The Boston Mycological Society

In the fall, when the air in New England becomes crisp again, when the twilight falls early, I can feel nostalgia for the dream of academia I once held. You see, I remember when I believed that college would be like the old books I would read set in Oxford, anywhere between the early 1800s and the Second World War. There would be late nights of deep intellectual conversation, fascinating characters, professors with passion and wisdom and devotion to the great thoughts of man. People would sip sherry and quote in Latin. I would walk with the spirits of the great minds who had walked the ivy-edged paths before me.

Well, college wasn't so much like that, but there were some late nights, and some quoting (if not in Latin) and some places that were magical, like the observatory or the book-filled attic office of my favorite professor, a man equally devoted to poetry and opera. Wesleyan had enough of the old spirit to let me retain a romantic attachment to the idea of academe.

What ruined things for me was Harvard.

I work at the School of Public Health, and a less romantic place has never been found on this earth. The building was thrown up in the great ugliness-construction efforts of the 60s and 70s. It is charmless. The people are intelligent and earnest and do good work for the world, but the idea of the passionate intellectual, the man or woman devoted to ideas, the Renaissance scholar who may specialize in one field, but reads broadly and deeply from across the body of human knowledge, the professional scholar who remains an enthusiastic amateur naturalist or gourmand or musician, Nabokov with his butterflies - well, that is gone, my friends, dead and buried by the pressures of publication and specialization. The brilliant scholars watch American Idol with everyone else, read Tom Clancy, eat from the cafeteria, and churn out work with an eye to the next conference, the next publication, the next award, the next research grant. Eccentricity can not thrive in this environment. It is tiring and dull.

But even at Harvard, the slickest academic institution around, there can be little places, little moments, in which the ghosts of older academe whisper again. Tonight, I went to the Harvard Herbarium for a meeting of the Boston Mycological Club, and I heard them singing.

The Boston Mycological Club is not strictly a Harvard organization, but its links to Harvard are strong, and they are permitted to meet on Harvard grounds. The club is the oldest amateur mushroom society in the country. They get together for walks in the woods to collect mushrooms, then they use their collective expertise for identification. I signed up for a four-night course of lectures on mushroom identification, their recommended introduction to the world of mushroom gathering.

The room was not an elegant one. I had hoped the Herbarium would be located in the lovely old building that houses the Peabody Museum, but it was next door in a much later, less attractive structure. No matter. The interest of the people there, their obvious pleasure in learning more about a subject they care about passionately, was a thrill. I was, not surprisingly, one of the youngest people there. About half of the attendees, and nearly all of those pointed out as good sources of information, were in their fifties or sixties of beyond. Many wore unfashionable moustaches. One expert looked like a white-haired Johnny Fever, an aged hippie who probably became interested in mushrooms for reasons best left ignored; another seemed the embodiment of the research scientist, enthusiastic and a little nerdy. The older woman who watched the door was delicate and birdlike, with lively eyes. The thirty- and forty-somethings generally had European accents.

One exception, besides myself, was a couple in their late thirties who had just come back from a trip to Italy. They clearly had food on the mind, which naturally was why I was there as well, but something about such a straightforward desire felt almost unseemly. Other people showed great interest in spore patterns and so forth; a real amateur naturalist would surely not look at the fascinating variety of colors, forms, and growth patterns laid out on the table of specimen and think only "dinner." But that doesn't mean the love the real mushroomers had for mushrooms was cold and intellectual. They stroked the gills, smelled the caps, took one bunch into the closet to see if it still glowed (!), and, yes, rhapsodized about the pleasures of the best eating mushrooms.

I walked out into the chill air with dual dreams: of afternoons spent wandering in the woods, comparing notes on species with quirky characters, consulting field guides and making very serious noted in a special leather-bound journal, and of sautéed wild mushrooms over pasta with thyme and cream. A proper Renaissance gal would want no less.