Mushrooming in the Porkies

by

Mushrooms sprouted everywhere after the steady rain that soaked the old-growth hemlock of Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Michigan. In late October, I spent two weeks there, in the largest stand of old-growth forest remaining in the Midwest.

Peterson Field Guide in hand, I was ready for the mushroom equivalent of “birding.” I wanted to see and identify the varieties – but wasn’t looking to bring anything home to eat.

The first day, just outside my cabin, I was drawn to a brilliant red mushroom swelling from the litter in the dark open space beneath the high hemlock canopy. Just down the lane was something that looked like a piece of veined wet and swollen human tissue creeping across a trunk. It was a lungwort lichen.

“Lungworts only grow in rich, unpolluted and very old forests,” said one mushroom guide. The description hints of something primeval, rare and precious.

The Porkies are all of that, the only state park in Michigan that is designated a wilderness … 60,000 acres, 35,000 of which are primary, never-been-cut, virgin forest.

The park’s status protects this unadulterated ecosystem against altering by vegetation, commercial enterprises, roads or motorized equipment. Park Interpreter Bob Wild adds that the wide variety of plants and trees, along with an ecosystem allowed to decay naturally, makes for great mushroom viewing.

“The more uncommon mushrooms in the Midwest are found in our old-growth forest.”

Every day I walked, I noticed treasures at every turn among the mushrooms: tender yellow Waxycaps glimmering light on the shaded duff; a golden Amanita, smooth and oval as an egg in a white cup half buried in the pine needles; globules of orange Witches’ Butter oozing from fine cracks in old wood, edible according to my guidebook, if I could be certain of my identification, which I quickly became aware I could not.

Single perfect mushrooms gleamed on the ground like small expensive gifts in pale colors of the most unlikely hues: lavender, mint green, shades of gray, truly lovely enough to cause me to sink to my knees in awe. Another resembled a scrap of old man’s white beard, torn from a dead trunk and discarded.

In trying to identify mushrooms, I learned to examine them closely, noticing whether they were on soil, dead hemlock or live birch. On the first day my observations were basic, as I examined caps for gills (thin layers under the cap), pores (small holes seen instead of gills) or teeth (spines hanging from the cap). After a few days in one area, I’d moved on, learning as I went.

What shape are the pores? What color the spores? It was like going from Googling “mushrooms” in the morning and progressing by noon to “species richness of ectomycorrhizal fungi.”

I started to realize that these bright fruits were the tip of something much larger … the smallest bits of evidence of a vast living web of fungi, a network beneath my feet that connected to roots of all the living trees, penetrated everything dead around and overhead and filled the air with spores … and once in a while pushed up an astonishing fruit.

I couldn’t resist the urge to step on a puffball, one of the small gray marbles clustered on a log. Dust poured forth, millions of tiny spores filling the air. Mushroom spores have been found miles above the earth.

Colors were especially startling. Why so many and why so bright? The answer was apparent by watching squirrels harvest this bumper crop in their scatterbrained way, running frantically about, with bright ovals of mushroom caps clenched in their mouths. They wedged some into craggy tops of stumps, apparently to dry, and abandoned others after a slight nibble, as though distracted by some other task or appetizing treat.

The pores of a meaty-looking Bolete cap lying on the ground had been entirely gnawed off by a creature with teeth the size of pins. Nearby bright red domes lay scattered, with holes nibbled or pecked into the caps. Forest creatures seemed to be on some sort of mushroom rampage.

When conditions are right, fungi push a mushroom up onto the surface to spread spores that line their gills or pores by the millions. It’s probable that color attracts the attention of spore dispersers, creatures like the squirrels, deer, insects and others. It’s also possible that color might warn predators away, allowing the mushrooms time to mature.

My guidebooks are full of warnings about the terrible consequences of ingesting poisonous mushrooms. Certain Amanitas are obviously dangerous, vividly marked with a skull and crossbones next to the description and as a further warning, sometimes called Deathcaps. Some Amanitas are mind altering, used by the Vikings before battle to obliterate fear and by shamans in Siberia to speak to gods.

Frequently I saw squirrels carrying Amanita caps around in their mouths. Squirrels eat poisonous mushrooms with impunity, but I wasn’t sure whether these were the kind that are deadly or hallucinogenic.

The Little Carp River Trail follows the river’s course as it passes, churning over boulders through old- growth hemlock. The soft fungus-rotted innards of huge stumps, like teddy bears’ stuffing, had been pulled out as a black bear might if looking for grubs.

A beautiful gold Amanita poked up, its cap covered with fragments of hemlock needles and soft white patches, remnants of the veil from which it emerged. Its anchoring mycelium – that white thread-like mass – probably was also connected to the nearby giant hemlock, encircling its roots in order to provide essential nutrients in exchange for receiving simple sugars produced by the high canopy. It’s a relationship without which neither fungi nor tree could survive. The more I understood about the complexities of the forest, the more wonderstruck I became.

On one drizzling day I carefully extracted a pure white mushroom, possibly a Funnel Cap (Leucopaxillus) from the soft forest floor and came up with a bundle of white threads and dead needles matted together as though stuck with glue. These were the mycelia that could be so helpful to living trees, but in this case were working toward a different end, that of decaying dead needles.

I came upon that decay going on in earnest on the Pinkerton Trail, a particularly lovely path that winds over humps and hollows left by dead and decayed trees. Again, old-growth hemlock towered overhead, the aroma of clean pine wafted up with each step. An enormous fallen hemlock was being consumed by fungi.

Woodcrust, small flexible pink semicircles fringed with white fur, the workhorses of decay in old-growth forests, grew alongside artists’ fungi (Ganoderma). On the upturned bottom side of the root mass an entire family of Fairy Helmets popped out in clusters, gold and speckled in youth, then spreading their striped brown-and-white caps in maturity and hanging blackened and stiff in old age. A coating of golden velvet-covered roots, dirt and fungi … decaying the decaying mushrooms.

Were it not for the mycelium of these fungi digesting the dead wood, I’d have been climbing over piles of trunks rather than mounds of dirt.

For a while, the largest organism in the world was a mass of hyphae – that of the Honey Mushroom (Armillaria gallica). The web of inter-connected strands covers about 37 acres near Crystal Falls, about 100 miles south of the Porkies. This single organism is estimated to be more than 1,500 years old and to weigh 100 tons. The “Humongus Fungus,” as it’s been nicknamed, has since been outsized by another bundle of hyphae that is 2,400 years old and covers 2,200 acres out west.

Pulling a single Hemlock Varnish Shelf from a dead trunk or plucking a Turkeytail from its log felt like a tug, an inconsequential tear at first, but one that could start the unraveling of an immense ecosystem.

Leslie Askwith is retired from the Chippewa County Health Department in Michigan as an environmental health sanitarian and emergency preparedness coordinator, now working happily as a writer from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. She was the first writer-in-residence at the Porcupine Mountains, during the amazing month of mushrooms (October 2007).