The MushroomFundi

A diver first.

Four years as a diver in the South African Navy, and years afterwards in the water at Cape Point for crayfish and abalone, back when the daily quota was four of each per person. He was already a forager. He just had not looked up at dry land yet.

Building computers through the boycott.

With the world boycotting South Africa, IBM and Apple pulled out of the local market, and South Africans still wanted computers. Computer Warehouse imported containers of parts and Gary was one of the people who assembled the machines. The business sold in 1988.

The Tomato Bar, Ios.

His share of the sale bought ten months of travelling with his wife Essie: Rome, Singapore, Australia, Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, London. They stopped on the Greek island of Ios, liked it enough to buy a bar, and ran it for four years, diving and spearfishing between shifts.

The last cigarette.

At forty-three he moved to Observatory, close enough to see Mowbray Ridge and Newlands Forest from the back garden. He was smoking sixty Camels a day, and when he tried to chase a ball down the road after his two small sons he saw stars. He stopped smoking so he would be around to watch them grow up, and started walking into the forest instead. That first morning he could not even reach the trees.

Becoming the expert.

Then he turned over the leaf litter and found his first porcini, a mushroom the size of a saucer, hidden entirely underground.

The day I saw my first porcini, the size and shape of it, it was like finding abalone on land.

Gary Goldman

So he did what a man who is good with spreadsheets does. He typed every species out of every mushroom book he could find into a database: botanical name, common name, size, colour. Then he picked every fungus he walked past and took it home to identify, reading with a dictionary open beside him because he did not yet know the words. Forty-five edible species on that one mountain, and he can tell you where and when each of them comes up.

The first field guide.

Written with Dr Marieka Gryzenhout of the Department of Genetics at the University of the Free State, so that the next person would have the expert he never had. Two hundred species, described and photographed, with habitat, distribution, edibility and the look-alikes that catch people out.