Mycology for Dummies
Halfway up Mam Tor, between the hikers, the fell runners, the mountain bikers and the dog walkers, an interloper in grey trackies. I watch him as I take a break and make a start on an inedible cereal bar, the sweat chilling on my back. He looks a little hungover, and his trainers are dirty from the patches of sheep shit and scree he’s had to navigate to reach a field just off the main path. His eyes are locked to the floor, slowly pacing. Occasionally he will stop, bend over to examine something on the floor, and then put it in the Tesco bag he carries in one hand. He moves furtively, but there’s no need. We all know what he’s here for.
He holds a tiny mushroom up, squinting at it in the low autumn sun.
Writing about drugs can be difficult because so many people have an instinctively negative reaction to hearing about them. Something about their illegality, their countercultural prestige, the way they shape the lives of those who use them, means that it’s hard to listen to someone expounding on them without thinking, yeah, okay, we get it, you take drugs.
Writing at this level of ironic remove isn’t safe either. It’s not the content of the conversation, but the conversation itself. Even the act of having it is to invite an unwanted confidence, a cozy little complicity. You’ve been judged cool enough to share in the illicit. Nobody is impressed, whether you asked them to be or not.
Well: so what? If an eyeroll spares us having to hear about someone’s “sesh” or the time they pissed themselves or thought their wheelie bin was a bear, so be it. Drug stories are like dreams or D&D campaigns — they’re only really interesting to the person experiencing them. For most people, in any case — personally I’m very happy to hear about people’s dreams, as long as they’re interesting and ideally involve me.
Similar issues attend writing about drinking, though the pub as a pastime is so deeply embedded in British culture that as a conversational gambit it falls somewhere in the area of talking about the weather, the small talk equivalent of white noise. There is a special kind of exhaustion in reading someone writing badly about the particular texture of a trip to the pub. There are only so many ways to describe the crispness of a pint, and only so many interesting things which happen in them. Even the most well-intended accounts end up feeling like the kind of things that end up in CAMRA magazines.
Different drug conversations are annoying in different ways, of course. Cocaine is so often yoked to drinking in this country that most stories about it end up being the boorish mythology of someone who fancies themselves a “pintman” and tried to climb a piece of civic infrastructure. Ketamine seldom produces clear narratives, only an abundance of second-hand recollections and struggles with verticality. Weed is a deadening, insular kind of drug, and creates deadening, insular stories.
Ecstasy produces some of the most dramatic personal-emotional experiences, but doesn’t help at all with finding the right words to express them, though there are exceptions to this. Upon being given his first pill, a friend of a friend recently said in tones of wonder that he felt like he had taken off a glove he didn’t realise he’d been wearing his whole life. I’ve yet to hear it put better.
Psychedelics fall into their own category. Stories about psychedelics are as likely to be accompanied by the lingering smell of patchouli or the scratchy uneasiness of the long-term wreckhead. Psychedelics can make people religious.
Unlike most street drugs, whose primary vectors are house party kitchens, pub toilets and stultifying afternoons in front of the TV, psychedelics have a thriving online community of ‘psychonauts’ whose accounts — trip reports — are shared on websites like Erowid. They include doses, setting, timechecks, and detailed accounts of visual and bodily effects. They are, at least in part, educational. I would read them for hours when I was a teenager, bewitched by the idea of breaking down the doors of consciousness. I often referenced Aldous Huxley (without ever having actually read him). Later I would contribute a trip report of my own, which wasn’t as bad as I feared on a re-read, though it did include the phrase, “I cannot emphasise enough how mangled I was”.
Walking through the night in almost total silence, taking in the world around me, was fantastic. I would often stop because of something that I saw; outside a door the ground appeared to be breathing and rippling, and the tarmac was rolling like waves.
I stopped at a bus stop and the worn and ridged road moved together to form wonderful tribal patterns, flowing together. I found if I concentrated on one point, the distortions would increase; moving my eyes even slightly seemed to “reset” them. Concentration caused them to progress to whole new shapes, until it reached a point of the shadows forming two stylised figures, who kissed in front of me.
There is a particular tenor to many of these accounts. Mine was speckled with words like “beauty”, “wonder”, “gorgeous”. I was also moved to rip off Neutral Milk Hotel — oh how strange it is to be anything at all! There is a reason for this, and it isn’t a particularly complicated one. People call psychedelics beautiful because they are. To stand on top of a mountain and see the hills breathing like the land itself is some enormous warm-blooded animal is an experience which makes you reach for words which are rarely used for hammering a baggie of coke with the back of your phone to break up the lumps.
Okay, we get it, you take drugs.
Lately I’ve gotten into a habit of taking mushrooms and then going on long walks alone. Mushrooms are, of course, special. They weren’t concocted in a laboratory by a biochemist in the 60s. They aren’t powdered, they aren’t a lengthy acronym like 4-AcO-DMT or 2C-E, they don’t come in baggies: not originally, anyway, though eventually they too must be demeaned by a trip in a dirty Citroen Picasso. They grow on the hills. If you know what to look for, they’re everywhere.
This is all woo woo, of course. Biochemically it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference whether you’re swallowing something from Edale or a synthetic. Experientially, though, there is something to the knowledge that you’re part of a continuum of human psychoactive use that runs back to the prehistoric. And not just in the sense that, say, an Anglo Saxon peasant might have brewed beer just like we drink Neck Oil. In the case of mushrooms, they might well have walked these same fields. Knelt down to pick a psilocybe semilanceata, popped it into their mouth, and watched the sun set.
It’s also hard not to read a certain cosmic intentionality into them. I’m not inclined to religion, but it feels almost like cheating that something so rewarding can be so commonly found and, to a small degree of error, easily identified. Foraging for mushrooms more generally (psychoactive or otherwise) is extremely high risk for the uninformed. Some of the most poisonous natural things in the world are fungi. It’s a great way to kill yourself by accident. As far as psilocybin go though, there is essentially nothing they resemble which is likely to do you any damage beyond an upset stomach. None of the really nasty ones — your amanita, which have names like Death Cap or Destroying Angel — look anything like the small, unprepossessing Liberty Caps.*
My thirties are becoming the decade of the mushroom, as I become less and less interested in stimulants and dirty toilets, aching jaws and sunrises before I’ve gone to bed. Perhaps in part that’s because they are as much of a quiet, meditative, daytime experience as a seedy nighttime one. And, while there can be a certain queasiness, a fizzing of the skin, they’re also less of a bodily one, and certainly not inclined to grab you by the throat and shake you in the way of some others. The sense of wellbeing that comes with them doesn’t feel like a nitrous blast of dopamine, more like a gentle, incidental byproduct of having such a pleasant time.
All of which is to say: there are some things it is worth the risk of sounding a wanker over.
*There is one crossover — amanita muscaria, the iconic fly agaric, is an amanita but is consumed for its psychoactive effect, albeit at a certain level of distillation and remove. And is substantially riskier as it may be mistaken for the Panther Cap, which can be deadly.
