Where “The Smurfs” reside

I

 can’t help notice that our houses have a huge resemble to “The Smurfs” houses. A house made out of brick and cement or wood shares the same structure as a basidiomycete; a dwelling space attached to the ground (the stalk) and diverse roofing systems (the cap). So, did Peyo (the creator of “The Smurfs”) try to make a metaphor of us, humans, being those diminutive blue organisms and our houses being mushrooms?... That was all I was thinking about as we were heading to another beautiful place in Kamloops, Dallas-Barnhartvale Nature Park.

Hunt, Gary Hunt was waiting for us at the parking lot. He seemed rather happy to get started with that trip and I was not surprised at all because after seeing him talk about mushrooms a week before, with that passion, I was expecting for that level of enthusiasm and beyond. He was full-equipped: he was wearing a ski coat which made him look twice as wide, a pair of mountain pants stuffed inside a very expensive-looking mountain boots and a belt bag which would provide him with everything he needed. So, as I said, full-equipped. Then, I looked at myself and I realised I was not even wearing an appropriate coat to keep me warm… Experience and manners maketh man, I guess.

Benchland trail was his first choice; Pinus ponderosa dominated all the landscape at that point, but as we got into the guts of the park Douglas-fir started gaining territory. What we came there for was to observe those little organisms popping up from the soil—mushrooms or more concrete, organisms classified under the phylum of Basidiomycota. They were not that many and that was because the raining season came before the expected so all of them popped up two weeks ago (more or so); now, everything was already decaying. The first individual that we bumped into was representing a wide common genus of that land, the genus Suillus. Those mushrooms keep a close relationship with Douglas firs (they are Douglas-fir specialists). The second one was a few meters apart from the first one and was representing another genus; this one was very rarely as it had a red cap and a wine pink stalk. Gary confirmed the name confidently; Russula sanguinaria (it was easy for me to relate the name to the mushroom because the Latin word “sanguinaria” means the same in Catalan, related to blood).

Without even noticing it, my table of contents of all the mushrooms found along the way was getting infinite, and I was now surrounded of a very different type of nature… half of it was covered in knee-high grasses and the other was not even covered by grass, everything was devastated as if a natural catastrophe had happened at the other side of the fence. Cattle and horses had happened.

Sitting in a rock at the very last stop of the trip, Bluff gate, looking then drawing at the creations of Mother Nature and humans combined together in the same landscape, the same old thought jumped right back in from my subconscious. I did not see any Smurfs’ houses… yes, I did see lots of basidiocarps, but none were red with white dots and a white stalk. I was carving for Amanita muscaria. This mushroom is home for “The Smurfs” but it also belongs to the genus with the most poisonous mushrooms in the Earth. The remnants of the veil in the cap give them those famous white dots. Why would Peyo choose a poisonous mushroom to be a house? Why not picking another nice and less deadly one? Was he trying to make a comparison between our homes and that particular mushroom? Was he trying to say that our homes can be poisonous sometimes?

I guess I’ll never know the answers to these questions because he passed away more than 20 years ago, yet I want to believe that he did it on purpose. I want to believe that he was trying to show that houses can make us sick, and mostly these recent times when kids don’t get out to play in the street—they prefer to play in a virtual reality far off the actual reality.

"The Smurfs": created as a comic then converted into a TV series and films… all these formats trying to say the perils of staying always indoors reading comics, watching TV or playing video games and not enjoying outdoors, the sun and nature… Simply, brilliant.

Foot orienteering

The term “maps” spelled backwards is “spam”. Two whole different words that represent heads and tails of the same coin of four letters.

A

 photograph is a digital representation of a particular moment. An architectural model is a representation of a building. A sculpture is a representation of the human anatomy, art or nature. A statue is a representation of an important person, event or even a pet (for instance the statue of Hachiko built in 1934 at Shibuya Station, Japan). And, a map is a representation of a place, of a piece of land that sometimes we call home and sometimes we call new home or temporary home. It is a piece of paper representing lots of information, both objective and subjective information.

Before maps came along, people used to guide themselves with resources Mother Nature provided them with: stars, wind, ants, the sun…. Then, maps drawn in paper appeared which was a huge leap for the society at that time. Maps and cars, together, were the basics for summer vacation. Years after, internet, GPS and the satellites placed in orbit, acting as the cameras from the Big Brother TV show watching out every single human being in the planet Earth, snatched the leadership from paper maps. At the end of the day, a map is a map you would say, it doesn’t matter if drawn in a paper or showed in a smartphone screen; but, I will tell you something: there are things which screen maps cannot show you that paper maps can, paper maps are not just political or physical maps, paper maps can be whatever you want them to be—they can represent home, a new experience, a bad experience, even feelings deeply buried inside your flesh. 

I still believe, typing these very words with my Macbook, that electronic devices don’t show us all the magic and reality kept inside things which are real, which you can touch. It’s not the same, lots of people would disagree with me now, an eBook in which you can stuff hundreds of books inside (it really only shows a bunch of words well-organized in a blank background) than a real book, printed in laid, marbled or wove paper. A book can mean a memory of a trip you took, or it can remind you of a person just by touching and sensing it. Touch is one of the five “traditional” senses we often forget we have (we are so used to touch only the inert glass of our phones or plastic of our laptops). In this regard, a map and a book are the same. I still remember one time when my family and I were on the car on our way to the Pyrenees, when my mom took out from the glove compartment of the car that old road atlas they used to give you not to get lost, before Google Maps came into the picture. I saw a tear going down all the way from the left eye to her mouth— “Wow, this is old… we used to use this all the time when I was a kid to go to my grandparents’ place” she said trying her best to hide all those feelings that were riding a roller coaster inside her. Those tears were the perfect response of what maps are able to bring out of you.

I am beyond grateful to have been born in an era where technology facilitates the way we live in this world; I cannot imagine myself going through hundreds of books in the library just to write a paper, trying to write in a typewriter or even communicating via letter—however, I do like some things the old-fashioned way, and maps are one of those (a must-have in my bag for travelling)—and I am pretty sure an orienteering athlete would be on my side.