What's even better than finding a cool mushroom? Finding someone who shares your joy.

One day when I was feeling sad, I took a walk and found exactly what I needed to feel happy again — someone taking pictures of a mushroom.

That was cool.

Because while I usually seek solitude in the woods, a sneaker wave of loneliness had me craving human interaction. And like a raft floating by just when I needed it, a fellow mushroom lover was the perfect person to pull me out of my depression.

I first saw him the day before, yet hadn’t been curious enough to investigate why he was hunched over a camera in the woods. But when I saw him again the next day with a tripod set up under the same trees, I felt compelled to approach.

 
“Are you filming?” I asked, figuring only making something like a stop-action movie would require him to spend so much time in one spot.

“I’m taking pictures of this mushroom,” he said, explaining that he thought it might be a new species of cortinarius. And not satisfied with the pictures he took the day before, he came back to take more.

That began one of the best conversations I’ve ever had with a stranger; no awkward small talk, just me asking tons of questions about the mushroom that he patiently answered.

“What makes it different — it’s more purpley?”

“Yes, it’s more purpley,” he said with a laugh. “That’s a perfectly good way to tell them apart.”

To verify whether the “more purpley” mushroom was indeed a new species, he planned to send some of it off to a lab, and I smiled thinking of someone having the lucky job of testing mushroom DNA.

I also smiled afterward realizing that he could easily be my son, thinking how cool it would be if I had been able to have a child and they became such a smart, kind person who loved mushrooms as much as I did.

But coolest of all was how that mushroom had helped both of us: Because the young man was also sad, having recently left his rural hometown to attend college in a concrete jungle where he, like me, was feeling cut off from the things he loved.

“It’s awful,” he said of his new city. “I hate it.”

So maybe that mushroom was indeed a new species, created to make us smile. As if somehow us mushroom lovers had tapped into the underground web that connects fungus in the forest. And sensing our sadness, nearby mushrooms had sent someone to help.

That was very cool.

The photo above is actually of my friend Nathan, who also loves finding mushrooms and taking their pictures, but I did take video of the young man and me talking about the mushroom he found: