ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605130171
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C9 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Outdoors
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
It was a year ago that we met the two young fellows coming down a backwoods road, their stuffed shirts swinging over their backs like a tramp's knapsack.
``Get a turkey,'' I asked, knowing it wasn't spring gobblers that had them shirtless and sweating and looking a bit sheepish.
``No,'' they said. ``Heard a couple.''
What they were toting home was a huge stash of morel mushrooms.
People will tell you where the turkeys are gobbling and where the trout are rising to a hatch, and maybe even give you a tip on a hot, new stock. Mushrooms are something you keep to yourself.
But we had these guys red-handed, or so we thought.
``We found them up near the old graveyard,'' one said when we persisted.
So we kept that in our memory all year, and last week - hoping the time was right - we entered the area where the old graveyard sits peacefully beneath huge maples, the etchings on the headstones faint and filled with gray moss.
It was a cool, damp day, and a wood thrush sang nearby with flute-like notes, enough to make the visit more than worth our while. But there were no mushrooms.
Maybe it was the weather.
``Never can remember a spring like this,'' we say, a statement we made the previous spring, and the spring before it.
There is the sleet of February one day, and the humidity of August the next. Forest fires are a threat at the first of the week, floods the last.
Just as we restlessly ponder whether spring will appear, suddenly it comes rolling across the horizon like a tidal wave of leaves, then it is gone.
You've got to wonder what impact such weather has had on the creatures that pop through the forest duff this time of year, the trilliums, the violets, the morel mushrooms. Will the wildflowers even bloom, you ask at one point. Yet, no matter the weather, spring always has its parade.
The queen is the trillium, the violets the attendants, the dogwoods and redbuds wave the flags and the morel mushrooms are the clowns.
The clowns are the ones you want to take home to dinner with you, so we combed the graveyard area carrying a hefty bag.
Just as we were about to blame our lack of success on the weather, it occurred to us that the young fellows had steered us in the wrong direction. There had been no mushrooms at the graveyard. They had used it as a decoy.
We turned to another area, down the ridge, where we had collected mushrooms the past three springs. A walk through it can make your mouth water, with the remembrance of mushrooms fried in a black, iron skillet, like chicken, only much rarer - and better.
Mushrooms lack the fins and feet and wings that other deep-woods creatures use to avoid human contact, yet they can be elusive. Any good recipe should begin with, ``First, you find them.''
We found them on the downside of a red oak blow-down. They looked like clumps of honeycomb growing out of the 10 million leaves per acre that fell the previous autumn and were flattened by winter snows. Our bag began to take on precious cargo, then there were no more to be found. Enough for a one meal, no more.
When we left, the wind was stirring the new leaves in the crowns of trees up the ridge from us, or was it the sound of those young fellows laughing up there near the graveyard?
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB