"Looks Like a Lactarius"

We straggled out of the woods in twos and threes and emptied our baskets onto a makeshift table in the dirt parking lot.  The mushrooms were roughly sorted, and my challenge as an abject beginner was to figure out where on the table I should put each of the mushrooms in my basket.  The yellow one was easy -- it went over with the other yellow ones.  Also I'd been taught to recognize the Russula, which come in all different colors, so my red one and my purple one got spread out alongside their brethren.

But I had a whole range of brownish and whitish mushrooms, in various shades and shapes and sizes.  I went vaguely by shape and color and laid them out.  I had a couple of mushrooms that didn't look like anything else on the table.  [A little joke, I discovered, among insiders in the mycological society, was to reply "not known by science," in response to a query about a mushroom.]

Then this magical performance began, unlike anything I've seen anywhere else.  A little, wrinkly, old man, tanned a dark brown, stood at the base of the table and the others all crowded around him.  Too polite to jostle, exactly, but you definitely had to work to get a good view.  The little old man surveyed the mushrooms and let out a joyful whoop and started picking them up, one by one.  He would wave the chosen mushroom around, as if conducting a symphony, and shout out questions, which the assembled group would call out answers to.  "Let's start with an easy one!  Take a look at this -- what am I holding here?"  People called or murmured a latin name.  "And why?  What kind of a spore print would I get with this?"  "Olive green!" responded a woman in her late thirties, wearing a t-shirt with a tree frog on it.  "Right!" called the little old man.  "And tell me about the gills, what about the gills?" 

I would duplicate more of the conversation for you but it was a mishmash of vocabulary words and Latin terms I couldn't catch or spell.  The little old man would whoop or crow delightedly as he led everyone else through a Socratic identification of the table's worth of mushrooms.  He sometimes crumbled a stem in his fingers or pulled apart the underside of a cap to show us the veil or the gill structure.  Once he licked a cap.  I got a glimpse of his tongue and it was huge and strangely textured, like the surface of a washcloth.  Another time he took a bite of a mushroom and spit it out.  "Yep, that's a _____," he said, while the group around him laughed affectionately and shook their heads.  The assembled crowd would jump in and point things out, too.  "There are two different shape cells in this genus, round and elongated,"  one might offer, or "That's a polypore."  There was a Canadian naturalist who seemed to know a lot, and the old man sparred back and forth with him.  "What is this called?" he would say, and when the man responded with the Latin names he would say, "What did it used to be called?" referring, apparently, to some previous taxonomic home.  "And where does it fit in the taxonomy?" 

It turned out that mostly what I found were different varieties of amanitas.  The old man's introduction to that group was, "And which species would make you a mortician's ward?"  Another fellow, a bearded man between 50 and 60 who, I learned, made slides and examined cells and spores under the microscope a lot, picked up one of the mushrooms and asked the group, "how many ounces do you think this is?"  About three or four, someone answered.  "This mushroom is toxic enough that fifty percent of people who consume one ounce of it will die."  Yikes. 

I found a bolete, too, and felt oddly proud when the little old man gave a little whoop and said, admiringly, "This is a great edible." 

From my notes scrawled down to capture a sense of the conversation and the vocabulary:
Q:"What do the kids call these?" A:"Chocolate tubes." 
The number of cells in a button is the same as the number of cells in a big mushroom -- that's why they can grow so fast, they just have each cell expand but there's no cell division.  Not true for polyphores = cell division; can grow around a foreign body b/c cells divide. 
Amaloid spores -- polypheria
the annulus would be gray
colored gills attached gills flattened gills. split/branch gills.  sometimes gills go down stem (chanterelle) involute gills long gills short gills free gills notched gills
ascomycete = cup fungi (ascus = tube).
"It's called that because the Russians who named it thought it sounded like a fart." 
Paxillus -- cousin involutus is poisonous. 
Prize of the day goes to the person who found harmolmyces = red/purple jelly drops, looks like jello but it's not.
"Looks like a lactarius"

Comments

[wab]

These last two were great. Why not put them together for the magazine of the mycological society as a first time experience story.