In a Name

Mushrooms, lots of them. And who’d have thought back in our drought-like July that by summer’s end we’d have such moisture-loving bounty? But as a result of some late season wet and cool weather, here they are. Which is to say, everywhere – pummeling upward in the woods, along paths, and, most notably, into our lawns.

They’ve been bountiful in recent news, too. Last week both our local NPR station and the Bangor Daily News reported a significant increase in Maine’s mushroom poisoning deaths. The number’s tripled this year, with 18 this past month alone. About the same time, an island friend, a new and enthusiastic forager of chanterelles, sent me a Washington Post story about two D.C. area men who, in separate incidents in the same week, nearly died from imbibing mushrooms that after a lot of rain suddenly sprouted in their yards. Grateful to have survived – barely – and no doubt pondering how it’s possible our cultivated lawns can be home to what might kill us, they’re still waiting to find out how extensive their long-term liver damage.

What are these mushroom culprits? Death Cap and Destroying Angel.  Names that seem to say: here is all you need to know.  

Names that, if a bit late, the D.C. men now have tucked securely within their lexiconic arsenal. And this they may know now too: regardless any similarities to its benign (read: edible) cousins, the Death Cap is, according to David Spahr of nearby Knox County and self-named “Mushroom Maineaic,” among the world’s most dangerous mushrooms – even though in typical fungal symbiosis, and underground among a network of microscopic mycelium threads where a mushroom’s real work is done, the Death Cap is beneficial to its hosting tree or soil by contributing nutrients like phosphorous and magnesium. The seductively innocent-looking, all-pristine-white Destroying Angel is equally toxic. A single cap of this beguiling sorceress can take down a grown man.

Often, not knowing the names of things has no consequence. Had the D.C. foragers been possessed of even a small amount of mushroom knowledge, they wouldn’t have needed names. They might’ve by sight alone identified typical characteristics of the amanitas genus to which the most deadly, lethal-toting amatoxin mushrooms belong. They’d have considered, for example, whether a cap is parasol-shaped or the gills tightly packed, or if, no matter how shredded, remnants of a membranous veil remain. They might’ve been more cautious if only armed with Mushrooming 101’s dictum: Never eat what you can’t positively identify, meaning that “It looks good” clearly doesn’t cut it. (Such warnings should not be equated, however, with what we admonish our young offspring as they push around another strange green vegetable on their plate.)

Conversely, knowing the names but not possessing adequate knowledge can have serious consequence. Recently, in one of my favorite local restaurants, I didn’t need the waitress to tell me the Black Trumpet mushrooms featured in that day’s menu were delicious. Or that, locally foraged (presumably by experts), their seasonal appearance would be brief. But on a walk in the woods the next day, passing mushrooms that looked to my amateur eye just like what Black Trumpet suggests, and though my salivary glands did what they’re obliged to do as I conjured up a bowl of hot buttered pasta with wild mushrooms, I yielded to uncertainty, continued on my walk and left the Might’ve-Beens to their quiet but insistent shouldering past leaf and duff. Likewise, within sight of my study window is what appears to be a meaty boletus and though I’m attracted to it by that name alone and how it rolls around on my tongue, I’ve not so much as attempted a “nibble test.”

It’s easy to appreciate names, no? Particularly the aptly named. Like Banana Legs, Green Zebra, Mr. Stripey, Black Krim, tomatoes that are too generally chalked up as “heirlooms.” Not that we need such specific names or their identifying characteristics when, mostly, we hunt and gather in the aisles of our local Hannaford’s. And where, actually, names aren’t necessarily accurate thanks to marketing-savvy renaming, the removal of, for example, any “yick” factor that even the vegetable-pusher-arounder’s parents might find unappealing. No way was Slimehead going to make a splash in the fish department until it metamorphosed into Orange Roughy.

For a few summers at our local farmer’s market, the “plant lady” brought buckets of perennials and, along with her aggravating slowness in assembling bouquets as she regaled customers with her encyclopedic knowledge, she insisted on using taxonomic names not common ones, prompting one old-timer gardener who knew a thing or two herself to sniff, “pretty high-falutin, isn’t she?” To her, bee balm was just as appealing as monarda, goat’s beard as aruncus. And, truthfully, do I need to know anything other than bachelor’s buttons to picture bright bits of blue punched into a June garden? Does it matter, really, if the larix is a larch is a tamarack is a hackmatack?

Taxonomic or common, names are a form of handshake introduction. And though a name alone may tell us nothing, it can also be the threshold to knowing. And only through knowing are we likely to get to caring. How can we have a relationship with someone whose name we do not know? How without knowing the names of what resides around us – Annie Dillard’s “happy recognitions” – can a place grow to be that which we love?

“The difference in naming is a difference in seeing,” observed Lee Ann Schreiber in her memoir about moving from Manhattan to a small town in upstate New York and getting to know it as home. For her, seeing only a “chunky dark bird” on a particular date in March would never be the equivalent of welcoming back the first cowbird to her feeder on its migration north. That name, the door that opened into knowledge about a particular species, its habits and migratory patterns, informs her more convincingly it’s spring. Cowbird carries with it the promise of another cycle repeating itself. As it does for me with spring-heralding osprey or, at the far end of the same year, a hackmatack that by its conifer-appearance alone doesn’t suggest its needles will bronze, grow as golden as if dipped into flame, then drop away. And where mushrooms, whatever their names, almost as quickly as they appear, sink, slide back, become again of the earth.