No Boletes for Me

I saw my first wild mushroom of the year the other day on my hike with the dogs on the Borrego/Bear Wallow loop. Until the rains came—in torrents—in mid June, two weeks early in our monsoon season, I figured there would be no mushrooms at all. At my house in El Valle, while the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fire roared on the other side of the mountains, the land was woefully barren except for where I’d irrigated: the orchard and hay field. I’d say it was the driest and brownest it’s ever been, even though we’ve lived through many previous drought years.

Now, after those first few drenching storms and a return to a somewhat normal monsoon—I know, I know, there is no normal anymore—everything is verdant green and growing way too fast for me to keep up with, considering that I’m living in Santa Fe. Yesterday, I went to El Valle from the dentist’s office in Taos hoping to mow the orchard. Five minutes after I got there the deluge arrived. At least I was in the hoop house, where I watered—it’s inside, remember—and pulled weeds until the rain stopped. No mowing the soggy orchard grass, of course.

But I digress. I expect there will be a bounty of mushrooms, just like last year, when the spring rains came in April and the monsoon season flourished. But I won’t be eating any. The only ones I feel confident to harvest are boletes (porcini), those round, fully capped little things that are easily identifiable. I remember eating them years ago when my friend David stopped by and fried some up on his way home from Las Trampas Canyon. I remember frying some up after a long trip up towards Chama with Peter.

Last year, everyone in El Valle was harvesting them all over the forest and sharing with those who weren’t harvesting. I cut them up and put them in the freezer. Then I went up the Santa Barbara Trail with Marty and we brought down a bagful. I froze them as well, waiting to cook them in a stew or in stirfry. One night, however, I decided to thaw and put them on a pizza, which I ate for dinner, around 6 or 7 in the evening. Around 10 that same evening, I became sick to my stomach, rushed down to the toilet, and threw everything up. Then I was fine and went back to bed.

I didn’t know whose mushrooms I’d eaten, Marty’s and my collection, or Alonso’s, or someone else’s. I figured I’d cooked a rotten one: bad enough to make me sick but not bad enough to kill me (you can’t really die from eating boletes). But on a cautionary note, I threw out the rest of the mushrooms in my freezer.

A little later that summer I went to a party in my neighbor Luke’s field (he lives in Albuquerque and intends to build a house in El Valle someday). They were cooking food outside and I decided to take just a little stew, because after Luke’s I was on my way to Taos to attend a memorial for my friend Bill Whaley, the one who died of a heart attack on the Taos Ski Valley slopes while skiing with his granddaughter (see April 25, 2021 blog post). As I dug in, Luke said, “Kay, you know there’s some boletes in there. I heard about what happened to you.” I thought about it for a minute, that everyone else had been eating this stew, and went ahead and finished my small bowl.

At Bill’s memorial, at a lovely restaurant in Taos, I sat with my friend John Nichols and ate some hors d’oeuvres and reminisced about Bill. But John, who is 80 years old, wasn’t feeling too well and asked me if I’d read what he’d written about Bill when it came time for our stories. He left and went home. John, by the way, is at his most brilliant when he’s eulogizing or remembering a friendship: full of sentiment mitigated by humor and lots of love. Once he’s read his piece there can be no follow up. So I’m sitting there, waiting for the remembrance to begin, when my stomach starts to rumble and I know exactly what’s happening: I’m going to throw up that bolete stew I ate. Which I did, in the restaurant bathroom, and then came out and stood up before all of Bill’s friends and read John’s remembrance, which was indeed brilliant.

So that’s it for me and boletes. I’ll be happy to go out with anyone who wants to look for them on a walk in the woods. I’ll harvest them and carry them and give them to anyone who wants them but I won’t eat them ever again. I have no idea why I suddenly developed some kind of allergy to this specific mushroom, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Now if it were potato chips or pickles, that would be a different story.