by Sam Kornell
Mike is hunched over a pile of soggy wood chips at the bottom of a glade in Golden Gate Park. It’s a clear winter afternoon and sunlight filters through the eucalyptus trees, landing on grass still damp from a recent storm. Mike sifts through the wood chips, slowly and deliberately examining the soil beneath. Two paper bags fill a pocket of his Patagonia fleece jacket.
Mike is a 28-year-old engineer at a prominent software company in San Francisco. He is soft-spoken and self-possessed; on weekends he drives his Subaru Forester to his time-share in Tahoe to ski. He donates to public radio, and he has made himself into an aficionado of the city’s Indian restaurants. He is, or seems, like a well-adjusted member of society.
But what he is doing — sifting through wood chips in a damp, obscure corner of the 1,000-acre park that bisects the western portion of San Francisco — is a felony. He is searching for psilocybin, the psychedelic mushrooms that grow wild in San Francisco and neighboring Marin County from fall to spring. If he finds any, he tells me, he’ll stuff them in the bags, put the bags in his backpack and backstreet home on his bike.
Not long ago, Mike agreed to take me on one of his mushroom hunts, and as he scoured the ground, he explained his affinity for psilocybin. We were in the lower section of Golden Gate Park near its terminus at Ocean Beach, and aside from an occasional jogger, the park seemed empty, a forest in the middle of one of the world’s most famous cities.
Mike told me doesn’t do mushrooms very often-maybe once or twice a year-but when he does, it’s because he wants to explore a problem in his life that has been troubling him. “When I take them, it may be because I have a decision to make, or maybe I suspect that my outlook toward something is not as healthy or as loving as I would like it to be,” he said. “Psilocybin allows me to see things with a fresh point of view. When I’m on them, [I'm] not as burdened by cynicism or other self-protective layers in my psychology.”
Is Mike delusional about the power of mushrooms to refresh his worldview?
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