Mushroom hunting photos

Mushroom hunting at the coast with the Guidry boys, aka Corey and his father, whom he affectionately refers to as "Pops," among other things.


This shrew died shortly after this photograph. It was pretty traumatizing. It just lay down in the middle of the road and stopped breathing. Corey and I were like, "...did that just DIE?" We witnessed (and perhaps were the cause of) the passage of its soul into the Shrew Netherworld.


There are crazy trees in Oregon too.


Amanita phalloides, aka the death cap. DON'T EAT THIS MUSHROOM! IT WILL KILL YOU IF YOU EAT IT. This is one of the three deadly poisonous mushrooms in Oregon.


Foxgloves contain atropine, a tropane alkoloid. It has a similar chemical in it that's similar to the deadly amanita. It's a stimulant... when people die of drug overdoses, they inject a chemical similar to this into their hearts, and it gets their hearts beating again. Think Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction."


Amanita mascaria! The eponymous mushroom from popular culture and likely the most familiar mushroom in the world. It is thought of as being the soma of the Rigveda (an ancient Indian collection of Sanskrit hymns). There's a substance that people use call the "soma," which brings dreams. That's this mushroom right here. They were EVERYWHERE on the coast this week... never seen anything like it. They're mycorhizal, so they grow with the roots of trees. People would dry them and use them as Christmas tree decorations because they grow with pine trees. Let's hope Little Billy in the suburbs never got his fat Game Boy playing lips around any. Then again, let's hope he did.


The oyster, our hero from Ecuador, dwells here in Oregon as well.


Reishi (ganaderma lucidum)... I remember the first time I went mushroom hunting with the Brian and the Jess they found oodles of these... you can make a disgusting tasting but very healthy tea out of them... Corey taught the recipe to Don Delio (our shaman friend... god, that sounds weird! I can definitely say I never thought I would have a "shaman friend"). It's used for cancer treatment, immune disorders and for cleaning the blood and has been used in Asian medicine since ancient times. I love that phrase, "ancient times." It makes me think of the phase he is not nearly so old as the ancient ones.


A pristine chanterelle. God, we found so many this year! It was a bumper crop, as they say. Corey and Jay were gathering 40-50 pounds in ONE TRIP and selling them all on Sundays at the market. On Friday and Saturday nights our refrigerator would be full of giant paper bags, with stray pieces of dirty and grass all over the floor and kitchen counters.


A cauliflower mushroom. I'd never seen one of these before. Damn, they look weird. But they're also really good. Corey's friend and fellow mushroom partner in crime Matt gave us this one after finding four or five.


He fried some up for us and it was delicious, sweet and wonderful. Corey said that some people cook them in the style of pasta too... peeling them off and then boiling them in a big old pot.




Corey and Jay at the Milwaukie farmer's market. See that ghetto ass sign? Yeah, I made that, with tape from the Dollar Store.


Our latest bounty. Corey picked so many of them he was carrying them in his shirt and they were falling out. We had porcini burger for dinner last night. It made it all worth it, even the falling down the mountain 40 feet and landing in a blackberry patch.

if it's one thing I know, said El Bo, it's where the chanterelles do grow

Selling last Sunday at the Milwaukie Farmer's Market was really fun. Unfortunately it was absolutely freezing cold and raining. We made about a $90 profit, but everyone else who was working there said that it was by far the worst and slowest day the market had ever had. I could definitely understand that: there's no way I would have been there if I hadn't been selling.

Nevertheless, it was a great way to meet interesting people, despite the icy cold rain and my dazed slow chuchaki head from the dinner-wine-and-hottub party last night (such parties are seemingly slowly but surely becoming a Saturday-night tradition at the Duck Pond house, a good way of hanging out with friends and eating delicious fresh mushrooms collected that same day). I love being part of a new community. The farmer in the stall next to ours gave us a little tin of pesto, which was amazingly delicious and consumed by me that evening in 0.9 seconds. Another guy gave us an ... I can't remember the name of the fruit, you peel it and eat the tips of the leaves, and then the flower in the middle is the best part? I'm not on the top of my game today, apparently. But whatever it's called, we ate it last night with olive oil and butter and DA-HAYM it was good. It's a pretty sweet deal: whatever we don't sell, we trade with others and get amazing farmers' market food. I love sharing with other people and giving them the chance to try amazing new mushrooms, to see the nervous or heisitant expressions on their faces fade away when we tell them all the different things you can do with a chanterelle, a lobster, a matsutake. As I've said before, we always find more mushrooms we can possibly eat ourselves, anyway.

Corey and his mushroom-hunting partner-in-crime Jay went to the coast yesterday and only found a couple of porcini. It's still just a little too early, but it's good to see that a few are popping up! We had porcini on toast with red peppers for dinner last night. Corey also found some meadow mushrooms, which he's saving to cook for my mum tonight, because she once said that she and my grandad used to find and eat them when she was a little girl in England.

Porcini is Corey's favorite mushroom. It is pretty good. I have wonderful memories of my first time eating a porcini, in an omelette in Corey's apartment. Mmm. It was a porcini I had walked right by but that Matt had scooped up immediately afterwards, recognizing it's true, treasured identity. Then because Matt is a great guy he ended up giving it to me and Corey anyway. Anyway, believe it or not, I still haven't decided what my favorite mushroom is yet... I sure like that fried lobster Corey cooked that one time (MMM! better than potato chips!), and the grilled matsutake (so thick and indescribably cinnamony and faintly spicy). And, of course, you can never go wrong with the infallible chanterelle.

Corey an Jay went mushroom hunting today too, in one of their best spots, and found over 40 pounds of chanterelles, and 10-20 pounds of lobsters. Hopefully tomorrow we'll go get some more matsutake, and maybe even take my little brother along, to baptize him in the ways of the Hardcore Mushroom Hunting (wear boots, rain pants, and be ready to get soaking wet and freezing cold anyway). Crazy! Get ready, Milwaukie! I sure hope it's sunny on Sunday!

Some relevant updates, here from the PDX mycorenewal front:

- Went mushroom hunting with Corey and his dad on the coast. We experienced a moment of horror when we thought the porcini were infected with this terrifying white-powdery mold, but then much to our relief Corey deduced that they were another species, Old Man something, which is good because first of all it is far too early for the porcini to be out and second of all they are so delicious, a mold that killed them all would be tragic beyond words.

- We went to the Milwaukie Farmer's market last Sunday. Surprisingly, there was no culinary mushroom stand in sight! So we talked to the market managers, and it turned out they had a space they were more than eager enough to rent for us. The idea of going into the mushroom-selling business still feels a little hard for my brain to wrap around: very self-made man, little-house-on-the-prairie. But very appealing for my increasingly hippie-like brain. We found about 20 pounds of chanterelles and lobsters last Friday alone, so we have more than enough booty to share. We’re thinking of selling five-dollar units in little baskets. Most prices we’ve seen (at other markets and in Whole Foods and the like) seem outrageously expensive, like ten dollars for a pound of chanterelles (!). I guess that price can be considered a reflection of the labor that goes into retrieving those “golden treasures,” what with all the gas price drama. But such a price can really turn off people from ever trying wild-grown mushrooms.

- Don Delio (our shaman friend from Cuyabeno) called us at 1:30AM this morning, after we'd nodding off in the middle of an episode of "The Wire" (rented from the local public library). This would make it about 4:30AM Ecuadorean time. From what I could understand in my blurry, fuzzy head sleep-state, he was in Lago Agrio just calling to say hello. I hope everything's all right with him and his family, regardless... I can definitely say that I never thought I'd be awakened in the night from a phone call from a shaman. The experience was unhappily reminiscent of all those terrible "who will take the 3AM call???" advertisements airing on the idiot box.

Some more links-happy-go-clicky fun:
- In this current political climate, Chevron doesn’t want to be left out of the fun!

- The case continues to move forward (this article has an especially good summary of the extent of the contamination in the community, as well as of Chevron’s tricky-dicky dealings with the trial up to this point)

- This is interesting too, although I have to admit I had to look up “indict” just to be sure that I understood what the article was about (hey, don’t I seem refreshingly open and candid compared to most other “blog” “writers” with such an admission?). I like the plaintiff’s summary of Chevron’s supposed clean-up attempt as “merely dumping dirt on pits of oil and water rather than removing the pollutants.”

a list of things that are ecuatorianamente refrescante

- the little town between Quito and Ambato that seems to consist of nothing but ice cream shops, with brightly painted popsicles flaunting on every other concrete wall
- the salsa remix of ¨Billie Jean¨
- garbage cans shaped like clowns or cartoon characters´heads (the Bart Simpson one is particularly grotesque)
- Drinkable Kiosko yoghurt. WHY is there no drinkable yoghurt in the EEUU WHY WHY WHY it is beyond delicious.
- plastic bags of mandarinas sold by children on the street, 10 for $1
- handing over a $1 bill and holding your breath while you wait for the inevitable question from the storekeeper: tienes cambio? (do you have change?)
- uncoooked french fries, squishy white in the middle
- juices with the consistency of marmalade
- rows of houses with open roofs, piles of gravel and sand in the yard, in a seemingly frozen limbo of construction and rennovation
- mean dogs barking at you and snapping at your heels. Brian, who is proficent at a Phillipino form of martial arts, commented that he had to refine his technique to fight the dogs rather than the humans here, since they were a bigger threat.
- old women in braids leading cows or donkeys around on frayed rope
- gasoline at $1.48
- the ¨camaron camaron camaron camaron¨ song and the ¨creo en Jesus Cristo, quien me va llevar al cielo¨ accordion ditty, easily heard on any bus sound system
- foreigners in sandals, shorts, and those olive green knee-high drawstring pants
- political graffiti: Colombia Hermano, Uribe Terrorista, Armas de Destruccion Masiva: Television, Radio, Media, Mucho Mineria, Poco Amazonia.
- hairy fuzzy pigs on the side of the road
- brown toilet paper; in Corey´s words, ¨Bible paper.¨
- yoghurt-flavored Bon Ice. I´m going to miss Bon Ice so much. They´re these folks dressed up in bright blue suits with a polar bear logo, selling these tube-filled frozen ice creams and yoghurts, with yummy tropical fruit flavors.
- the sweet thick smell of Palo Santo, a kind of incense: it looks like a thick piece of wood, and it´s burned to drive the evil spirits away, which more often than not consist of the evil poo-smelling spirits hovering over the single toilet in a house which has up to nine people living in it, all of whom have their bowels affected in one way or another by the lovely grease-rich diet.
- dead roasted pigs in wheelbarrows
- The guts market at La Floresta, a lively outdoor barbecue venue that sells all the intestines and stomach lining you can eat, right by our house. If guts aren´t your thing, they´re are always the deliciously amazingly bad for you yucca fries, which we successfully made ourselves the other day (note: frying yucca takes a LOT of grease, and it´s a good idea to cut it with a machete, and also to boil it first before frying).

I´ll try to think of more to add here................

As written earlier, our time in Ecuador is coming to an end! A new adventure in Portland is about to begin! (or more specifically, in Milwaukie, at the infamous duck pond house). Our plans for it include chickens and a huge garden. For the time being, we have a ticket to return to Quito on January17th 2009. I´m not sure what will happen between now and then, but anyway, we have a ticket, and there´s a group for Mexico that may be coming in January for Amazon Mycotour Version 2.0, so there´s that too. Until their return to ´keets in November, Jess and Brian will be running around California-Montana-Oregon-Illinois attending speaking events, so hopefully that will result in some useful promotion and outreach. I´m not sure what will happen to this blog during our time in Oregon; I´m thinking we´ll maybe use it for mushroom-hunting related posts and so on (without giving away our location secrets, of course!). And we´ll keep posting stuff about the Amazon Mycorenewal Project, the Amazon Defense Front and the Cuyabeno reserve, naturally.

On that note, the Chevron case is moving forward(this is an audio file sent to me by a Reedie alumni freelance journalist, also living in Quito).

Also, here are Danny´s awesome flickr photos of the first (and hopefully not the last!) official Amazon Mycotour. Danny´s an awesome photographer with a kickass camera; I really recommend checking them out... I especially like this one of Corey-- it really captures the whole Mad-Scientist-Geek side of his personality).

guapulove

Corey typing now... The Guapulo bus is a beast of burden, a lazy fat hobbit, and a bumpy ball bender all at once. The bus system in Quito is a fuming cauldron of black vapors that make my eyes burn and throat sore, Guapulo is much cleaner...though the perrenial dog orgy makes one think.

Los Conquistadoresy La Tolita...my Quito home...whole roasted pigs in wheel barrowsThis is me scratching my ass I think...We climb this hill every day...a couple times...it still makes me tired...eeek

Graffiti.

This is my best good friend Bubba and no we are not relations...No shrimp boats in the Andes but randomly placed donkeys can often be observed pooping.

Brian A. Pace and Corey R. Guidry, esquire, smoking cuban cigars...We like tobacco sometimes.

Ashley Jordana Payaguaje, aka Super Jungle Baby, is shown here in her Chanel hammock with matching versace drool blanket. This is Don Delio´s baby, she is a new Siona-Secoya person who will have to deal with the strange contrasts of living in a national park(3 hours downriver) and trying to interact with the outside world. We brought her a blanket, the green one, I think she peed on it.

This is Motora (Grillo).Sshe is a little stray cat we adopted. I´m allergic to cats...but damn she´s cute.
Another cat photo...and some species of jungle monkey... J. pachicoensis.

mmmm garbage

An average American family goes out for Sunday brunch.

It´s interesting living in Guapulo because you´re in this village valley with chickens and pigs and donkeys and eucalyptus forest and then you look up and it´s the city skyline hovering above you...

These are some black people who tried to attack us. According to most South American these people are dreadfully dangerous...

Another chicken of the woods...Jess discovered it...it was kinda corky...

Hmmm..in what activity are these individuals engaged?

I hate cats as you can see.

Preparing a fresh meal of Ecuadorian Chifa(chinese food).

My clean room for fungal cloning and basting turkeys.

Our time in Ecuador is drawing to an end!

cali's last hurrah

In Cali for what is very possibly the last hurrah for my family. I thought Corey and I would end up spending a relatively quiet, down-tempo time here, mostly watching movies and catching up on U.S. politics (an endeavor which ended up disgusting both of us so much that the phrase "ignorance is bliss" is beginning to make a lot more sense to me now). However, we ended up doing what we do best: being quite Busy Little Bees, buzz, buzz, buzzing around, this time (to our relief) in cars, instead of noisy, dirty buses, which made a huge difference in terms of comfort and sanity.

On Tuesday, Corey, my mother, Omar (the family driver/all around handyman and great guy) and I drove to Silvia, a small town in the mountains about 2 hours away in Cali. At the tollbooth, we purchased a yummy, if a bit crazy-looking and strange-tasting fruit called zapote. It peels naturally in that star shape, and you kind of suck on its fruity fuzziness like a toothless baby. One minor example of the amazing variety of fruits in Colombia, most of which are endemic to the country, Julie types in her best business-like guidebook tone.

The Silvia Tuesday market is huge: Indians from surrounding villages come in to sell and buy fruit, vegetables and handicrafts. It is amazingly busy and fills up the entire town: pots and pans, hair ties, chontaduros (a yummy palm nut you eat with salt), plantains... you see folks everywhere in their woolen skirts and hats, not so much "traditional Indian dress" as it is evidence left over from the days of oppressive rule by the Spanish, who forced the indigenous community to dress in such a way in order to mark them as visually obvious Indians. I wonder if people continue to dress like that nowadays as a mark of pride or simply because over the course of time it has become traditional... Anyway, it's interesting to visit a place with such a large and colorful indigenous gathering in Colombia, where such a thing is the exception rather than the norm (as it is in places such as Ecuador's Otavalo).

This bird told my fortune: its owner blew on it, it hopped down to the bottom shelf of the wooden box and landed on a piece of paper, which was then promptly turned over to me as my fortune. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what it said, something about learning to appreciate my luck, I think...? Anyway, it was definitely a first for me. There were a lot of small stalls selling all kinds of interesting herbs, including a dried-up bear claw.

I love hiking around in Silvia, passing the people on horseback, the giant pigs, the chickens rolling in the dust, going over the little bridge...

On Wednesday Corey and I paid a visit to my father's workplace. It was too bad that we weren't able to give my father a little more advance notice about our arrival, because he commented that in an ideal world, he would have loved for Corey to have been able to give a seminar both about his thesis work on Bt corn and about our work in Ecuador. For next time, maybe...? There isn't much in the way of mycorrhizal (let alone mycorenewal) research going on there, but we got to talk with a soil scientist and check out a bean experiment meant to breed drought tolerance. Some of the many beans you see in the photo above are meant to represent drought conditions, others represent irrigated ones (apologies in advance for my faulty scientific terminology!).

This was an especially cool experiment because it wasn't using any fancy genetic work, meaning that they were no bacteria or jellyfish or harpy eagle genes pumped into the beans. Nope, it was good old-fashing plant reproduction. So, it was nice to see that that's still going on.

Another aspect of the bean project concerned aluminum toleranace. Here I begin typing eloquent dictation from Corey: "all plants are affected by aluminum concentration in the soil so they're trying to breed aluminum tolerance because the soils here and in other areas such as Brazil are high in aluminum concentration." Thank you, Corey! The long root in the photo above is the root of a bean that has demonstrated more resistance to aluminum than the short, stubbly root.

We also visited the biotechnology lab, full of impressive glowing white rooms, plants in jars, humming machines and soylent green.

Cultures for yucca, genetically manipulated so that they'll produce betacarotene. Some of them already appeared orange, even at this early stage, frozen in their little plates.

Genetically manipulated yucca plants. Some come out looking weird, others look quite normal. This isn't exactly related, but on the car-ride towards my dad's workplace, I read an interesting article in UK's The Guardian about the effects Bt cotton in India(http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/30/gmcrops.india) which kind of colored my view about the whole genetically modified food business. More on that later, maybe.

This is just a random crazy insect my younger brother found outside by the swimming pool, an example of Colombia's (or more specifically, our back-yard's) insect diversity and all around "whoa!" quality.

On Friday we embarked upon an Epic Pachico Family Adventure, in which we drove two hours to Popoyan, a very pretty colonial city to the south of Cali. Corey and I last knew Popoyan when we flew in to the Popoyan airport from Gorgona: after spending 8 hours in the Guapi airport, waiting for the delayed-from-weather flight, we were deliriously happy to be in Popoyan. This time around, we (thankfully) got to see a little more of the city than the airport lobby.

My parents very kindly treated us to a night in a very nice hotel room, in an old colonial building with a huge courtyard that was once a Franciscan monastery.

Those monks sure did live it up.

Popoyan is full of narrow streets and whitewashed buildings. In fact, everything is so white that when the sun is out and you take a picture everything appears as a white smear, as though an angel or vampire or the creepy girl from "The Ring" or some kind of otherworldly creature darted into your frame and messed up your photo.

That weekend was the Festival de Gastronomia (Gastronomic Festival!) in Popoyan, which meant that there were all kinds of exciting booths set up in the lobby of our hotel and others, with delicious free food ranging from black free-range coffee grown by a women's collective in the region to french fries (advertised under the brand name "McCain"--John, I didn't know you were in the papitas business!) to fried sausages (which I didn't try, because of the mad horde that rushed the booth the second the sausages were ready). My mother was given a free bottle of expensive Chilean olive oil--I guess she must have a nice face.

On Saturday we drove up to Coconuco, a small town famous for its volcano and hot baths. There were a lot of signs in the town for "Yoghurt Natural," so maybe their yoghurt is famous too? We spent a nice day soaking in the baths, getting all prune-wrinkled, and then my parents and Corey and I went for a small hike up a somewhat steep dirt path in front of our hotel, where we got nice views of the surrounding valley and a waterfall.

Corey and my dad discuss manly topics, such as map making, compass directions and geology/geography.

We were lucky enough to glimpse the snow-capped rim of the volcano, the first time I have ever seen snow in Colombia.

Today we drove back from Coconuco and made a brief stop in Popoyan just to explore it a little more one last time. Popoyan is full of these houses with these dramatic courtyards, which you can peep quickly into and admire the fountains and flowers.

The sight of this llama at the park inspired a discussion centered around a very important question: can you ride a llama, if you're not a) a small child or b) a short person from the Andean region and indigenous descent?

I wanted to climb this hill, but Corey said he was too tired. So, instead we got ginger cookies and pandebono (a yummy Colombian bread pastry of which Corey has become very fond), which was just as nice if not nicer.

The one family photo in which there wasn't at least one person making a silly monkey face.

One of the things I was thinking about on our first day in Colombia, in the back of the car with Omar driving and Corey in the front seat, returning from a trip to the mall to get Corey some contacts (yes, one of the first things we did after arriving in a rarely-visited foreign countrywas go to the mall), was that Cali is really just any other city after all. It took me living for a significant period of time in another South American city (a bigger, dirtier one) to get rid of Cali’s symbolic baggage. Quito has the same “pueblo town”quality as Cali—-a significant lack of throbbing, underground culture, the kind that produces yoga classes or art in the streets, the feel that I imagine that Buenos Aires or Bogota might have. Thinking of Cali this way (as similar to other places, as opposed to this wholly unique, unreplaceable spot) is a comfort rather than a downer for me… it makes Cali easier to leave, I guess, if it feels like other places, rather than this unique site. Not to say that there are certain things about Colombia and Cali that are and will be to me simplyirreplaceable, but I'm not going to dwell on that right now, for fear of getting sentimental. After all, people move away from their childhood homes all the time. Just because this has been my home base for the past soon to be 23 years (even when my family was living in Virginia and I was living in Portland, Cali was always argubably, without competition, home), doesn’t mean that leaving has to be, I dunno, a big deal. Oh, well.

Also, as a kind of random aside, here are some recent news updates relevant to Ecuador and the mycorenewal project:

This just happenned in Cuyabeno: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/14/content_9288163.htm. I know you read stuff like that in the news every day but it´s different when it actually happens to a place you know. I mean, picture the Willamete and the hooplah that would take place if the spill had happenned there. Makes me sad to see what it looks like, the Aguadulce (Sweetwater) river, when we go back there later this week. Sell your cars, folks.

Also, here is a somewhat hilariously inaccurate (at least to me) article about the mushroom project: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/08/eaecuador208.xml

Mushrooms eat trash!!! No, really!!!!!!