|
THE YEAR OF THE FUNGUS
Mary VanFleet
One early October day in a particularly wet fall some years ago, I got an excited mid-afternoon phone call from a neighbor: “Can you take a ride?” “Where to?” I responded. Still excited, “You have to come see this!” “What?” I asked. “It’s amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it. You have to come see this! Let’s go! We aren’t going far. Bring your camera.” “OK” I replied. I got my keys, hat and jacket, camera and flew out the door to pick her up.
We drove down the road to Hwy 20 and headed for Macks Inn. Turning to go up the S. Big Springs Rd, we ended up along the walking trail that runs along the river from the float launch up to Big Springs. We piled out and headed up the trail, along the summer home area.
“Wow!”…..”Holy Cow!”….”Hey, come see this one!”….”Wow!” was the way it went the entire time as we got on our hands and knees to look at the tiny ones and stood back in amazement at the much, much larger ones. Black ones, green ones, brown ones, orange ones, golden ones, white ones, some slimy looking and some with speckled tops. Some looked scary, some creepy, some so delicately fringed and beautiful. We must have seen 75 or more species in the first half mile. They were everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE! “Don’t back up, you are going to step on a really cool looking one”.
The shutter was snapping and the pages of the mushroom identification were rapidly flying back and forth to try to identify a few of them. Obviously, some were just coming out of the ground and had not taken their final identifying shape, and others were so past their prime that they were a challenge too. We finally gave up page turning and just enjoyed the once in a lifetime experience. We’ve never seen that again. Edibles? Not too sure any were, but they were amazing none the less. To the eyes, not the palate.
| 
