Findin' Any?

Morel-hunting season has begun in Missouri. It’s hard to believe that I grew up in central Missouri and had almost no idea about this whole scene. My family’s food came from the grocery store and it came from people’s gardens. We were not big mushroom eaters, probably because my mom isn’t a big fan of mushrooms.

Once or twice, perhaps, we had mushrooms at the commons of Grandma Schroeder’s house (yeah, where I live now), if, say, Uncle Richard and Aunt Carole had had a bumper harvest in Moniteau County—enough for them to not eat up immediately; enough for them to bring to Jeff City and share as part of a planned rendezvous for the whole family, perhaps on a work day at Grandma’s yard—I can imagine that could have happened. I can imagine Grandma frying up some chicken and having some potato salad; I can see Aunt Carole frying up the morels just before serving.

I can imagine me looking at the gorgeous, hot, perfectly fried morels with skepticism, taking a bite, and finding them good.

But I don’t clearly recall it.

And even though I spent tons of time hiking and exploring the woods, I also don’t recall ever seeing a morel until I was more than full-grown and had moved back to Missouri in the late 1990s. That’s when Sue and I had started our “Year of the’s” and had two back-to-back “Year of the Mushrooms” (two, on account of the first year being abnormally dry and droughty, so there were few mushrooms to find). (By the way, our “Year of the” projects included all species in the group, not just edibles, so having two years dedicated to learning about mushrooms still only scratched the surface. It’s such a large, diverse group, it was like having “year of the animal” or “year of the plant.”)

I highly recommend having yourself a “Year of the.” Decide on something you’d really like to learn about, and just saturate yourself with it. Turn it into a year-long master’s program on that subject. Devour books about it. Talk about it with others. Look for lectures (and now, YouTubes) about it. Join a club that does it. Every time you go outdoors, look for it. If it’s an activity, like painting or playing an instrument, then try doing it every which way; go to concerts or museums; learn its history; take lessons; attempt related artforms. Spend a year seeing the world through the lens of that thing.

And it will stay with you forever. Like any part of your education, no one can take it away from you.

So as we enter morel season once again, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite morel-hunting stories. (Everyone has a ton of morel-hunting stories, right?) This was during our first Year of the Mushroom. Sue and I were still living in Columbia then, in a duplex in the Country Hill subdivision in southwest Columbia, near the Columbia MKT trail. We spent a lot of time on that section of trail between Columbia and McBaine.

Well, since we were saturating ourselves with mushroom consciousness, we were always on the lookout for morels. We couldn’t go outside without scanning the ground . . . looking.

If you haven’t hunted for morels, you don’t know what a dickens it is to try to see them. This time of year, the ground is covered with dead leaves that are the same colors as morels, plus pinecones . . . and little dead flower stalks from last year, and newly sprouted brittle ferns, and all kind of other odd things that cast reticulated shadows that look like the pockmarked pattern of morels, and catch your eye.

Anyway, we had taken to always carrying a wadded up plastic grocery bag in our back pockets “just in case” we found any mushrooms. (Yes, plastic is not optimal, but we’re talking “just in case.”)

So we got a little sidetracked. We stepped off the trail and down the shallow slope toward a nearby dryish creekbed. Again, . . . just in case. We didn’t have any luck, but as always, we enjoyed poking around. We didn’t have any reason to even pull our plastic bags out of our pockets; it was a bust.

But as we were doing this hunting, several well-coifed ladies had hustled by in their colorful new track outfits; I sensed them looking down at us, casting disapproving looks in our direction. Yes, we had roamed off the trail onto private land (I suppose). We might have even looked sketchy. I don’t think they had a clue what we were up to. Whatever; I don’t care what they might think.

Anyway, we finally gave up and were trudging back up the slope to the MKT trail, and at that point we met a fellow on the trail. He was loping along, but I don’t think he was there to get exercise. He looked like he was out for a nice walk, just kind of sauntering. He was fairly young, in his mid-twenties, I’d say, and he had on a pair of jeans, some worn work boots, and no shirt. He had kind of longish, dirty-blond hair. He looked to me like a native Boone Countian.

And he just half-smiled at us and said, knowingly: “Findin’ any?”

This, my friends, is one of the best things about morel hunting. It’s a club, and an offbeat one. It has nothing to do with race, class, ethnicity, religion, politics . . . anything, other than a taste for morels, a willingness to go into nature, and the thrill of the hunt. And a kind of time-honored competition, with a strong impulse not to divulge the precious locations of perennial troves.

. . . So, how did we respond to this fellow’s inquiry? We said, after a healthy, slightly less-than-innocent pause, “. . . no.” And we all kind of smirked and nodded, and we left him to wonder.

Happy morel-hunting, y’all. And if you’re “findin’ any,” I hope you leave a few for someone else!