He asked if finding 230 makes the game any less fun. His question was meant to imply that there would be no fun in finding these if they were, in fact, not difficult to find. I asked him if he caught 30 trout in an hour, if he would then find it tedious and retreat to his car and drive home. His question was fair, my rhetorical response was, too, because there are times when you can spend an entire day hoping for one trout to rise to your fly, and there are entire seasons when finding a few mushrooms is so very difficult to do.
That’s why there has to be commitment to the goal, dedication to the fungus. This isn’t a fungus that waits for anyone, and if you time your first several expeditions poorly then you’ll likely have spent all of your motivation capital by the time the magical day arrives. This is the same as salmon fishing in tributaries in the fall. If, during a cool September afternoon, you take a drive and pull on your waders, and soak a fly for the afternoon with nary a take, by the time the run has arrived and the big, silver fish are biting there is a very, very good chance that you won’t be up for the challenge, because you’re tired, and you’ve already driven too much for too little. This is the way it is with mushrooms, and a few early trips where the skunk never leaves your back is enough to spoil an entire season of hunting.
And hunting, it is. I’ve said this many times before, and it falls on deaf ears and blind eyes. Not mushroom blindness, mind you, which is a condition that afflicts all mushroom hunters, but metaphorical blindness, the sort that afflicts those who read words but cannot understand the story. The morel hunt is fleeting, and it is dangerous, and this is why yesterday afternoon I took to the woods with a mushroomy friend and we hunted. He donned camouflage, while I own none. Lest you think I ignored by Mother’s Day responsibilities, I’ll have you know that I roasted a turkey in my wood fired oven, fed many family and friends, shot some clay pigeons (or, generally towards them), practiced throwing some hatchets, which sounds scary and dark but is, in fact, far less scary and dark than hunting morels in a thunderstorm while trespassing.
The turkey hunter wouldn’t stop his calling. At first, we assumed they were real turkeys, the live kind, but after too many warble warble warble calls, it was apparent that there was a man in those woods, calling turkeys close enough to him so that he might shoot at them. We made every effort to look nothing like turkeys, and we did our best not to be pulled into his shooting zone by his consistent, alluring calls. There is no way to know if a particular morel hunt will be successful. The weather can be right, the rain right, the month right, the trees in the proper stage of leafing out, the grass in the proper stage of greening up, and still there’s no way to know if where you are is where you should be. This is a kin to fishing in Geneva Lake. It is a wonderful lake, full of big fish, but finding them in those depths on any given day is equal parts sonar and luck. Morel hunters, we have no such sonar.
The first mushroom was a lonely one, stuck in a random place, growing alone with no friends, no family. We pinched his top anyway, and walked on. Another one here, one there, strays, mostly. This is how morel hunting is, usually. A few mushrooms will be found in close proximity to the others, but many, many others will have sprouted in random locations. We hunters struggle with this, and when wandering a woods it is nearly impossible to know if you should be walking towards the west, or the east, so you generally walk in a circle of sorts, avoiding the turkey calls and the roads. It wasn’t long after those first few outliers that we found one, a bright blonde one. And then another. And another. And so many others that we didn’t know quite what to do.
The instinct, when one walks upon a prodigious flush of morels, is to snatch them up as quickly as possible, even though they are stationary prey and they have no means by which to flee. Even so, we greedily grabbed at them, pinching each one off and accumulating a great pile of conquered quarry. When the frenzy was over, we had at least 60 mushrooms, all pulled from one 15 x 15 section of scabby dirt. When ticks are crawling on your stomach and your sides and up your back, you’re aware of it, mostly, but when so many mushrooms must be picked there’s really not enough time to shwoosh the ticks away. Lyme’s disease is an urban legend, except for country folk, right?
Having giddily stashed our blonde and gray prizes in our packs, we pressed on. There were other flushes like that one, though none quite as prolific. We walked through rain, through property we didn’t own, narrowly avoiding the hunter and whispering to avoid detection. Two hours after we stepped foot into those woods, we returned to the car, where we raced off into the rain to find a covered shelter where we could count and divide. We pulled the morels out by two, each accumulating our own pile, and when we were done, we had a combined 230 morels. In the entirety of my mushroom finding life, which spans only a few years, I have perhaps found 230, in total. In two hours on that soggy mother’s day, the numbers were in: 230 morels, 30+ ticks removed, one large tear in my jeans, at least three bloody scratches from the brambles, and two thorns that I worked out of my palms only just this morning.
When the hunt morphs from a spirited, but exhausting, search for a small handful of seasons delicacies, and turns into a smashing success of simple reaping, is the effort any less rewarding? It’s a rhetorical question, able to be answered only by those who have stumbled through the thorns.