The hunt is one for mushrooms

All the pleasurable incremental signs of the onset of spring — nesting birds, blooming dandelions and the pale green aura of newly minted tree leaves, to name a few — culminated at 3:06 p.m. Tuesday when blurry river bottom leaf litter suddenly receded, revealing the sharply focused pitted cap of morchella esculenta, the gray morel.

In the blink of an eye all my practiced excuses — too cold, too dry, not enough this, not enough that — reverted for use in future springs. A walk in the woods — my third in six days — had become a mushroom hunt.

I plunged the metal probe of my thermometer into the soil next to the first mushroom of the season.

While I waited for the temperature to register, I adjusted my mental scan image, which I had over-optimistically set for larger, brighter, more conspicuous morels, to low-profile tan specimens that remained invisible until you found the exact angle with which to make eye contact.

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The thermometer said 52.3 degrees, at the lower end of the range widely considered suitable for spring morel fruiting.

Encouraged by the thermometer, exhilarated by the first find and informed by experience that one morel can often lead to others, I recalibrated my mental scan image and began walking concentric circles around the season’s first mushroom.

Emulating our common ancestor Homo erectus, I could not find another morel. But when I adjusted my sight angle by crawling on my hands and knees, more snapped into focus, singles, doubles and clumps of three.

I did not pick any until I had identified a dozen. I continued crawling around until I’d found another dozen. Then, well past the point of diminishing returns with noticeable heft in my mesh bag, I returned to the fully upright position and walked off to check one last known productive spot.

My friend and mushroom hunting buddy Arthur Clark and I found and named the spot several years ago when we noticed a tangle of snakes copulating in some uncommon shrubbery.

While we observed the snakes, we noticed several big yellow morels growing nearby. After a moment’s hesitation, we reached in to pick the mushrooms, apparently not disturbing or distracting the snakes.

Then and there we decided that we’d a lot rather crawl into snake bushes for morels than into buck thorn or multiflora rose, which we will do if so called upon.

When I returned Tuesday to the spot we refer to in a slightly coarser version of snake bush, I found but one snake and one morel.

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But as I write this on Wednesday, looking forward to a warm, wet forecast, I see more snakes and mushrooms in my near future.