With commercial pickers behind every tree, it's becoming harder and harder for a simple lover of wild mushrooms to harvest enough for "a bowl of soup and a fry-up" (as I like to term the amount I try to gather every fall). I set out before noon, and before I'd gone half a mile up a trail which has served me well the last several years, I was saying, "It's still too green. I'm too early by a week or two." At the same time, I was having an internal argument, with one voice saying, "Turn around, go home," and another saying, "When have I ever been one to turn around on a hike?" For me, that's almost unthinkable, but there I was, thinking it. "I'm getting old," I reproached myself, forcing my feet forward. Just then, I spotted a button-sized chanterelle, one of only half a dozen mushrooms of any type I'd seen so far. I scanned the surrounding area and...what?! There, on a mound of moss, were half a dozen decent-sized chanterelles which someone had cut and left behind! From their condition, I guessed they'd been cut yesterday, and having been out in the cold night air, they were still fresh and succulent. I dug my perhaps-bag out of my pack and loaded them in. Then I spotted a couple more a little deeper into the grove. All thoughts of turning around disappeared. I had enough already for either a bowl of soup or a fry-up, but not both. I collected a few more before reaching my turn-around point (where, incidentally, I did my daily tai chi routine on the bridge in the company of a woolly caterpillar of some sort). I arranged my collection on a mossy log for the photo, and then on the way back, added another 6-7 which I could then spot by being in a different angle of the light. As it turned out, I had a very large bowl of soup and a whopping fry-up from this, my first (and possibly only) mushroom hunt of the year. Stripping the forest of its gold is not my way.
No comments:
Post a Comment