Art by Daniel "Attaboy" Seifert
Disclaimer: DO NOT GO HUNTING FOR MAGIC MUSHROOMS IF YOU HAVE NOT DONE THE EXTENSIVE RESEARCH REQUIRED TO IDENTIFY DIFFERENT SPECIES ACCURATELY.
With that said, I was reckless, however, my adventure was nothing short of an unforgettable experience which I will repeat.
This all started when my friend (we will call him JAR) told me that instead of buying magic mushrooms from the Bagwan (the name we gave to our plug), we should go pick them instead. “This dude has to be a fool to think magic mushrooms just grow all willy nilly like that” was also my reaction and I called him out for his absolute disregard for basic mycology. 3 minutes and a quick google search later, I realized I was wrong and found out that there were in fact multiple species of Shrooms growing natively and abundantly in my state. That was pretty much all I needed to be on board with his plan.
For those that do not know anything about Shroom hunting, mushrooms like to grow in poop, specifically cow poop. This means all we needed to do was find a cow field, and to our luck, we knew a couple of areas nearby that had exactly that. The next morning I was getting ready to hop some fences and step in some shit, and that is exactly what we did. Our morning was consumed by the search for cows in fields near where we lived, but we kept coming up cold. Eventually, however, we found the holy grail of cow fields. But like all good things, it came with a catch. It was surrounded by not only a 7-foot fence but also another electrical fence on the inside of the perimeter. Past the electrical fence, there was a moat of some sort filled with greenish water and a layer of lily pads that floated peacefully on top. Smack dab in the middle of the field was what I would call a mini sub-tropical forest. When I looked it up on Google Maps it had an elliptical shape and was about 700 ft in diameter on its longest side. We figured that there had to be cars coming in and out of the field, so there must have been a gate. Sure enough, there was, and soon after the cars on the street had stopped passing by, we hopped the gate, making sure not to get skewered by the barbed wire. Once we were on the other side, it was almost magical. If you ignored the cars and the suburban life surrounding the field you could have sworn that you were in some sort of African safari. As soon as we crossed the land bridge dividing the moat, a flock of beautiful white birds flew from behind the only tree that provided them with shade like if it were the opening scene from The Lion King.
“Fuck bro you just stepped in shit.” That was all I needed to hear and smell to know we were in the right place. We made a Beeline for an old rusted out metal shack (which JAR and I joked to be a meth lab) but it was locked, crushing our pipe dream of finding a hidden stash of drugs as we soldiered on in the 97-degree heat. Behind this shack was the start of the grove. Trees that seemed to have been fighting the wind for much of their lives gave us some much-needed shade. Yet as we were blanketed by the shadows, I felt the glare of beasts lock onto us. I looked to my right and spotted a herd of cows about 20 feet away. Some of them were watching us, some of them were just relaxing under the shade that the canopy provided. For the most part, we ignored our mammalian friends. If anything, they gave me hope that we would find some fresh feces teeming with fungi.
That’s when we saw the mighty Shroom. In all honesty, it looked
more like a shriveled up, orange penis; something that could have belonged to Mr. Trump, but that didn’t deter our excitement. We had found our first mushroom. We cut it and put it in a Tupperware. As we ventured deeper into the grove we encountered the one thing we had failed to prepare for: spiders. Now let me make things perfectly clear, I am not the kind of person that would burn down a house if they saw a tiny spider vibing in the corner of their room. I understand their role in the ecosystem and respect the little guys. BUT, this forest was straight out of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We decided that as a precaution we would use long sticks and swirl them around in front of us before going in any direction like some sort of poor man’s machete. This technique worked wonderfully and we pretty much used it until we stepped out of the forest.
With our sticks in hand, we were ready to pick every single mushroom we could get our hands on. After collecting some more of what we called Oysters (flat-looking mushrooms growing on trees that we wanted to believe were psychedelic but we knew in our hearts weren’t), we reached a blockade. Every direction except behind us was covered in spider webs. But these were not the spiders we had seen toward the beginning of the forest, they were the creepy looking ones with lanky legs and a long body. As soon as we touched their spider web we realized this was truly a different breed. The spider web of this particular spider felt like nylon. I do not know a lot about spiders but in my mind, the stronger the web, the higher the probability the spider has of fucking my shit up. Suddenly, JAR screamed as he looked up and we saw what has to have been the king/queen of all the spiders. It looked like a hand-sized, genetically modified version of the other scary spiders we had just encountered. We laughed in fear and moved on… Until I did something very stupid. I, (like an idiot) after seeing a caterpillar on JAR's shoulder, decided that my best course of action was to yell that there was a bug on his shirt. This illiterate jumble of words sounded like “HoLY SHTi There BUg shoulder CaterPillar.” After seeing an Apex predator of a spider, startling him about a bug intruding in his personal space was not the smartest move. Like any normal human being, he screamed a little and realized it was just a cute wriggly green dude dancing all over his shirt. He carefully removed the caterpillar and left him to munch on some leaves. This led us to continue our current and more pressing dilemma: “Where the fuck do we go?” We decided that we should carefully remove the tinier spiderweb to the left of us without harming the spider. Luckily, JAR doesn’t fear death and he bravely took it upon himself to do so. As soon as we breached the spider blockade we were met with the most amazing sight. Right in the middle of an opening in the forest was a tree being illuminated by a single incandescent ray of sunlight shining through the canopy. The tree was being hugged by another, almost parasitic, species of tree. Besides that, it was a fresh sight in the never-ending spider forest and JAR decided to walk around the tree and scout for more mushrooms.
We found a fucking beehive!
I mean seriously, I was not even planning on eating the mushrooms, I just wanted to pick them. But I certainly did not sign up for a forest filled with deadly spiders or bees. The God Tree’s backside was covered in them. They were harmless but in the moment I really did not want to encounter any more fucking bugs. (I do not know why people say ignoring bees helps in trying to avoid them. It honestly just feels like an IRL Medusa scenario. Why would bees ignore 2 huge evolved apes when they waltz into their home? And for the record, the only 2 times that I have been stung by bees have bee-n completely unwarranted). Regardless, that is what JAR suggested I do and it worked this time. We had now survived a spider and a bee infestation.
Past The God Tree was some barbed wire fencing and JAR suggested that we should jump it but I was too tired to continue on exploring the forest and we decided to head back. We walked out the way we came from while taking slightly different routes, stumbling upon another batch of oyster mushrooms growing on dead logs. After examining them carefully we decided to take them even though it was clearly not the fellow we were looking for. In hindsight, we should have just left them alone and let them do their job decomposing and whatnot but our desire to find a psychedelic mushroom championed over our environmental concern.
We finally reached the opening we had entered through, but this time something was different. Something more sinister than the spiders or the bees had taken hold of our awareness. A huge bull was blocking our path to the gate we had come in through. Well, it was not exactly blocking it, but his eyes were still fixed on us and honestly, I was a bit scared. I’ve run away from bulls before and it is not an enjoyable experience. His balls, swinging side to side, had me in a hypnotic trance and the only way to escape him was by carefully and slowly walking past him.
JAR had other plans. Again, he made a ludicrous suggestion to walk around the bull and get close enough to the cow den to find fresh poop (because the Shrooms grow were the poop is freshest). And again, I agreed. We walked towards the tree where the migrating birds had departed from and then along the moat until we got close enough to the cow den to find some recently shat shit. Still no Shrooms.
JAR and I had survived 5-inch spiders, 2 beehives (we found another one on our way out of the forest), and a bull but had nothing to show for it. In the end, we were satisfied with our adventure. We walked over the landbridge, hopped the gate, and walked back to JAR’s car.
At JAR’s house, we evenly distributed our ugly no-good mushrooms and I went home. Once I had rested from my journey I watched a video (this is not the exact video JAR sent me but it is similar) JAR had sent me on how to grow mushrooms from older mushrooms. The video instructed me to fill ¼ of a Mason jar with used coffee grounds, then to place the cut-up mushrooms (I only used the regular looking mushrooms, not the oysters) on top of the coffee bed, and then to finish filling with coffee grounds until about ½ of the jar was full and all the mushrooms had been covered. The final step was to grab a coffee filter and seal the top of the jar by wrapping rubber bands around the mouth of the jar, using the coffee filter as a semi-permeable lid. I used bounty paper towels as I thought that would work. It did not. 30 days later and all I have in my jar is white mold. JAR, on the other hand, sealed the jar correctly and now there is a thriving culture of mushrooms growing peacefully within it. The reason we went through this whole process was to correctly identify the mushrooms once they had grown again. The final step is to do a spore print which will aid us in identifying the mushroom species we collected, but because nothing has grown to an identifiable size, that part must wait.
Stay tuned to find out what happened to JAR’s jar.