It took me just a few seconds, once I met local mycologist John Wheeler, to realize how very little I knew about mushroom-hunting.
Wheeler is a retired carpenter from Housatonic by way of Egremont and president of the Berkshire Mycological Society since 2005.
He’s been obsessed with mushrooms for nearly as long as he has been married, and he’s been married 34 years.
In the years when Brian Alberg was the chef at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Wheeler would barter a 10-pound haul of hen-of-the-woods for a lovely anniversary dinner.
In preparation for the two-hour walk that I had with Wheeler, I would be accompanying him with a canvas shopping bag. Wheeler, when I met him in the Mount Everett High School parking lot, had a long, shallow basket on his arm.
He told me that the holes in the basket in-between the warp and weft let the mushrooms breathe, which allows their spores to escape and disseminate and grow new mushrooms. Another good tip I learned from him: good mushrooming etiquette is sort of the opposite of good picnicking etiquette.
As a self-professed sufferer of ADD, which he considers a disorder of ‘hyper attentiveness,’ rather than a failure to pay attention, Wheeler tends toward deep dives driven by a hunter-gatherer’s mentality.
“For hunter-gatherers, if it’s not food and it’s not a danger, it’s background noise,” Wheeler told me.
Background noise is how he thought of mushrooms until he gave electrician Steve Comalli a ride home from Mundy’s bar one night back in the 1990s.
The next day Comalli called and said, “I need a ride, man! The honeys are out!”
“What the hell are honeys?”
“Really good mushrooms, man. My uncle says they’re all over the mountain.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
The old-school website of the Berkshire Mycological Society (BMS) contains this highlighted disclaimer: “What you choose to put into your mouth is not our responsibility.”
That said, something else I learned during my hike with Wheeler is that it is not as easy to poison yourself through fungi ingestion as you might think. According to Wheeler, only about 20 percent of the mushrooms you’re likely to come across in the woods, glens, riversides, and yards of Berkshire County would make you sick.
One in 10 species could kill you, and of these Wheeler highlighted the conical, white, highly toxic Amanita Virosa, which, as he put it, “in two weeks will turn your liver into mush.” About 20 percent, on the other hand, are edible, and ten percent taste good. Golden oysters (Pleurotus Citrinopileatus), available now if you know where to look, taste like heaven when fried up with a little olive oil, garlic, and salt.
The weekly BMS-led Sunday morning hunting forays are open to the public and culminate with an informal categorization of their findings atop a picnic bench. The Mount Everett woods are a regular hunting ground. “This spot here is very low,” explains Wheeler, “and it’s got great tree diversity. It’s an easy walk, and it’s got great trails so everyone can do it. It’s one of the best spots we have.” The forest is full of dead logs which do a decent job, when moisture is otherwise lacking, of retaining moisture. Another favorite go-to spot for the club is alongside the Shay’s Rebellion field on the Egremont-Sheffield road.
You can check the group’s Facebook page for information on upcoming walks and classes at their website. If you’ve ever done gourmet mushroom hunting the convenient way, in the produce section of a specialized supermarket, you’re likely aware of the long, honeycomb-like morel, Morchella esculenta. It’s fickle, fleeting, and highly prized in French cooking, which places it at the top of the fungal hierarchy, as far as capitalism is concerned. Dried morels can fetch well over one hundred dollars a pound online.
During our region’s brief morel season, from early to mid-May, the BMS’s Sunday morning foraging forays might attract twenty-five participants.
Among these on Sunday, July 24 was skincare expert and Lee resident Ginnie Miller who joined through the urging of her acupuncturist, Lisa Wood from Millerton, there with her three kids. “So many of us walk in the woods, and have no idea what we’re looking at,” Miller said.
Helena Barnes, an epidemiologist from Sharon, Connecticut, studies effective interventions for bladder and kidney cancer patients at Sloan-Kettering and started foraging a couple of years ago. Marion Macpherson of Kinderhook has been coming along for fifteen years.
The myriad medicinal (to say nothing of psycho-tropic) qualities of mushrooms are well-documented. Reishi, and Ganoderma Lucidum, boost the immune system, and Bear’s Tooth—or Lion’s Mane—Hieracium Americanum can help people with dementia.
“I heard about studies they’d done on Alzheimer’s patients that if you take it, it helps with memory loss,” Wheeler said.
Hen-of-the-woods is anti-carcinogenic. “A woman told me she took it in pill form when she was in remission for cancer as a means of keeping it at bay.” Oysters are a cholesterol uptake inhibitor, meaning they’ll offset the cholesterol level in, say, an omelet.
On our jaunt, we came up with some bug-infested Reishi (June is prime time for those) and thirty-three other species. “Not too bad for the conditions,” said Wheeler, though the club’s record is nearly five times that amount.
“One year we had 157 species in forty-five minutes.” That was in August, just after a series of hurricanes had plowed through the region. In the early spring they might get between five and 20, and mid to late June somewhere in the forties or fifties. The average in late summer, when there’s been good rainfall, is about 100. This summer, by contrast, has been dry. There are another eight weeks of the season to go, however, and mushrooms are nothing if not unpredictable.
My favorite find of the day was a cute little Chestnut Bolete (Ggyroporus Castaneus), which Wheeler says makes for good eating.
I admired its resemblance to the Italian Porcini, with which I’ve had a thirty-year love affair.
On a hike with my dog the day after our hunt, I was rewarded for my new hyper attention to dead logs when I came upon a beautiful bonanza of golden oysters, which offset the cholesterol in the pork chops I served my family later in the day. Just don’t ask me where I found them.
As avid hunters are only too well aware, the field is vulnerable to the pressures of competition. John once learned that a forager-seller had been checking the BMS website weekly for hints on good locations, and then clearing out the indicated area before Sunday morning rolled around. Wheeler has wised up, and now he only posts locations of walks ninety minutes before their ten am meeting time.
Fortunately, Wheeler’s attitude when it comes to mushrooming is come one, come all, and leave the rivalry at home. “It’s like an Easter egg hunt for adults and we’re mammals and we’re supposed to play most of our life away.”
This coming Sunday, July 31, the Berkshire Mycological Society will be exploring Bob’s Way in Otis, and John Wheeler is offering a ride from the Price Chopper parking lot leaving at 9:30 a.m. to anyone who’d like to join.
