How do you find a mushroom? You're there in the woods, walking along under the pines and the oaks, with a small whining entourage of mosquitos in a pack around you. The floor of the woods is covered in an erratic pattern of dead leaves and pine needles and baby white pines and sometimes a stump or a big rock or a downed branch or tree. You're walking slowly along with your basket, scanning the ground, telling your brain to look for something different. But different from what? There's hardly a pattern to recognize. Your eyes find everything that's not-leaf, but that doesn't really help you, because most of the not-leaf objects aren't mushrooms. And a lot of the mushrooms, as it turns out, appear as funny leaves. They're underneath the leaf, so what you see is a brown leaf that's lumpy and slightly higher than the dead leaves around it, as it gets pushed up by a growing mushroom.
I accompanied a friend on the Maine Mycological Society's last foray, on Sunday. She and I wandered along at about the same pace. "There's one," she'd say, and go over to pull something up. I scanned the ground harder, but didn't see any. We kept walking, and I kept looking, and still she would find them when I couldn't see them. It's not as though they were invisible. She'd point one out and I'd think, "why on earth didn't I see that?" But I just didn't.
But after about fifteen or twenty minutes I started seeing them. I'd like to describe what changed or what slight pattern of light and shadow I began to recognize, but I don't think I can. The mushrooms I found were all different sizes and colors, yellow and brown and purple and red and white. I also found some slime molds and some ghostly and mysterious Indian pipes (invisible at first, but then once I began to see them everywhere in the woods). I actually got really good at seeing brown mushrooms (a dull grey-brown, soft, although I also found a warmer honey-brown one, the only edible one I found, plus one with a shiny dark-brown top). I started to find them first, and my companion would say, "Good eye!" or "Oh, I didn't even see that!"
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