Bruce loved the woods in every season
and we loved how he narrated jags
of mushroom hunting spring and fall --
morels, puffballs, boletes, musical
exotics. Mycology classes at the U
were legendary for amenitas
and impossible to get in. Death-frisson --
never eat what you do not know
and though I'd eaten the Prince
from my own front yard every fungus
pulsed with poison the way lit sparklers
promised hyper-heated injury.
I didn't fear tainted oysters though
an oyster mushroom meant
an automatic no. He took us hunting
chantarelles in the hills east
of Sedro Wooley and the UFO sightings.
Once within Doug firs and hemlocks,
feet sucking diff, he disappeared.
We peered and peered in the constant
drizzle of a mountain stream,
the still mountain air, until first one
and then the other bent under
protective evergreen boughs,
saw chantarelles - orangish, slightly
concave, wavy-edged like carousels,
each bloom a certainty. We bent
their stems and popped them free,
collected fruiting bodies into a Safeway
bag gritty as extra-fine sandpaper.
When Bruce returned we too
bragged and went silent when
he asked where. We hauled
our labors back to the car, gloved
hands clumped with the musky
scent of earth. Years later I stand
in the produce department,
a whole cooled section heaped
with chantarelles for a princely sum,
but I hold close where ours came from.