The Lake Geneva Morel

It is difficult to explain, this obsession over a mushroom. Yesterday, after an indulgent lunch with family, I escaped to meet a friend. We parked one car at an undisclosed location and drove swiftly to another. Around the corner and down this road, a quick right onto that one and off the gravel into the weeds, behind a clump of trees. We parked there, in that location, scanning our surroundings to make sure no one was close and that no one else had seen where we turned. If we had camouflage netting we would have draped it over the car, just to be safe. Even that sounds safe, but in this uncertain game of trespassing there is no assurance that safety could ever exist.

Mushroom hunting isn’t a safe game. In fact, it isn’t a game at all. It’s a hardened art, pursued only by those willing to sacrifice. If you’ve ever walked through the woods with a walking stick in your hand, scanning the ground for a mushroom, you have not done what it is that we do. If you have a picture of some hippies on a sunny hillside, gathering great clutches of mushrooms, this is nothing like what you’re imagining. This is not a sport, not any more than survival is. This is where life and death, success and defeat, celebration or humiliation, all of these rest in the balance.

To find a morel, this is a trick. To find many of them is another matter all together. There can be one here and one there, and at times when you fall to your knees and scramble under thorns so perfectly in place during an Easter weekend, there can be as many as ten in a single strained reach. Other times, you can wander for hours, eyes to the ground, scanning madly for the hint of a honeycombed fungus peaking out from under leaf litter, or through the edges of a grassy clump. Yesterday, with the light growing dim, it was no longer time to hunt for the morels, it was time to harvest those that we had already identified.

If you have ever walked through the woods during summer and come upon a path where short sticks appear purposefully stuck into the ground, the chances are you’ve stumbled upon a mushroomer staking his claim. When a morel is small, barely pushing above the earth, this is not the time to harvest. At this time, savvy hunters will reach for a stick and jam it into the ground near the infant morel. The idea here is that the morel should grow, bigger and more delicious each day, and when the timing is right the hunter will turn gatherer, and return to the spot marked only by an upright stick. If you find these sticks in July, you are too late. If you find these sticks in April or May, and you see the morel next to such a stick, you must do the right thing and walk away, swiftly. To poach a marked morel is a great sin, a kin to emptying a lobsterman’s trap.

The harvest scheduled for yesterday was mildly anticlimactic, but still worthwhile. The morels that we had marked a week before did not grow much, an unfortunate stagnation due to the cold nights and the dry days. Morels need warmth and rain to grow, and this year they were enticed into the air early only to have their fresh little tops burned by the frost and dried in the wind. Conditions aside, the hunt cannot wait. Morels are like a Lake Geneva summer- they are both many fine and wonderful things but they are not patient. Neither wait for the unprepared, and so on a cloudy Easter perhaps 200 morels ended up in our mesh bags.

But to read that you’d think the mushrooms willingly did this. Or you’d think that finding such a mighty number of morels was easy, like the hippies on the sunny hill, lazily scooping up heaping handfuls of perfect morels. The hunt was nothing like this. It is nothing like this. There may be a time for that sort of gathering, but in Lake Geneva, the hunt for morels begins first with the clandestine parking of cars, the hiding of intentions, and the spraying of as much deet as your clothes and skin can hold. Morels are generally in one of two places: near dead and dying trees, and under the thickest and sharpest, densest thicket of thorns imaginable. They are rarely only under the trees, on the edge of the meadow, in the open. They grow in insidious places, places that double dog dare you to crawl into and under them. And when you ultimately do crawl into that thicket, with hungry ticks crawling up your arms and legs, you reach to pluck the one morel that you can see in the middle of that devil’s nest and for a moment you wonder if it is all worth it.

Morels taste surprisingly like mushrooms. Their fame is not due to their flavor but to their scarcity. They are not commercially produced. Any mushrooms that you see on fancy restaurant menus in the spring of the year have come to your table courtesy a mushroom hunter. Someone who crawled through the dirt for you. Someone who likely contracted at least a mild case of Lymes disease on your behalf. Restaurants love to place morels on their menu because it gives them tremendous foodie cred. I like to hunt the morel because the hunt brings me a great dose of satisfaction.

When hunting the morel, the time can not be exactly known when this will occur but occur it will. You will experience morel blindness. This usually strikes the afflicted after wandering, or crawling, for four or more minutes without seeing a single morel. This is not the same as wandering for hours and not seeing a morel, as this isn’t morel blindness so much as it is an unfortunate choice of location. True morel blindness hits only once you know you’re in a morel location, and you know there are morels afoot. Even when you know they are there, it can be completely possible to not see them. After scanning for minutes, your eyes grow weary. You forget what a morel looks like, and question whether or not you could see one if one were indeed immediately in front of your face. When this happens, it’s best to look into your bag and refocus your eyes. Once you retrain your eyes to recognize that honeycombed little tip, you’re ready to return to the hunt.

If you’ve just read this and you have no idea what I’m talking about, then it’s time you took the woods and joined the hunt.