Black Trumpets in a Turbulent Time
Catastrophic flooding has ravaged Vermont – inundating the downtown of our charming capital and leaving my quaint little riverside village reeling from damage to homes, roadways, and infrastructure.
While the mighty Winooski has receded back within its banks, the river now churns with a dark, hazardous stew of runoff. Craters replete with toxic floodwaters block access to swimming holes and hiking trails. Where I used to go each evening to watch brown trout and fallfish rising to mayflies, I now witness log jams, truck tires and insulation floating menacingly down the raging waterway. Where I encountered fiddleheads this spring, I find only matted down, decaying and dirt-encrusted vegetation, looking more like recently excavated fossils than ferns.
My local chanterelle patch – a glistening fairy ring beneath dark hemlocks – has been sullied by mudslides and flash flooding, so I head for an upland hardwood forest in search of solace and wild mushrooms. With low lying areas too waterlogged even for moisture-loving fungi, I navigate up well-drained, ledgy slopes, battalions of beech trees interspersed with the occasional oak and ash.
I know exactly where to find the motherload of black trumpets at my old honey hole, where I made an annual pilgrimage last week and left hundreds of baby Craterellus in the ground. But today I decide to level the playing field, challenging myself in new, nearby territory, each step an invitation to awe and discovery.
Bushwhacking beyond the blazes and following mycelial instinct, I find the hills in peak mycological form. Enormous, brutally bitter Tylopilus rubrobruneus punctuate the landscape, untouched by animals who are rightly repulsed by its fierce astringency. My Bolete eyes even spot several plump (though regretfully bug-ridden) Boletus atkinsonii, an uncommon porcini relation with an affinity for oak and beech.
As my pace slows to a mindful waltz, it’s the tiny, humble jewels of the deciduous woodland that are captivating me most on this July foray. Myriad miniscule emergent Craterellus ignicolor, a hardwood-loving species of yellow foot chanterelle, glow enticingly from the forest floor. Mossy slopes reveal scattered fruitings of mature black trumpets intermingling with the baby yellow feet, only visible to the expectant eye.
It’s not a windfall, but rather, a tantalizing trickle of trumpets that keeps me company along the journey. While nothing to rival the scale of my prime trumpet patches, there are just enough new fruitings here to keep me continually in a spellbinding state of suspense, primed for the next find. A few choice trumpets here, a dozen more sprinkled there; inedible purple corals and toxic red Russulas (some seemingly regurgitated by chipmunks) lurking around the next bend – the hunt takes on a soothing and satisfying rhythm, providing sustenance and sanctuary. A medley of colors and forms, the resplendent and resilient forest becomes a balm to these trying and uncertain times.
