Out in the Land Where the Mushrooms Grow

The little orange eyelash cups are so completely dinky that surely I’d have walked right past them, whistling my way down a muddy trail in the Wayne National Forest, if it weren’t for the keen eye of Martha Bishop. We’re out here to scout mushrooms and record our discoveries for future generations, but I can’t say I’ve been contributing much to the group. “Eyelash cups,” after all? Who’d have known? Bishop, a plant biologist at nearby Ohio University, waves the crowd closer.
We all sort of huddle around her, the guru of our guided fungi hike in the Wayne, and each one of us rookies exhales in brief astonishment. The rotting log we’re staring at seems covered in stray marks from colorful markers, but these are mushrooms, all right. More precisely, they’re the fruiting bodies of the fungus. Scutellinia scutellata. Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe.
Sure enough, Bishop stoically points out the eyelash-seeming bristles ringing the dainty orange discs. She leans in closely and brushes away leafy debris before hoisting the tiny specimens aloft on the edge of a Swiss Army knife. Just like that, seeing a rash of eyelash cups and banking the memorable name in the back of my mind, I feel like I’ve learned something. I can take this knowledge back home to Cleveland.On a bright autumn afternoon like this, I can lean in close to a decaying tree trunk somewhere in the city and say to my impressed fiancée, “Now, these little fellas here are called ‘eyelash cups,’” as she recoils and asks what in the world I’m talking about.
I’ve been walking along a dry creek bed in the woods for the past hour with my fungi hike cohort. We’re fanned out across the loping landscape, hunched sharply and poised with pocketknife and magnifying glass to chart the caps and stems of fantastical mushroom species. It’s September in the Appalachian foothills, and we’re rewarded with the delightful, humid air endemic to long hikes in southern Ohio wilderness. It’s downright steamy out here. I’ve been trying to attune my eyes to the minuscule world of mushrooms, but it’s like grazing a menu in a foreign language for familiar phrases. The visual process isn’t automatic. I mistake an outcropping of nails in a felled telephone pole for fungi. I pick up mushroom-shaped stones with dumb glee to show my compatriots.
We number two-dozen today. Whereas most of us stumble through the task, a few in the group are real pros. They have preferences among their stack of dogeared field guides. These men and women and children join Bishop’s fungi hikes on a monthly basis and seem to piece together a working knowledge of mushrooms with ease: what’s edible and what’s not, what strange ailments this one cures, what horrific brain diseases that one causes. They have recipes.
Further up-creek, one of the women in our group spies a shelf of fungi extruding from another collapsed log. Bishop wheels in to snip it from the wood and bring it close to her nose for a deep sniff. As the day goes on, she’ll compare the scents of fungi variously to “mushrooms like you’d buy at the store,” “shrimp and peaches” and “lightning bugs.” She squeezes this thing, remarking on its softness, its spongy pores, its cheesy fragrance. She’s unsure; it’s not like she can reasonably be expected to identify everything we throw at her today; more than 2,000 species of fungi grow in Ohio, and each one is a visual universe all its own. Never mind that scientists routinely change the names of fungi, rearranging taxonomies and making the hard work of mushroom identification even more difficult for the rest of us. The game, I declare, is rigged. 
Bishop tucks the object into a wax paper bag for further examination and tosses it into a fine wicker basket already overflowing with odds and ends from the forest floor.
“That’s the great thing about fungi,” she says. “There’s always something you haven’t seen.”

ξ

I came here to put a long curiosity to rest and gather a new way of looking at things. I know nothing about mushrooms, apart from their good work as pizza toppings and psychedelic shepherds. By following the impulse within me to walk through the woods and look at small terrestrial wonders, I thought maybe I could get closer to something. I’ve visited the Ohio Mushroom Society’s website many times, hoping to write a feature about their work and root around the dirt for answers to loftier questions. Working at an alt-weekly for years, I was always foraging for quirky angles into big, universal stories. The Ohio Mushroom Society hosts educational hikes around the state and partners with the sustainability-minded Rural Action for regular summertime bioblitz expeditions in the Wayne . I went to college in this part of Ohio, and, with the years piling on, I find that I’m eager to layer my memories of this place with context. Now that I’m returning as a bit of an outsider, I wondered: Where was I back then? For that matter: Where am I now? And what’s happening out there in the trees?
To get from Cleveland to this part of Ohio, curious drivers zip down the state’s I-77 spine, hooking west across bleary-eyed Cambridge and riding the Zanesville bend in the Muskingum River before tearing along township roads and deeper off the grid. The national forest covers 244,000 acres across three “administrative units” in southern Ohio, each crowding around Nelsonville, Ironton, or Marietta, three great splotches of mostly preserved public lands in a sea of roadside diners, gas stations, and stunted corn crops. It might look like uninhabited green space on a map, but the Wayne is where most of the state’s non-human residents live –– whole populations brimming across kingdoms, classes, families. 
The purpose of a bioblitz is to put names to those populations, to see them and recognize them and let them go on existing peacefully. Joe Brehm, director of environmental education at Rural Action, helps organize the Ohio Mushroom Society’s fungi hikes with Bishop, and he guides volunteers through the process of photographing species and uploading them to iNaturalist, a cataloging app for citizen science. The first graphic you see when opening the iNaturalist app issues a clarion call: “Get outside and observe an individual organism. Pick something wild and take a clear, full-frame photo.”
The spectrum of oddly shaped, overly feathery, and googly-eyed mushroom species is as appropriate a place to start as anything else, probably.
So much of the droning public discourse on The Environment spins on an axis of doom. I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to make sense of the game plan to respond to climatic agitation. I recycle newspapers. I rarely eat meat anymore, sure. But what’s the best way to get a few billion humans to do anything productive? To abandon industrial vices and front the essential facts of life? It seems a task beyond the limitations of social media or even the enterprising plant-based burger industry. I wanted to look elsewhere. I wanted to look at something scrutable.
But look at what, exactly?
I decided to pay a long overdue visit to the Ohio Mushroom Society. If anyone could guide me closer to nature, closer to an answer about our uncertain climate, surely those folks would know where to look. 

ξ

As I navigate my Corolla through the landscape of pock-marked pavement and trees, the map in my phone leads me to a nondescript house in Trimble, Ohio, but no one’s home when I knock on the door. I was told we’d be meeting at the Rural Action office, “an old church painted white,” and so I scour the rest of Walnut Street. I find a steeple and park my car. Brehm waves me inside and offers tea. A few people are here already, and, soon enough, the group is assembled and chatting pleasantly around a wooden table. Everyone’s come prepared with Nalgene water bottles, granola bars, bandanas tied artfully around their necks. Even though I ate a whole bunch of my trail mix on the way down, my backpack is still stocked with plenty of nuts and raisins.
We go around the circle and introduce ourselves, explaining why we’ve come here. One guy says he’s “just your run-of-the-mill questioning seeker,” which seems apt. Most of us admit to having no clue about mushrooms. We inch closer to Bishop and Brehm, hoping that they’ll lead us through the mind-bogglingly complex fungi kingdom this afternoon. Brehm says we’ll be carpooling, and he mentions a bus that fits ten. 
We’re heading to Wildcat Hollow, a trail that threads through a verdant valley somewhere deep in the Wayne. Everyone seems to think it’s a great location, even if it’s been kind of dry around here lately. It absolutely poured in Cleveland the other night, but this part of Ohio missed out. Fungi thrive on moisture, so this is a problem. We may not find much at all out there, but the work itself is in the looking. 
“Well, that’s all right; you won’t know if today’s a good day or a bad day!” Brehm says to us amateurs. 
“Oh, it’s a good day!” someone responds cheerfully. Everyone is here purposefully, mindfully, and it shows.
Bishop distributes wax bags and wicker baskets. She explains how we’ll want to place individual species in separate bags because we might want to eat some of them later. You don’t want your sandwich fixings to rub up against some asphyxiating spores. You’ve got to be very intentional when foraging for dinner. I imagine myself stuffing a Santa-Claus-sized sack of oyster mushrooms in my backseat and bringing home a feast for the neighborhood.
I join the group boarding the bus, hoping to glean some confidence from the camaraderie of close quarters, and it turns out Brehm wasn’t kidding; we head around the back of the church to find a short red school bus. Some Trimble neighbors sold it to Rural Action a few years earlier. Inside, the place is an immediate source of comfort. Blue carpet remnants line the ceiling and walls, and “New Car Scent” pine tree-shaped air fresheners dangle from fans installed throughout the interior. A toilet seat hangs above the rearview mirror. Bumper stickers of the automotive racing ilk dot the dashboard. A strand of Christmas lights festoons the windows. I’m compelled to look up Phish’s fall tour dates as I consider the vehicle’s roadworthy majesty.
We plow through Trimble, Glouster, and Burr Oaks, small towns that lead us further along empty roads and deep into forested landscape. It seems like Brehm is absolutely flooring it, but it may be the roar of the generator that’s jury-rigged to the back of the bus messing with my head. Anna, a pigtailed fungi hike devotee sitting in the back of the bus, turns to me and asks what I’m writing about. I shout over the din that I haven’t got that part figured out just yet, but I sense that there’s an answer waiting for me out there. I wonder if the same could be said for anybody on the bus today. 
Up front, Brehm is offering cooking tips over his shoulder as he wends the bus past tilting headstones, gas tanks, clapboard churches. He navigates gravelly mounds and leans into hairpin turns through hemlock stands, yelling his recommendations of salt and garlic and a little oil in the skillet for when we get back home with our hauls. The bus is just straight-up chugging through the countryside. 
Then, with gusto: “Here comes the rollercoaster!” he calls out, and a bunch of us instinctively raise our arms. We descend abruptly into the hollow.

ξ

“The Wayne National Forest Bioblitz is an ongoing effort to document all the amazing things that live within these woods,” according to the Rural Action message on Facebook. “Anyone can participate! Simply take a picture or record audio of any living organism and upload it. If you are within our project’s boundary, your observation will be included. Anyone can help identify an observation, so do not feel like you need to be an expert!” Thank goodness.
By the time I showed up, Rural Action and Ohio Mushroom Society volunteers had already recorded about 3,000 different species across 10,400 observations in the Wayne, according to Brehm. In spite of my arrival, the group was planning to add a few more before day’s end. 
According to a handy brochure issued by the US Department of Agriculture, Wayne National Forest became Wayne National Forest in 1934, when US Forest Service surveys of bucolic, tax-delinquent farmland and abandoned mines brought more than 1 million acres under the auspices of the federal government. The Civilian Conservation Corps offered jobs in reforestation and erosion control, juicing the state with public dollars and a renewed sense of purpose. After generations of tillage and iron smelting, southern Ohio just couldn’t escape the dominion of human intervention –– although at least this time, we were trying to help. Slowly, we pulled an ecosystem from the barren landscape and turned emptiness into woodland. The USDA history lesson ends with a thundering final paragraph: “What is now forest was once farms. As the scars left on the land are healed, the gravestones of the pioneers may be some of the last evidence of their lives here. It’s a stark reminder of how tenuous our place on the land can be, and the value of places like the Wayne to each of us, whether or not we ever visit them. Conservation of our nation’s Forests and other natural resources are a legacy we, as a people, leave our children.”
It’s the same sort of message that bleeds into every conversation about our planet in the twenty-first century, and it seems clear that this tension is our culture’s defining debate. If there’s a political frustration that past generations have left us in the present with a suffocating planet and a hefty bill, well, then it’s incumbent on us to consider future generations. Our unborn great-grandchildren and their successors. What sort of world will they inhabit? What sort of lifestyle will be thrust upon them? 
It seems like it might be helpful for us humans to hold questions of our fate on the same page as the fate of ubiquitous Earthlings like fungi. Just as mushroom-hunting has grown in popularity over the past century alongside gastronomic experimentation and outdoor leisure, so too has the scientific understanding of mycelial intelligence. The general public is grasping the secrets of fungi at the same time it’s wrestling with the climate’s uncertainty. Mycelium is the out-of-sight vegetative network of fungi, the universal subjective consciousness of mushroom bodies sprouting lusciously across the surface of the planet, including right here in the good old Wayne. It’s everywhere, this mycelial network, and it holds a greater understanding of Earth’s needs than we do. 
I feel like I can’t grasp the ecological depth of all that, per se, but I sense that I might learn something about how to handle the warming grip of climate anxiety just by spending time in communion with these fungi. Surely, it can’t hurt to try getting in touch with smaller beings. Paul Stamets, a mycologist and author who straddles the line of scientific counterculture and podcast pop culture, hosted a TED Talk more than a decade ago, shining a light on the sixth major extinction event on Earth and insisting that mushrooms hold keys to saving the planet’s health. Since then, he’s gone on to join the rallying cry for climate action while turning his attention (and, kind of, the public’s attention) toward the small, apparently innocuous mushroom caps bursting from our front lawns and behind the garage. Bishop, with her quick grasp of the Wayne’s rich relationship with fungus, seems to be touching the same nerves with folks who are looking for something in which to place their faith. Why?
“The field of mycology, and specifically of mushrooms –– I know of no field that is understudied, underrepresented, underutilized and under-appreciated and yet has such a powerful potential for doing a lot of the good and giving us the solutions we so desperately need today,” Stamets said at a Portland Psychedelic Society event in September 2018, just a year prior to my immersion in the Wayne. 

ξ

We find a lively camping setup outside the Wildcat Hollow trailhead. Firewood is stacked up outside a major RV, and tents dapple the meadow like mushroom caps. A panting bulldog –– the wayward pet of a nearby camping party –– wanders over to our group as we tumble out of the bus,The odd thing, though, is that the dog keeps returning as we work our way through the woods throughout the afternoon, bounding tongue-lollingly from behind a rotted log or through the brush to join us and receive ample head scratches. (Actually, it’s totally possible that the dog has lived in the woods forever, that it obeys no master except for Mother Earth. We never do learn its story.)
Brehm performs an administrative headcount, then offers a twist on the proceedings: “I know we’re looking for mushrooms, but whoever finds the biggest caterpillar gets a prize. Right now is a great time for caterpillars. So, if you want to look up as well as down, that’d be great.” If I were even remotely conversant in caterpillars, this might be my time to shine. Alas. 
As we gather ourselves, we talk briefly about the gargantuan honey fungus in eastern Oregon –– the largest terrestrial organism on the planet, a 2,000-year-old, 3.4-mile beast of underground mycelial energy and sprouting fruit heads. It has reorganized the forest aboveground, redistributing nutrients to kill trees and arrange the planet’s surface to fit its own, deeper narrative. This vision of the sprawling network of intelligence is one feature among many that’s captured the imagination and fascination of scientists and the general public. “That which is so powerful, yet so ephemeral –– some mushrooms and kill you, some can feed you, some can heal you, some can send you on a spiritual journey –– but that which is so powerful and so ephemeral, it’s natural for humans to avoid or be afraid of them,” Stamets said in that same Portland speech.
Brehm mentions the smaller ringless honey mushrooms that prosper in Ohio. I set a quiet goal to find a cluster of them, an indication of achievement, a personal merit badge. Brehm also quickly points out that these things are pretty common, that they’re really no big deal.
I could take or leave the scientific jargon; their common names are far more relatable. We’re talking about: “pigskin poison puffball,” “turkey tail,” “false turkey tail,” “chocolate tube slime,” “white cheese polypore,” “blue cheese polypore,” “freckle-gilled gym,” “eyelash cup,” “comb tooth,” “artist’s conk,” “ceramic parchment,” “wood ear,” “dead man’s finger,” and “the angel of death.” The poetic license is remarkable. Chocolate tube slime, for heaven’s sake. Each name seems surprisingly explicit. Later, the run-of-the-mill questioning seeker in our group points out that the dead man’s fingers someone finds really do resemble a charred corpse flipping us all the bird. I rush over to take a closer look at the gnarled mushrooms laid out on wax paper. He’s right.Once we’ve got the ground rules established, Brehm lets us loose upon the forest. The folks who’ve been through this before seem to sprint toward the good spots: moist networks of fallen, moss-coated trees; creek beds that wrap tightly around depressions in the woods; the leafy place where the valley floor meets the hillside of the hollow. I’m not sure where to go, so I stumble awkwardly alongside Bishop. Clearly, she’ll lead by example. 
What’s strange is how unfamiliar, how wild, the idea of mushroom identification is to me. Not in the sense that it’s some alien concept, but that I have no idea how to approach the matter. I’ve spent thirty years on this planet walking past fungi and maybe, at best, briefly thinking about how weird they look. It’s only been in the past few years –– moonlighting as a line cook with a chef who enjoys the work of foraging, listening to podcasts where guys like Stamets occasionally wax fungal –– that I’ve given a second thought to these creatures’ habits. But they’ve been here longer than us. I’m the new guy. I’m the guest here. We all are.

ξ

After a few hours in the humid scrub of the Wayne, we return to the bus, clusters of seekers emerging from the forest at irregular intervals. Some in the group have clearly been busy; their wicker baskets runneth over with mushrooms of all sizes. Others, myself certainly and maybe solely included, have only a few scraps of fungus to show for all the sweating and hunching out there. Brehm does another headcount, and we gather around an extinguished bonfire. Everyone begins to lay out their haul, arranging their fungi neatly on wax paper. I sort of sheepishly toss my loot off to the side: a chewed-up milkcap that may have been in the process of dying, a clump of small mushrooms that look like grocery-store figurines, and an unidentifiable portion of . . . something I found growing on a log. As Bishop walks through the display to help identify these things, I kick a few leaves across my tableau. I’d rather not waste her time. 
One thing I find just remarkable among the bunch is a lush cloudburst of mushroom, a dreadlocked fungus that looks like the dog on Beck’s Odelay. Someone actually found this thing out there in the woods, this coral castle of white branches. It’s called a “comb tooth,” which seems fitting, and, believe it or not, we learn from Bishop that it’s actually edible. Its taste, apparently, is mild and nutty, as long as you cook it thoroughly and disperse any beetles that might be housed in its recesses. The couple that found it places it neatly in a wax paper package and, one must assume, prepares it for the drive back to the kitchen. We’re all here for answers to some question, and it’s sometimes as simple as, “What’s for dinner?”
A few folks in our group talk about “the safe six,” a common gateway to understanding fungi and the most common species of mushrooms that are safe to eat. These include: morels, shaggy manes, hen of the woods, chicken mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, and puffballs. With a bit of preparation, most anyone could reasonably walk into a nearby patch of nature and find one of these species. It’s just a matter of looking –– and looking closely. 
The closer you look, it turns out, the more you think about the interplay between the smaller ecosystems of Earth and the sprawling industrial centers of human civilization. We’re all in this together, of course, and everything impacts everything else. The more you think about this, the more you’re compelled to act, to walk into the woods and commune with animals, plants, and fungi. To tread lightly and live in a way that protects us all from ourselves. 
“We, as creatures on this planet, depend on plants for our survival,” Brehm says as we’re wrapping up at the site. And plants depend on the vast network of fungi for their survival, he goes on. The whole cycle of nutrients and ingestion and decomposition is the engine of Earth’s environmental strength. We’ve caused so much damage to this place, and I think we’re all wondering what’s going to happen next and what we can do to prevent it. I guess the better question might be: Are we paying attention at all? 

ξ

Eric Sandy is an Akron-based journalist who reports on criminal justice, civil rights, drug reform, and environmental issues. He is a student in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program as a creative nonfiction writer.