Mushroom Show

I went to the Puget Sound Mycological Society’s annual wild mushroom show today; had an enjoyable ride through the misty rain to Magnuson Park; I arrived feeling appropriately fungus-like; and, while I enjoyed the homemade quality of the event—hand-lettered signs and all—I was underwhelmed by the exhibits, even those that featured giant boletuses or amanita muscaria.

I was expecting something more like the show I saw in San Francisco when I was a little hippy boy in the city; as I recall, there were tables upon tables of mycelium, with all sorts of moldy-looking folks waxing rhapsodic about their stinky, smelly, and gooey fungi.

Today, there was a pretty good selection of folks who looked like they spent a lot of time pawing over rotting treetrunks, but there wasn’t as much of their decaying bounty as I expected.

My favorite part of the day was looking over the shoulder of someone who had brought a bag full of mushrooms from his backyard to be identified by one the resident experts; I learned a few things about what’s growing in my own yard.

I figured out that we had shaggy parasol (lepiota rachodes), which apparently, makes pretty good eating, although the one that had been growing in our garden turned out to be too rotten to cook.

I almost bought a shitake growing kit and I still may; growing mushrooms seems about the right level of difficulty for someone with my abilities as a gardener. The fruit of mycenia springs up magically, after all; so I’d be unlikely to botch it. Plus, it would be funny to talk about having a brown thumb instead of a green one; Mimi would appreciate it, anyway.

Becoming an expert mycologist is one of those things I’ve always halfway aspired to; it became obvious to me today, though, that I’ll never be a mushroom maven; on the other hand, I’m still hoping that I’ll be remembered as a fun guy.