Morel Issues
Apr. 18th, 2010 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
Atlanta, a little town not far from here, is the first place I can remember. We moved away before I entered school, but we still kept coming back to visit. I think, as I guess I've hinted in a poem I posted here, that my dad loved this area and hated to leave it. I think he might have been happier and lived longer if he'd ignored the siren song of the Bigger Career and remained as Superintendent of a small, remote backwoods town (as it was then).
Be that as it may, we kept coming back. One of the reasons was hunting for Morel mushrooms in the Spring. We'd load up, drive up here, take a motel room, and go out in the woods looking for mushrooms.
I think I might have identified the motel where we stayed, although I'm not sure. I didn't drive, so of course I don't remember how to drive to it. I remember it was painted green. The rooms were paneled in knotty pine, and were larger than most motel rooms. They had a kitchenette built in and were supplied with a few cooking utensils, some plates, an electric kettle and some little packets of instant coffee, tea, and sugar. It was a classic 1950s setup, and being as this was probably in the mid to late 1960s only ten to twenty years behind the times-- remarkably advanced, for here.
Having a kitchenette was important, since a large part of the experience was cooking and eating the mushrooms we'd found. Mom and Dad would fry them up in butter and eat them.
The sad thing is that I hated mushrooms back then, especially morels. They have a distinct taste that's strong, for mushrooms. I didn't want anything to do with them, so I don't remember where we found them or what kind of tree to look beneath.
I do remember that we hunted mushrooms on some hunting land my dad had owned. "Had owned" is the operational phrase here, because he'd sold the land when we moved away. But mushroom hunting introduces a strange form of land ownership. People are fiercely possessive about their prime 'shrooming spots. They'll tell you where to hunt a whitetail buck, and if they're REAL friends they might tell you about a prized fishing hole in enough detail that, if you're good enough, you have some small chance of locating it; but tell you where to find morel mushrooms? Never.
So we'd go out to the land our family had once owned, and we'd come back with bags of mushrooms. And once, with a pair of mushroom hunters up from Ohio we'd collected out there. They were hopelessly lost. "We followed what looked like a phone line, but it didn't seem to go anywhere."
Dad nodded wisely and said "I strung that wire. It goes around the boundaries of this property. The property line doesn't follow any road or natural features. It's hard to make sense of, and easy to get lost out here."
We got them back to their car. They gave us some nice hand-made rugs the wife had made, but they didn't give us any of their mushrooms. And then we went back to our own motel room, and the smell of Morel mushrooms fried in butter filled the place. I wrinkled my nose at it.
I love the things now. I've gone out looking for them, but in the years since I moved back up here I have NOT FOUND ONE.
Be that as it may, we kept coming back. One of the reasons was hunting for Morel mushrooms in the Spring. We'd load up, drive up here, take a motel room, and go out in the woods looking for mushrooms.
I think I might have identified the motel where we stayed, although I'm not sure. I didn't drive, so of course I don't remember how to drive to it. I remember it was painted green. The rooms were paneled in knotty pine, and were larger than most motel rooms. They had a kitchenette built in and were supplied with a few cooking utensils, some plates, an electric kettle and some little packets of instant coffee, tea, and sugar. It was a classic 1950s setup, and being as this was probably in the mid to late 1960s only ten to twenty years behind the times-- remarkably advanced, for here.
Having a kitchenette was important, since a large part of the experience was cooking and eating the mushrooms we'd found. Mom and Dad would fry them up in butter and eat them.
The sad thing is that I hated mushrooms back then, especially morels. They have a distinct taste that's strong, for mushrooms. I didn't want anything to do with them, so I don't remember where we found them or what kind of tree to look beneath.
I do remember that we hunted mushrooms on some hunting land my dad had owned. "Had owned" is the operational phrase here, because he'd sold the land when we moved away. But mushroom hunting introduces a strange form of land ownership. People are fiercely possessive about their prime 'shrooming spots. They'll tell you where to hunt a whitetail buck, and if they're REAL friends they might tell you about a prized fishing hole in enough detail that, if you're good enough, you have some small chance of locating it; but tell you where to find morel mushrooms? Never.
So we'd go out to the land our family had once owned, and we'd come back with bags of mushrooms. And once, with a pair of mushroom hunters up from Ohio we'd collected out there. They were hopelessly lost. "We followed what looked like a phone line, but it didn't seem to go anywhere."
Dad nodded wisely and said "I strung that wire. It goes around the boundaries of this property. The property line doesn't follow any road or natural features. It's hard to make sense of, and easy to get lost out here."
We got them back to their car. They gave us some nice hand-made rugs the wife had made, but they didn't give us any of their mushrooms. And then we went back to our own motel room, and the smell of Morel mushrooms fried in butter filled the place. I wrinkled my nose at it.
I love the things now. I've gone out looking for them, but in the years since I moved back up here I have NOT FOUND ONE.
