Mycologist David Arora, a former Santa Cruzan, relaxes on his Mendocino County property. Photo by Christian Schwarz.
The moon has just set behind a curtain of 100-foot redwood trees, and David Arora is on his first mushroom hunt of the new year. It didn’t take him long to get around to it. It’s 12:15am on Jan. 1, and the mycologist is craving a large basket of matsutakes to bring home, soak in a rich marinade and eat for dinner the next night.
“I’m trying to find at least one matsutake,” says Arora, scanning the path in front of him. “They’re amazing.” At this dark hour, he’s leading a group of 10 mushroom enthusiasts, only about half of them holding flashlights, through the woods of his multiple acres of fungal paradise in Mendocino County. They’ve been drinking wine and eating mushroom-laden dishes, like a black trumpet dip and some hedgehog turnovers, all night, and people are in fine spirits.
Arora, one of the world’s foremost experts on mushrooms, often hosts parties on Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve for small groups of fungi enthusiasts. A hike wasn’t on the agenda for tonight, but it wasn’t a huge surprise either. For the moment the group has fallen behind Arora as the foragers kneel on a carpet of pine needles, busily picking hedgehog mushrooms. Arora, meanwhile, has moved ahead and is zigzagging across the winding dirt path.
“I think there’s one here,” he says. Surveying the forest with his flashlight, Arora suddenly finds his jackpot, a patch of matsutakes. “Oh look, you guys!” he shouts down to the group. When no one responds, he switches to a whisper, as if he were in a museum. “Let’s wait for them to come up here,” he says in a quiet aside. “We’ll let them find the mushrooms.”
Arora on a mushroom hunt is like a kid in a candy cap store. William Rubel, a food writer and close friend since 1970, is on the hike, having survived a near–freezing late–night skinnydipping session to procure watercress for a salad (at Arora’s insistence, of course). Rubel says in some ways the 59-year-old Arora is still at heart the same curious explorer he was as a teenager, roaming the hills of Pasadena, and later the Santa Cruz Mountains, looking for fungi. “He’s still excited to pick a chanterelle,” says Rubel, who was Arora’s neighbor at UC–Santa Cruz, where Arora’s passion bloomed into a veritable obsession. “How many thousands has he found? It’s still like the first day he discovered mushrooms. He’s still 16.”
“It never gets old,” Arora explains casually. “It’s always exciting to find mushrooms. They never look quite the same. Some years everything’s bigger. Today we found some beautiful mushrooms.”
A quarter past midnight may sound like an odd time for a foray, but Arora loves the challenge and thrill of foraging for mushrooms when he can barely see his own feet.
“It’s exciting!” Arora says the next morning. “It’s just different to be out in the woods at night, and we may have nightlife in cities, but we’re not nocturnal creatures. So, when we’re in the woods at night, we’re at a great disadvantage in every way. We can’t see well. We can’t smell well. It’s just interesting.”
Arora returns to the Monterey Bay this weekend for the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair, which he founded 38 years ago. After taking a mostly hands-off approach to the fair for the past two decades, Arora is speaking for the second straight year. While he says he never regrets having left town, he says he does miss Santa Cruz at times.
It was in Santa Cruz, after all, that he wrote his opus, Mushrooms Demystified, the go-to field guide and, at 1,056 pages, essentially the mushroom bible to anyone living in the Western United States. Arora is currently working on the third edition of Mushrooms Demystified. It will be the first update in more than 25 years.
Mr. Mushroom
Mushrooms Demystified is still widely regarded as the premier book for mushrooms west of the Mississippi, and it covers all of North America. Experts say the book has opened foraging to millions who never would have become interested otherwise.
“It’s the best field guide I’ve ever used,” says Tom Bruns, a mycology professor at UC–Berkeley who grew up on the East Coast and got his PhD from the University of Michigan. Bruns uses Mushrooms Demystified as required reading for all his classes. He has a lot of respect for Arora as a mycologist, even though Arora lacks the formal scientific training of most academics in the field. “He’s self–taught, and that’s really impressive,” says Bruns. “I’ve worked on fungi all my life, and I don’t know them like he does.”
Phil Carpenter, co-chair for the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz, says Arora’s wry sense of humor makes his books more accessible. “He’s got a very strong command of language,” says Carpenter, who organizes the annual Fungus Fair. “The sense of humor that he puts into his books adds an element you don’t find in other serious texts, and Mushrooms Demystified is a very serious text.”
Carpenter says that between Arora’s renewed involvement with the fair and his rewrite, this is the most active Arora has been in 20 years. “He just had so much other things going on. He’s been traveling a lot. He’s always been a world traveler when it comes to mushrooms. But he’s getting more active,” says Carpenter.
Indeed, Arora is taking almost all new photographs for the new Mushrooms Demystified. But he downplays any career transformations that appear underway. He says he couldn’t have rewritten his book much sooner because ongoing DNA research left so many species’ names in flux. As for the fair, Arora says he became involved again in part as he noticed changes in its management that have allowed its revenue to stay with the federation instead of going to the city.
Arora says he’s excited to be re-taking so many pictures, too. His publisher, Ten Speed Press, wants as many digital photographs as possible in the new edition, and the digital camera allows Arora to take essentially the same picture for hours until he gets the shot he wants without wasting any film. “I would say my interest in mushroom photography is being reinvigorated,” says Arora.
Most nights at sunset, Arora attempts to snap the perfect picture of a bowl of chanterelles in front of a glowing chanterelle-colored sky. It’s all part of his vision to create an entertaining, user-friendly field guide better than any other on the market. “I’ve got better sunsets than they do,” Arora says. “So, I’m going to use ’em.”
Keeping It Real
As much as Arora loves fungus clubs, including, obviously, the one he helped found, he does offer a critique of them. Many people lose sight of the reasons mushrooms are so much fun, he argues—namely that many of them taste good, and they’re fun to find. Arora’s idea of perfect mushroom hunting is what he finds on his annual visits to China, where the ultimate goal is simply finding the ingredients for a good meal.
“I like to go mushroom hunting with villagers because it’s actually very simple,” he says. Unlike mushroom clubs, Chinese villages have specified roles, with certain people assigned to go out and pick mushrooms—hierarchy, as he calls it. The villagers don’t get competitive in the search. They bring mushrooms home, cook them and share them with the group.
In clubs it’s a little different. “There is no hierarchy here,” Arora says. “It becomes about: Who can pick the most mushrooms? Who can name the most mushrooms? It’s just endless. Not as much fun.”
Arora first became interested in fungi when his family was staying at a house on the Hudson River in New York State. Arora came across a mushroom book and started venturing out to see what he could find. “He’d come back. The dog would have a turtle in his mouth, and David would have a new mushroom,” says his mother, Shirley Arora.
These days Arora and Rubel, the food writer, often travel together, eating mushrooms many Westerners frown upon or even thought were inedible.
“William and I have a philosophy that’s different than people in the mushroom clubs,” says Arora. “They become like mushroom snobs. I don’t sit with them on purpose, but if I sit with them somewhere at a dinner table and they start talking that way, it’s cool because I can always one-up them. I can always say, ‘Well, you might think the chanterelles in Oregon are the best, but I prefer the ones from Zimbabwe.’ And of course they can’t top that.”
“Connoisseurship is good,” Arora continues, “because that means you’re appreciating something in a more nuanced way. But then when people invest their ego in it, they become snobs. There are dozens of great mushrooms, and it would actually be a disaster if everyone picked just a couple kinds.”
Arora has followers who appreciate his approach. “Sometimes we overlook certain mushrooms just because of reputation, or one’s not as good as another,” says Sarah Karsmarski, who drove from Santa Cruz with her boyfriend to celebrate the new year with Arora. “He doesn’t want to put them on a scale and find out which one is the best mushroom.”
It is fitting that a man who got his start by leafing through a book in a cabin in the woods now owns a cabin of his own, where he invites interested foragers for dinner and classes.
It isn’t Arora’s style to keep copies of his famous guides prominently displayed in his library, but maybe books aren’t the world-renowned author’s most effective way of teaching anyway. If Arora, a walking encyclopedia himself, gets hungry enough, he will likely take dinner guests on a curious stomp through his thickly forested yard in search of fresh supplies—no matter what time of day or night.
THE FUNGUS FAIR is Friday, Jan. 13, 3-7pm and Saturday–Sunday, Jan. 14–15, 10am–4:30pm. David Arora presents “The Wheel of Fungi” Saturday and Sunday at 1pm. Louden Nelson Center, 301 Center St., Santa Cruz. Admission $5 Friday, $10 Saturday and Sunday.
