Mushroom Tourist

For the last twenty years, I have mushroom-travelled. Which is not to say that I went on magic mushroom trips. No, just that whenever I travelled, I would go for walks – solo ones I researched in advance and ones with friends to their favourite walking spots – and while walking, I would look for mushrooms.

Some people use travel as a way of broadening their horizons; I use it as a way to add more mushrooms to my repertoire. It’s become my way of being in the wider world: when in doubt, walk under the trees and look for mushrooms.

And then take pictures of those mushrooms and post them to social media, because I want people to feel some of the same connection I feel in those moments. The same pleasure.

During the three-plus years of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became harder to travel as widely as we were all used to. The concurrent climate crisis, as evidenced by grinding drought, wildfire smoke and stunted crops, also made me reconsider how much and how often I wanted to travel once things got back to some kind of normal.

So I tried to sightsee in my home place – my yard, my neighbourhood and my city – while also travelling within the prairie provinces between variant outbreaks.

This is my mushroom diary from these years, though really it is more like a bundle of picture postcards from me to the world. Or a stack of flash cards where the test I’m cramming for is surviving the world.

March 28, 2021

Went for a willowy walk in Assiniboine Forest today, where I also found a pre-bent hoop of dogwood whose red-orange almost matched the orange-red of my long sweater-coat, an enormous conk – a shelf-like bracket-shaped fruiting body of certain fungi that grow on trees, that are hard like trees – and some other small mushrooms nearby …

[The splitgill mushroom orSchizophyllum commune is small and grey-white and furred. It is the mushroom you would expect the White Witch to be wearing as decoration on her person/robes/carriage in Narnia. I found it clustered along the entire length of a young trembling aspen.]

April 11, 2021

I found a mushroom that has it all, including a moustache of pixie-cup lichens and moss. It was the only mushroom I was able to get close to, as it was right next to the boardwalk at the Brokenhead Wetland Interpretive Trail. (This was my first time there, though I’d heard about it for years!) There were various lichens and mushrooms everywhere in the white cedar swamp as well as red carnivorous pitcher plants glittering in the sun but I very carefully stayed on the boardwalk. I was grateful to have the opportunity to walk in this place, that it was made available to me. Some of the time I lay down on the boardwalk so I could see mushrooms better, but that’s as close as I got …

[A polypore, which is a mushroom with pores for dispersing spores instead of gills,