Stay and Eat

Dry Land Fish :

The story about snow (soon to arrive in another section of the Omnichronic,) had some musing on night sounds. Today I’ve been walking around thinking about a night sound that heralds the dry land fish. That’s the old-timey name for morel mushrooms hereabouts; so named because like fish, rolling them in cornmeal was the most common way of preparing them for frying.

They are not easy to find unless you know where there’s a patch, and its unlikely that you would know that location unless someone showed you, which is very unlikely, or unless you ramble around in the woods alot during a very particular time in spring.

Springtime in this part of the hills comes in fits and starts. Bold flowers surge up in the occasional warm days of early February, only to bow back down under random snows and bitter freezes. Then a longer, warmer spell, that calls for lettuce bed making and burning. We have a saying around here that you can tell when its spring because the hillbillies start burning things. What’s burned is the last of winter; limbs, blown off in storms; leftover leaves, weed-patches. Still there are cold snaps, and they snap harder by seeming late, like vengeance.

Of the spring peepers that start singing early, my grandmother would say; “They’ll be looking through glass windows before long.”

The signal for dry land fish season is a certain rain. I go on the lookout for it when mayapples are just beginning to spread their umbrellas. And often I wake up in the middle of the night at the distant rumble in the West, low and sensual amidst the myriad little jingling calls of the frogs. There will be lovely cracks of ozone-scented lightning, and the rain will not usually be a hard one, but soaking and gentle. “Not a ditchdigger and a fence buster, but a root-soaker and a nubbing stretcher.” as my dad used to say.

The cold front that pushes this storm along means that the following days will be breezy and cool. If they are not too cool, the dry land fish will come up. You’ve got to get out in the woods and start hunting, because you only have a few days to find them

Even if you know where to look morels are not easy to see. The crinnulated dark caps of the first kind to emerge are blackish brown, with a surface of dips and pits that break the shape like camo. They can be nearly invisible in leaf litter, blending into the complex break of light and shadow shapes. I think the easiest way to see them is to squat and scan for the distinctive shape poking through the leaves. They grow in flocks, so where there’s one, there are usually others.

When I was in my 20s I happened to mention mushroom hunting to a casual friend, a good-natured guy named Jeff. Eager to appear knowledgeable, or maybe loosened by beer, he said, “Oh yeah. I know where there’s a patch.” And to my amazement he actually showed me the exact place. No real dry-land-fisher would ever reveal the location of their patches. It was in a soggy little woods just off a back road about 5 miles north of our farm.

It was summer when he showed me. I made a mental note and waited.

It used to be that most farmers didn’t mind someone walking across their land. Hunters, pleasure walkers and gatherers of wild things were generally ignored or greeted friendly as long as they climbed fences at the posts and didn’t leave gates open. People who put up “No Trespassing” signs were thought cranks and killjoys, and a bit stupid, since their un-neighborly ways rebounded when they needed neighbors.

That’s changed now, and it isn’t safe, really, to ramble about these days. This story falls midway in the change, so I was beginning to be more cautious of where I hunted. And I knew this was someone else’s patch, whether they owned the land or not, so I went early, like the pig in the story, to beat them to it.

There were morels. But as I was filling my basket I saw a man, coming through the woods toward me, and thought “uh oh, the jig is up.” So I got up from my crouch and greeting him as innocent seeming as I could. I could tell that he was annoyed to find me there, but he was concealing it with the exact courtesy which foragers recoginize as proper. I tried to be chatty, commenting on the timing of the rain and the good quality of the dry land fish which blared in my basket, and I asked him if itwas his land. No. It wasn’t.

“How did you find this place?” he asked coolly.

“A friend of mine, Jeff ___, showed it to me.” says I

“Oh, he did, did he?” said the man, and I could see his temperature raise a notch.

"Do you know him?” I asked.

“Yes, I do. He’s my son."

I could tell from the tone of that, that Jeff was going to have some explaining to do. And I bet that if he knew of another of his dad’s patches he never showed one to anyone else after that.

Writing this is odd, because in my enthusiasm to describe everything to do with morels, I thought of telling far too much about the location of MY favorite patch. Surely no one who reads this would ever find it? You can’t be too sure.

I will say that it is on the shelf of a North facing bluff, above the bend in a creek. The creek is usually up after a spring rain, so imagine a waist deep wade through fast cold water and maybe that will deter you. At the base of the bluff stretches a long narrow glade of bluebells. Near the top the woods flattens out slightly, and if the timing is just right, there will be a basketfull of morels. I’ve taken my mother there, and one of my nephews, but really its better to go alone.

Dry land fish do not smell like fish. They smell like sex. So exactly that it seems randy to sniff them in public. Why is this so? What do they have in common with us?

Whatever it is, it is utterly delicious. You could treat them as the old timers do, and dip them in a lightly beaten egg, then roll them in cornmeal, or seasoned flour, and fry them in hog lard. There isn’t much that is better.

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