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My son came back from a late summer day camp expedition announcing that he and his fellow campers had gone mushroom hunting and had cooked up a bunch of "aspen boletes." My husband and I threw each other looks, having grown up in an era when wild mushrooms were synonymous with either a good hallucination or outright poison. But on the Friday I picked him up from camp, I ducked into the teepee (yes, this camp has a teepee), and was offered a delicious plate of boletes, broiled in butter. I did not die.

That Saturday, the summer thunderstorms having abated for the time being and the days unfurling into an unbearable August beauty, we connived to hike near Silverton. We chose a short (2.4 mile) but steep (nearly 1,500 feet elevation gain) little jaunt that is really, truth be told, San Juan County Road 62. It held promises of one Kansas City Mine up ahead, and began, as so many things do around Silverton, with the remnant of another mining operation, replete with neon water pools, kill zones and one rotting building.

We explained to Chris about acidic drainage, about how some of it was natural around here, others caused by the mines, and panted our way up to an aspen grove. Lo and behold, mushrooms lurked at the edges. Chris danced around, squatting and pulling one up. "See," he said, "it's spongy on the underside. That means you can eat it. The ones you can't eat have gills."

That's it? I thought. After all these years with the impression that a person had better know what they were doing when they selected a shroom, and that was the sum total of difference? "That can't be all," I said. My husband agreed, and we both irritated Chris in that way parents do, all the time, by not trusting him a hundred percent. What Chris didn't realize was that we were also still adjusting to him knowing things we honestly did not. Nine now, he is no longer the wee four-year-old to whom we could appear godlike and Know Everything. Like the puffy clouds blowsing overhead, like the wild parsley already turning yellow on the slopes of our hike, having a kid is a year-round exercise in the kind of wistfulness usually reserved for autumn.

As we left the aspens and continued up the road, above timberline and into a lovely little basin, Chris seemed to forget about his parents' annoying skepticism. This was especially true after his mama managed to snort a fly up her nose, whereupon she spent several minutes flinging boogers onto the gravel until the odd, tickly feeling was gone.

We ate lunch by a dandy stream and headed up to the mine, expecting glorious piles of tailings, brilliant toxic pools and at least one head frame. It was therefore somewhat disappointing to find that the Kansas City Mine had been . . . reclamated. A huge heap of dirt covered what must have been the kill zone, straw sprinkled over it. I had to smile, because I suspected this to be the work of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, a voracious clan of high-altitude mining cleanup volunteers. It was positively affirming of my sense of community to hike to nearly 12,000 feet and find their spoor. We lazed about in a meadow near the base of the mine, Chris admiring bits of rusty mining debris, and headed back down when Mommy freaked out about a gray cloud overhead.

I thought, once more in the aspens, that my husband would dismiss the mushrooms again. Of the two of us, Jonathan would be the more curious. He used to think about becoming a chef and worked for a while in fancy restaurants. He has lovely hands that grow a life of their own around food, and pretty soon he was plucking shrooms carefully, the old ones with bug bores discarded, the younger, fresher ones, brought home. I have no idea what changed in him from the beginning of the hike to the end, but it was interesting to watch his transformation. It suggests to me, after all, that the next time Chris comes home with some piece of wisdom, perhaps we will be a little less slow on the uptake. And, like a mushroom flourishing on what has succumbed to a certain senescence, he'll like our responses a little better.

Katharine Niles is the author of the award-winning novel The Basket Maker.