Shroom Hunting

It rained a lot last week, sheets and sheets of rain. But this morning, glorious sunshine. On top of Maisie’s Peak, out of breath after a week off and with an arm stretching towards San Francisco, downtown was as tall as a cuticle, my fingernail on the horizon. But I could see it! Amazing early spring air, damp with pungent Bay Laurel and lichen and moss.

Jerry met us at breakfast and decided that a post-rain Saturday was prime for mushroom hunting, so we drove up the hill to an alpine lake along skyline Ridge, ditched the canoe (whim #2) and went off the beaten path with the kidlets.

Chas surprised me with his reaction to a Banana slug. He was pretty offended, wouldn’t touch it at first. This blew me away; I think these things are the coolest molluscs around, like a cold slice of mango looking back at you.

We found a rough-skinned newt, too, that was hard to photograph in the deep shade of a thick, ancient redwook .It crept with fat, orange and humanlike fingers across our hands, drunkenlike yet determined to get back into the detritus. So I returned him to the ground before we exhausted the little guy, and he indeed honed immediately into a random opening in the lattice of wet pine and laurel litter.

We bypassed fallen trees, macerated by rain and time and recently, bear paws. Fresh fiddleleafs, little forest babies, unfurling and mushrooms everywhere. Fruiting above a mycelium beneath an oak tree, wrinkled black Elephant correction: “Elfin” saddles. Little brown mushrooms, maroon unbrellas, fluorescent capes and fans of turkey feathers. Matte black puffs, like ashballs, and salmon candylike clusters on rotting bark. In the split of a tree, neon orange jelly fungus.