This week my 2007 Sierra Club Wilderness Calendar changed from maple trees in Texas to mossy rocks in Oregon. In this part of coastal California the forest has been wetted down by a series of pretend rains, a pre-winter phenomenon that damps down the dust but doesn't make the frogs sing.

Already the early fungi are out, or I should say, up. Our driveway is filled with mini-mushrooms scattered like gravel along the pine duff. Overnight we discovered a gorgeous Shaggy Mane, and near it something sooty, skinny and ten inches tall. It may or may not be poisonous, but it's certainly the scariest looking thing we've seen.

This is exactly the right time for local photographer, raconteur and anti-fungophobist Taylor Lockwood to publish his second beautiful book, Chasing the Rain: My Treasure Hunt for the World's Most Beautiful Mushrooms.

Chasing the Rain is a memoir based on more than twenty years spent playing the accordion and chasing newly sprouted fungi around the planet. But you may want first simply to enjoy the glorious profusion of full color photographs.

As the Malvina Reynolds song goes, "There's a green one, and a pink one, and a blue one and a yellow one..." and the unidentified "brown mystery" one that Taylor found clinging to a log in Australia. He writes, "It could be a fungus, an animal, an insect's nest, or some combination."

Mycena interrupta looks like blue jellyfish clinging to a tree. Podaxis beringamensis is cultivated by termites in Australia and looks like, well it looks like nothing you've seen.

Geastrum minimum resembles flowers, or maybe some kind of chocolate bonbon. Mycena viscidocruenta are slimy and scarlet. Hygrocybe graminicolor resemble tiny green Japanese umbrellas. Weraroa virescens resembles a fig. Paurocotylis pilla looks like a pomegrante. The mushrooms photographed here look like all these, plus: purple rocks, cornbread muffins, cabbage, Tiffany lights, soccer balls with warts, kidney beans with hair, kitchen sponge, pumpkin on a stick, sea anemone mated to liqueur glass, octopus, buttocks, tomato, bird bath, sugar bowl, turtle back, and so forth.

Shocked, pleased and mystified, the reader then turns to Taylor's recollections. "...my best find was a Tricholoma bakamatsutake. After lunch, I traveled to Muroran in a bus full of beer drinking, singing, Japanese mushroom hunters... I had dinner... as the rain made mushroom music on the roof."

In Japan Taylor came across "an odd, greenish thing sticking out of the ground. Was this a mushroom, a tree stem, or the chewed-off stalk of wild asparagus? It was a mushroom all right. Neda-san said that he had known about it, but after forty years of mushroom hunting he had never seen a Pseudotulostoma japonicum in the wild!"

The adventures pile up and the succulent photos accumulate. Taylor has a web site, of course, and sells photos for use in books and magazines around the world. He has a three-part DVD to help in mushroom identification, and he is the author of a previous book, all photos, no stories, titled Treasures from the Kingdom of Fungi.

The adventure began on a warm, wet winter in Mendocino, 1984. Taylor bought a camera, flash, macro lens, and film -- "with mushrooms on my mind." Years later he had "an epiphany. I realized that through my photography, I was in a special position to help raise awareness of and appreciation for mushrooms and other fungi. I was single, self-employed, motivated, and I really believed mushrooms needed me."

As for Taylor Lockwood's favorite mushroom hunting locations, he always answers, "The ones I haven't been to yet."

Transcripts of Words on Books temporarily are not available through the KZYX web site. To be on the WOB emailing list, please send a note to amiksak@mcn.org.

You can read back issues in these two locations: http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/index.html and http://www.habitualreader.com/friends/blogs/friends_blogs.html

Orders/Information:

Chasing the Rain: My Treasure Hunt for the World's Most Beautiful Mushrooms by Taylor F. Lockwood. Hardcover $29.95. ISBN 9780970944924.

Treasures from the Kingdom of Fungi by Taylor F. Lockwood. Hardcover $29.95. ISBN 097094490X.

Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds:

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same
There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and there's lawyers, and business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course and drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp and then to the university
Where they are put in boxes and they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

(for the lyrics my thanks to OCAP, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty http://www.ocap.ca/lyrics.html)

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