Kirsten Ferguson

Season of the Chanterelles

Grifolafrondose. Hen of the woods. We found it sprouting from the base of an old oak tree, creeping up the trunk. Our first haul. Leah knelt in a patch of moldy orange leaves that smelled like iron and dirt. Hen of the woods looked more like a lumpy gray brain with scalloped edges than the feathers of a chicken. Leah scooped handfuls into her woven basket. When she stood again, the knees of her corduroy jeans were stained a deep brown. Earlier that morning, on an overcast day in October, Leah had suggested that we drive north to the river. A barfly at Leah’s favorite local tavern, the one that filled with third-shift workers early in the morning when most people were on their way to their jobs, had told her about a promising patch of forest on the other side of the river. A flat swampy piece of land that floods often and overflows with mushrooms. We parked along the tight shoulder of the road, climbed over a guardrail, and descended the bank. Leah knew a spot where the river ran low and flat, and rough boulders rose high out of the water. We crossed the rocks to reach the dense woods on the other side. “Where there are trees, there are mushrooms,” Leah said. 

Craterellus cornucopioides. Black trumpet. Trumpet of the dead. A mushroom so dark it blends in with decaying leaves on the forest floor. Searching for it is like looking for black holes in the ground. We found it next to a rotting tree stump that swarmed with ants. A small garter snake with a yellow stripe shot from a patch of weeds. “Aha!” Leah said, adding the silky black trumpets to her basket. I admired her enthusiasm. I first met Leah not long after she moved to upstate New York from West Virginia. A friend of a friend. She needed a roommate, and I needed a new place since mine had been sold to condo developers. The new owners would march into my apartment on the first floor of a battered but majestic building with marble fireplaces and Doric porch columns. Barely a knock before they gathered in hard hats and planned their renovations. Leah was always up for excitement. I found her easy southern charm, ginger freckles and live-wire nature impossible to resist. I learned too late that some people walk a narrow line between adventure and reckless indifference. And by the time you realize you’re in a bad place, there’s often no time left to get out of it.  

Laetiporus. Chicken of the woods. We found the ruffled ribbons in the center of a downed tree seared black by lightning. The tree was laid to waste by an electrical charge of 100 million volts that exploded cells in the wood. The mushrooms glowed a radiant orange, like plump pieces of radioactive citrus. “Chicken of the woods tastes like meat fried up in a pan,” Leah said, gathering the rubbery orange brackets. “If you batter and deep fry pieces, you can pretend they’re chicken nuggets.” Leah learned to forage during her Appalachian childhood. She and her mess of a family shot squirrels, poached deer, snagged fish, simmered snapping turtle soup, dug wild ramps, and brewed wine from dandelions. Her uncles weren’t afraid to make stew from roadkill either. Up north, Leah found work in a gift shop, selling horse-themed trinkets to tourists. A job that paid enough for grocery runs. But when we first moved in together, she spent a long winter on food stamps and unemployment. When spring came, she cashed in her last unemployment check and hosted an elaborate barbeque in the backyard of our duplex. “When was the last time you had grilled shark at a barbeque?” she asked our friend Mike. “The last time White Trash got food stamps,” he said. 

Hericium coralloides. Bear’s head tooth. So elusive. We found the white fleshy spines dripping from a dead tree like hunks of ice cascading over a waterfall. Leah’s basket overflowed with her catch now. As much as I enjoyed mushroom hunting with Leah, I was wary of consuming her haul. She was too cavalier about identification. Mushroom foraging is not meant to be a game of chance. Most edible mushrooms have a shadow version, an easily mistaken poisonous look-alike. Misidentify a mushroom and end up with a liver transplant. Sometimes people know just enough to be dangerous. They get too eager, and they see what they want to see. The first time I went adventuring with Leah, we battled the bottleneck traffic on Cape Cod and drove to Provincetown to visit our friend Mike during the summer that he hustled as a line cook in the steamy, frantic kitchen of a Commercial Street restaurant. We took my car, and Leah promised to drive home as part of the deal. I spent the last day surrounded by crystal white dunes on the beach, while Leah visited friends on her own. When we met up to depart, she was overly chatty, vibrating like a tuning fork. By the time we reached the highway, I realized how high she was. I made her pull over so we could switch places. I drove home, sick from a hangover. Pissed.

Calvatia gigantea. The giant puffball. Traipsing the woods for them felt like being on an Easter egg hunt, except our prizes were massive spores that rose from thick carpets of mildewed leaves. I found a puffball that resembled a dimpled pair of pale-white buttocks. Leah found one like a misshapen volleyball with stitched seams. I was careful not to puncture them. Mature puffballs release a cloud of powdery black spores that invade and damage the lungs. Why was I still friends with Leah? I had asked myself that question more than once. She drew me in with her warmth, her friendly touches and her home-cooked meals. Yet she embraced darkness so easily. As its own sort of comfort. On the cold marble floor of the bathroom at the bar, I once watched her get down on her knees and scrape up spilled coke. She brought home new friends, strangers, after last call to gather around a mirror in our living room until early morning. She surrounded herself with people who were friendly on the surface but gradually revealed themselves. Like the guy who laughed about having a fish in his tank that was slowly eating another fish. Each day taking another bite while he watched, thrilled.   

Cantharellus cibarius. Chanterelles. As it started to rain, Leah spotted thick clusters of them glowing over the forest floor like brilliant yellow beacons. Mother Nature assigned a wider color palette to the kingdom of fungi than she did to flowering plants. Chanterelles were the biggest prize of all. Leah scooped them into her basket. They smelled like apricots. It was easy to confuse chanterelles with their toxic twin, the Jack O’lantern, which cripples with stomach cramps. The Jack O’lantern is more likely to be in groups, unlike the solitary chanterelle. I checked the gills. Jack O’lantern gills are knifelike and straight. Chanterelles are forked. It was hard to tell. Leah was not deterred. “These look just like the chanterelles I found back home in West Virginia,” she said. “I sautéed them with pasta. They tasted like peppery peaches.” Leah’s basket overflowed with the golden mushroom caps. The gills spread like the accordion of a crepe paper fan. The rain came down harder. “We should go,” I said.

Craterellus cornucopioides. Black trumpet. One fell from my basket into the water as we returned to the river, and I gingerly hopped from rock to rock. One, two, three, four. I counted the slippery boulders and made my way slowly, while Leah rushed ahead. Traversing streams always made me nervous. Unlike Leah, I didn’t trust myself not to fall. Looking down, I could see multi-colored pebbles on the placid river bottom. On the surface, swirls of white oxygenated water churned. I paused to stand on a large boulder in the middle of the river. Leah was almost to the other side. I heard her start to laugh. A high-pitched giggle. “What’s so funny?” I asked. She pointed to her feet. White Keds. They darkened as the water level rose, soaking her shoes. I laughed. It seemed funny at first. I looked down at my sneakers. Blue Adidas. They were still dry, but the water level was rising around my boulder island. Now the bottoms of Leah’s corduroy jeans were wet. I stared at them and realized what must have happened. Upstream, a dam. They released it. 

Cantharellus cibarius. Chanterelles. I saw them in my basket as my hilarity twisted into a sickening fear. I stared upstream as a surge of water barreled toward us. Leah moved fast, skipping over her last two rocks to safely reach the bank. She grabbed a branch and held it toward me, but she was too far away. I hunkered down on my boulder perch, paralyzed. Thinking maybe the river would stop rushing before it eclipsed my rock. The surge rose higher and higher. My feet got wet. Then my ankles. When the blistering cold water reached my shins and then my knees, the force and velocity swept me off the rock and into the swirling tide. I got sucked downstream. I prayed I wouldn’t hit my head on a rock, and I did all I knew how to do. I swam. I swam for my life to the other side. A twisted tree root jutted from the barren brown riverbank, and I grabbed it to pull myself to shore. Leah met me where I landed downstream, and we scrambled up the bank, soaked and shivering. As we climbed over the guardrail and back to the road, I saw the sign, not far from where we parked the car. “Danger: Water levels may rise rapidly and without warning due to sudden water storage releases. High waves or fast-moving water may result in serious injury or death.” I turned back to the river and saw my basket of mushrooms bobbing in water far downstream. A golden chanterelle, or maybe a poisonous Jack O’lantern, tipped out and swirled on a wave before disappearing into deep, black water.