When I show him the orange meat, he says, “Oh yes, Chicken-of-the-woods.  Sulphur shelf.  Delicious.”

At home that evening, it,s almost dinner time.  My cousin Anja, interested in the medicinal properties of Northwest mushrooms, sent me three separate field guides to mushrooms.  The total page volume of all three books combined is over 2,000 pages.  I must be able to identify these yellow mushrooms with all those pages. 

After paging through each book, I announce to Jane that indeed these were not chanterelles! 

I tell her they are Jack-O-Lanterns. “In fact, they glow in the dark.”  I tell her it’s a good thing we didn’t eat them, because they are extremely poisonous.  “They won’t kill you,” the guides say.  But in their own literary styles, they list all the things the mushroom will do to you.  After I tell her this, I ask her if she wants to sit in a dark closet with me. “It takes about 10 minutes in pure darkness,” I tell her.  “After that, the book says you can look at the mushrooms, and see them glow.”

Jane declines my offer, so I sit in the closet on my own.  It is not such an easy thing to do, to sit there in pure darkness and wait, with nothing to do.  So I let myself drift into thought.  And some time later, I open my eyes and, a faint green glow?  Maybe.  Or have these mushrooms been dead too long anyways? 

Nobody really knows why these mushrooms are bioluminescent.  However, some mycologists ponder the notion that mushrooms may be more connected to the nocturnal world than the day world.  So fitting to their reputation as organisms of death and mystery, some wonder whether mushrooms feed not on the energy of the sun, but on the energy of the moon. 

When I emerge from the closet, it’s dinner time.  While Jane cooks up something conventional, I am slicing up the sulphur shelf mushrooms.  I sauté them in olive oil and garlic and a dash of salt.

The sulphur shelf is a burlesque orange up-top, and a goldfinch yellow underneath.  The sulphur shelf is not sold commercially, for one reason that fifty percent of the human population is allergic to it.

Amateur mycologists like to get a little bit sick sometimes, they like to say: hunting the thousands of edible mushrooms in this world is a practice of independence, wit, and folk biology.

In a small enough dose, nothing is ‘toxic’, and with mushrooms, ‘toxic’ at a lower dose may simply mean mind-altering.  Exploratory.

But Northwest Indians are not known to have used mushrooms for psychedelia, nor did they consume alcohol or any sort of drugs.  In fact, little is recorded about their consumption of mushrooms.  Let’s put it this way; mushrooms were an available source of food in almost any season; especially on the wet, emerald coasts. 

12,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, 400 years ago, anybody, everybody…everybody pretty much anywhere in the world was a folk biologist.  Distinguishing between the hundreds of varieties common to anybody here in the Northwest would have been a skill developed at the earliest stages of life.

In today’s modern West, identification of species for the purpose of edibility seems completely foreign.  But it’s not.  As a species, we are not really that separated from our not so distant past.  A European American just 150 years ago would himself be familiar with hundreds of plants, fungi, animals.  He tested, he relied on the knowledge of his community, he ate.  Sometimes he got sick.