At six foot eight, Simon Leonard PO ’29 is a noticeable figure on campus, whether he’s walking around with the Pomona-Pitzer basketball team or playing guitar under a tree. My first encounter with him, though, was at a less popular spot on campus: the Indonesian language table at Oldenborg Dining Hall.
When I asked him why he wanted to learn my native language, he said he likes surfing, weird fruit and fungi.
This was a far cry from the answers I was used to hearing (“for work” or “for a friend”), and though I knew that Indonesia was a great place to surf and eat rambutan, I wasn’t quite sure where the fungi fit in.
It wasn’t until I bumped into him again — on a day where his plans included working at an entomology lab and stopping by a “love and masculinity” discussion group at Pitzer College — that I found out the extent of his fungi-fanaticism.
A prospective Biology major from the North Bay, Leonard’s interest in Indonesia and its traditional uses of fungi — much of which, he noted, has been neglected by Western mycology — is just one facet of his mycological enthusiasm.
He became curious about fungi in the seventh grade, when he noticed a mushroom on the ground and thought “it would be really cool” if he could just pick it up and eat it.
Instead of giving into his impulse, Leonard checked out mycology field guides at his library, which identified the one he’d seen as mildly poisonous. When he began scouring forests in addition to pages, he found many mushrooms that he could actually eat, his favorite among them being sweet-tasting candy caps.
If you talk to Leonard, it won’t take long for him to tell you about David Arora, his mycologist hero. Besides having read all of Arora’s books (which contain interviews with mycologists from all over the world) and watched all his recorded lectures, Leonard once drove eight hours to see him speak in person.
“He has the coolest paper I’ve ever read, if you want to throw out a cool paper for the audience to read,” he told me. “It’s mindblowing.”
Arora’s study on “communal psychoactive effect[s]” of mushrooms in the Yunnan province in China, is one of many papers Leonard read for fun in high school and has been re-reading ever since.
Despite Leonard’s reservoir of knowledge, I noticed that he doesn’t frame himself as a fungi expert. He focuses much more on what he doesn’t know than what he does.
“It’s a familiar component of life to us,” Leonard told me. “Seeing a mushroom is a day-to-day occurrence. But there’s so much you don’t know about a mushroom. There’s so much we don’t know as a species, as humans, that it’s really just a never-ending race to learn everything that you can.”
He explained how significant — and mysterious — mycorrhizal symbiotic relationships between fungi and plants are.
“It’s this super prolific, mutualistic relationship that fuels the forest in so many different capacities,” Leonard said. “It’s an incredibly dense network of communications between different species of life that’s happening underground that we’re just totally unaware of. And there’s a lot that we still don’t understand about it.”.
I’ve never met anyone who shared Leonard’s passion for fungi, so I was surprised to hear that his high school’s mycology club, of which he was the president, drew in over forty members. Many of them were even willing to meet at 4 a.m. in the winter to go mushroom foraging in Point Reyes.
Evidently, Leonard’s love for fungi doesn’t dissuade him from connecting with people. His most recent Instagram post was captioned “I have so mushroom in my heart”; like a true biology major, his heart welcomes all forms of life.
Of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” for example, Leonard related to Thoreau’s connection with nature, but less so his attitudes towards other people.
With regards to Thoreau’s cynicism on society, Leonard said, “It kinda turned me off to the idea that you had to be so strict and closed-off, when you could be cool and open and accepting.”
When he’s not foraging, Leonard plays bluegrass on his guitar. Being “open and accepting” is an ingredient of bluegrass, which Leonard describes as “a weird genre of music.” Bluegrass places less emphasis on original composition — songs are passed down and played in different ways — and more on group dynamics and choosing songs that everyone will sing.
“It’s the coolest feeling in the world,” he said. “You’re in a group of people and you’ve never played with someone before, but you all know the same songs and you can all understand the structure of how to play together really well.”
When I mentioned that the previous subjects of my “Claremont Characters” column had both been passionate about music too, he replied, “Music attracts the weirdos, for sure.”
Sharing passions with other people is equally important to him on the basketball court. He’s been grateful for his team not just because, at their similar heights, he doesn’t struggle to hear them, but also because of their shared dedication.
“It’s been really fun to be able to be with a group of people who all want to take something at the same level of seriousness as you,” he said.
Though it seems like Leonard has put a lot of his passions into action, he told me that he has “a lot of dreams and ambitions that often don’t come to fruition.” These include building a banjo skinhead out of plastic bags and a surfboard out of mushrooms.
As for more feasible plans, Leonard is eager to start a Claremont mycology club and meet more people to play bluegrass with.
“Find me,” he encouraged, “I’m tall.”
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