Rain-Day Hike With Child Becomes Unofficial Spore Print Session After Veteran Declines to Comment on 'Mushies'

The message read: "Spore print?" Two words, posted eleven minutes under a photograph of a child in a raincoat holding a mesh bag, with the finds captioned, in the poster's own quotation marks, "mushies."

I read the pinned notice above the thread before I read anything else. It has been up since March: photographs of unidentified fungi will be answered with a request for a spore print. Nobody reads the notice. Everybody discovers it.

The walk was the day after rain. The poster describes it as a hike, the bag as the child's, and the word "mushies" as the child's word, offered as such. The veteran is Vera Pike, who has answered harvest posts the same way for years and who typed her reply in about four seconds. It took the thread forty minutes to decide she had refused to look at a child.

Then the clinic opened.

One member posted instructions for a pressing weight. Another objected to glass on principle. A third said paper, unless the cap is wet, and a fourth said paper was precisely the problem when the cap is wet. Two more argued about drafts, then about humidity, then about whether a fan in the room counts as a draft. None of these people were addressing the poster. All of them were addressing each other.

At comment forty-one, someone uploaded their own spore print: black, radial, dead center on white card. It drew sixty-three reactions. The child in the raincoat had drawn fifty-one.

Mei's Denominator, this week: of the 78 comments posted before I opened the thread, 4 mention the child, 51 concern the pressing weight, and 23 concern whether a spore print settles anything. It does not settle anything on its own. A print gives a color and a habit of deposition, and a genus if you are lucky, and never a meal. Food use belongs to a qualified local identifier holding the actual specimen, in person, with the cap and the habitat and the substrate in front of them. The thread holds none of those things.

The poster returned later with a photograph of the child holding an umbrella. Three comments. One of them was "Spore print?"

Vera Pike did not intend a verdict. She says this, and she is right, and it made no difference. The thread had already cast her as stern. Both sides complained to her anyway: the poster wanted warmth, the veterans wanted something firmer, and Vera was asked to supply both in the same reply. She typed "Spore print?" again, to a different photograph, and went to bed.

"I ask everyone," she told me. "That's the whole job."

Nadia Evers later cross-posted the umbrella photograph to her own group, where it drew a long thread about rain boots and nothing at all about gills, and where several members blamed Vera for the tone of a thread she had not posted in.

Last night the poster asked a new question. What is a spore print, exactly? The child wants to know.

Eleven answers arrived before anyone noticed that the question had a child inside it. The twelfth reply was two words, and it finished with eighty-one reactions, eighteen more than the umbrella ever got.

The print outpolled the child. It always does.