When you think about it, we’re all just a bunch of molecules flowing through a bunch of other molecules that occasionally congeal in an ectoplasmic singularity we wistfully call reality. Which is why I try not to think about it, especially on the motorcycle.
It’s Saturday on Memorial Day weekend, I’m on my way to the McCloud Mushroom Festival, and my mind is focused on the serpentine road unwinding before me, past the fainting goat farm, over the top of Buzzard’s Roost and on up Highway 299.
I turn north on Highway 89 and shortly after see my first foragers, plainly dressed men carrying white sacks loaded with morels, porcinis and boletas:
Or so these faux foragers would have me believe! I slow down enough to get a close look, searching for the tell-tale signs of the shroomer: pupils the size of cast iron frying pans, the elongated gait of an early primate. They look at me like I’m a cop, but they are absent the symptoms. No psilocybin here. I speed up and leave the mushroom pickers behind me, determined to find my quarry—anyone who happens to be tripping balls—just ahead at the McCloud Mushroom festival.
I’m starving when I pull into town so I stop at Floyd’s Frosty and have the special of the day: the Swiss mushroom burger.
Floyd, or whoever is behind the counter, swears the mushrooms on the burger aren’t psychedelic. I eye him skeptically. He appears to be sober and gives me a bemused smile. Then it begins. A faint, dull throbbing that expands in waves until I recognize it’s the baseline of the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Grace Slick is whispering on the wind:
“… When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go/And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low/ Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know …”
I wander through a corridor of booths and tables from which the mushroom people hawk their wares: mushroom candles, rows of tiny wooden bears, a burly man selling sauerkraut. I stop at a series of tables displaying the numerous varieties of mushrooms found in northern California.
People are circle around the Mushroom Man, who sometimes goes by the name of Eric Schramm, as he explains the various gourmet properties of the assembled fungi.
The Mendocino County resident’s spiel is mesmerizing, but epicurean delights are not on my menu today. Grace Slick’s plaintive wail grows nearer:
“… One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small …”
A smiling man proffers an enormous stick-like insect.
A beautiful girl cups a giant mushroom in her palm.
I follow a tall man in a floppy fur-lined top hat through the throng, convinced at last I’ve found a fellow-traveler. He’s swinging his arms and legs Chewbacca-like and then he stops at one of the booths and speaks to a shorter friend in a low guttural dialect I can’t comprehend. He senses me eavesdropping and gives me the stink-eye. I can’t make out his pupils through all the squinting.
The music draws me on until I reach a makeshift dance square in the parking lot where live human beings perform mating rituals slightly off-time to the music. On stage the Jefferson Airplane (an older gentleman informs me the band’s name is Blue Relish, but I don’t believe him) are building up to the tune’s crescendo, Grace’s voice clear as a bell over the throbbing bass, pulsating horns and thrashing drums:
“ … Feed your head! Feed your head! … ”
I stagger toward a small tent in search of respite and am slammed with a kaleidoscopic patchwork display of paintings featuring checkerboards, barely recognizable animals with strange proportions, and distorted depictions of everyday items such as fruits, vegetable and furniture. An auburn-haired woman sits among the paintings, and I figure she must be Alice, even though the name over the tent’s doorway says “Catherine G. McElroy.”
“Are you shrooming?” I ask Alice.
“No, this is just the way I feel inside,” she answers.
“Me too, “ I say. “Me too.”
R.V. Scheide has been a northern California journalist for more than 20 years. He appreciates your comments and story ideas.
