Amanita muscaria, or do mushrooms have quadruped envy?
In late July, I was lucky enough to be in Colorado’s Clear Creek County area, at a dude ranch with my family. One option, not for the faint of heart (or buttocks) is an all-day ride up to a high camp for an overnight stay. After about 3 hours’ riding, we all got to stop for lunch in a lovely wooded hilly area. Before gorging on fajitas cooked on an open fire, I sought a good tree for, uh, ok, to stand behind and empty my bladder of urine.
On the way back, feeling like a new man, out of nowhere my eyes were pulled to this button of red in a carpet of green. My first amanita muscaria in the wild!
Mushrooms really do seem like a gift to me, provided to me to appreciate and photograph — to bring back the image to the world and share. Sigmund Freud was an enthusiastic mushroom hunter, interestingly, and believed mushrooms to be sentient beings, capable of fleeing when spotted. That’s why, according to his grandkids, he’d throw his hat over a ‘shroom immediately after finding it. This Amanita kinda bolsters that belief for me, because after getting ONE shot fired off my camera, I went to eat and talk of my first magic mushroom find. Well, a bunch of us returned and searched to no success. It was GONE. I even remembered a few landmarks leading up to my discovery, but nothing. No red button remained. Did it run away? Sigmund?
amanita muscaria playing it cool in the Colorado hills
Kenneth Setzer 