Although I’ve met people who claim they’ve seen that, I never have. And thus am left to wonder what they may have been drinking or smoking as the afternoon drew on.
I can, however, speak from personal experience about a somewhat similar phenomenon, the peculiar luminous halo that surrounds a morel mushroom when you come across one in the leaf-litter of the spring woods.
The yellow morel (Morchella esculenta) is one of the priceless treasures of this season.
Well, not exactly priceless. Depending on the April-May weather, which greatly influences the abundance of the bloom, you generally can find morels for sale at somewhere under $30 a pound — or only about twice the price of a fine restaurant steak.
There’s no way of guessing how the irregular weather of the current spring — late snows and frosts, torrential rains and floods — will have affected this year’s supply.
But as you read this, the search is on. And mushroom hunting is an all-consuming, often maddening enterprise. Occasionally it’s a fatal one, since some varieties are lethal.
A menu that includes the wrong kind can be a last meal, and the deaths of several important historical figures, including a Roman emperor and a pope, have been attributed to such an error.
That is a particular hazard in France, where mushrooming — especially in autumn — is a national passion. In the fall of the year, at least one pharmacy in every Paris neighborhood is required by law to have an expert on duty, so that when folks come in from the forest with plastic bags full of mixed delights, they can be told which of the contents are palate-pleasers and which would kill them.
Some seasons in my Ozark woods amount to the very definition of futility. One can tramp the woods for days on end with not a single find. Other years, there’s a bonanza.
Once, while displaying my ineptitude on a city golf course, I followed a misdirected approach shot into a swale behind the 16th green.
Suddenly, I was riveted by that mysterious phenomenon I mentioned at the start. All around me were literally dozens of glorious morels, each one enveloped by a phosphorescent glow. At least that’s how they struck me.
I immediately gave up playing golf, but returned to that same spot every few days, until the course superintendent spied me hunting and ordered me never to come back.
A later time, during an April turkey season, some friends and I came across a recently flooded lowland where morels were so plentiful that the gathering of them couldn’t be described as hunting — simply harvesting.
We picked until our backs were tired from bending, and came in with sacks of them, enough to cover completely a spread Army blanket.
I don’t suppose official records are kept. I’ve seen references to morels as tall as 10 and 17 inches. The largest we found that day was a 14-incher, shaped like a miniature Christmas tree.
That was 25 years or so ago. In subsequent springs, we’ve found fewer than a dozen there. This year there may be none.
And that is the awful torment of the morel addiction.
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