The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [195]
But this was virtually the last time all day I lifted my gaze to take in the panorama: As soon as Ben announced he’d spotted his first morel, I began, exclusively and determinedly, looking down. There I found a thick carpet of pine needles amid the charred carcasses of pine. A morel resembles a tanned finger wearing a dark and deeply honeycombed dunce cap. They’re a decidedly comic-looking mushroom, resembling leprechauns or little penises. The morel’s distinctive form and patterning would make it easy to spot if not for its color, which ranges from dun to black and could not blend in more completely with a charred landscape. From a distance, the tiny stumps of burned saplings are easily mistaken for morels; so are the blackened pinecones, many of which stuck straight out of the ground like chubby thumbs and fooled you with their patterning, rhythmic like the morels. This was hard looking, and for the first hour or so, every auspicious sighting turned out on closer inspection to be one or the other of these morel imposters.
To help me get my eyes on Ben—who by common consent had the best eyes on our team—began leaving in place patches of morels he’d found, so I could study them in situ, approaching a patch from various angles until I’d settled on the proper focal length and angle. The trigonometry of the gaze was everything, and I found that if I actually got down on the ground—which just below the layer of pine duff formed a mattress of sliding mud—I could see the little hats popping up here and there, morels that a moment before had been utterly invisible. When Ben spotted me hunting in a prone position, he approved. “We say, ‘Stop, drop, and roll,’ because you can see things at ground level you’ll never see from above.”
Ben and Anthony had a slew of these mushroom-hunting adages and I collected them over the course of the day. “Seeing is boleting” means you never see any mushrooms until someone else has demonstrated their presence by finding one. “Mushroom frustration” is what you feel when everyone around you is seeing them and you’re still blind—until, that is, you find your first, thereby breaking your “mushroom virginity.” Then there’s the “cluster fuck,” when your eyes are on and other hunters crowd you, hoping your good fortune will rub off. Cluster fucking, I was given to understand, was bad manners. And then there was the “screen saver”—the fact that after several hours interrogating the ground for little brown dunce caps, their images will be burned on your retinas. “You’ll see. When you get into bed tonight,” Ben said, “you’ll shut your eyes and there they’ll be again—wall-to-wall morels.”
Anthony and Ben had dozens of theories about mushrooms—as well as a healthy appreciation for the limitations of all theories involving something as mysterious as mushrooms. They cataloged for me the “indicator species” for morels: other, more conspicuous plants and fungi that signaled their likely presence. Dogwood in bloom was a good sign that the soil had reached the proper temperature, as was, allegedly, the appearance of the ice plant, a big bright red phallus rising up from the otherwise lifeless forest floor; however, there were no morels in the vicinity of the one ice plant I spotted. A tiny brown cup fungus was another indicator species that proved somewhat more reliable. Anthony and Ben were convinced the morels would appear at the same altitude in any given week, so wherever we wandered we consulted the GPS to ascertain how high we were and tried to stay around forty-four hundred feet.
I could see why you would want theories to organize your hunting; I’d worked up my own while hunting chanterelles with Angelo. There was so much ground to cover, and the morels were so damned quiet, that theories helped divide the field on which we were playing this game of hide-and-seek into warmer and colder areas. The theories told you when to intensify your attention, scrupulously combing the forest floor