70~The International Brother(and Sister)hood of Trout, Ramps, and Morels

Zrmanja River, Croatia; photo by Antonio Karaga

Last month I had the good fortune to visit Croatia for ten days - my first time in the Balkans. The region has been crisscrossed by empires and armies for millennia, and is still on the mend from the most recent wars in the 1990s, following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Croatia emerged independent from that conflagration, and seems to be proudly thriving. My starting point and raison de voyage was a conference on wildlife conservation in Zagreb. When the conference ended, I dove into a rental car and went in search of Croatia, through Croatian trout.  In doing so, I soon found myself back home.

From Zagreb, the GPS steered the car and me southeast into hills of beech forest, and to a modest two-story lodge in the woods, run by fly fishermen and brothers Denis and Darko (correct - and not a Harry Potter or Star Wars character). Meals were included, and D&D are my kind of people. During my two-day stay they variously and proudly served wild boar stew, homemade venison sausages, their own honey (thick and opaque with suspended pollen), a drink made from elderflowers picked from the very tree that shaded the outdoor dining table, and jam made by their mother from something called Cornelian cherries (they did a lot phone tapping into Google Translate to explain what we were eating).

Darko’s dark elixir of honey.

I occupied the upper floor of the lodge, and two other fishing clients shared the bottom floor, regulars for several years: an erudite plastic surgeon from Burgundy and his aikido instructor (it’s an interesting, rich world out there, sometimes brought to us by the people we meet). The good doctor had brought along some good wine, and generously shared it around the table at meals. He was clearly (and justifiably) proud to be Bourguignon, and I benefited from his ambassadorial largesse.  

Darko drew the straw (probably short one) to guide me, and took me to an extraordinarily clear and beautiful forest stream not far from the small lodge, the Curak River.  As expected, there we found brown trout, like we have back home (browns are native to Croatia, and introduced to Wisconsin), and exquisite grayling, with small delicate mouths and fan-like dorsal fins - geisha trout.  I was so transfixed by the beauty of the stream and its potential for trout (and to keeping my back cast clear of beech branches…), that I didn’t notice what was everywhere underfoot, until I saw a couple of women, a mother and daughter, collecting them – ramps, aka wild leeks, aka “bear onion” in Darko’s translation from the Croatian.  

Now, I’ve spent a fair number of early spring hours in the Iowa County woods back home searching for ramps, without success. Others have led me to some in other places, in Vernon County, but I’d never found a ramp myself.  And now here they were, massed around me in Croatia, patches as far as the eye could see along both shady banks. To paraphrase (and possibly butcher) T.S. Eliot, ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive somewhere else and find we are still at home.’  That’s how I felt along the Curak River that morning, catching brown trout and taking in the heady, pungent scent of ramps.

Lunch break: Darko sitting on mosses and ramps along the Curek.

After bidding farewell to Darko, Denis and the good Burgundians, I headed south to rendezvous with “Sniper” (quite the movie so far…).  “Sniper” is the nickname of one Antonio Karaga, a moniker he earned as a teen due to his accuracy in casting a spinning lure for stream trout.  I’d made contact with him, and he and his friend Boris, himself a member of the Croatian national spin fishing team, agreed to help me find trout in their home region of Dalmatia. 

The environmental transition in that three-hour drive south was extraordinary.  It was as if I’d left the Black Forest of Germany and in three hours had driven to Greece or Sicily.  Most of the beech forest gave way to rocky, Mediterranean-like scrubland, and on the sun-parched upper slopes above a stream where Antonio and Boris took me to find brown trout, wild sage grew instead of ramps.

The morning after a long and fairly successful evening of chasing trout (photo at top of Boris, left, and me with one of our catches), Antonio and I were having coffee and talking food in the large, airy restaurant of my modest hotel in the town of Knin.  At one end of the dining room a whole lamb and two roasting pigs rotated on three spits over a woodfire. In deference to Muslim clients, the lamb occupied the top position, to keep it clear of pork drippings.

Our talk turned to mushrooms, and Antonio struggled to find the English word for a prized fungus he could find in cooler patches of forest in the area. He finally took out his phone and showed me a photo of his four year-old son Niko proudly holding his very first find of one. A morel!  Back home before my departure in mid-May I had searched in vain for morels (making 2022 the third bust morel year in a row).  I found comfort and delight, and a sense of connection, in finding them in some way here, and in the proud thrill in his son’s eyes – probably much like my own the first time I finally found a morel.

Niko’s score; photo by Antonio Karaga

This brought me back a few years earlier to Morocco. With a rental car (again) I had gone to rendezvous with and collect my daughter after she’d finished a weaving apprenticeship in the far south of Morocco, at the edge of the Sahara. As we drove back north toward Marrakesh we passed camels and palms, and bought dates from a roadside stand. The road then switch-backed up the Atlas Mountains, which run east–west across the middle of the country. After we crested the Atlas ridge, we descended the cooler, forested, northern side of the range (which faces the moisture of the sea) – another remarkably rapid environmental transition. Old men appeared alongside the road, proffering plastic bags of something for sale. After the fourth or fifth one, our curiosity got the best of us and we stopped, and the man rushed to the car window with… dried morels! It was April, and he was selling morels he’d found in the forest nearby. Incredible. Just a few hours earlier we’d bought dates in the desert.

Meeting old food friends like this shrinks the world, in a comforting way.  While conducting a wildlife survey once in Laos, on a high, dry plain I looked down to see, to my wonder, minute wild strawberries growing at my feet (when I was a boy my mother pegged me with two names, depending on the season, Strawberry King and Watermelon King). 

With food and travel we can find both the exotic (in Laos you can also partake of fried bats…) and the familiar.  With the familiar, such as morels in Croatia and Morocco, it’s like meeting a friend you know in a place you don’t. There is solace in finding that the boundaries of our home extend farther than we knew.  Likewise, it’s a reminder, which we seem to need often, of how very small, and interconnected, is this planetary marble coated in life.

Yesterday I made my annual combined run for wild trout and Amish strawberries in the Viroqua and La Farge area. I did pretty well on trout early in the morning, and came upon a very large snapping turtle basking high on the steep bank in the morning sun. Startled, it simply rolled down the bank pell-mell like a tumbleweed and ker-plashed! into the stream. Reminded me of Harrison Ford/Dr. Richard Kimble’s desperate leap from the dam in The Fugitive movie. Alas, it’s not a good year for strawberries, and my Fragaria man, my mainline connection, Gideon Zook, couldn’t fill all of my order. Still, a dozen quarts are headed for the freezer, or into a pie crust in the company of rhubarb. Life is good.