When my first son was born, friends and family assured me that the only thing my wife and I really had to worry about was keeping him alive. They failed to mention how hard that would be: Kids are remarkably resourceful, and for the first few years of their lives they seem to turn that resourcefulness entirely towards finding novel ways to kill themselves. We cared for and supervised Rhys as carefully as any first-time parents, but by the end of his toddler years, he had back-flopped off a picnic bench onto concrete, grabbed a chef’s knife off the kitchen counter while my back was turned, and eaten more foreign substances than I can recount here. None of those, however, scared me as much as the time he decided it would be funny to take a bite out of a mushroom he found during a water break on the Continental Divide Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park. I told that story on Backpacker this week in a piece about California’s ongoing mushroom poisoning outbreak, which so far has caused 40 illnesses, 4 of them fatal.
Fungi are both intimidating and fascinating to me. They differ so drastically from plants and and animals that it can be hard to conceive of them as life at all. While we tend to think of mushrooms as discrete individuals, they’re really just the reproductive parts of a much larger organism—fruits sprouting from a threadlike network of mycellium, often tangled around the roots of the trees that play host to them. The genus implicated in this season’s illnesses, Amanita, includes everything from the edible coccora and grisette to the death cap, a half-mushroom of which is capable of killing a person or causing enough liver damage that they need a transplant. (Somewhere in between are psychoactive species like the fly agaric, toxic enough to be dangerous but not so much as to stop people from tripping on them.) I will never, in a million years, be confident enough in my ID skills to risk eating any of them.
Rhys, for what it’s worth, is fine. He survived his forest taste-test—the mushroom turned out to be a harmless if gross slippery jack. And as far as I can tell, his liver is still in fighting shape.
Leave a Reply