There is a scene in the movie Lost on a Mountain in Maine where Luke David Blumm, who plays the young, lost and hungry Donn Fendler, picks something off a boulder to eat as he wanders through the forest below Mount Katahdin.
That material, commonly called rock tripe, is in the genus Umbilicaria. I’ve heard that people eat it as a survival food. I’ve thought about trying it out of curiosity, but I’m afraid it might cause intestinal distress, so I haven’t.
I mentioned that rock tripe can be eaten while watching the movie with some friends. They didn’t respond or care, so I remained quiet because people generally don’t seem to pay attention to lichens.
Maybe the study of lichens isn’t as popular as other parts of the outdoors because they’re not palatable like plants or mushrooms, and only a handful out of the tens of thousands of species are suspected to be hallucinogenic.
There are no known psychedelic species in Maine. Our forests would be void of them if there were.
Many of them only grow a few millimeters a year, so foraging can quickly deplete the amount in an area.
People often mistake lichens for moss. Mosses are plants, and lichens are not. They’re a partnership between algae, bacteria and a fungus.
I once followed lichenologists into the woods who were studying the ones that produce small black dots. My boss told me these people were myopically focused. I was more fascinated with them than what they were studying, and have yet to meet people who have been so hyperfocused on something so obscure.
The one thing I took away from that class was the taste of bitter wart lichen. I was told to lick my finger, touch it and then taste the white dust that came off the warts. I have yet to taste anything that bitter.
One common lichen is lungwort, Lobaria pulmonaria. It looks a lot like lung tissue. Organisms with the Old English suffix “wort” in their names were once thought to treat ailments, and there are references dating back to the 16th century of lungwort being used for lung disease.
This gives them a sort of Harry Potter magical essence, especially when people refer to it as “lungs of the woods.”
Another lichen, sometimes called dogtooth lichen, was once used to treat rabies.
Usnea, also known as old man’s beard, looks a lot like Spanish moss, but Spanish moss is actually a flowering plant. I was caught off guard when a fellerbuncher operator recently told me that he and his wife collect usnea as a homeopathic medicine because it has antimicrobial properties.
I would like to think of the forest as a magical place with mystical medicines and breathing green lungs sprouting out of tree stems. Unfortunately, I am usually too busy considering uses for a stand of trees and traveling too quickly through the woods to think of such things.
Every once in a while, something will catch my eye and make me stop and appreciate its unique structure and the role it plays in the forest.
Maybe there is something to be said about the compounds and their medicinal purpose.
But that’s for scientific researchers, and probably not the random observer who thinks it’s funny to lick a tree with white wart-like growth on it.