The plotting, bragging and obsessive secrecy has begun — along with occasional covert reconnaissance and territorial disputes.
In other words, morel mushroom season is officially open in southern Indiana.
The season is a little late this year because Mother Nature couldn’t exactly decide when spring would begin. She made several brief attempts, then backslid into winter, before warming up sufficiently and providing the right amount of moisture to awaken the hidden beds of the little spongy fungi.
This has been frustrating for elite soldiers, like my friend Dan Hedrick, in the army of hunters. For many years, Dan has brought home several bags full of the delicacy by mid-May. He lives just across the Bartholomew County line in Jennings County, and has both a number of long-term, secret mushroom plots in the woods and a knack for sniffing out others. Yet, he just found his first morel this season about six weeks ago, and has only come up with a handful since.
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If you just moved to Columbus from Manhattan or Tokyo or the South Pole, you may not fully understand the anguish felt by the locals over this delay in the natural order of life. It is a serious emotional problem.
Mushroom hunting is not just a quaint, outdoor activity, or a sport or even a treasure hunt here — even though a pound of morels can be sold for as much as $50. Mushroom hunting is an obsession, and the “where” and “how” and “when” of the hunt are held in holy secrecy and passed down through families from generation to generation like priceless heirlooms.
The 11th Commandment for mushroom hunters reads: “Thou shalt not betray God or your family by revealing any information about where you find your morels.”
Having said all of this, I must confess that I have never found a morel myself — in spite of being raised in a family where the annual hunt was sacred and the location of “the beds” was as secret as my great-great aunt Hannah’s two illegitimate children.
I grew up eating morels — fried in my mother’s heavy iron skillet in a healthy portion of Crisco. (I won’t get into the various arguments about the best way to cook morels, but Mom just soaked them overnight in salt water to kill any critters inside the folds, then rolled them in flour and salt and dropped them in the skillet.)
Still, I have never found one myself.
My two uncles and my aunt on my mom’s side of the family were the suppliers. One uncle was a now-and-then house painter between bouts with alcoholism. The other uncle drove a truck for a fertilizer company in Shelbyville. Their real vocations, however, were hunting wild game and fishing most of the year as they awaited mushroom season.
My aunt was the best morel hunter in the family. She was a tiny woman with a voice that sounded like fingernails raking across a chalkboard. She was argumentative, loved a good fight and lived — well armed — in a mobile home near Hartsville, where she brought home bushel baskets full of morels every year.
My truck driver uncle lived in a rental home on a farm near the little town of Bengal near the Shelby-Johnson County line, and loved the outdoors so much that when he developed cancer and emphysema in his 70s, his brother would drive him across open fields in his truck so he could shoot rabbits out the window.
When my uncle was near death, his estranged son returned to the farm from San Francisco to help. The two had not spoken since the day in his son’s early 20s when the subject of homosexuality came up in a conversation that did not end in harmony.
Yet both father and son talked and healed many old wounds during the days before my uncle died.
On the morning before his death, his son leaned close as my uncle struggled for breath and said, “Dad, I know you love those mushrooms you always find in the spring. If you’ll tell me where you find them here on the farm, I’ll go get some and fry up a mess for you.”
My uncle struggled to lift his head a bit and motioned for his son to come closer. Then he whispered one of his last statements on Earth: “(Expletive) you, Gary. I will take them to my grave.”
Tender moments like these say all there is to say about what morel mushrooms mean to the people of southern Indiana.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page each Sunday. Contact him at [email protected]
