with the express purpose of looking for them. I always calculate they're liable to be around when half the leaves, by my reckoning, are on the ground already. Sometimes, if you're in the forest at the right time, a shaft of light will illuminate one blazingly. I know what it is, but I always approach it with a sense of trepidation that I might have stumbled across a human skull. Loopy, I know, but there you have it.

This comical phallides, a stinkhorn, though, I wouldn't eat if you paid me, because I'm a homophobe:

That and because these things stink to high heaven.

I've seen some shells out there, so I'm wearing bright clothes. Yesterday, I came across a very large porcupine who scurried up a tree as fast as a porcupine is capable of scurrying, which is not very fast.

Hey, and happy Big 5-Oh to Stacy. There's some nice Anne Hathaway sideboobage over at his blog, which is a great way to spread the vibes.

What's that? Rule 2 linkup? Honestly, that's all right. I'm doing fine here with my two co-bloggers and my four regular readers, but now that you mention it, you might want to blogroll Kirsten Lombard, who blogs from the belly of the beast in Madison, Wisconsin, and was most recently seen giving Fuss Rheingeld holy hell at a town-hall style event, and who---I want this to be pointed, Stacy, because you're a professional--dug deep to send you what pittance she could for your excursion to the dangerous Kentucky backwoods.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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