Why Nobody Says Where the Morels Grow

Late in April, after the dogwoods have turned and the oak buds carry a fuzz of pale green, the trucks on the gravel roads slow down. The drivers have their windows down. They are not lost. There is a canvas sack on the passenger seat, or a cardboard box on the floor behind it, and the pace of the truck says the driver is looking for something on the ground — something not there yet, something that is going to be there very soon.

What they are looking for is a mushroom the size of two fingers, gray-brown, pitted like a small drowned honeycomb, hollow through the center. The morel comes up out of last year's leaf litter when the soil has warmed just so, and the season it makes is brutally short. In a good April the picking lasts two or three weeks. In a hard April it is over in days. The mushroom does not oblige the calendar. It answers to the ground and the rain, and nobody gets to schedule it.

So the hunters read signs instead. When the redbud blooms lavender along the fence rows, the first morels are not far behind. When the oak leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, they are up in earnest. When the mayapple leaves unfurl their green umbrellas, the season has arrived or is already leaving. In the South the morels come in early April and are often gone before the month is out. Farther north they wait until late April and may run into the first week of May. Out West the calendar follows the burns more than the blooms, but in the hardwood country from the Missouri bottoms to the Michigan ridges, April is the month and the redbud is the clock.

The hunt itself is a slow, stooped, silent thing. Hunters walk a hillside in long uneven passes, stopping to turn over a leaf, squat, stand, move on. The morel hides even when it is in plain view. A hunter who has looked at the ground in April for forty years will walk past one, circle back, and find it on the reverse pass. The woods have their own noise — birds setting up territory, water moving off the high ground — but the people in them are quiet. This is where the secrecy begins, though nobody would put it that way.

A Secret Handed Down

The rule has no written form and no exceptions. Nobody says where.

A morel hunter asked how the season has gone will answer freely, with detail, with weather. The same hunter asked where will smile, and the smile is not a yes. The subject changes. The day's temperature gets discussed, and the conversation moves on. The refusal is absolute; it is the way of the thing.

The spots are handed down inside families the way certain tools are handed down, or certain grudges. The path to a good patch is shown once, to a child, on a cold spring morning, and the child learns without being told that this knowledge does not leave the family. It is not for the best friend, and it is not promised to anyone later. A brother is trusted only after years of evidence. The map lives in a head and never on paper, and when that person dies the ground keeps the secret a while longer, until some other person finds it by luck and begins the silence over again.

There are spots that a grown child takes to the grave out of simple respect. There are spots that outlive the families that found them. A patch under a dying row of elms can be found by a new family twenty years later, and it will not matter to them that someone else once stood there, because the ground holds what it holds until the trees fall and the conditions fail.

What the Silence Protects

The silence is arithmetic. Morels do not grow in fields, in quantities that can be shared. A berry patch gives all day and is still full in the morning. A morel spot is a small, finite thing, and the first person through it in a week takes most of what is there. The second takes leftovers. The third takes the memory. One hunter with a sack can do more to a good spot in a single morning than ten years of weather.

And the spots repeat. The same south slope, the same dead elm, the same old orchard floor will produce again next April if the conditions hold and if enough fungus stays in the ground to carry the spot through the year. Hunters argue about whether to cut the stem or twist it off, whether to leave some to spore; the argument never settles, because listening is not the custom. But everyone agrees on the deeper point. A spot is an asset. It is managed like a garden and guarded like a bank account.

The spots are worth something too. Morels move for real money in the spring, to the back doors of restaurants and the stalls of the farmers markets, to buyers who come from out of town with cash and coolers. The finders do not pretend otherwise. But the money is not the main reason for the silence. The money explains why the silence is fierce. The reason for it is older.

The deepest offense in the morel year is telling a spot. To send another person up a known ridge is to spend a thing that can never be replaced, and for nothing. Old-timers tell of patches being burned or doused by the original finder rather than surrendered to a rival. The story is told as a caution. It may not be true of any particular ground. It is true of the feeling.

Until the Lilacs

The season ends without ceremony. One morning the weather is right and the woods are full of little gray caps. A week later there are only the old ones, dry, cracked, standing like spent candles. Then none. When the lilacs go purple, the morels are done — every hunter knows the sign, and the sign does not vary. The people who walked the hillsides in April go back to their jobs and their errands. The sacks go back to the closet. The ground goes to work on next year.

In every other month those woods are nothing special: a slope, some trees, several years' worth of leaves. In April the same ground holds what no map records, and the knowledge of where is held by people who will not say. That is the arrangement, and it is understood by everyone who takes part in it.

A hunter asked why he keeps the place to himself will offer the practical answer — a limited supply of mushrooms, a long supply of human beings. The true answer is in the way he looks at the ground when he says it. April is the shortest season the country has. It is over practically before it begins, and the people who love it do not want company in the having of it. A thing this small and this temporary is not improved by being shared.

So the trucks keep slowing down, the windows stay down, the sacks stay empty until the moment they are full. And when two hunters meet in a clearing in the last week of April and one asks how it went, the answer will be short, and it will not include directions. It means the season came and went and was found, which is all anyone gets to know.

Photos: Doug McGrady (CC BY 2.0)