So there was a group of Moravian music. There was a string quartet. There was even music that featured Negro spirituals. There was American Indian. They were at the front of the stage and then behind them was the orchestra that was playing a whole other piece called Renga , which was derived from the drawings of Thoreau. So he kind of picked out little things and made visual scores of them. There were a lot of swoops and punctuations and, you know, kind of randomized music going on.
Anyway, that was the piece we were working on. So at the time I was living outside of Albany, which is where I grew up. And he came up to Albany to work on this piece. He was basically proofreading the material I had put together. It was a rainy rainy week for the most part.
I want to go out. And we drove around in the station wagon and we did some car foraging. And so forth. By the end of the afternoon, we had gathered quite a lot and he basically focused on edible mushrooms. That afternoon it was not a mycological exploration. It was focusing on things that he was familiar with. And we went back to my apartment and he cooked everything up and we ate it all, each mushroom prepared a different way to accentuate its flavor.
And then we washed down with some Montepulciano or something. That was the big mycological adventure I had with Cage. What actually brought me to mushrooms had to do with his death, which came rather suddenly.
But the big one came on August 12th of as he was making his dinner. That was the end of the line for John. And so I was kind of left, bereaved. He was a friend at that point. He was a patron.
So there was a big hole there and one of the little mushroomy things that did happen while he was alive, what came about… An incident: my father who likes mushrooms and decided he knew enough about mushrooms to go look without any experience or knowledge of it. And he did finally get sick from eating mushrooms and I decided I had to get him a field guide or something.
Cause you know, he was just flying by the seat of the pants. Yeah, that looks delicious. You know, lots of people have made that mistake.
And I was reading through the preface and in that preface Gary Lincoff, the author, wrote about how he came to mushrooms and it was through John Cage! So there was this connection there. And so August 12th, John died. And I, up to that point, I was starting to think about a hobby. Before that, as I mentioned it was a full-time job plus, and I was at a point I was working for John, but I also had other clients, and so I was working a lot.
Too much and not getting out in the woods enough. And so I thought to have a hobby, which would get me out into the woods and also might, in the acquisition of Latin binomials, might keep my brain going in my dotage. And so a friend suggested I go to the New York Botanical Garden and take their beginning mushroom class up there in September, which was being taught by Gary Lincoff. I guess the best way to talk about Gary is to talk about the club.
So I joined the club. Now, this is in After the last day of class, Gary handed out an information sheet for people to introduce them to a way of going on with their mushroom activity. And the New York Mycological Society was listed as one of the resources. So, there was a phone number. There was no web page in , very hard to find the New York Mycological Society. I have a feeling in a way that may have been a good thing because you had to be a hunter to find them, you know.
I think that was a good thing! But in any case, it was rather easy for me. I had a phone number and I talked to Wilbur Williams, the treasurer, and paid my dues and began going on walks with them. And it was an interesting group of people.
And it was at the end of the season when I joined up. It was a smaller group at that point. And so there were a number of personalities that we became acquainted with, but all of whom or most of whom at least were very friendly, very free with their information, very interested in telling you whatever they knew about mushrooms.
A mushroom in a photograph is really a two dimensional thing and you need to study mushrooms in really four dimensions or five dimensions. You need to know their length and width and depth three, their smell, and how they proceed in time, particularly with certain species. So it really is a much more complicated affair than looking at a photograph and comparing it to another photograph.
And that hands-on experience is something that you get, you know, on a trail with someone who knows about the mushroom. So one of the people who was the go-to person in the club was Gary Lincoff, and he just had an encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms.
And so you not only learned the basics, you learned some of the subtleties. You learned the aspects of the habitat, the ecology, you know, the whole nine yards was what Gary would bring. So those walks were precious. And we were like his acolytes. And Gary would go through, who knows hundreds of mushrooms and, go through at least 20 or 30 of them and give you a complete descriptive, really encyclopedia-type essay on each one.
So he was invaluable. He was funny. Eugenia Bone, who wrote a book called Mycophilia featured Gary in large part. Over the years, one of the aspects of the New York Mycological Society that has been part of its structure is that we have our walks and then in the wintertime, there are lectures. So you have something to do during the so-called off-season. So Gary was the person who organized that and brought in people, but he always had at least one lecture, you know, when he would talk about things, always in a sort of off-beat way.
It was never a dry lecture. There was just a little entertainment built into it, you know. That was his profession. He did mushrooms all the time. He taught botany as well. He was actually a first-rate botanist, in addition to a first-rate mycologist. I can tell you, he knew the botanical gardens so well, he could do it blind because he went through a period of blindness.
He had hurt his back severely, and he was in so much pain, he was put on steroids. And the corticosteroids will cause a cataract to form on your eyes. And so he was telling me one night at dinner, he was like teaching these classes in botany.
I mean, he was very, very complete. It was a holistic kind of situation. So he inspired me to delve into microscopy and all of that. Greenbrook is an interesting place. It sits out there on the top of the Palisades kind of across from Yonkers is about five miles North of the George Washington Bridge.
And you think of a bunch of Ms. Marples running around working on flowers and whatnot. This was probably a pretty powerful formidable group of women. So Lynn had been leading these walks and I had gone on a few with her.
And was introduced to Lynn through the then-naturalist, a woman by the name of Nancy Slovic. Sadly Lynn left us in After her passing, Nancy asked me if I could take over the walks. I had always done a little bit of teaching, but I felt better prepared through my association with Gary.
The scientific method if you will, of a mycologist is to make collections and to describe them. To classify them and kind of organize them. Mushrooms, probably everybody knows by now have relationships with plants through their root systems.
So making a list is just like what mycologists and botanists do. It really is the scaffolding of the profession. It provides one with the information that one needs to come to a greater understanding of the place of fungi in the world, how they interact with our world, how we interact with them and so forth.
And so Guy made a list of the mushrooms. What would grow out of that eventually would be a book with descriptions and, you know, supporting literature and photography and so forth. And she finally nagged me enough and I said, okay. And we set off on this scientific adventure. Up to this point, I was basically pot hunting, meaning we were hunting for food.
So I was kind of an itinerant, going to places where I would find morels in the spring and then there would usually be a break till the summer season started up. And then we would go looking for, you know, Lactarius in the hot months of July and the Black Trumpets and the Chanterelles. And you go to the places that are good habitats for those things. Now, there are a lot of other mushrooms. I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of species, the fleshy mushrooms, you know. As soon as you see a Chanterelle , you go for it and you spend your time there to pick every last one.
Then you go looking for another patch of yellow in the woods and ignore everything else in between, right? A survey is a whole other exploration. So then I was no longer kicking Russulas.
I was picking them and trying to figure out what they were, and in order to do that, you needed to get the microscope out. You brought literature with you and you could just do a total zone in on polypores. One of the things I neglected to say was that I did say it was a conservancy.
So we were allowed to pick mushrooms to do this work. The project was advised basically by Nancy who was a first-rate naturalist who studied all things botanical and otherwise, very familiar with all the flora and fauna of the area. She set up the protocols that we followed. So, we accessioned everything. We had people following a protocol that included in situ photography. Then we would pick the collection.
Then that would be brought to a staging place where we would then do studio photography as best we could. And then everything was labeled with its location and the surrounding trees and so forth.
It was in itself for the people who participated, it was a great way to learn about how to do this kind of work. For me, I was then confronted with trying to identify these mushrooms that I had, many of which I had no idea what their names were. We did this work every Saturday or Sunday for two years. And in its broad outlines, it was quite interesting. Overall, we made 1, collections.
The summer of was a rather thunderstormy summer. That summer, we found a little over collections. And that year we found over a thousand, so we more than doubled our collecting. On that point alone, it was instructive just to show how, what the interplay of hydration and fungi can result in.
Particularly looking at the polypores, which are rather durable, but we find all sorts of things like the split-gill mushroom, the Schizophyllum commune , oysters, which grow all year round, and other species, which are very cold-tolerant, you know. The Enoki , for example. That is really where we kind of got our feet wet. Gary said, well, I think you should make a presentation to the society on the work that you do. You know, so I did this thing and it had everything but the kitchen sink in it but you know, you have to start somewhere.
So Gary was in so many ways, he taught me about mushrooms, but he also led me into other activities, until eventually, you know, he kindly suggested that I take over his classes at the botanical gardens. One of the things to illustrate what seemed anomalous to me at the time was this mushroom I found. It was a polypore. A polypore is a durable mushroom that we generally find growing on wood. And when I say durable mushroom to differentiate it from the more evanescent ones we find.
So, your typical fleshy mushroom that you find — be it a Chanterelle or a Morel or whatever you find growing with a cap and a stem as a rule — are mushrooms that are destined to be basically rotten in a couple of weeks.
So they come up, they produce spores, and then they demise one way or other. Then rain comes for a longer period of time during which time they then begin to grow more of these spore-producing cells and produce spores.
And so they go back and forth between these two states. But they may be around for, as I said, a season, there are annuals. And then there are these polypores that grow for many years. Year after year, they add a new layer of spore-producing cells.
So anyway, these are known as the polypores. I found these polypores in November. Some of them were just starting to form and other older ones had been out for awhile. I took them home and I keyed them out in a book I had on polypores. So when I say I keyed them out, I used a book that contains many descriptions of many fungi.
You have this structure at the beginning of a chapter or the book, or both places that will lead you to a particular identification or a genus or a species. So I did this, I went through the key with this mushroom that I had found, and it turned out it keyed out beautifully to a mushroom described in the book or named in the book as Polyporus elegans. The only problem with it: it was a southern species. Gary was teaching a series of classes, ten or something on Saturday mornings, on polypores.
And it turned out into a long exploration. We ended up consulting Tom Volk and others, and it turned out it was this southern species. It might be a contribution to that point of view. Greenbrook is situated on the Palisades escarpment. When lava flows into cracks in sedimentary rock, they form either sills or dikes. Dikes are vertical. Sills are horizontal. On my many rides between my home base, which was up around Albany in New York on the train, I would look across the Hudson and see these columns.
But in fact, the Palisades are a very thick sill of diabase. The Clean Editor. Bacon Bad Editor. Tears Editor. Attention Span Writer. Show all Hide all Show by Hide Show Editor 27 credits. TV Series 3 episodes - Second Chances Show all 8 episodes. Show all 47 episodes. Miami Freerunning Show all 6 episodes. TV Series documentary 3 episodes - Episode 4.
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