Mushrooms offer inspiration as well as tasty temptation

Bill Knight colm for 5-15, 16 or 17

After the Oval Office Occupant fired FBI Director James Comey last week, many Americans probably felt like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed a bunch of manure.

But that’s as unfair to mushrooms as the claim that the move had nothing to do with derailing an FBI investigation into Russia’s meddling with elections – especially this month.

No less an authority than The Forager Press has pronounced mushrooms – specifically the morel mushroom – “May’s wild food of the month,” noting, “The true morels – morchella esculenta, elata and semilibera – are not only some of the most delicious wild mushrooms in North America, but they are also some of the easiest to safely identify.

“They can be found for a few weeks each spring, fruiting just after the first spring flowers appear,” they add.

Well. Morels are tasty. (Of course, even corks might be delicious after dipping them in egg whites, covering them in cracker crumbs and sautéing them in butter.) However, “they can be found” is technically true but quite misleading, as anyone can attest who’s tramped through the woods fighting off sticker bushes only to end up with an empty, forlorn plastic bag from some grocery store and a tick crawling on an ankle.

Besides foragers who may mimic Euell Gibbons (“Stalk the Wild Asparagus” author and Grape-Nuts huckster), there also are scholarly musings, such as “Mushrooms and Macrofungi of Ohio and the Midwestern States,” a 166-page book published in 2013 by Ohio State University Extension. But in describing toxic as well as scrumptious mushrooms, the plant-pathologist authors might discourage mushroom afficiandos from foraging much past the produce section at a nice, clean and tick-free grocery store.

So I prefer a literary appreciation that these Fungal Friends have spawned (spored?).

Twenty years ago this month, I did a reading at a Spoon River Morel Mushroom Festival, where the material included the following pieces of ’shroom poetry. I concede that the audience was more tempted by edibles than audibles, more interested in free beer than free verse. Still, these excerpts are enjoyable, if not quite tasty:

“After rain, after weather,/ they emerge, flesh-colored/ and naked as throats:/ milky as the caps they’re/ named for. They loll,/ slouch-brimmed and sprawling/ upon their stalks,/ pale slips swelling upward/ almost visibly/ through the grainy loam.” – Robert Gibb

“These morels, smelling of wet graham crackers mixed with maple leaves;/ and, reaching down by the pale green fern shoots, I nipped their pulpy stems at the base/ and dropped them into a paper bag – a damp brown bag (their color) – and carried/ them (weighing absolutely nothing) down the hill and into the house; you held them/ under cold bubbling water and sliced them with a surgeon's stroke clean through,/ and sauteed them over a low flame, butter-brown; and we ate them then and there –/ tasting of the sweet damp woods and of the rain one inch above the meadow:/ It was like feasting upon air.” – William Jay Smith

“Overnight, very/ whitely, discreetly,/ very quietly/ our toes, our noses/ take hold on the loam,/ acquire the air./ Nobody sees us,/ stops us, betrays us;/ the small grains make room.” – Sylvia Plath

“Mushroom, soft ear, old memory,/ root come to tell the air:/ Bring the forest floor along/ the valley: Bring all that comes/ blue into passes, long shores/ around a lake, talk, talk, talk,/ miles then deep. Bring that story.” – William Stafford

“I am a mushroom/ on whom the dew of heaven drops now and then.” – John Ford

So: Celebrate; feast!

“O, the month of May, the merry month of May,/ so frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!” – Thomas Dekker