How to Change Your Mind

AT THE TIME OF MY VISIT, Paul Stamets lived with his partner, Dusty Yao,
and their two big dogs, Plato and Sophie, in a sprawling new house on the
Little Skookum Inlet that is constructed inside and out of a small forest’s
worth of the most gorgeous clear Douglas fir and cedar. Like many
species of fungi, Stamets has a passionate attachment to trees and wood.
I arrived on a Friday; our reservation at the campsite wasn’t until Sunday
night, so we had the better part of the weekend to talk Psilocybes, eat
(other kinds of) mushrooms, tour the Fungi Perfecti facilities, and ramble
the surrounding woods and shoreline with the dogs before driving south
to the Oregon border Sunday morning to hunt azzies.
This was the house that mushrooms built, Stamets explained,
launching into its story before I had a chance to unpack my bag. It
replaced a rickety old farmhouse on the site that, when Stamets moved in,
was slowly succumbing to an infestation of carpenter ants. Stamets set
about devising a mycological solution to the problem. He knew precisely
which species of Cordyceps could wipe out the ant colony, but so did the
ants: they scrupulously inspect every returning member for Cordyceps
spores and promptly chew off the head of any ant bearing spores,
dumping the body far away from the colony. Stamets outwitted the ants’
defense by breeding a mutant Cordyceps-like fungus that postponed
sporulation. He put some of its mycelium in his daughter’s dollhouse
bowl, left that on the floor of the kitchen, and during the night watched as
a parade of ants carried the mycelium into the nest—having mistaken it
for a safe food source. When the fungus eventually sporulated, it was
already deep inside the colony and the ants were done for: the Cordyceps
colonized their bodies and sent fruiting bodies bursting forth from their
heads. It was too late to save the farmhouse, but with the proceeds from
the sale of his patent on the fungus Stamets was able to erect this far
grander monument to mycological ingenuity.
The house was spacious and comfortable; I had a whole upstairs wing
of bedrooms to myself. The living room, where we spent most of a rainy
December weekend, had a soaring cathedral ceiling, a big wood-burning
fireplace, and, looming over the room from across the way, a seven-and-
a-half-foot-tall skeleton of a cave bear. A painting of Albert Hofmann
hangs over the fireplace. Overhead, beneath the peak, is a massive round
stained glass depicting “The Universality of the Mycelial Archetype”—an