The Drug Club
(on Floating Street, Paradise West)

From Daire in Dublin

The mushroom.man's house:

You hear no crackle, no brittle sounds from the damp leaf litter on the floor of the oak wood. An dull, oppressive sky sheds only a limp light through the thinning canopy of trees. I move through the forest slowly, eyes down, straining to pick out the brown of the fungus cap from the russet background. Penny Buns; a well-baked bun of a mushroom with an ability to hide, to go unobserved on the first pass of the eye. You have to surprise them; spot them when they think that you've moved on, when they drop their cloak of invisibility. Not plants - beasts. To a zoologist they're closer to animals than plants. To me, too. Strange creatures that give up their secrets reluctantly. Clever. Not like a potato that any idiot can grow, or a cabbage, not easy to domesticate, not happy to take man's shilling: ceps will succumb only to the hunter, the forager, the man who knows the woods. I move through the trees. Beech and oak, an odd holly. The river roars in autumn spate below me. A jay chatters.

How old are these creatures? How long in the subsoil? Spreading their strands of mycelium, growing slowly, fruiting, eating, symbiotic with the trees. As old as the forest, as old as the land. A primal life form, complex, abundant, earthborne, airborne, maybe waterborne. A flash of red - fly agaric - the Norseman's soma, there under the big birch. Slugs feast on it: it's old, maybe a week old, big chunks are gone from the stem, the cap. There will be others around. The walking gets harder, brambles knit a mat that catches the legs, determined to snag, snare the unwary foot.

Perhaps hiding in here, away from the deer tracks. I beat the brambles with my stick and feel better. They're aggressive; they fight back. Small, useless mushrooms are in here. Frail caps, frail stems, no taste, no use. I look up. Maybe a bracket fungus on a trunk. Not even that. I slash my way out of the bramble patch and walk more easily. My autumns in my woods are damp affairs; not here the crisp dry leaves of a New England fall. Just a mat of damp on its way to becoming leaf mould. And the fungal world works there too, living on the planet's underbelly, finding it's niche in the rot and decay, in the dark and in the damp. It likes the humid, the fetid - there's no mould where the sun shines. But then, field mushrooms live in the open. They're the ones you can domesticate, the unsubtle ones, the ones any fool can find, upright and white in a field of green grass. They hold no mystery, no secrets, no taste. My prey is not like that. No, my prey is cunning, camouflaged and covert. Sometimes crouching in long grass, sometimes its brown cap lost in the dead leaves on the forest floor. My eye is trained to these woods, to my quarry. I think back. Rain four days ago, sun yesterday, is that the formula? They like some light, but not too much. They like moist, but not too wet, they like warmth, but not too hot. Fussy little buggers. Moving uphill. The trees are further apart, the light is better. The deer tracks begin to look like forest highways, wide and covered in deer shit. You never see them in the woods - hardly ever. Just the evidence, just the marks they leave behind. The oak and beech give way to birch. Young, skinny things like gangly adolescents. Still no prey, but something nearly as good. Orange birch boletus in clumps of two and three, a bit big, a bit too mature and spongy, but good enough. Into the basket, wipe the knife, walk on. Badger set. Busy little brocks have left yesterday's litter outside the front door. I remember my last dog, a yellow labrador bitch, beautiful and very large, who used to enjoy a quick roll in badger shit and then try to be friendly while smelling like this. There's a clearing beyond the set where a fallen tree makes a seat. A gentle mist is falling as I look around me. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey. I sing it. Maybe a day like today. No, they have dry leaves in California, ones that blow in the breeze; you'd need a hurricane to shift this lot. Stuck together with slugs and wet stuff. I can smell mushrooms. The smell of fungus and damp earth, the truffle smell but less intense. I can smell my prey, perhaps near here. I stay sat, savouring the scent of the prey - is that a spoor? I'll look it up later. I can smell them. They're near. I lean back on the trunk. I stare at the watery sky. I'm a fool: of course I can smell them, they're in the basket at my feet. I sit up and check that's what I'm smelling. I lie back again. It was.

It's a hunt. It has all the feel of a hunt, the rise in adrenaline, the senses on red-alert. I like hunting small game. Rabbits, pigeon, pheasant, mushrooms. You have to know your quarry, where it lives, how it lives. The more you know the more you catch. You have to get into its skin, react like it, you have to know its likes and dislikes, where it feeds, where it lives. The odd thing is, that to catch it you must also love it. Eat it and it's a part of you. I never catch what I don't eat, not even a mushroom. The light falling mist has wet me. My face is wet, tiny rivulets form on my coat running down to that huge sponge of a forest floor.

I wonder how long it takes for the water to seep through the hill and come out in the river below. A week? A year? I decide most of it probably never gets there, it goes straight back into the air as tree sweat. No, not in winter - there are no leaves to sweat. They're like me, they only sweat in the summer. I sit up. Water runs down my neck. I pick up the basket and move on.

I have a plan. I am walking the woods in a big circle. I want to end up where I started. 'And the end of all our wanderings will be to return to the place from where we started and know it for the first time.' I seem to have found my starting point as often as I've started out but I feel no wiser, just better informed. I'll walk the ridge, then go downhill to the river, then along the banks to the bridge. I knew this river before I knew it was this river.

In my early twenties I think, I ate some peyote buttons and drove down here. I walked this river and hallucinated. Odd things happened. I walked towards a bridge knowing that if I looked over the parapet at the other side I would see two trout basking near the surface. And it happened just like that. Time twisted and warped and strangely no insect tried to bite me. Nearly six years later I moved to the river from the city. I had never been sure where I had been that day. A year or so after moving I was exploring the river downstream and I found the place. There was the bridge, the track, the view of the mountains. Here I first stepped into that different world. I found the place from where I had started, but still I only knew it to see. At least I know the river now.