Morel Mushrooms

If you have eaten morel mushrooms at a fine restaurant anywhere in the United States, you most likely ate "burn" morels taken from the mountainous West.   They were probably harvested by a commercial picker amid the charred and utterly blackened remnants of what was once a dense forest.

Burn morels, according Jennifer Frazer, writing for Scientific American, and citing studies following the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park, are specific in their habits.  First, they appear in almost ridiculously huge numbers during the spring and summer of the first year immediately following a forest fire.  More interestingly, the study revealed that morels did not appear in plots where only 50% of the ground surface burned.  Morels only appeared in study plots where the earth was burned between 50% and 99%. 

Morels actually prefer to grow where full-on scorchers have blown down trees and swept bare the slopes, where fire bakes the earth and fizzles through the roots underground for days after.

Funny thing: morels are delicious.  They have a taste other than of dirt (as I perceive most mushrooms).  I find them to have a flavor not for removed from that of steak.

Morels are one of precisely two types of mushrooms I like.  I really like them.  I also like shaggy manes.

Sadly, my stomach does not appreciate morel mushrooms nearly as much as my taste buds.  The last two times I ate them, I found myself violently ill within an hour.  Over the years, I have been sickened by other mushroom types palatable to others. 

Yesterday, on a high mountain drive north of Helena, that girl and I came upon the remnants of a great forest converted to scorched earth and black sticks by a forest fire last year.  On a whim, we scampered lightly into the after-rain black trying not assume the same color.

Amid the broken and blackened trees and charred earth, we found a half dozen fist-sized morels.  We harvested them.  This evening I may try a very small taste.  They really are that delicious.

--Mitchell Hegman

Something Steven Wright Said

—If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?  

—Be nice to your children.  After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.

—Is it weird in here, or is it just me?

Steven Wright

Flamingo, Birdy, Penguin

Birds are important to me.

Gulls and ravens have flown through my poems for all the years I have written them: “One white bird, two black birds...”

Every year, for the last twenty-five, I have marked down the date of my first bluebird sighting.  They are my official harbinger of spring.

I regularly talk with my magpie neighbors.

On my recent trip back to Ohio, Mackenna and I played sticker book regularly.  Finding a good placement for the white mama duck was always our first priority.

We are all about the birds.

Little Mackenna, though having just this month turned two (with a little help from her mother), sent me a Father’s Day card.

Today, I am posting a photograph of the card.

These birds are the rarest and most beautiful.

--Mitchell Hegman

The Right Path

I think it’s obvious I’m on the right path.  I’m still finding single malt Scotch and good friends along the way.

--Mitchell Hegman

Traffic

On our recent cross-country drive from Ohio to Montana I was struck by the slowly changing landscape.  I watched as the leafy trees of the Midwest melted away to open plains.  The plains then ascended into tall mountains with dense pine forests.

I was similarly struck by how four and five crowded lanes of traffic gradually diminished down to two mostly quiet lanes.  By the time we reached Wyoming, we often found ourselves driving stretches of interstate highway without another car in sight.

It’s somewhat shocking to fly out from Montana and find yourself immediately plunked down amid the heavy traffic in Ohio’s cities.  As I have told that girl on several occasions, I feel as though I am constantly “merging with traffic” on my visits there.

Ohio has quite a history with automobiles.  

The world’s very first automobile crash occurred in Ohio City, Ohio, in 1891.  The accident occurred when John W. Lambert’s single-cylinder car sideswiped a tree and then careened into a hitching post.

There is also that tenacious, though undocumented, story that in 1895 a total of only two automobiles were on the road in the entire state of Ohio…and they somehow managed to crash into one another.

And there is this: The world’s first electric traffic signal was installed at the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 105^th in Cleveland, Ohio, in August of 1914.

Things have been on a steady downhill ever since.  

--Mitchell Hegman

Scary Stuff

—Finding images of giant spiders captured by the trail camera you placed on a tree near your house.

—Watching the Weather Channel.

—Announcing that you like a song you just heard on the radio, only to be told Justin Bieber performed it.

--Mitchell Hegman

Home

We entered Montana at midday yesterday and drove through 340 miles of my river and mountain home. 

Give me the West.

--Mitchell Hegman