The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [198]
Yet at the same time the morels are trying to escape the dying forest, they also play a role in its renewal. The slightly sulfurous, meaty odor of morels attracts flies, which lay eggs in the safety of the mushroom’s hollow stalk. Larvae emerge and feed on the flesh of the morels; birds then return to the forest to feed on the larvae, in the process dropping seeds that sprout on the forest floor. Mushrooms are hinges in nature, now turning toward death, now toward new life.
After lunch we wandered off our separate ways again for a few more hours. I worked my way downhill, slip sliding in the mud along a steep embankment that followed a stream until it emptied into a creek. I had no idea where I was or where I was going: I was following the trail of mushrooms like a desultory train of thought, heedless of anything else. Including, as it turned out, property lines: I ran into a forester who told me I was on his company’s land. But that was okay with him, just so long as I promised to tell people that logging companies aren’t always evil. Logging companies aren’t always evil. The forester, evidently thrilled to have someone to talk to, told me to keep an eye out along the creek—it was called Beaver Creek—for large boulders with blackened hollows scooped out of them like bowls. It seems the Washoe Indians would wash and mash acorns in these bowls and then bake them into a kind of flat bread.
I never did find one of the Indian bowls, but hearing about them made me realize that this forest had been part of a human food chain for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The Indians understood that you could work out relations with wild species that didn’t necessarily involve bringing them under your roof. Oaks have always refused the domestic bargain, clinging to their bitterness in the face of countless human efforts to domesticate them. But the Indians found a way to live off these trees even so, by devising a way to detoxify the acorns. (We have to do something similar with these morels, which, uncooked, would sicken us.) So much here has changed. The oaks have given way to pine, obviously, and the forest food chain that once sustained the Washoe along Beaver Creek now, attenuated and extended, reaches clear to the coast, linking these woods to a pricey taste on tonight’s menu at Chez Panisse.
Along Beaver Creek that afternoon the morels were totally on, as Ben would say; almost everywhere I looked the honeycombed dunce caps appeared, and I filled a bag in less than an hour. My hands by now were black with soot and stunk of smoke, but I could still smell the meaty perfume of the morels, these fleshy buttons of protein popping out of the dead earth, this seemingly spontaneous combustion of food. I was talking to them, cheering on their every appearance, and they were talking to me, or so it seemed. I exulted at their sudden ubiquity, which I took, weirdly, as evidence of some new connection between us. It sounds crazy, but there is something reciprocal about the transaction, the looking and the appearing, as if we were each doing our part, throwing a line of affiliation across the gulf of wildness. I’ve no idea how deep into the woods I’d wandered, but I was more outside than I can remember