“Well, isn’t this a fine mess?” I mumbled. “Just a few more and I’ll have enough for breakfast.”

That may sound strange to some folks, but mushroom hunters will understand. Getting one’s self into a fine mess is about the best thing that can happen to a mushroom hunter.

I grew up in the Midwest in the days when mushroom hunting was a blend of art, science, and religion. There was a certain mythology to mushroom hunting when I was a kid.

We always looked around apple trees, for example; and oak groves were good – as were beech, ash, hickory, maple, gum, sycamore, poplars, walnut, hawthorn, hedge apples, etc. We always looked in the mayapple patches. We found most of our mushrooms in places we always looked.

Dedicated hunters carried a stick and raked the leaves to uncover the secretive morels. Some dragged their feet as they walked, hoping to cover their tracks so no one would find their mushroom patch.

That’s part of the lore of mushroom hunting: You never know where you’ll find them, but you surely aren’t going to tell anybody else where you’ve been looking.

I’ve learned to choose my mushroom hunting companions carefully. I won’t take a person who has never found a mushroom, for example. There’s a reason they’ve never found a mushroom, and there’s no point in dragging a jinx through the woods with you.
I get a kick out of those old stories about blindfolding your companions when you take them mushroom hunting. That’s a bunch of baloney. Ninety percent of them will try to peak under the blindfold as soon as they get in the car.

Some of my best mushroom hunts started out as something else. We would be planting corn and park the fertilizer truck next to a woods, or we might find some mushrooms at the edge of a lane.
Those were the days when portable outhouses were unheard of, but every farm had a woodlot. If a guy was working in the field, he always spent part of his day in the woods.

It’s hard to say how many mushrooms are found by folks who are actually looking for a paw-paw tree, but we found quite a few that way.

My favorite mushroom hunt started out as a turkey hunt. I was wandering around waiting for a turkey to gobble, when I happened to spot a few morels.

The turkeys weren’t cooperating anyway, so I put the mushrooms in my hat.

A few minutes later I found some more – and my hat was getting full. So I took off my t-shirt and tied the top shut.
By the time my t-shirt was full the turkey hunt had escalated into a full-blown mushroom hunt. Finally, I didn’t have any place to put them.

So I took off my long underwear and tied the legs shut. A few hours later my underwear was fully loaded. I took that as a sign it was time to quit.

Some folks might wince at carrying mushrooms around in their underwear, but that’s because they aren’t mushroom hunters. We can’t expect them to understand, now can we?

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.