By Mike Pound
Globe columnist
The guy told me that what he has is a disease.
He told me that he can’t help what he does, nor can he explain why he does it. He just knows that he does it, and he has done it for 30 years. He even admitted that he sometimes does it with his wife. Like a lot of people who have a disease, he didn’t want me to use his name. At first, he didn’t even want to talk to me, but when I agreed that he could remain anonymous, he opened up a little bit.
“It really is a sickness — a genetic defect,” he told me.
That’s it. He has no other way to explain why he hunts wild morel mushrooms. I mean, it would be different if he or his wife truly loved wild mushrooms, but they don’t.
“They’re OK, but we’re not crazy about them,” he said.
Lyndell Wood, of Golden City,
e-mailed me about the mushroom hunter a while back, so the other day I called Lyndell to find out more. Lyndell told me that the guy is the best mushroom hunter in the area — or at least the best he has ever seen.
“But he probably won’t talk to you,” Lyndell said. “He’s not one for publicity.”
I called the mushroom hunter anyway. When he answered the phone, I told him what Lyndell had said.
“He’s right,” the mushroom hunter said.
I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. So I said that I told Lyndell that I was going to call the hunter anyway.
“Now you can say you did,” he said.
It was beginning to sound like a tough interview, but after I promised not to use his name, the mushroom hunter opened up. He turned out to be a nice guy with a pretty good sense of humor.
He’s not sure how he got hooked on mushroom hunting, and he’s hard-pressed to explain exactly what it is that he likes about it. Basically, he likes being out in the woods, he likes the challenge and he likes the people with whom he hunts.
“My wife and I hunt together,” he said. “It’s one of the things we can do together.”
I’ve been mushroom hunting only once. It was a couple of years ago. I went with Warren Rose from the Missouri Conservation Department. I was doing a story on mushroom hunting, and I figured I ought to try it before I wrote about it. Although it was pretty late in the season, Warren agreed to take me hunting. We didn’t find any mushrooms, but I did learn where you’re supposed to look. You’re supposed to look around water ... or is it around trees? Maybe it’s around trees near water. I really don’t remember. What I do remember is Warren telling me that it’s not easy to find mushrooms.
Of course, my anonymous mushroom hunter disagrees. He thinks it’s pretty easy to find mushrooms — if you know what you’re looking for. He should know. He told me that he found 6,515 mushrooms this season.
“We give a lot away,” he said.
He told me it was a great mushroom season — for a while. The early warm weather and the rains combined for a bumper morel crop early, but the cold snap pretty much ended the season, he said.
I asked the mushroom hunter where he finds his mushrooms, expecting that he wouldn’t tell me. But he did.
“I don’t have any problem telling folks where I hunt,” he said. “Just head east out of Arcola to the lake.”
The lake he’s talking about is Stockton Lake. Turns out the lake area is lousy with mushrooms — if you know where to look and, more importantly, according to the mushroom hunter, how to look.
“I could take people to where I found them, and they wouldn’t find them,” he said.
So what’s the secret to mushroom hunting? For one thing, you need to be prepared to hoof it a bit. The mushroom hunter told me that if you can see where you parked your car, you haven’t gone far enough.
“If you don’t get covered with mud and ticks, you ain’t been mushroom hunting,” he said.
Look for lots of timber and brush, the mushroom hunter said. Stockton Lake is a good place to hunt, he said, because there are large tracts of undeveloped land. As far as he’s concerned, land development — homes and businesses — is the enemy of mushroom hunters.
“It’s those purple signs that are doing it — those ‘No Trespassing’ signs,” he said.
But until the “No Trespassing” signs take over, the mushroom hunter expects to keep going out looking for the morels.
Like he said, it’s a disease.
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Mike Pound: Anonymous mushroom hunter is a fun guy
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