expression for psilocybin when asking him about going hunting for
’shrooms.
“I really, really hate that word,” he said, almost gravely, adopting the
tone of a parent upbraiding a potty-mouthed child.
The word never crossed my lips again.
By the end of the call, Stamets had invited me up to his place in
Washington State, on the Little Skookum Inlet at the base of the Olympic
Peninsula. I asked him, gingerly, if I could come at a time when the
Psilocybes were fruiting. “Most of them have already come and gone,” he
said. “But if you come right after Thanksgiving, and the weather’s right, I
can take you to the only place in the world where Psilocybe azurescens
has been consistently found, at the mouth of the Columbia River.” He
mentioned the name of the park where he had found them in the past and
told me to book a yurt there, adding, “Probably best not to use my name.”
• • •
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE my trip to Washington State, I pored over Stamets’s
field guide, hoping to prepare myself for the hunt. It seems there are
more than two hundred species of Psilocybe, distributed all over the
world; it’s not clear whether that’s always been the case, or if the
mushrooms have followed in the footsteps of the animals who have taken
such a keen interest in them. (Humans have been using psilocybin
mushrooms sacramentally for at least seven thousand years, according to
Stamets. But animals sometimes ingest them too, for reasons that remain
obscure.)
Psilocybes are saprophytes, living off dead plant matter and dung.
They are denizens of disturbed land, popping up most often in the
habitats created by ecological catastrophe, such as landslides, floods,
storms, and volcanoes. They also prosper in the ecological catastrophes
caused by our species: clear-cut forests, road cuts, the wakes of
bulldozers, and agriculture. (Several species live in and fruit from the
manure of ruminants.) Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, the most
potent species occur less often in the wild than in cities and towns; their
predilection for habitats disturbed by us has allowed them to travel
widely, “following streams of debris,” including our own. In recent years,