I’d never heard of morel mushrooms until I came to Missouri. Boy howdy, have I heard of them since then! Come April, a good rain and a few days of temperatures in the seventies and the roadside will be sprinkled with abandoned vehicles. People flock to the woods as if they suddenly believe leprechauns really do exist.

Randa first tried to persuade me of the fact (the mushrooms, not the leprechauns) over twenty years ago. Being a natural born hiker and outdoorsman, I readily joined her on the first jaunt. After forty-five minutes or so of fruitlessly searching for something she described as looking “kind of like a sponge,” I was ready to give up and go home. Actually, I was ready to give up after ten minutes. She, being more convinced of the phenomenon than I was, took longer to reach that point.

I will also confess that I was not all that eager to try a sample of the ‘shrooms that her brother, Kevin, gave us after hearing about our pitiful situation. For four or five hours, she rinsed and soaked, soaked and rinsed the morels, trying to rid them of the last little critter. Then, she breaded and fried them (the mushrooms, not the critters). It was obvious that she was in a state of ecstasy as she exclaimed, “Oh, these are wonderful! I love these things!” Then she stretched a sample toward me and smiled in utter delight, “Try this.”

She had no idea what level of determination and devotion was required for me to participate in that culinary experience; I tried it. It wasn’t bad, I had to admit. The second one seemed a little better. By the fifth one, I think I’d actually begun to like them.

With my acquired taste came a new willingness to search for morels in the wild. By our tenth year together, I’d pretty much given up. After twenty years, I was quite content to take our chances with the occasional benevolence of others and have one or two servings of mushrooms in the few years of abundance. Without a determined faith and a confident hope, it’s kind of hard to put in the kind of work that leads to good results.

H. Arnett
4/19/10