More Than Morels
Every year morel season becomes an unhealthy two to three weeklong obsession for me. I call it the insanity. I have to find morels no matter the cost in blood sweat and tears, though I refuse to pay $40 a pound to the guy with a pick-up truck load of them. I’m not the greatest morel finder. I’m usually the guy who arrives at a morel site shortly after whoever that greatest finder was. This year was no different in that respect. This year was like others in other respects too.
I once again led a foray generously imparting tons morel expertise even as I tromped over a morel that someone else saw. Once again I spent the weeks leading up to morel season scouting for possible foraging sites that no know else would think of, like little patches of trees on no man’s land etc. Like every other year I found my body contorted around buckthorn, gooseberries, green briar, multiflora rose and a host of other unpleasant plants to get to those morels that others didn’t see or didn’t think were worth going after. Like most years I found enough morels to enjoy in a few meals with my wife, Sally, and with a couple friends. This year I found more than some years and less than others. So this year was average for my morel finding, yet something was special about this year – something more than morels. I found a treasure trove of adventures starting with the first early mushrooms I found.
I’d been eyeing a hillside in town where some of the trees were recently cut. The property was a school campus that was in transition. On April 30th I found two small patches of morels also, mica caps and dryads. One patch was next to a fox den under a cottonwood tree. Somehow I found myself totally in the middle of a large buckthorn bush causing me to question how I got there to begin with. As soon as I extricated myself from the bush the smell hit me. I’d plopped my foot right in a nice gooey round pie of the most disgusting fox feces imaginable. There were six more pies that were exactly the same size and fairly evenly spaced around the front of the den opening. It was a real foxhole protected by a canine minefield. Oh well the shrapnel was only on the bottom of one shoe. It wasn’t anything that some bleach couldn’t fix. Later I found some wild asparagus. So I came home with enough wild asparagus, morels, dryads and mica caps for Sally to make a pizza big enough to share with Greg, a friend with MS that I bring an evening meal to every other Monday.
On Tuesday my neighbor Ed said, “The morels are popping, I got 47 of em!”
I thought, Wow 47 that’s pretty specific. Later that week, Sally and I walked down the trails and through the ravine from the nature barn by Eagle Point park to look at floodwaters by the tracks. On the way, we saw a morel hunter on the ridge find one. He said, ‘That’s all I found today. Yesterday I got 121 of em at Scott County Park!” Wow! Just like my neighbor, he had an exact count of them. I found one a minute later, so I decided to keep an exact count on our walk. I found exactly 1. However I doubled my take exactly when I opened my mailbox and found another that Ed had left for me. He wanted me to see just what kind he was finding.
That Saturday May 6th the Prairie States Mushroom Club led a foray put on by the Wikiup Learning Center near Cedar Rapids. True to form I got the wrong information and arrived an hour late, but I couldn’t have gotten there earlier anyway due to a long night before playing music. So if I knew the real time I’d have stayed home and missed the fun and excitement of watching a dozen or more people finding their first morels. Again I found exactly 1 myself. I decided to quit keeping such an exact count.
The next day I found some morels on a steep wooded embankment near an apartment complex. Being so near tightly packed rental units the woods had some interesting debris like an old baby stroller and broken toys etc. Also there was a spot where someone had camped many years earlier. Nearby were also a suspicious number of purses that had been rotting for a long time. I glanced around thinking, I’m not the only one who seeks the most hidden spots.
I also found a terrible mess of green briar, honeysuckle and locust trees. At some point my hat was ripped off and briars attacked the back of my ear. I forgot about it until later when it was smartin pretty good. I asked Sally what was going on with my ear. She said, “Well it looks like a cut not a tick. I left my tender ear alone and assumed I was feeling a scab when I did touch it days later. However, scabs don’t grow, but deer ticks do and this one now looked like the meat of a sunflower seed. My doctor put me on a full treatment of doxycycline to prevent Lyme disease. The odds that the tick could have infected me with it were the same as playing Russian roulette if I hadn’t taken the drug. I decided I wasn’t in a sporting mood.
Sally and I went to a friend’s property north of town with a friend of hers. Her friend was in shorts but – oh well. We walked all the way to the top of a bluff and down the other side and back up and down again finding not very many morels. However I did find a nice unchewed deer antler that Sally’s friend traded her share of morels for. That meant that Sally and I had enough to go with eggs for breakfast the next day.
I had to endure three days of taking care of business and chores while knowing others were getting all the morels. This made my insanity even worse than when getting poked, bitten, and possibly skunked in the woods.
That Thursday I led a HS biology class from Scattergood boarding school near Iowa City on a foray with Sally and another PSMC member, Dhanna, at Dows observatory and forest preserve across from Palisades Kepler State Park. I’d never seen the telescopes or been inside the observatory, so I contacted the observatory folks and played the HS science class card to see if they’d open it. They did! John Leeson, an enthusiastic retired engineer from the astronomy club gave us a tour and a great presentation on light waves and astronomy. One large telescope was set up to look at sunspots – wow! This was already the coolest foray I’d ever been to before we even hit the woods!
Dows preserve is a very large wood with no official trails. So when the kids showed up in shorts or totally ripped up jeans, sleeveless shirts or halter-tops and sandals or flip-flops I said, “So none of you want to actually go into the woods I see.” They looked crestfallen and asked, “Why not? ”There are ticks and biting bugs and more kinds of thorns and stickers than you could imagine and there aren’t even official trails in this woods.” They all replied that they’d be fine. Their teacher, Ben, said, “I warned them but they insisted they’d be okay.” “Well it’ll be a learning experience for sure.” I said.
In fact they were okay, taking the scratches and bites all in stride. One girl calmly pulled 4 baby deer ticks off of her bare arm and went right back to asking many questions and making many observations. Ben had each of them tell me what their favorite mushroom was. That was fun. I had some sort of story to share about each one. I liked Ben a lot – at least until he asked me why I didn’t pick a half free morel that I nearly stepped on. At that moment I thought he was some kind of smart-ass who was yanking my chain for being blind, but he actually thought I might have avoided it as a poisonous false morel. Excellent! This provided a perfect opportunity to change the subject from my poor mushroom hunting skills to pontificating on the difference between true and false morels. Meanwhile, the kids were finding enough of the half free morels to eat with their supper later. That was great, but I was once again empty handed.
The walk was a great learning experience for us all and mostly in good ways. The kids also found a wild turkey nest with eggs. It was really cool, though I was treated with blank stares when I exclaimed. “That’s the biggest bird’s-nest fungus I’ve ever seen! This variety is probably edible especially in its mature stages.” I forgot that I wasn’t with my mushroom club friends who were familiar with both bird’s-nest fungi and my hapless sense of humor. They would have at least treated me with disgusted groans and invitations to walk elsewhere.
After the foray, we visited our friends Dave and Margi who’d just moved to a acreage near West Liberty. I spotted some morels as we were walking around their property, including the nicest one I saw all year. In my “generosity” I let them have that mushroom and a few more of their good ones, which they had with salmon later. I also finally had a few more for my larder. I was getting close to having enough morels to share with my friend John, which was my goal for the year. John was the one who first taught me how and where to look for morels, but now he had cancer and couldn’t go into the woods. One more day of foraging produced a few more mushrooms and wild asparagus stalks. I now had enough to meet my goal and Sally made a delicious mushroom asparagus risotto that we shared with John and his wife Kate.
It was now late in the season when I got an email asking for an interview from a woman with I-heart radio which owns the two largest AM stations in Iowa. She read where I was quoted in a morel article in Iowa Outdoors but she had no clue what a pathetic and, by now, mostly deranged morel hunter I really was. Though I mentioned the insanity and my actually mediocre morel finding skills, I was actually able to share some useful information without once crying or screaming.
That last day of hunting was marked by wild geraniums that were getting to big to see under. I wouldn’t disturb them anyway. Plus a couple days later the blessed scent of black locust blossoms told me that the insanity was finally over. Now I could concentrate on why the “scab” on the back of my ear was getting bigger rather than falling off. I’m sure that few people would be very impressed if I kept an exact count of the morels I found. Yet all in all I considered it a truly excellent season. That’s because, for me a truly excellent morel hunting season is always about more than morels.
