Chapter 19: Mushrooms and Me
In my 40’s, I acquired a hobby, looking for and studying wild mushrooms. This became a serious avocation, enough to make me want to write a book, “In The Company of Mushrooms”, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1997. Why not share bits of its prologue and epilogue? Somehow, bringing up a nearly lifetime hobby feels like a good way to end these memoirs.
Prologue: The Hunt
Like most people, I first got interested in wild mushrooms with eating in mind. I was tantalized by the prospect of being able to gather specimens of rare taste scarcely available by other means. I still delight in foraging for edible species, but my horizons have expanded as I have discovered that there is more to mushroom hunting than just looking for those that are good to eat. By now, I have become convinced that a mushroom collector searching only for provisions for the table would be comparable to a bird watcher looking only for quail, ducks, or pheasants. Going on a mushroom walk fulfills all sorts of other yearnings besides the gratification of foraging for natural food. I am excited by the zest of the hunt, challenged by the demands of identification, pleased by the encounter with species that have a special meaning to me, and charmed by especially handsome specimens.
Lactarius indigo (Wikipedia).
Mushrooms, growing on the ground or sticking out from tree trunks as brackets, seem to color the motif of the forest. Many mushrooms are lovely to look at, varied in hue and shape, smell and texture. As resplendent as flowers, they present us with a range of shades, from forceful brights to subdued pastels. The shiny, lacquer box red of certain bracket fungi, the violet of the eastern Cortinarius iodes, the royal blue of Lactarius indigo, or even the spotless white of deadly amanitas feast the eye of the passerby.
When I lived in Boston, I enjoyed mushroom collecting in the collegiality of a few fellow devotees. Picking wild mushrooms is not the common occupation in North America that it is in most parts of the world where mushrooms can be found in abundance. Still, this is a growth industry: more and more people are getting into mushrooming, especially in northern California and the Pacific Northwest. Because of the abundant rainfall and extensive forests, these are some of the best picking regions on this continent. There seems to be a great deal of latent interest elsewhere as well; I find that laymen, people who never expressed the urge to look for wild mushrooms before, often respond to my passion with curiosity.
The Destroying Angel, Amanita virosa. (Wikipedia).
I am often asked if I have ever been in trouble from eating mushrooms. The questions seem to arise mainly from curiosity, but occasionally there is also concern. Some people worry about me, perhaps from an ingrained belief that eating from the wild is a reckless thing to do, akin to keeping poisonous snakes or tarantulas in the house. Many others, however, are truly interested in the topic and ask me, sometimes insistently, to include them in a future mushroom hunt. Often, I am told of grandparents, usually of European or Asian origin, who used to pick wild mushrooms both here and in the old country and who tried to teach this art to their grandchildren, usually with little success.
In many ways, mushroom hunting is very much like another that tends to attract avid followers, namely, bird watching. Both call for a love of the outdoors, considerable zeal, and the ability to put up with frustration. In my mind, however, there are advantages to mushrooming. First of all, the specimens don’t fly away; you don’t have to be quiet to have a successful hunt; and you need not fear aerial bombardment. On the other hand, starting out on the path of identification is harder for mushroomers than for birders, one reason being that the novice begins with a smaller base of reference. Every fledgling bird watcher knows that sparrows are songbirds, sea gulls shorebirds, and hawks raptors. Most people are more limited when it comes to identifying mushrooms and may be able to discern only that a specimen is of the cap and stem variety, a puffball, or a bracket fungus.
Once hooked, however, mushroom hunters pursue their avocation with enthusiasm, some with an intense passion. They sometimes talk about mushrooms in a charged, nearly poetic language. Here are the words of Larry Stickney, a San Francisco mushroom lover: “Early in the season, hunting in the cool, magnificent redwood forests can produce both many choice edible mushrooms and an exquisite sense of beauty, tranquility, and exultation from the deep silence and sheer size of the trees. Right next to a thousand-year-old, three hundred foot giant, you can find tiny, fragile, elegant Lepiotas, Mycenas, which can set your sense of proportion and perspective atingle.”
Porcini (Boletus edulis), highly prized for its taste.
(Amazon).
My sentiments exactly. I wrote this book to share such sentiments for the hunt, for nature, for biology. My expectation is that by telling you stories about mushrooms and the people who study and enjoy them, you too will share my enthusiasm.
Mushrooms surprise us in many ways. Do they in fact burst forth like mushrooms? Are they friend or foe? All of us know that some mushrooms are food, some are poison, and some alter the mind, but many are not aware of the essential role they play in the perpetuation of life on earth. The study of mushrooms is not an unassuming subject. Each encounter with a mushroom is a singular event. Every specimen makes demands of me: Do I know it, and, if not, should I collect it and try to find out what it is? Should I bring it home for the kitchen? Am I to share it with fellow mushroomers? Should I photograph it, sketch it? Should I guess how long it’s been around, how long it will last, whether or not it will come back the next week or the next year? What role does this particular species play in human affairs? Has it, or one of its relatives, been used for food, or, in malevolent hands, for poisoning someone? Was it used for altering the mind, for understanding the present, for divining the future?
In this book I present mushrooms as more than a source of food, even though I find that an interesting and rewarding matter. I am intrigued by how mushrooms have been viewed through time and by different cultures. As a biologist, I find the ways they grow and reproduce unique and fascinating. As a lover of nature, I am fascinated by the different niches in which mushrooms and other forms of fungi are found. Ants and termites, for example, have evolved an intriguing
interdependence with fungal life. And, lastly, I have found that the people who share my hobby are second in interest only to the mushrooms themselves.
Epilogue: The Biologist as Mushroom Hunter
During a vacation taken while I was just putting the finishing touches on this book, my wife Edith and I were walking a trail near Oregon’s Crater Lake. She pointed out to me a small collection of mushrooms that were growing out of a shallow snowbank. Edith’s ability to spot mushrooms is legendary in our household but finding them in this habitat seemed unusual. The specimens were respectable in size, about an inch across the cap and two inches tall, rosy pink in color, and covered with a shiny layer of slimy material. Baby mushrooms were still entirely encased in the snow. I identified the specimens as belonging to the wax caps (Hygrophorus goetzii), a species that is one of the few known to grow in snowbanks.
The Snow Bank Mushroom (Hygrophorus goetzii)
(Mykoweb)
The realization that life can be sustained at unexpected extremes of temperature has generated much excitement among biologists. Life at high temperatures has generally attracted more attention than that in the cold. Bacteria have been found growing at temperatures as high as 113˚ Centigrade, about 23˚ Fahrenheit above the boiling temperature of water at sea level. Obviously, for water to reach such high temperatures without boiling, it must be under high pressure, such as is found in the depths of the ocean. How can life exist, and even thrive, at such extreme conditions?
Few answers are available to date. It turns out, however, that these “extremophiles” are not just a biological curiosity. They have industrial applications as well. The enzymes of these organisms are themselves resistant to high temperatures and can be expected to be employed in a variety of technological processes. One of these enzymes is used in the reaction that amplifies DNA, known as “polymerase chain reaction,” or PCR, a technique that is now used for Covid-19 testing. This particular enzyme, a DNA polymerase, is derived from a bacterium isolated from a hot spring at Yellowstone Park. Our view of what we call extreme conditions is anthropocentric. Any circumstance that we ourselves cannot tolerate is considered extreme. It takes bacteria, mushrooms, and other fungi to show us that this is a parochial view of life.
On the hike with my wife, I had no way to measure the highest temperature to which the mushrooms were exposed in the snowbank. It may well have risen above freezing in their vicinity, at least for short times. However, cold these specimens were. Perhaps the slimy layer that surrounded the specimens served as their antifreeze. It may not be a coincidence that many mushrooms that grow at low temperatures are in fact slimy. Whatever the mechanism, ours was an unexpected sight. I felt reassured that, given such prowess at survival in an unfriendly environment, mushrooms are probably here to stay.
Just as I started it, I end this book on a personal note. I have known all along that the subject of mushrooms is a rich one, as our discovery of the mushrooms in the snowbank illustrates, but I have nevertheless been surprised as this book unfolded that there is so much to write about it. As I was working, more and more interesting material kept appearing. Sometimes this was in the form of stories, either discovered in books or told to me; sometimes it was experiences of my own that came to mind. I ended up reaping a greater harvest than I had expected, for which I am obviously glad.
I am a microbiologist by profession, now near the completion of my career. When I collect and study mushrooms, however, I do not act as a professional biologist. Most of what I love about mushrooms and how they fit in people’s lives is far remote from my research and teaching. My life in science has been spent at the laboratory bench: I study how bacteria make their DNA as they grow. I am of the generation that witnessed the beginning of molecular biology and its offspring, genetic engineering. It was only after my career was established that I stepped into the world of forests, pastures, and mushrooms.
The distance between these two interests—microbiology and mushrooms—may not appear to be very fundamental to a non-scientist, but it is in fact quite considerable. It is true that biology is biology, in the sense that the basic question is always the same—What is life?—but at the level at which we participate in the profession of biology there are marked differences in attitude between those who study living things in the field and those who work in laboratories.
This gap is of recent origin—it was unknown until the nineteenth century—and, happily, it gives signs of closing. On the one hand, biologists who study the evolution of living things and their place in the environment are coming into the laboratory to take advantage of modern molecular tools. On the other hand, those who study the functions of living cells have found great opportunities in probing the wondrous diversity of the natural world. The rift between the field worker and the lab worker, in the questions they ask and the attitudes they convey, is narrowing, and we can welcome the fact that biology is reemerging as a unified science. It is worth noting that the “history” in “natural history” is derived from the Greek word for “learning by inquiry,” which today we would name “science.”
For most of my professional life, however, the distinction between “field biology” and “laboratory biology” was quite substantial. My colleagues seemed content to study one or two kinds of bacteria under laboratory conditions and only rarely seemed concerned with the “real world.” The view has been put forth that different personalities are attracted to the two approaches to biology. To overstate the point, the “naturalists” are seen as more caring, more accepting of their role as stewards of living things, whereas the “experimentalists” are thought to be more analytical, interested mainly in how things work.
That’s the theory, at least. I have always had a hard time with this notion because it seemed, at best, to describe people at the extremes. I feel that I straddled these two worlds. Strange as it may sound, I have developed, if not a love, at least a personal closeness to the bacteria I study. The strains I have worked with are, by and large, harmless to people. To me, they are living things, not just bags of enzymes and DNA. They are, in other words, as alive to me as mushrooms are—and as trees and animals are. So, is the jump from the lab bench to the woodland glade as big as all that? In both places one can find, or make, the opportunity to study nature, to experience life, and it is my hope that this book will lead you at least part of the way toward that end.
Chapter 20: My Family
I wrote about my parents in chapters 1 and 2 of these memoirs. You can read about my first wife Barbara in Chapter 13 and 18, and my current one, Edith, in Chapter 18. Here I write briefly about the rest of our families, both mine and Edith’s.
My two children are Judith and John. Neither is married and both are childless, thus I have no grandkids on that side. Judith is a highly renowned stained glass artist. She has pieces in major museums, including the Smithsonian, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, London ‘s Victoria and Albert, Saint Petersburgh’s Hermitage, and many others. She lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches in several art schools. She not only practices art, but also thinks about it in insightful and philosophical terms. Parental modesty aside, I am, of course, immensely proud of her. Besides her talents, she is captivatingly unpretentious and caring.
Judith’s "My One Desire”, stained glass. 52″ × 35″, 2007.
Private collection.
Judith.
John in action.
I am equally proud of my son John, who is a sensitive and thoughtful individual. For some 30 years, he has worked at the Boston Zoo, where he lovingly prepares the food for the animals (which makes him an essential worker). He is also an avid and highly competent rock climber and obstacle competitor, both outdoors and in gyms. To know him is to like and admire him.
My near family is rounded up by two cousins in Israel. Hanna Engelberg-Kulka who is, of all things, also a microbiologist. She is an eminent and bemedaled professor at the Medical School in Jerusalem. Her brother Moshe is retired from being the prominent hernia surgeon in Israel. He and his wife Henia have two daughters, Sharon Nachmani who is a psychotherapist specializing in anorexia and a lecturer at the University of Haifa, and Orit Engelberg, a curator of Jewish Heritage who is currently writing her PhD thesis on the Environmental History of the Dead Sea.
Edith at ease.
The tiny size of my side of the family is made up by Edith’s. She has 3 children, each with 3 children of their own. But it stops there. At time of writing (in 2020), we have only 2 great-grandchildren, so there will be no geometric progression (27 great-grandchildren would be some handful!). Edith’s oldest, Tom, lives in the Washington, D.C. area, and so does her youngest, Steven. The middle one, Jeanny, is in Los Angeles, so she and her kids are the ones we see most often. I have bonded nicely with all of them, but of course this is a work in progress. Geographic distance does not make this easy, neither does the pandemic. But all of them are lovable people, exceptionally smart and accomplished. I claim that they take after me!
Tom and his family. (front to back) Grandson Eitan,
wife Pam and Tom, son Josh and his wife Zahvi, son
David, daughter Rebecca.
Our great-grandchildren Eitan and Raya.
Jeanny and her family. Daughters Arielle and Zoe and
son Daniel. Jeanny on the right.
Steven and his family. Daughters Erin and Mia,
Steven, wife Monique, son Amit.
One Last Word: My Life in the Social Media
For the last 10 years or so, I have had a new career, if you can call it that. I have been involved in a blog and a podcast. The blog, Small Things Considered, was mentioned already in Chapter 18. I share it with some most capable colleagues, Roberto Kolter, Christoph Weigel, Janie Kim, and Daniel Haeusser. This blog continues to grow strong and has a steady and varied readership. We state: “The purpose of this blog is to share our appreciation for the width and depth of the microbial activities on this planet. We will emphasize the unusual and the unexpected phenomena for which we have a special fascination.” I get a tremendous pleasure from digging into beguiling, sometimes remote comers of the microbial world.
The podcast, This Week in Microbiology, is run by a most proficient podcastmaster, Vincent Racaniello (a master of the trade, he has 4 or 5 other such endeavors) plus Michael Schmidt and Michelle Swanson. It’s a lot like discussing paper over a beer with good friends. I also enjoy this greatly, even without the beer.
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