To Sam Shoemaker, who made — or grew — a kayak entirely from mushrooms and paddled it 26.4 miles from Catalina Island in California to San Pedro. Accompanying Shoemaker on his voyage, the longest open-water journey in a mushroom kayak ever recorded, was a 50-foot-long fin whale, which breached the water and then followed the kayak for three miles. “It was just like a psychedelic experience,” the artist and mycologist said afterwards, without admitting whether or not he himself was actually on mushrooms. 

While dreams of replacing plastic with fungal materials and launching colonies of floating mushroom houses may never be realized, the experience of seeing a whale up close while paddling across the open seas in a new-age boat made of mushrooms certainly seems like a decent-enough bedtime story to tell future generations of Shoemakers. …