KNOMO CHOICIUS

Fake News From Futures Past: The Essential Robert Duncan Milne

Here is my Goodreads review of a new book that will be of interest to those interested in life after death, old science fiction, or Spiritualism. I cyberly met the editor, whose PhD project this was, through a weird orchestration of events last winter, and, being a fellow writer, offered to review the book. It’s now available on Barnes and Nobel, but here is the text of my review:

The heading, “Fake News from Futures Past,” is from the Foreword. The Acknowledgements of all that it took to compile the stories of Robert Duncan Milne, and the detailed Introduction to the collection of stories themselves, this massive treasury of stories from the time of the first blossoming of genre science fiction fifty years before it was called that, gives us a window back into a time when science and spirituality were not at such odds as they are for most people today.

I was a participant for two decades in a USA based Spiritualist church, and even briefly a member. Having had a series of mystical experiences in 1996, including a materialization event that was pretty scary, the Independent Spiritualist Church, combining belief in science and spirit, became a welcoming community for me. Yet nobody mentioned science fiction. We knew about the Fox sisters, but not Robert Duncan Milne. By the time I was attending, the attention paid to science was mostly perfunctory and declaratory, claiming that Spiritualist seances offered irrefutable scientific proof of the world of spirit. The actual members of the congregations had little to no interest in actually gaining any understanding of scientific facts or reasoning. This was disappointing to me, as a working engineering consultant. But reading the introduction to the book provides lots of historical context to what was happening in the American culture as technology started battering older ways of life.

I have been a lifelong lover of science fiction, and especially older science fiction. As Scottish sci fi writer Ken MacLeod writes in the Foreword, the writing practice of the time, which continued in full strength up through John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), was to include “fake news” and other “fake” (fantasy, fictional) references to provide the background for the stories. I miss this style of storytelling, and was happy to get a drink of it in the stories I read for this review. Nowadays, writers of all genres are told to “show, not tell” what is going on. That’s annoying for me. If I wanted them to show me everything, I would watch a movie, not read a book.

Here are some thoughts on a few of the stories, written in a time of skeptics, but not a dogmatically skeptical population at large. Science was new, science was interesting, science seemed to provide credibility to Spiritualism, when compared to the old “revealed truth” faiths.

The Silent Witness: What a great story. Anyone working as an expert witness over the last 30 years will be familiar with the arguments about whether digitally captured photos, rather than film, could be presented as evidence. AI is reopening those arguments again. Here we have the latest scientific gadget of the 19th century, an experimental recording and playing phonograph, that becomes the silent witness and saves the innocent accused.

HOT NEWS! An AI video was just allowed in court to let a murder victim speak.

The Eidoloscope: The editors note that this story is considered one of Milne’s greatest works. While he was not the only speculative writer describing the possibility of travel to the past, they conclude that he likely picked the idea up from what we now might call “the thought field,” rather than from any of the other writers exploring this idea. In the story, we learn that the walls really do have eyes, or at least the ability to see and record, even if they need the help of Milne’s character’s invention to let them retell what they’ve seen. Milne is absolutely not giving mere lip-service to science. He explains in clear prose that any willing lay-person may readily understand, the concepts of how his character’s time machine works. It’s simple cause and effect, like any other science, even if it appears to bring us recordings of ghosts rather than embodied beings. The timing is such that the embodied beings whose likenesses are brought before the witnesses are still remembered and recognized by current living humans, when they have the chance to see the walls emit their memories.

The editors show what a visionary Milne was, in addition to being a literary and scientific genius. He understood, brought to life, and warned us about the ethical issues that are usually only revealed after extensive use and reliance on new technologies.

It’s also interesting that Milne, likely in line with the word usage of the day, calls out the new technological gadgets as “art.” The sci-fi gadgets were made by individuals using concepts and tinkering skills, rather than a methodological scientific process. Of course, as the Rosicrucians and modern physicists alike tell us today, it’s all about harmonization of vibrations. Who needs a team and a big budget? Besides, the inventor meets the skepticism of the other character with irrefutable 18th century thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed! It is merely changed from one form to another. Thus any energy thing that has ever experienced energy in its neighborhood, sits ready, in proper circumstances, to disgorge that energy in form identical to that in which it was absorbed. The local “Akashic Record” is held in every solid object. Anything that happened once is eternal. We don’t even need the mysterium of quantum physics!

A New Palingenesis: Milne starts out by noting that the ideals of Spiritualism are pure, and uplifting to those who live according to a belief in an afterlife, a point also made by the founder of another modern religion, the Bahai. Yet, he acknowledges the dogmatic blocks that many will have in following his tale. This is obviously still a problem today for many different “occult” phenomena.

This story is particularly beautifully written. The paragraph describing the caring doctor’s action to comfort his dying wife lets us imagine being present in the room with the narrator, the doctor and his wife. It covers all the things open minded people wonder about. “While noting the tender care and consideration with which the doctor arranged the cushions and performed those hundred little nameless offices, which only affection dictates, for his invalid wife, I could not help wondering, as so many more have fruitlessly done, at the mysterious provision which does not permit us to know whether the emotions and affections are merely the chance mechanism of a moment, or enduring and imperishable entities which have an infinitely more lasting existence than the forms of matter with which they are now associated.”

Is love forever, even if the body is not? Read the story and come to your own conclusion!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7540907155

Stream of Consciousness: Enough Hate

In 1973, I had a difficult experience with two teachers. I was outraged at accusations they made against me. I felt angry. I felt hatred. I was nauseated for a week. Note that these are my memories from a long time ago, so the exact details are fuzzy. But I realized that the hatred was making me sick. I renounced hatred then and there. I can still dislike, take actions against things I don’t like. But hatred is not beneficial in any way that I have ever been able to determine. Not that I have gone out of my way to try to find benefits of hatred. Although one book on critical thinking I read some years ago suggested that if you have to hate, hating ignorance and hatreds, for example, could be an intermediate step to moving beyond hate.

It is very depressing these days to be part of the American public. Having lived overseas in the 1970’s and 1980’s for a total of a little more than two years, I found out what people from other countries thought about American leaders. We interfered in many countries beyond the ones that were in the news due to the Vietnam war, and we took other actions to protect our comforts, even when they went against our stated values of democracy and freedom.

Recently, every day, the events happening in our country seem worse and worse. It’s hard to imagine how much worse it can get. The arrest of the extensively vetted green card holder, former UK Government employee, who just finished his masters degree at Columbia University, by all fact based accounts, someone who worked for peace and justice, is a much bigger problem than any of the news sources are saying. This goes far beyond free speech issues.

My neighbor, during the presidential campaign, insisted that “nobody is taking anybody away.” Well, he hadn’t read about Project 2025.

Read for yourself at the link below. My response: The members of any legitimate universal religion who promote sectarianism are betraying the higher teachings of their culture. The ADL used to promote tolerance, knowing that hatred is viral, and the targets never remain isolated. Now, they seem to have lost that most basic foundation of working for justice for all. The rise of far right Jewish groups goes to demonstrate what my wise friend Reverend Dan told me years ago. We do, in general, as we were done to, not as we would like to have done to ourselves. The competition among religious groups to out reproduce each other is a factor underlying the rise of the right, and the take-over by the intolerant, of national governments around the world. All of this getting us to focus on hating each other, instead of getting us to focus on what the powerful are doing to end humanity as a flowering of unique individuals, each of us doing our own thing to enrich the experience that humanity as a whole “uploads” to The Universal Consciousness, is a problem. Since the previous sentence is long winded, who knows who will try to understand it? Bottom line: Mahmoud Khalil is not a terrorist. His whole life speaks to his efforts at building a just peace. Why isn’t the UK speaking up louder about this?

We are now doing even worse things than what we’ve been doing to the Afghans who helped us during out twenty year military effort in their homeland.

As a person who tends toward gloomy outlooks, I have found, over the years, that taking a longterm view of the world helps me to stay centered and balanced. There was actually research done that demonstrated that while many people do better by staying in the NOW, depressed blood chemistry people often do better focusing on the past, present and future. That is how, after years of studying wisdom traditions from around the world, including science fiction, the Mythology of the Future, I am less gloomy than I was, despite the global turmoil being created by multiple organizations claiming to represent me, or “people like me”. Hint: I am unique and there is nobody else like me. Even my mother used to say that God broke the mold.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/israel-betar-deportation-list-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

But Nothing Knew Not Fear

And in the beginning, there was nothing.
And in the nothing, was the potential for everything.

And then suddenly the nothing became Everything,
which included the memory of nothing.

And so Everything knew Nothing.
And Everything feared Nothing.
But Nothing knew not fear.

And Everything knew not what to do
about its fear of Nothing.

But then Everything had an idea.
The idea was to forget about Nothing,

This should not have been difficult.
Everything was a veritable kaleidoscope
of moving matter and energy.
And so, Everything forgot Nothing,
by experiencing every thing.
And tried to know itself.

But Nothing never stayed away for long.
And so Everything understood Time,
as the recurrent memory of Nothing,
and how it became Everything.
And how everything changes.

In its attempts to forget Nothing,
Everything tried many diversions.
Metamorphosis into more and more
complicated forms, spread further and further apart.

And Every Thing became lonely.
And sought other Things.
And so part of Everything became Gravity.

And so things gathered together.
And eventually, particles became stars
and stars attracted planets
and planets sprouted life forms
and it was very interesting.
Everything was surprised.

And Everything almost forgot the
mystery of how nothing became Everything.

Watching the life forms emerge and diverge
was very surprising. Even delightful.
But then again, the sparkle dulled.
It was routine. A beautiful routine, but a routine.

And so Everything decided to renew exploration.
The frog was experiment 1.0.
It was a good experiment.

And dinosaurs and birds and shrews
and mice and wolves and elephants
walked the earth.

And Time passed. And things settled down.
And Everything noticed that nothing new was happening.
And was reminded of Nothing.
And decided to spice things up.

The photo at the top is of the ball joint that lets a bumblebee move its antenna around. Image obtained using a scanning electron microscope.

You Should Talk With Your Elementary School Kids This Holiday Season About…MATH!

Why is life such a struggle for what is left of the middle class, and the working class today, compared to 40 years ago?

Because the very few have gained control of the very MUCH. If you can’t understand HOW the rich steal from the poor, you won’t be able to protect YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FRIENDS, or anyone else, from being stolen from. Legally. You will continue to facilitate funneling more and more of the group wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Last night, at a holiday gathering, I met a charming gentleman wearing a mint green suit jacket. The gentleman shared that he was retired from accounting work, and was now working in the public schools, among other duties, helping tutor kids in math and reading. He must be a mature and patient man! From what I have recently read, half of Americans ages 16 – 65, are unable to read above 8th grade level. Their math skills are similarly weak.

WHO CARES?

Who cares? he told me one of his descendents asked.

Well, I said, they, the youth, the adults, everyone should care, because how else can you follow the work of the investigative journalists who are trying to help us see how the rich are stealing from the poor? If you can’t read, and you don’t know what a percent is, you will not be able to understand why our society has arrived at this point of oligarchy.

You won’t understand HOW the very few have gained control of the very MUCH.

You won’t understand HOW the very few have gained control of the very MUCH. If you can’t understand HOW the rich steal from the poor, you won’t be able to protect YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FRIENDS, or anyone else. You will continue to facilitate funneling more and more of the group wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Give your kids the gift of math awareness.

Kahn Academy has free math, basic literacy for all ages, and financial literacy for older kids.

I made my employee look at a couple of the geometry lessons, because he was disinterested in geometry when he was in school. Yet to do the work in my lab, he had to understand the properties of circles in a little more detailed way than he did. The lessons are very good. And oh, did I mention? They are free.

Arrow

Yesterday, I finally got back to my Mid Michigan Word Gatherers Writing Group after quite a while. It was great to see old friends and meet a new person. It was interesting to write creatively, after my long stretch of non-fiction. Here’s goes!

Gravity’s arrow points downward.

While Motion’s follows a forward push.

Entropy’s arrow flies away, always away.

But Mystery shrouds the arrow of time.

Outer and Inner

Apple paints itself red outside.

Meat bleeds red from within.

Leaf makes its own green, which

Caterpillars ingest and excrete,

eventually the Monarchs color their chrysalis with the green tint.

Noon sky from inside is blue.

Tiny dots pierce the black night sky.

But from inside or out?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Flammarion.jpg

AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The anonymous author is of the photo. The original artist for the engraving was French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion. It is from his “L’atmosphère : météorologie populaire,” published in 1888 by the . Wikipedia

Candlelight

One pink candle pokes its white helices

out of the baby’s cake, while the flame

eats downward and the family sings.

One red and one green candle stand proud

on the table. The autumn evening calls for

mother to strike the match.

One white candle sputters.

The old woman gasps, glazed eyes close.

Her niece holds her hand, and whispers

Good-bye.

Mother Nature is Cruel to Female Spongy Moths

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: This has to be one of the ugliest things Mother Nature ever made. Seriously. Why hairy protrusions on the shell of the transformation chamber!

In July of 2022, I found this hard segmented shell stuck to the bricks that framed the door to my workplace. Hanging from it was the outer skin of a hairy caterpillar. The whole assemblage was lightly covered in a ragged group of silk fibers, attached to the anodized aluminum door frame. I’m not sure why so many insects find this north facing door so attractive. Two days later, it was out. After hours of internet searching, I determined that it was a female Gypsy Moth, now renamed in politically corectness to “Spongy Moth.” Note that she has crawled up the brick approximately ONE BODY LENGTH from her original position. This, sadly, is as far as she will ever go in this form.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: She herself is not so bad looking.

One hour and four minutes after the above photo was taken, an unknown time after she emerged, she has attracted a mate.

Note the beautiful feathery antennae on the male, half her size. Note also how her face is completely covered by fuzzy stuff. She doesn’t need to see, because she is going to die here in place. Hence, my title. So here below, we see the tan colored egg mass. The “Spongy” stuff.

Well, I don’t really know what’s spongy about it. After a few days, I transferred some of the material to my microscope stage. And the view was remarkable. Tiny transparent balls, held in short strands of silk. The pairs of bright spots on most of the individual eggs are reflections from my microscope lights. Why is one pink? Is it dead? Did some other insect parasitize her egg mass?

These kindof look like tiny bearing balls.

The green arrow shows the developing baby caterpillar, and the beat rolls on. However, I euthanized the entire batch, but not before taking this photo of two of the early hatchlings. Or maybe there are something else. They don’t really seem to be the same shape as the forms inside the eggs.

And this is the sad end of the life of a female Spongy Moth. Even sadder than the life of a barnacle, which has been discussed elsewhere on this page. To end, I will show this beautiful, flaming red bolete mushroom. And below, my giant tomato next to my moderately sized, but very delicious, sweet and fragrant, cantaloupe.

Choo Choo Grill Alive and Well

A couple of weeks ago, my 2010 Toyota Yaris, with 319,000 or so miles on it, started acting a bit strange on the way into work. Every time I hit a mildly rough patch of road, really anything that was not perfectly smooth, the car started to waddle. I had no immediate rush appointments, so decided to stop at the Muffler Man on Plainfield Avenue, which Google Maps assured me was open. They immediately had time to check it out and confirm my suspicion that a bushing in the steering mechanism somewhere had worn out. Aside from normal items that wear out, such as windshield wipers, headlights, batteries and tires, this was only the second thing that had ever gone wrong with the vehicle since I bought it with 12 miles on it. The WOMAN owner of the Plainfield Muffler Man suggested that I go have lunch at the Choo Choo Grill, right across the street. Hmm, I thought… I’ve been passing by the Choo Choo Grill on my way to work for as long as I have been in the Greater Grand Rapids (Michigan) area. Finally time to check it out!

So I did. A friend called just as I was walking out of the Muffler Man door, and when I told him I was going there to have lunch, he informed me that their onion rings are famous, and that his in-laws had met there! Ok. That sealed it. Off I went.

And had the olive burger and onion rings. And yes, the onion rings were really good. I told them I’d been driving by for 35 years, and they said they were glad I stopped. Apparently business has been slow because people think they are closing. Well, they assured me that yes, they would like to retire, but no, it’s not closing. The food was great. A very cozy place with 3 tables and a few more seats at the counter.

If you are on the north end of Grand Rapids, check it out!!!

Seriously, is this flower REAL?

When I was younger, my mother had a bunch of plastic flowers, and some of them looked just like the yellow flower above. I never thought these actually existed, until I saw some at the annual fall Chrysanthemum show at the Fredrik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan. WOW! Pretty amazing.

I always try to convince any out of town visitors to join me for a tour of the gardens and equally amazing sculpture park.

https://www.meijergardens.org/

Pink Sauerkraut

Merlot Variety of Napa red cabbage, regular green cabbage, carrots, garlic and ginger sauerkraut! YUM!! Good luck finding this at the grocery store!

Last spring, the weather was unsettled, and my seedlings were started late, because I was traveling overseas for all of January. But, I still managed to grow enough tomatoes, peppers, cukes, parsley, garlic and nasturtiums, among other things, to put away around 200 servings of frozen veggies to be Vita-mixed into a private blend V-8, V-9 or V-12!

Note the funny nose on the salad tomato. That’s fairly common with this early variety. I can’t remember if it’s a Sub-Arctic Plenty or an Oregon Spring. The purple onion is a Welsh Bunching variety that I cut the seed head off to allow it to form a larger bulb. I bought a packet probably 20 years ago and still have them. There’s a beefsteak tomato in the back, and a light green Armenian cuke, which grows with fancy scallops. They are delicious and stay tender even when ridiculously big. Like 2-3 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. The striped cukes were new for me last summer. Delicious and tender, but like many of my cukes the last few years, they are getting killed off by a fungus or virus. Along with the garlic, the beets did GREAT. I really liked the first time for me Red Cloud variety. Very uniform and clean.

The cabbage crop, the second most important after all the juice ingredients, was pitiful. The heads were not solid and I ran out of time in the fall. The two year old neighborhood “Kraut Party” was delayed when the usual participants got CoVid and then RSV. But come January, I figured I would make a small batch of kraut with the Chinese (Napa) cabbage that had been quietly reposing in the produce drawer of my fridge. Since this was a solitary effort, I put in more garlic and ginger than my friend would have wanted, along with the Suzuko variety Napa cabbage and carrots. I didn’t get a photo, but it tasted pretty good. I was surprised at how the unique Napa cabbage flavor was brightened, even with the strong overtones of garlic and ginger, delicious all together, with the extra garlic and ginger intended as anti-inflammatory to heal the after effects of the RSV.

After transferring the green / white Napa kraut to a smaller jar, I decided to try, despite my neighbor’s warning not to mix red and white / green cabbage in the same batch, to do just that. I used the Merlot variety Napa cabbage, and a small regular green cabbage head, along with what would probably be considered an excessive amount of garlic and ginger, as well as carrots. I did not know what to expect for a color, but certainly I was not expecting PINK!

Half gallon Ball Canning Jar at Left. A nice serving of fiber and probiotics at right. My arthritic hand was tired after slicing the Napa cabbage, so I chopped the green cabbage in the Vita-mix, as coarse as I could, but that was still pretty fine.

Since I cut out almost all the sugar in my diet after coming home from the hospital, I found myself really enjoying the flavor of the kraut for my bedtime snack. So once this batch was done, I got out the last of my cabbages, both small red heads, and made the last batch from last summer’s harvest. After two weeks, I put this garlic and ginger heavy batch in the fridge yesterday. Yet to be tasted.

The garden is a wonderful place and wonderful activity. I actually had a good year for fruit. First time the tart cherries produced enough / the birds left them for me that I could make juice. It was delicious. The cherries are technically tart, but are pretty sweet. The batch shown was about half of the harvest. Not huge, but it’s just me. So much better than buying the stuff at the grocery store. My Canadice red seedless grapes were also quite productive and I made and canned some juice from them too.

And then, at the end of the summer, there were quite a few Monarch Butterflies that came to get nectar from the Echinacae flowers.

It was a good season for the coleus plants, too.

Mushroom Memoir

I joined the Brownie Troop at Oakview Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1965. The troop was full, but the Girl Scout Troop needed leaders, and they told my mom that they would let me join if she volunteered. I don’t remember much about the Brownie activities. I do recall the day an older kid leaving detention, for an infraction unknown to me, set the couch in the teacher’s lounge on fire during our Brownie meeting, and I do remember being one of only two girls who were crying about it. Half the school burned down from that little lit cigarette butt. I also remember wearing the Brownie uniform, and I kept the little gold Brownie pin for many years.

In fact, the little gold pin (not real gold!) was only recently stolen, when someone broke into my house, left my old laptop and took the jewelry box. I live, and have lived, in a rural area for 34 years now. They didn’t have to break the wood frame of the door, but they did. The basement door is left unlocked. But that would have been too easy. Of course, the cops didn’t care, even though it was one of a series of recent B&E’s.

Of course, the size lumber that was used to build the house in the 1840’s no longer exists. My neighbor Wayne had the brilliant idea of flipping the board around its vertical axis, so the damaged portion would be hidden in the wall. That facilitated and sped up the repair.

Anyway, back to the Girl Scouts. My mother kept on being a troop Leader when I graduated to the Junior Girl Scouts in 4^th Grade. Pretty much everyone disliked her. She had a short fuse. Perhaps due to lead poisoning. She grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia. After the Flint (Michigan) Water Crisis (due to lead contamination), a large group of scholars got together for a research project, and they showed that local murder rates in the early part of the 20^th Century were very closely correlated with the distance of the town from a lead smelter. Lead, at that time, was the material of choice for all the snazzy new municipal water system pipes. It didn’t rust like steel. Richer municipalities, along with those closer to the lead smelters, used lead pipes. Flint was wealthy at the time. A center of manufacturing.

Back to my mom. Perhaps adding to her lack of patience were her bad teeth. She had a lot of mercury based amalgam fillings. My sister didn’t want to hear my theory of our mother’s temper’s relationship to her fillings, but I think the fillings and the lead pipes in Fairmont probably had a significant effect. I didn’t know her father, who died before I was born, but nobody else in the family ever seemed to have such a temper. Anyway, she was a tough woman, but the Girl Scout Troop did a lot of exciting outdoor activities when she was the leader. We did many overnight camping trips. Way more than most troops. People are always complicated.

Adding to my early exposure to nature, at some time even before joining the Girl Scouts, my parents had decided that we should do family camping. No trailer for them. After the first trial with rented equipment, we had a giant canvas tent that would sleep 8, for the four of us and the miniature poodle. We visited the Shenandoah National Forest on our early trips, and my parents kept the top of the Styrofoam “ice-chest” with the bear fang punctures for many years, as a souvenir of one of the most exciting nights of our lives. The dog was terrified. It made a good story. See, I am still telling it 60 years later!

All that goes to say that, at an early age, I was, despite growing up in suburbia, introduced to nature. My first gardening adventure was growing radishes at age 4. They turned out very spicy. My mother served them as the “bitter herb” for the Passover Seder. The years that I have not had a garden are very few. A couple of summers when I was in college. A couple of years when I lived overseas.

When I had a chance, I moved to a rural area. I live on a forty acre plot, with a hundred by hundred foot fenced area for a garden and small orchard. For the last 5 years or so, I have been growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley, radishes, garlic, nasturtiums, and various other things, to make “veggie juice smoothie packs.” I try to have a home grown juice smoothie every morning for breakfast. My goal is 225 juice packs in the freezer for the winter and spring.

The garden is a big part of why it’s painful for me to contemplate moving away. Losing the chance to see a dark night sky is another big reason. Looking up and the stars, and thinking about how people have been looking at some of the same groups of stars that we call constellations for as long as 30,000 years is just amazing to me. Way back then, Deneb, the swan goddess’s tail, was the pole star. Myths and archeological finds (Gobeckli Tepe) from the ancient near east and Europe hint at the religious traditions of that time. Before I moved out to the country, I knew the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia (the giant double-u). I don’t really remember even understanding the mythological significance of Orion, and his dog, Sirius. The whole calendar of the ancient Egyptians was based on the appearance of Sirius after it had spent time below the horizon. During the Geminid meteor showers last week, it was very clear and the date was close to the new moon, so very dark. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, was sparkling white, green and red. I feel sorry for city dwellers.

But, as much as I love working in the garden, being in the garden, eating my own produce, ugly heirloom tomatoes and all, and taking a few minutes on clear nights to ponder the stars, there’s something even more special about hunting for wild mushrooms in the woods at the back of the property. On occasion, on my way to the back of the property, I have found Dryad’s Saddles, edible if young enough, in the grass, or sprouting from a tree, or giant puffballs along the south-eastern edge of the property. Neither are very tasty, but they are edible and so a decent consolation prize. But the tastiest prizes are in the back, with the big oaks and maples and other, mostly deciduous, trees.

Learning to recognize and get brave enough to eat chicken-of-the-woods, hens-of-the-woods, shrimp-of-the-woods, green quilted Russulas, black trumpets, white and yellow oysters, red chanterelles, entolomas, and a VERY few morels, while avoiding eating Jack-O-Lanterns, red Russulas, Destroying Angels, “Little Brown Mushrooms,” and Angels Wings…. Now that’s a skill. Because I have taught myself, and have never yet gotten sick. As “they” say, “There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters!”

Most of the people in my neighborhood learned to find morels when they were kids. Nobody where I grew up hunted mushrooms. Or at least I do not recall, even among the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts in my social circles, anyone who hunted and ate wild mushrooms. And even my current neighbors are surprised to discover that when I say I hunt mushrooms, I do not mean “only morels.”

It has definitely been challenging to learn to understand the jargon of mycology. One of my early finds was a whole clump of giant white, funnel-shaped mushrooms at the edge of a water-logged area near the tree that I was convinced for years was an elm, but I now think is a beech. I looked through all my books and could not find anything remotely resembling these beautiful, snow-white, 8 – 10 inch high, 5- 6 inch diameter fungi. Any one would have made a meal! Some months later, I finally “grokked” that the cap shape descriptions in the books were not random. “Oh it might be flat, it might be convex.” No. The point was that they always go through a sequence, usually from convex, to flat, to concave. So the reason that those shrooms looked the way they did was because they were at the end of the cycle of maturity of the “fruiting body,” and the caps had turned inside out. Usually, the pictured examples of mushrooms in guide books are sooner after they pop up.

The aspiring shroom hunter needs to learn all the vocabulary associated with the way the gills, or other “fertile” surface is connected, or not, to the stem; the vocabulary to describe the shape of the stems; and the vocabulary used to describe the habits of the particular species, such as “gregarious,” or “solitary,” or “clustered.” The aspiring mycologist needs to know the difference between gilled shrooms, and shrooms with pores. For the pored shrooms, are they boletes, or are they polypores? Numerous older books say no polypores (which include Dryad’s Saddles, Chickens, and Hens) are poisonous, but newer books don’t want to be that BOLD!!!! Too many people have taken up this hobby. The experts want people to be sure that they have identified the exact species before cooking and consuming it.

Way too many people, IMO, are willing to eat a shroom that someone in a Reddit forum or some software says is ok. This is insane. Ok, there are a FEW mushrooms that are recognizable, just by looking at the cap shape and coloration. But the software apps that act like they can identify a mushroom from the view of the cap are completely ridiculous. Ok, for pure curiosity, fine. But not to eat. Period. Stay cowardly.

A lot of my finds go in the compost, mostly unidentified. For the first time, I found what I was pretty sure were blewits this fall, but after checking in all of my books and a few reliable on-line sites, I wasn’t sure if a) they were blewits or b) blewits are always safe to eat. I was excited when I identified “Woman on a Motorcycle.” I didn’t eat it, but I was highly confident that I knew what it was.

Maybe it would be ok to die of mushroom poisoning, since that supposedly was how the Buddha finally entered Nirvana. But, the symptoms of organ failure that the Amanitas and other really deadly shrooms cause are not reportedly fun to live through. One of my engineer colleagues told me about mistaking Jack-O-Lanterns for chanterelles. He does not care to repeat the experience. My plan is to continue to be a cowardly mushroom hunter.

As I age, and my joints creak, and I don’t move so fast, and I still have to work for a living, I wonder if it even makes sense for me to keep living out in the country, where it’s so hard to find people to help with the garden and mowing the lawn, etc. But then I realize that if I move to the city or the suburbs, I will sit on my rear end even more of the time, instead of getting out in the fresh air and growing and hunting my own produce, and admiring the same stars that all the famous and forgotten people since antiquity, and even before antiquity, have viewed.

Joyous Just Passed Solstice, Merry Christmas if you celebrate, and happy New Year. I’m not terribly optimistic that 2024 will be an improvement over 2023. The world seems to be falling apart. But some people manage to find joy anyway.