Foragers and “noccers”: 5 Questions for mycologist and author Eugenia Bone
Bone discusses the communities of amateur mycologists and foragers she spent time with for new latest book, Have A Good Trip.
Eugenia Bone grew up in New York in the 1970s, and everyone at her school was doing LSD. There were plenty of fun psychedelic trips, but also quite a few bad ones, including someone who may have had a psychotic break. Psychedelic mushrooms were rare to her then, Bone said, but over the course of the next few decades, they became a bigger part of her life through mycology. Bone became a cookbook author and recipe tester, often writing about wild foods and foraging, and in 2011, she wrote Mycophilia, a popular book about mushroom hunting. That led her “down the wormhole of mycology,” Bone says; one of her chapters was about magic mushrooms, which at the time was still the “black sheep of mycology.” Johns Hopkins had just begun their research on people having mystical experiences while taking psilocybin, but few amateur mycologists focused on the mind altering mushrooms.
In her latest book, Have a Good Trip, Bone takes readers on a tour of the various subcultures in the psychedelics world, exploring everything from the science of psilocybin and microdosing to bad trips and private retreats and guides. The Microdose spoke with Bone about the communities of amateur mycologists and foragers she spent time with in the book.
In your book, you join a mushroom foray with amateur mycologists to hunt for psychedelic mushrooms. What was that scene like?
These mushroom forays are sometimes held at a bed and breakfast, or a camp — any place where people can look for mushrooms. The one I write about in my book took place at a large AirBnB in Long Beach, Washington, and since I was the elder stateswoman of sorts — or just elder — they let me stay in a hotel nearby. The attendees were mainly folks from the Pacific Northwest, though some came from further afield, and the BnB was a wild scene where day became night and night became day. The incredible thing about them is that they all look like hooligans with baggy jeans and rock band t-shirts, earrings, piercings. But their knowledge of mycology was really impressive; it turned out they were biochemists, biologists and ecologists. It’s always shocking when someone who’s smoking a big gigantic joint is rattling off Latin binomials. [Reporter note: Latin binomials are the two-word scientific names denoting genus and species, as in Homo sapiens.]
Did you end up finding any psychedelic mushrooms?
I asked them if they could show me some locations with psychedelic mushrooms, and there was one spot they had noticed Psilocybe stuntzii, also known as blue ringers, which are a not-so-strong species, growing in someone’s yard in the next town over. It was a little ranch-style house with a chain link fence around it, with a decorative rock garden. And the people I was with pulled across the street and said, ‘Ok, let’s wait until the homeowner leaves, and then we can just jump over the fence and look at the mushrooms, then take them.’ And I said, ‘No way am I jumping over! It’s a big fence! I’m just going to go talk to them about it.’ So they were like ok — they all were outside the car, parked across the street, lined up to see what would happen.
I knock on the door and a woman answers, and I explain to her that we’re amateur mycologists, and asked if it was ok to look at the mushrooms in her yard. And she said, ‘Oh my god, I hate them - I want to throw bleach on them; I want to get them out, they’re disgusting.’ I explained to her that they are secondary decomposers, meaning they’ll be gone in a couple seasons because they’ll have used up whatever it is they’re eating. She asked a few more questions, but then she said, ‘Tell your friends to come on over.’ She gave us all paper grocery bags and told us to collect all of them. While the other mycologists worked, I chatted with her to keep her at ease; her mother came out with a walker, we talked about how the neighbor was kind of a jerk. And she mentioned that the entire yard had been laid on top of sawdust – and I imagined a whole enormous pile of sawdust inoculated with these Psilocybe stuntzii spores. I asked where she’d gotten the sawdust and she said it came from just down the road from Basket Case Nursery. It was too perfect. We went down to the nursery to see if there were more, but the fence was too high for us to see over.
In the book, you also talk about another fascinating subculture: amateur mycologists called noccers. What do they do?
Noccers, pronounced “knockers,” is short for “inoculators” — they do renegade cultivation of mushroom species. One of the most common ways to do this is collect myceliated wood chips, because the mycelium of some psychedelic species grow on that medium, and then you can spread those around in several locations so the mycelium can spread to new piles of wood chips. As I mentioned earlier, Psilocybe mushrooms are secondary decomposers — they move through nutrients quickly, whether that’s wood chips or sawdust, or cow manure — and so you have about two or three years before you need to find a new food source for them.
So Noccers will cruise around looking for freshly laid wood chips. They’ll go in with a backpack full of myceliated chips and throw them into the pile, or they’ll make a slurry with spores, put that into water balloons, and chuck them over the fences of landscape companies, or city park departments where they keep big piles of wood chips. Another way they find out about freshly laid chips is that they have a mole in the landscaping company that provides wood chips to the city of Seattle.
That seems like a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. What’s their motivation?
The idea behind it is to keep the different phenotypes of mushroom going. That’s a mycologist’s mind at work: they’re looking to preserve diversity. There’s so much natural genetic variation within species that mycologists don’t want to be lost. It strikes me as an appreciation for mushrooms, and wanting to augment what’s happening naturally, in contrast to cultivating in home labs.
But the other part of it is a hooliganism, a naughty fun; and in some cases, it’s also a little self-serving, because people want to keep up their own supply of mushrooms, especially for microdosing. I talked to one guy who nocced his parents’ condo.
You mentioned earlier that psychedelic mushrooms were, for a time, the “black sheep of mycology.” As psychedelics have seen a resurgence of popularity, have you noticed any changes in the amateur mycology community?
Before, the psychedelic mushroom community was quite small. My mentor, Gary Lincoff, one of the people who started the Telluride mushroom festival which celebrated psilocybe and other psychedelic genera. I’ve long been a part of the subcommunity interested in these mushrooms but it was not the norm; most people in my years in the non-commercial foraging community, people in clubs, were interested in either culinary mushroom or in mushroom taxonomy. Tons of people who just like to learn how to identify, even more who join walks in woods and ask, “Can I eat this?” That’s how I got interested.
But now, psychedelic mushrooms play a much bigger role in clubs. Many clubs have asked me to speak about my book; there’s a bit of a misunderstanding when people see it they think it's advocacy instead of more of a critical look at the scene. And afterwards I answer so many questions people have about mushrooms, almost always someone wants to talk about derealization, which gives me pause because that’s a pretty bad experience to have. Even people who have been studying mushrooms forever are just learning about how bad trips can be and how long the negative experiences can persist. By shining a light on this, I hope people might know more, and get ahead of potential distress down the road.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
