Mushroom Fest

Blog post 1

8/18/20220

37O49’0” N 107O52’33” W

I have, for the turmoil of my early years, had the privilege of calling the town of Telluride home, and with that responsibility, the town taught me from a young age all that it valued most: chief among those things being mushrooms. From the age of 5, I can remember gallivanting through the woods with my parents and brothers in tow looking for the elusive delicacy of Chanterelles, Porcinis, Hawk’s Wings, and more (prized edible mushrooms), then taking our finds home and preparing a feast fit for mycofiles. But it is not so often that you see a New Jersey-bred end-of-culdesac nuclear family type ingesting funga, so how did we get there? Telluride, among other incredible features, has a marathon of festivals that span the summer months and liven up the town every weekend, and one of those festivals just happens to be the biggest meeting of mushroom lovers on this side of the country. After a couple of years of seeing these “weird hippies who dress up as mushrooms” traipse around town, we eventually figured if you can’t beat em join em, and so the rest is history. Now years later I find myself attending the 42nd mushroom festival and my 15th year, and so far I have spent the last day getting my mind blown with revelations about ecosystems and the place of Funga in it all. So over the next couple of days, I will document what occurs at this fascinating gathering and relay it to you, the distant observer.

8/19/20220

Today is the second official day of the mushroom festival and it is very late, so I will keep it short. There is a very wise lady named Katrina Blair. She is the resident forager extraordinaire of the Durango area and makes the long trek from Durango to Telluride every mushroom festival harvesting enough edible plants along the way to feed more than a hundred people. This upcoming Monday I will begin a residency at her farm for two weeks to learn about permaculture, farming, and of course foraging, so I decided to volunteer at her dinner to get to know her a little bit before I moved to the farm. So that is how I spent the lion's share of my day: softening limes, preparing chokecherry and apple garnishes, and serving zucchini lasagna. After nearly 5 hours of work came one of my most treasured events at the mushroom festival, The Mycolicious, Mycoluscious, Mycological Myco-Poetry Slam, where the past present, and future poet laureates of Telluride gather to sporulate the audience with the mushroom bug through poetry. My father is a previous poet laureate, so naturally he always speaks, and I being his son also speak, so we decided to have a bit of mushroom fun on stage. Here is what we read:

The first thing I saw in the morning

Was a huge golden bee ploughing

His burly right shoulder into the belly

Of a sleek yellow pear

Low on a bough.

Before he could find that sudden black honey

That squirms around in there

Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.

The pear fell to the ground,

With the bee still half alive

Inside its body.

He would have died if I hadn’t knelt down

And sliced the pear gently

A little more open.

The bee shuddered, and returned.

Maybe I should have left him alone there,

Drowning in his own delight.

The best days are the first

To flee, sang the lovely

Musician born in this town

So like my own.

I let the bee go

Among the gasworks at the edge of Mantua.

Now that is a beautiful poem right?

But that is not all. You see, a couple of mushroom festivals ago I heard from a rumor that the great poet James Wright was also a mycologist. So I made the trip to Ohio and broke into James Wright's house (which is now a museum), and I searched through the house and eventually, under the floorboards of his office, I found his original manuscripts which were in the true rendition he intended: the mushroom cant. And so here is the true version of the poem, the mushroom verse:

The first thing I saw in the morning

Was a huge golden chanterelle

Plow its burly right shoulder

Into the gnarled red grain of a log

Deliquescing low in a valley

Before it could hit that sudden red cellulose

Squirming around inside the tree

I could not bare anymore

And knelt down to pluck it from the ripe soil

Maybe I should have left it there

To destroy in its own delight

But the mycelium in my brain

Forced me to rip it from the ground

And sporulate the gas works

At the edge of Mantua/Telluride

8/20/20220

Today was the last day of the mushroom festival, and after the normal hour or two of lectures was the awe-inspiring event of the parade, where all of the mushroom die-hards (like me) march down Main Street and dress up in lavish mushroom regalia. This year I have decided to dress up as the Fun-Gents (Fungi + Gentlemen). These couple of days are some of the best every year, and I would highly recommend that you make the trip next year and join me in this celebration of mushrooms.