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Fungi Tales

The Source

My friend Tony swears he can smell mushrooms. I don’t mean a batch of tasty morels lathered in batter and frying in the kitchen, but actual fungi still attached to the forest floor. Tony claims that the procedure is simple: He walks into a patch of trees, sits on the ground and sniffs. He told me that he doesn’t actually put his nose to the ground. “That’d be dumb,” he said. “All you can smell then is dirt. You just sit there and sniff and if there are mushrooms around, I can smell ‘em.” All of which leaves me with a quandary: On one hand, Tony’s one of the biggest liars I know, and on the other hand, the guy brings in more mushrooms than anyone else. Can a liar be pardoned a bit of hyperbole if he actually brings home the bacon…or mushrooms? My grandma used to take brother Keith and I in search of the Morchella or morel mushroom. In some parts of the Midwest they’re called “dryland fish,” in Kentucky they call them “hickory chickens,” and in West Virginia the little rascals go by the curious name of “Molly Moohers.” Parts of Appalachia label them “merkels” or “miracles” based on an old tale of a mountain family who were saved from starvation by finding a bounteous patch in the hills behind their house. And of course where you find the little buggers is a closely guarded secret although science has discovered that they like deciduous trees rather than conifers, and forest fires seem to encourage their growth. Professional mushroom hunters literally speed around the country to chase the burned out areas. Keith and I were not especially good ‘room hunters. Grandma would lead the way through the dense undergrowth, admonishing us to spread out. We would…for about thirty seconds, then we’d sneakily gravitate back to the path that Grandma was cutting through the weeds. The walking was easier in Grandma’s footsteps. When we did spot a patch it was most often my job to do the actual picking. I was the one member of the family born with immunity to poison ivy. I could roll in the stuff with nary an itch. Grandma spotted them, I picked them, she fried them. I guess Keith went along to provide color commentary. Some people are blessed to grow up in a community of artists. Some spend their formative years among saints. I was lucky enough to be raised in a community full of gloriously colorful liars. My Grandfather ran a feed store that also served as the loafer’s hangout in Perry, Illinois. In larger towns you went to a nursing home if you were old and feeble and losing your mind. In Perry you went to Homer’s Store. I can remember sitting on the worn-out sofas and loungers in the back of Grandpa’s store and hearing Lyndle tell about finding a mushroom so huge that he had to cut it down with his chainsaw. Then he had to cut in in half to get it on his truck. His friend Floyd had a poodle that could smell a mushroom a mile away. Floyd said that the dog would go on point just like a bird dog when he’d sniff out the fearsome fungi. Oliver claimed that he once hauled a huge mushroom home, dried it out, carved a door in the front and made an outhouse out of the thing. I grew up realizing that if mushrooms served no other purpose than to enrich our folklore heritage, they were worth the hunt. No tales of Aesop or Grimm could match the wild mushroom tales I heard at Grandpa’s store, and these old fellows told their fabrications with completely straight faces, teaching me a great deal about acting …all for the price of a nickel Pepsi. It’s a shame, really. We just don’t hold championship liars in the esteem that we once did. We shun them. We medicate them. We elect them to office. Which brings me back to Tony. Already in this amazingly early season he’s brought in tales of huge herds of mushrooms he’s found roaming over the Cass County hillsides. “One spot,” he said, “…and I’m not kiddin’. ..at one spot there was mushrooms as far as the eye could see!” Of course Tony had conveniently eaten all of them the night before and nary a morel to show as proof. We asked him to take a camera along next time to lend some credence to his tale. Tony said that his hands and pockets would be so full of mushrooms that he’d have no room for a camera. I suppose that I’ve learned a great deal from all these great hunters. Nary a season goes by when I’m not blessed with a supper of the tasty little gems of the forest. My strategy? Simple. I have very good friends who hunt mushrooms. They invite me over.