the mark haley holler: Gathering

Fall has come with especially fantastic color this year, and for some reason I find myself channelling my inner Katniss Everdean. No, not shooting people with arrows. I mean we've been experimenting with gathering the food available at the roadsides and wood edges. Among the roadside possibilities are walnuts and acorns. Of course, with us, what starts out as an expedition to gather walnuts and acorns, becomes an all-out menagerie. We come home with walnuts, acorns, mushrooms, caterpillars, and at least one box turtle. My children are the scourge of box turtles countywide.

While Charlie and Abe were diligently gathering the walnuts we actually set out to gather, I was getting distracted by white things in the grass. This has been a particular Fall for mushrooms. The meadows are ripe with three kinds of puffballs, as well as the occasional "Pinky" Meadow Mushroom and the more common Destroying Angel Amanita. It makes me wonder who the first person to mushroom hunt was. One ancient tribesman says, "Hey, look at this pretty thing with the pink gills on the underside. Let's cook it up!" It turns out to taste mild, and nutty. So he goes and gets more. These are white-gilled and almost mesmerizing bright. Seems legit.... Tastes pretty good too... until the liver failure sets in. Mushroom hunting is like that. This mushroom that is a "choice edible" looks exactly like that mushroom that will destroy your liver, bounce your checks, and kidnap your grandmother. Oh, and by the way, the choice edibles are still indigestible and contain no nutritional content. Sounds like fun! So you can see why I'm drawn to it.

The white things distracting me in the grass turned out to be those accurately, if dramatically, named Destroying Angels. So of course I had to pick them and take them home to make spore prints. I might be less glib about it if I thought there was the remotest possibility that either of my children would pick up a random mushroom off of the counter and take a nibble. But since they both act like I'm trying to kill them if I offer them anything that originated in the dirt, I'm not that fussed about it. I did, however, show my lovely mushroom of death to them and explained that, "This is one you never eat. It will kill you dead." At that exact moment, off in the woods we heard a shotgun blast, to which Charlie replied, "Well, that'll kill you dead!" His comic timing is impeccable.

Having gathered our haul of walnuts, we headed on to the oak tree where we first took up the idea of gathering acorns. I know what you're thinking, "Why acorns? Are they squirrelly or something?" Contain yourself, now. It turns out that if you bite into an acorn fresh from the shell, it tastes a lot like.... well, wood. Bitter, bitter wood. But I have read that if one is insane enough to gather, shell, grind, soak, dry, and pulverize acorns, it makes a nice, nutty flour. Am I insane enough? Yep. Inner Katniss Everdean, remember?

So home we trekked with our nutty haul, plus one confused turtle, one stripey woolly-pillar, and one killer mushroom. It never ceases to amaze me how my kids can whine that they're tired for the entire mile-long walk home (or, in Abraham's case, the entire mile-long bike ride in his underpants pulled by mommy using his bib overalls as a tow rope) and once we hit the yard, they're instantly up trees and zooming around on scooters. I shall coin a phrase: You're only as tired as you think you are.

Once we were home and Abraham was happily climbing hay bales while Charlie forecast the weather based on a cloud-type poster, I collapsed in a heap in the yard and found a friend. And I tell you now, it's a good thing for caterpillars, butterflies, and box turtles that they're not edible, because I am just crazy enough to try it.

I said it's been a good year for mushrooms, and also implied that you'd have to be daft to want to hunt and eat wild mushrooms. There is one easy exception to that rule, which is the Giant Puffball mushroom. I remember stomping them as a kid to watch them geyser spores, but they are also a nice edible, if you discount that pesky lack of any nutritional value. And since there is nothing that will kill you dead that looks remotely like a Giant Puffball, they're a safe bet for people who do like mushrooms and don't like playing Russian Roulette with liver failure. Now, you may have to do a little trespassing to find the perfect specimen, as we did, but where's the excitement, I ask you, in an afternoon of rambling if you don't break a few arbitrary laws? (Please don't report us...) Our perfect specimen was on a nice sunny embankment in a cow pasture, looking like a big white rock, visible from the road. No rock, it was a six pound, two foot wide Giant Puffball mushroom. I originally intended only to photograph it, but I was overcome by its awesomeness and ended up doing a little fence ducking. I believe that a good mom introduces her children to criminal activity early!

You can, of course, eat these mushrooms, or, if you're like me, you can cut them up and try to convince your children that they're giant marshmallows. It never works. Kids are canny little buggers. But you have to try.