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^{Photoillustration by Bruce Andre and John Paxson}

Plant pathologist Jack Rogers is always ready to step off the trail and into the cool forest to uncover its secrets. Or, even better, to collect them.

His targets, most often, are fungi, nature’s great recyclers. These organisms break down dead matter and inhabit living matter. They’re everywhere, but they aren’t always easy to see. They have secret lives beneath soil and behind bark, and many only surface to reproduce. But Rogers knows where, when, and how to look—whether it’s a certain stand of trees after a cold winter, a south-facing slope in the fall, or an area of a recent burn.

Rogers is built like a small bear and has a foghorn voice. It carries pretty far when he’s prowling the woods, and, along with a whistle, comes in handy when he gets separated from his fellow fungi hunters. His voice also holds a flavor of West Virginia, something he picked up during childhood, around the same time he acquired a taste for the outdoors. When he says words like fungi, and morel, the last syllable hangs on a bit long.

His first taste of fungi came during childhood, thanks to his Lithuanian grandmother. “People from her country know fungi and love them very well,” he says. She gave him tastes of the savory mushrooms that were a staple of her diet in her native country.

His first notions of them as wildlife came from his father, a biology professor, who wrote an article about the oyster mushroom in a West Virginia magazine back in the 1930s and who often took him on outdoor adventures. He knew the woods, says Rogers. “He certainly knew more than I do about moss and ferns.”

But Rogers surpassed him with fungi. During a long career at Washington State University—44 years and counting—the professor has served as president of the Mycological Society of America and has become director of the Mycology Herbarium, a vast collection of fungi housed at WSU. He even has a fungus named after him: Poroleprieuria rogersii. The organism was discovered by two mycologists a few years ago on the decaying bark of the Heliocarpus tree in Mexico. The scientists, one American and one Mexican, decided to name it in Rogers’s honor.

In college he found true love: the morel. It’s not the most spectacular mushroom. Plain, often black or grey, its stem is hollow, and its variegated cap looks like a sponge. But the modest fungus is a highly desirable treat, sprouting up in the warm, wet spring. It’s particularly tasty sautéed in butter or olive oil or coated with cream. It’s Rogers’s favorite fungus to hunt and eat.

This is one mushroom that has been very difficult to domesticate, says Rogers. It does well in forests that have recently experienced a catastrophic event like a wildfire or flood, even logging. While there are some efforts to commercially cultivate them, the best way to get them is still to just go into the woods and look.

^{Lori Carris}

Rogers’s colleague, Lori Carris, remembers hunting morels with him shortly after she was hired at WSU in 1989. She and a graduate student piled into Rogers’s orange 1972 Chevy half-ton and, in spite of the sheeting rain, drove 40 miles out of Pullman to hunt. The torrent didn’t matter; Rogers was leading them on a mission.

“I remember that trip,” he says. “It was one of the best morel collecting times I ever had. We collected sacks of them.”

One of Rogers’s research interests is sac fungi, or ascomycetes, including the morel. These organisms produce spores in an ascus, or sac. He is also interested in fungi that inhabit and infect forest trees.

Seeing Rogers enjoying a successful career that has brought him national renown and taken him to places like Mexico and Hawaii to collect specimens, it comes as a shock to think that his life in Pullman almost didn’t happen. With his wife, Belle, he moved to WSU in 1963 as a new Ph.D., having rushed though the last year of his studies to take a job in the Plant Pathology and Forest Range Management departments. The winter they arrived was one of the worst on the Palouse—month after month of grey skies and flooding. “If I had the fare out, I’d have left,” growls Rogers. “The whole area was a mass of mud. It was the most depressing sight I’d ever seen.”

The classes he taught in forest pathology were packed with students, including veterans of the Korean War. And they were demanding, especially on a first-time instructor. Rogers spent the first part of that year stressed, exhausted, and depressed.

But then he ventured out to forage. “The spring was beautiful. I got out into the woods and everything was OK.” And since his job was to study and teach forest pathology, one of his prime duties was to go out and hunt. He decided to stay for a while.

Constant hunting for specimens is a habit with most mycologists and pathologists. Roderick Sprague, a WSU pathologist in the 1940s and 50s, often found specimens for the University’s collections on the fly. His notes reveal details like “I collected this when I had to change planes in North Dakota.”

Rogers’s office and adjoining workspace are an ecosystem unto themselves. They are packed with papers, thousands of specimens, microscopes, books—and a case of Diet Coke. There’s just enough space left for a small computer. One morning last summer Rogers was sitting at it working on a paper about a new fungus he discovered in Hawaii. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he says, showing a close-up photograph of a black patch he found on the bark of a tree. Its pores and smooth black surfaces look like lava. Rogers tells me he plans to name it for Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes.

That’s just one of his immediate projects. He’s also harboring a strange find from the Netherlands. He pulls from a small bag a four-inch-long object, brown, and thinner than a pencil, with a lighter colored cap at the end. This was growing on live hardwood in a tropical greenhouse, he says. He hadn’t seen it before, but as a favor was working on identifying it. He is culturing some of its spores to observe its growth behavior. “If you can’t germinate the spores, you can’t do anything with them,” he says.

While watching them grow in his lab is exciting, finding them in the wild is even better, says Rogers. He’s got fungus fever.

“Oh yeah, I jump up and down and holler when I find something,” he says.

It’s different than other kinds of hunting, or picking wild blackberries, or fishing, he says. “If we were surrounded by morels and you could get them any time you wanted to, it wouldn’t be a lot of fun,” he says. “The chase is the fun.”

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