20 ~ Consider the morel

We crossed the brook to the left side and came to the foot of a hill.  Age-old oaks, mighty cedars, black birch, maple, Aralia, firs, poplars, hornbeam, spruce, larch and yew all grew together in picturesque profusion. The forest here had some peculiar feature of its own.  Below, under the trees, reigned twilight.  Dersu walked slowly and, as usual, kept his eye attentively on the ground at his feet.  Suddenly he stopped and, without taking off his eyes off some object, began to remove his knapsack, lay down his rifle and prop, threw down his axe, and lay full length on the ground, praying.  

I thought he had gone crazy.

“Dersu,” I exclaimed, “What’s up?”

“Pantsuy!”, he cried.  “Ginseng!”

-V.K. Arseniev, Dersu the Trapper

This marvelous passage is from the English translation of the book by Russian surveyor V.K. Arseniev, about his early 20th Century explorations in Siberia with a native guide, Dersu Uzala.  Dersu, when not guiding Russian government expeditions, lived a nomadic life in the boreal forest, cobbling together a living by trapping sable and collecting wild ginseng. 

Like Dersu finding ginseng, I feel much the same way each time I find a morel. With May behind us, I had hoped by now to post here a lyrical ode to morels, infused with gratitude for an abundant harvest.  Alas, it is not to be.  By all accounts, this was the thinnest year for Wisconsin morels in recent collective memory (the joke is that they’re sheltering in place). 

Chalk it up to a cool spring, or just the fickle, mysterious nature of morels (morel are like the stock market – analysts can always explain the reason for a market move afterwards, but not predict it, with access in advance to the same information).  Last year in the woods around the house (and with Corina’s help) I found 31 pounds.  This spring, the end of all my exploring was to arrive where I started, and to find myself an amorel man.  Over a period several days and many hours, I found less than a pound (one of the 2020 rarities is pictured above).

Still, I am grateful for that short pound.  Every morel I find is like chancing upon a miracle. It brings a mix of Dersu-like awe, and gratitude that I was fortunate enough, or in my case, competent enough, to find one.  Catching a brook trout (as I did last Tuesday morning) brings a similar sense of validation and reassurance – that, yes, there are miracles in this world, and that sometimes even I can encounter and hold one. 

Morels also rank high in my pantheon for their direct, visible connection between death and life.  In the May woods I search for morels not by looking down, but by looking up, for the skeletal crowns of dead trees. Find a dead tree, head to its base, and if it’s a recently deceased elm, there’s a good chance of finding morels there, nourished by the tree’s decaying roots. Without the death of elms (and sometimes other trees), we would have no morels.

Elms and morels are my teachers, of the lesson that death is not something to recoil from, as if it were an alien, toxic thing, and that only through death can new life – and miracles – be fed. The elm lives in the morel, and the morel (when I can find one!) lives on in me.  Even this lapsed Catholic can recognize that in the Eucharist, they were on to something.  As elms and morels both know, and which they remind us, our sense of the finality of death is at best an approximation. 

The capacity of morels to surprise and bring wonder was underscored in spring of last year, in of all places (hence the surprise), near the Sahara Desert.  On an April morning in far southern Morocco, my daughter Alonda and I reached the end of the road, where the pavement gives way to the Sahara, like a tributary emptying into a vast sea of sand.  We turned around and headed back north, toward the Atlas Mountains.  For a few hours we drove through a hardscrabble land of mud-brick villages, some date palms, and camels and goats eking out a living from the sparse, chapped vegetation.  With the Atlas range in view ahead, we stopped and bought some dates at a small roadside stand.

Soon we were on switchbacks, climbing up and over toward our destination, Marrakesh, on the other, Atlantic Ocean side of the range.  Along the narrow roadside, men held up Atlas crystals for sale.  Once over the high crest of the range and headed down the other side, out of the rain shadow that makes the Sahara, crystal peddlers gave way to sellers of herbs from forest that began to appear on the moister side.  Now and then we also passed men holding up plastic bags and strings of something we didn’t recognize. 

“What are those?”, I asked between bites of a date.

“Don’t know”, said Alonda.  “They almost look like morels.”

“Yeah, but couldn’t be.  Let’s stop for a look if we pass another one.”

On the road ahead we soon spotted a gaunt man offering more of the same.  We pulled over, and he enthusiastically thrust through the window, for our examination, morels – small bags of fresh ones, and necklaces of dried ones. Remarkable. It was hard to get my hard around, just a few hours after purchasing dates from the parched fringe of the Sahara. I loved the surprise - that one of my most memorable moments in Morocco would involve…morels.

Here’s hoping small miracles continue to appear in all of our lives.  Be assured they surround us, sometimes thrust through the window, and sometimes just waiting for us to notice, and give thanks, like Dersu before a ginseng.

What I’m reading and can recommend:

Die Wise, by Stephen Jenkinson

I’ve known Stephen for several years. He is a profound thinker, teacher and writer (check out www.orphanwisdom.com), and this work is an insightful exploration of death, particularly the way it’s treated (or rather, avoided) in Western culture.  I read it when it came out a few years ago, and still occasionally dive back into its rich pages for reminders and inspiration.