Memories

The moments that stay with you are never the calm ones — they're the ones where something unknown was standing right next to you the whole time

Ask me for my favorite days outdoors and I could give you a long list — quiet mornings, good weather, a full creel or a full trap line. But ask me which days I actually remember, in the vivid, replay-it-in-my-head way that only a handful of moments earn, and it's a much shorter list. And every single one of them has the same thing sitting in the middle of it: something I couldn't see, couldn't identify, or couldn't control, close enough to touch.

I was trout fishing a stretch of stream I knew well, working my way upstream past a log that had fallen across the bank years earlier and just stayed there, half-sunk into the moss. I'd stepped around that same log a dozen times on that same stream without a second thought. This time, as I came around the low end of it, the air changed. That's the only way I can describe it — a dry, rattling buzz that your body understands before your brain has finished processing the sound. Rattlesnake, coiled somewhere in the tangle of roots at the log's base, close enough that I never actually saw it until I'd already backed away. I don't remember deciding to freeze. I just remember standing there, rod still in hand, listening to that sound and understanding, all at once, that the stream I thought I knew completely had just reminded me it didn't owe me anything.

That's the thing about the finest days outside — the sunny stream, the good campsite, the quiet trail — they were never actually free of risk. It was just easier to forget that when nothing was happening. It takes one sound, one shape out of place, to remind you that the wild was never fully mapped, no matter how many times you've walked it.

I think about that same feeling from a completely different season, a completely different kind of cold. I was young and running a muskrat line on a pond I'd trapped a dozen times before, moving out across ice I trusted because I'd trusted it the week before, and the week before that. And then, with no warning at all, I wasn't standing on ice anymore. I was in the water, the cold hitting so hard and so total that for a second my body didn't even register it as cold — just as a kind of silence, everything going muffled and slow. I remember clawing at the broken edge, the ice giving way again under my hands before it finally held, hauling myself out soaked through in air that felt like it was trying to freeze me on the spot. Ponds don't warn you. The ice that held yesterday doesn't send word ahead that it won't hold today. You just find out, all at once, in the water.

And then there's the kind of unknown that doesn't come at you all at once — the kind that just sits there, patient, waiting for you to notice it. I was camped out overnight, deep enough in that the nearest road wasn't a real option if something went wrong, and somewhere out past the edge of the firelight I heard breathing. Not wind, not water, not anything I could talk myself into believing was smaller than it sounded. Slow, heavy, unmistakably alive. I don't know exactly how long I stood there, absolutely motionless, waiting for whatever it was — and I never doubted for a second it was a bear — to lose interest and move off into the dark it came from. Could have been ten minutes. Felt like most of the night. I've never been more aware of every sound the woods can make, and never more aware of how much of that dark I couldn't see into, than I was standing there waiting for morning to arrive and prove I hadn't needed to be as scared as I was. Or that I had.

None of those moments happened because I'd done anything wrong. That's what makes them stick. I wasn't reckless on that stream, careless on that ice, or foolish camped out that night. I was just doing exactly what I always did, in places I thought I knew, and the unknown showed up anyway — because it's always there, whether or not it decides to make itself known. Most days it doesn't. That's exactly why the days it does are the ones you never forget.

It's the same reason a mushroom find can stop me in my tracks even now, after years of doing this. I've crouched down next to plenty of mushrooms in the field that I simply couldn't place — not toxic, not safe, just genuinely unidentified, sitting there in a patch of leaf litter looking perfectly ordinary and giving away nothing about what it actually was. That, too, is the unknown sitting quietly in the middle of an otherwise fine afternoon. A snake doesn't have to be seen to be dangerous. Ice doesn't have to look thin to be thin. And a mushroom doesn't have to look sinister to be exactly the kind of unidentified risk that turns a good day into a bad one, if you guess wrong about it.

That's really the whole reason this site takes mushroom identification as seriously as it does. Not because the woods are more dangerous than they used to be, but because the unknown was always going to be standing right there in the middle of the good days, same as it was on that stream, that ice, and that dark campsite — and the only real defense against it is knowing, as best you can, exactly what you're looking at before you decide what to do about it.

— James Conklin, Founder, Spore & Scout