The End Days

Long time readers of this blog will know that towards the latter parts of April and the first week or so of May, I descend into madness. Morel madness that is. I find myself wandering the woods of southeast Iowa, picking off ticks before they can attach themselves to me, all to find a lot of what you see above. However, I find myself quickly approaching the time where I will have to find something else to consume me and will go mushroom hunting no more, at least purposely.

I've been hunting for morels in the same wooded draws for more than 40 years. In the large majority of those 40 plus years, I have found enough to sate my appetite even though these delicacies only grow for a couple weeks a year. But the last handful of years, I've found fewer and fewer mushrooms. Probably a large part of it is just me. My eyes aren't any better than they were when I was younger and living 40 miles away from the areas I hunt, I certainly don't get down to look as often as I did when I lived on the farm. Weather has also played a factor as a number of springs we've had in the last handful of years has been pretty dry. Morels needs the right temperature AND moisture to grow and we've been lacking in half that equation. However, this year, we've had the moisture and the temperatures and I struggled to find any. In fact, I only found two large yellow ones this year, one of which you see above. My wife was able to find three more but they were well past their prime. Meanwhile, my social media feeds are full of pictures of tailgates covered in mushrooms.

It leads me to the conclusion that perhaps I've just picked out the places I hunt. Occasionally, a young elm tree will succumb to the Dutch Elm disease and I might find a large mess of mushrooms underneath as I did I think two years ago, but the days of just finding mushrooms everywhere are over, at least in the wooded draws where I hunt. Perhaps climate is still to blame with global warming and some tiny variable that I can't discern has changed causing them not to grow in my wooded draws but still allow them to grow in other places. Whatever the case, I am getting close to throwing in the proverbial towel. Nothing is more disappointing spending the better part of an hour driving with dreams of finding a mother lode of morels only to emerge from the woods hours later with nothing more than a few ticks on my pants that I pick off and discard and left with another better part of an hour driving home a failure at providing morels for my family. I did that once this year and swore I wouldn't look again but my wife twisted my arm and because of that, we found five large yellow morels. While it whetted my appetite, I could have done with another five before calling it good for the year. 

I'm not sure what next year will bring. Will I go looking again? Probably. Morel madness is probably not something I can kick cold turkey. But I suspect the day is coming quickly when I will decide it isn't worth it anymore. That doesn't mean I won't ever go again looking for morels but rather that I will probably give up going to look for them by myself. Instead, I'll just go to socialize with others that have the madness and who are inclined to share any found morels with me at the end of the day.