The Not-So-Magic Mushrooms

Newsletter 2023-04-17

It’s a bad idea to send me to find anything.

When my wife asks me to grab something from a specific spot on a specific shelf in a specific closet, there’s a one hundred percent chance it won’t be there. I’ll play back her instructions in my mind, repeating each step verbatim. I’ll double check the GPS coordinates on my phone and verify them with a map and compass. I’ll run my hand through the location in question to make sure the item isn’t hidden by an invisibility cloak or phase distortion field. It simply won’t be there—until I say that to Lola. Then she’ll check, and it will be right where she said it would be. Depending on your pre-existing biases and possibly your gender, you can attribute that inevitable outcome to my incompetence or my wife’s black magic. Either way, we can all agree it’s a bad idea to dispatch me to find anything. Anyway, guess who took four children into the deep, dark woods looking for mushrooms?

I haven’t eaten a morel mushroom since I was a kid. As far as I can remember, I only went mushroom hunting once. It was when my family lived in a rental house not far from acres of woods behind a baseball field. Most childhood memories are dictated by proximity. It’s a shame that the rental house wasn’t right next to an amusement park or a laser tag arena. My dad took my siblings and me into the woods for what felt like days but was probably more like an hour and a half. This was in the dark times before we had the internet, so my brothers and I didn’t even know what we were looking for. It’s not like my dad went to the library beforehand to find us a picture in a book. Right as we were about to give up, Dad stumbled across roughly four small mushrooms. We tossed them in an empty bread bag and returned home conquering heroes. We had provided our family with enough calories for a small snack. We were one step away from living off the grid.

Dad fried the mushrooms in butter and flour. Then, we feasted. We each got a tiny bite. The mushrooms tasted like… butter and flour. If you add enough of those ingredients to anything, you have a pancake. Mushrooms are more or less tasteless on their own. Much like lobster, they’re simply an expensive butter delivery system, even if we got ours for free. My dad had wasted the bounty of hours of hunting on extremely ungrateful children. We all came to the unspoken understanding that we would never mushroom go mushroom hunting again. It was a hard-earned bit of wisdom that I followed for the rest of my life—until Saturday, when I threw it all away.

In my defense, going mushroom hunting with my kids wasn’t my idea. It started with a lack of adult supervision. Lola was going to her sister’s baby shower. Thankfully, this one was just for the ladies. It’s the one time I approve of gender discrimination. Recently, more and more baby showers have been co-ed, and the world is worse for it. In our younger years, back when baby showers were more likely to be single-gender, Lola would go to the shower and I would go to the golf course to get drunk with my brothers. It was the perfect system—until a designated driver took me home and I had to pretend I hadn’t just had approximately one beer per hole. That’s a gross exaggeration, unless Lola isn’t reading this, in which case it’s probably a pretty accurate count. Our friend, Lila, was also invited to the baby shower Saturday, leaving her husband, Peter, similarly alone. He and I are both now far too old to drink that many beers in the hot sun. We’re at the age where hangovers are measured not in hours but in decades. Instead, he suggested an alternative. Why not take my kids mushroom hunting in the woods on his parents’ farm? That sounded like a good idea to me, mostly because all of my childhood memories are hazy at best. I told my kids to put on their worst shoes and hop in the van. The Breakwells were returning to nature.

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

The farm where Peter grew up has roughly seventy acres of woods. Instead of watching TV, he spent his formative years romping among the trees. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. A Sarah McLachlan song started playing when he told us. In 2023, giving your kid that much fresh air and exercise is tantamount to child abuse. Nonetheless, I led my own brood into the forest. Surely they could handle it for one morning.

Before breaching the tree line, Peter gave each of us a plastic grocery bag. That was overly ambitious to say the least. Morel mushrooms sell for ridiculous sums per pound because they can’t be farmed or grown in a lab. They’re the only thing harder to raise than children. The only way to get them is to waste countless hours of your life in the woods hoping to get lucky. Peter had been doing just that for years. He’s an expert chef who can make anything taste good, even if it starts out completely devoid of flavor. I had no doubt that, in his skilled hands, these mushrooms would be the best thing I’d ever eaten. Even so, I plotted betrayal. If we actually filled six grocery bags with morels, I would have hocked them all to pay for my girls to go to college. I just couldn’t tell anyone. People would have definitely gotten the wrong impression if I told them I put my kids through school by selling mushrooms.

My kids’ motivations were less certain. They all vowed that they wouldn’t eat morels because mushrooms are gross, something they knew without ever having tasted or been in the same room as one. One of the benefits of childhood is you can decide what you hate with absolute certainty without any supporting evidence. That was fine with Peter. It meant more mushrooms for him, at least until I secretly sold them. The children went willingly, though, mostly because I told them they didn’t have a choice. Also, it was an adventure. I’ve taken them on trails through the woods before, but never off the beaten path. This rugged exploration would be a whole new experience. In addition to old shoes, I told them to wear clothes with holes in them, which is most of what they own. A "good" outfit only stays good for approximately the first fifteen minutes they have it on. I also advised them to wear jeans, which offer better protection against thorns and other plant defenses than the cotton leggings my kids wear ninety-nine percent of the time. The girls listened carefully to my recommendations and then wore leggings anyway. When it comes to fashion, it’s almost always a good idea to do the opposite of what I say.

Peter took us to an area overlooking a small stream and set us loose. The woods were so thick that it was hard to split up. We mostly stayed in a single-file line behind Peter unnecessarily rechecking all the spots he had already covered. Finally, I broke away and went out on my own. My twelve-year-old, Betsy, followed me, while the wiser children stuck with Peter. When our two groups lost sight of each other, my eight-year-old, Lucy, yelled, "Marco!" Betsy and I replied, "Polo!" It was cute the first three times. Then it was annoying, and, soon after, outright obnoxious. Anything worth doing is worth doing until your dad bans it for life. The kids didn’t mean to cause problems. They were simply scared of being abandoned in the woods. They’ve been brainwashed by anti-forest propaganda like the story of Hansel and Gretel. In reality, there’s nothing wrong with ditching your kids in the woods. It’s not like I would have left them out there forever. I would have come back for them when they were adults.

We didn’t have any luck on the south side of the stream, so Peter declared that it was time to cross and check the other side of the property. Fording the stream was dicey, even if the water was only a few inches deep. The mucky soil on either side threatened to suck in shoes like quicksand. Worse, the stream was in a ravine with dirt walls taller than the kids. I clambered across and reached back to help them up. It wasn’t an easy process. I’ve been living with a hernia for the past few weeks. Most days, it’s just a curious bump that I can’t even feel. That day, though, it hurt every time I moved. It was a good time for a flare up since I was far from medical care. My body is judicious with the times it tries to kill me. I felt a dull pain every step the entire way through the woods, especially when I had to duck or climb. I ended up walking straight through a lot of thorns and branches because it was less uncomfortable than doubling over. Regardless, I ignored the pain and reached back to pull my kids up the bank, not because I wanted to, but because if I abandoned my children in the stream, Lola might have questions. The one exception was Betsy, who stayed standing in the middle of the water because she was wearing knee-high rubber rain boots. She was immune to the elements and wanted the wilderness to know it. Nature would have its revenge soon enough.

My hernia slowed me down, but my bag didn’t. There was no extra weight to carry. Halfway through the woods, we hadn’t found a single mushroom. We left the ideal hunting grounds and started looking in random places. There were none there, either. What we did find, unfortunately, were thorns and brambles in abundance. In the past, I thought it was tragic when a developer bulldozed a stretch of woods to build yet another strip mall or subdivision. Saturday changed my mind. The only thing those clusters of trees and shrubs offer is pain. It’s long past time that we follow the advice of the Counting Crows. I say pave paradise and put in a parking lot.

The kids were pretty good before we crossed the stream. Once we got into the deep woods on the other side, though, their enthusiasm began to falter. Being smacked in the face by wooden spikes and spiderwebs every two steps will do that to you. Finally, Peter called it. There was no sign of morels anywhere. Either there weren’t any mushrooms this year or they heard us coming and hid. In reality, I think we couldn’t find them because I didn’t have Lola to point out how they were right in front of me the whole time. Her superpower was greatly missed.

We painstakingly made our way through the thorns and brambles and back across the stream. Finally, we arrived at a clearing on the other side. We were done with the woods. The woods, however, were not done with us. As Betsy walked, she noticed something uncomfortable on the back of her leggings. They were completely covered in briars. Or stickers. Or thorns. Call them whatever you want, but her leggings were saturated with little spiky balls of pain. She couldn’t even see them to get them off. I started plucking them one by one, but there were too many. We were going to be there all day. I called in her sisters to help. Together, the four of us worked feverishly to undo the forest’s final attack. I have a feeling that will be the children’s one lasting memory from the day. For the rest of their lives, whenever someone mentions mushroom hunting, they’ll think of the time they spent a quarter of an hour picking briars off their sister’s butt.

Afterwards, we went out to Chick-fil-A, which made the whole day worthwhile. I can turn pretty much any traumatic event into a good one with forty dollars worth of fast food. Briars notwithstanding, the children enjoyed themselves. They got to stomp through the woods and get their clothes dirty, which is always a plus. They also didn’t get roped into trying a bite of mushrooms against their will. It’s entirely possible they saw all kinds of morels and didn’t tell us to avoid that possibility. Our failure also gave them something else to look forward to. Had they actually seen a morel mushroom in real life, they might have been underwhelmed. Instead, it will remain mysterious and legendary, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Sometimes the best stories are about the one that got away, even if you have to ruin a pair of leggings in the process.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James