The Hunt and the Bounty

Spring is most definitely here.

This meadowlark near Kaw River State Park tells the passing cars it's finally springtime!

Everyone loves a good spring, and while ours is awfully early this year, it's hard not to enjoy the daffodil, hyacinth, and tulip blooms and the flowering bradford pear, redbud, and crabapple trees.



Crabapple tree at Dillon Nature Center

 It's been rumored that this has been one of the best springs Kansas has had in years, and we've had so many years of drought that we have become unaccustomed to the gaudy splashes of red, pink, purple, and green.  But we had the pefect storm of early spring weather (ha ha, get it?!) that led to explosion of life from the ground: a full week of a good soaking rain, followed by days of warm and dry sunshine. 




Beautiful red tulips that sprang up just as the daffodils began to fade.

 That kind of weather doesn't just bring the tulips out of hibernation.  It wakes up something else.  Something straight from legend.  Folklore handed down generation to generation tell us about the madness that grips a cultish group of hunters scattered across the countryside: Men and women abandoning their families at all hours of the day and night to trek deep into the woods where normally they would never venture, seeking out prey that only appears in the spring.  The locations of their hunting grounds remain secret, passed only onto children or the occassional relative.  Some would rather choose death than give up the coordinates of their territory.  When the bounty is collected, a feast is held where participants gorge themselves on the kill until they can only curl in the fetal position and groan.

What is this mythical creature of the woods of which I speak?  The thing that drives usually sane people right into the heart of tick habitat?  The treasure that even comes with a series of awesome-sounding names? 

Sleeping in the earth are impossibly small threads of living tissue, so tiny they might as well be invisible, absorbing nutrients from the ground and called...wait for it...mycelium, which lump together to a form a sclerotium in the face of harsh weather (like winter).  When things start to warm up, that little lump will either send out more tiny threads of mycelium, or if a complicated set of conditions is just right (weather, soil conditions, nutrient base), it will send forth a fruiting body to the world above.   Tasty, tasty fruiting bodies.

Coming to you live, from an undisclosed location: Morels

The fruiting body.  A mushroom.  The morel.  One of the most expensive mushrooms of them all, selling anywhere from $8.00 an ounce to $35.00 a pound, often more if it's during the off season (the off season being the other 48 weeks a year when morels exist only as underground mycelium or sclerotium).  Its taste has brought the most fearless warriors to their knees weeping tears of joy and enlightenment. 

Or so I hear.

This year, I finally got my hands on some.  But, it's not as easy as going to the woods, picking up a mushroom, cooking it, and eating it.  Oh no, there's way more involved.  They're worth the work, but by the end of morel season, you are glad it only comes once a year.

Step 1: Make Sure You Have the Right Mushroom

You'd think morels are pretty distinct, but there are other shrooms that come pretty close.  False Morels are nothing to play with as they are capable of nasty, nasty things.  From the Missouri Department of Conservation, I relay this warning: "The problem seems to involve the amount of a toxic chemical, called monomethyl hydrazine (MMH), present in these mushrooms. MMH causes diarrhea, vomiting and severe headaches, and occasionally it can be fatal." (For the link, click here)

Real morels.  These are good.

One of the False Morels.  These are bad.  The picture is courtesy these guys

There are other false morels that look a lot more like morels, but here's what I've figured out:
*Make sure the cap is attached to the stem.  If it's not, just leave it be.
*Make sure it's absolutely hollow inside, no cottony fibers, no extra stuff, nothing.
*If it looks really gross, it will probably do really gross things to you.

Luckily, I never ran into one of the impersonaters during my hunting trip, though that didn't stop me from intently studying each morel I brought home like there was gold hidden in one of them. 

Step 2: Gain Access

You can't just walk into the woods and expect to find morels.  First, they seem to prefer specific trees and usually come back in the same spots year after year, meaning that only occassionally will a new morel ground open up.  They also seem to pop up after a fire has gone through, and those don't happen all that frequently.

Second, even if you were to stumble upon a batch of morels, chances are that spot has already been staked out by generations of hunters and you're being watched this very instant.  If you pick a morel from such a spot, do not be surprised if you return to your car to find the tires have been slashed and "FEAR ME" written in pig's blood on the front windshield.

Your best bet is to make friends with a mushroom hunter or attempt to marry into a mushrooming family and hope that someday they will introduce you to morel hunting.  This will protect your life in two ways:

1) You won't have morel-crazed slashers seeking revenge, and
2) You won't accidentally pick up one of the Falsies and spend some quality time in the hospital.

As for me, I'm lucky enough to belong to a kin group with their own morel hunting grounds.  Somewhat secret of course, but I'm willing to share with you that it is located somewhere in the state of Kansas.

Step 3: Get tangled in bushes.

Now that you know what you're looking for, and you've gained access to a morel spot, it's time to get down and dirty.  For real, this isn't Walmart, these things grow in the dirt.  Be prepared.

Not all morels are easy to snag, sometimes you have to crawl into a thicket of saplings and bushes to pluck one or two from the earth and get your ponytail stuck on some branches only to nearly step on a cluster of five waiting in the open ground.  That's truth right there.  Thank goodness my aunt had better eyes than me!

Once you have a site with some morel action, just pluck those gems up and carry them home.

My haul:

1 lb, 6 oz of delicious.

Step 4: Clean and Salt Soak

Cleaning these babies is a pain, and after spending an hour or two hunched over a sink you'll begin to really appreciate what our ancestors must have gone through in preparing food.  See all those little folds?  Those fleshy pockets house bugs, sand, and probably some nasty things we can't see.  How to get everything squeaky clean? 

Rinse the living daylights out them.  "Rinse" might even be too gentle a word, "shoot pressurized water into them" is a more accurate description.  Scrub the nooks and crannies with a soft toothbrush.  Repeat.

Some people say that if you clean them well enough, you don't need to brine them (soak in salt water) to get rid of the buggies and that the salt may even alter the taste of the morels.  I'm more of a food safety girl than a purist, so into a big bowl of salty water they went.  I let them soak for about ten minutes, though I'm sure you're supposed to soak them for longer, I just got impatient.

"Rinse" again.  Pat dry.

Squeaky clean

Step 5: Cook

Ah, the methods of cooking.  Some fry them in butter.  Some bread them first and then fry them in butter.  Some batter them and then fry them in butter.  Whatever the recipe, copious amounts of butter are going to be involved, and you'll just have to get over it.

I followed what appears to be the most traditional way of preparing them:
Whisk some eggs together.  Crush up some saltine crackers into a fine powder.  Get some butter going in a frying pan.  Dunk morels in egg, then in cracker crumbs, place into pan.  Wait until your instincts tell you the things are done on one side, and then flip 'em.  When all golden brown and smelling good, take 'em out and eat 'em.

Frying morels in an obscene amount of butter.  No olive oil allowed.

For about a pound of morels:
4 eggs whisked
1.5 sleeves of pulverized saltines.
As much butter as your heart can handle (I probably used somewhere around a stick and a half)

Step 5: Devour with Gusto.

If you need me to explain this step, then you have no business eating morels.  They come once a year, you're supposed to gorge yourself.

Morels straight up.  Earthy, savory, melty.

[Note: Don't try to heat up fried morels from the night before.  My mother tells me they still taste amazing, but they get chewy like calamari.  That's, uh... just not my cup of tea.]

Everyday Life and Its Unintentional Therapy

Not all my "time  off" is spent gallivanting around random places and attempting to wax poetic on the greatness of biodiversity and conservation efforts.  For one, I've been working as a substitute teacher but the stories collected from those adventures are not solely mine to share on such a public forum.  I also spend a lot of time with my family and friends whose lives I've missed out on for far too long.

Walks out at Dillon Nature Center

I also spend quite a bit of time relaxing:

A good book and some leftover peppernuts

I also keep an eye on the backyard birdfeeders for unexpected visitors:

Not only have I been able to once again ground myself in the deep roots of my family, but reaffirm friendships long since taken for granted. 

It's been a great comfort to find that after all this time, we are still people with whom we want to remain friends. They are all still people I would choose to be friends with. Nearly a decade ago, we all left our common path and began our separate journeys.  A lot has happened since that time, relationships, house-ownership, marriage, travel, careers, career changes, motherhood, all those things that fundamentally change a person.  In spite of that, our friendships have adapted and changed and above all else, have remained.

I'm realizing more and more how good coming home has been for me, and it's only in hindsight that I recognize the effects graduate school and the looming uncertainty of the future have had on me.  I've slept better than I have in years, the seasonal depression that usually plagues me has noticeably lessened, and my various neuroses and insecurities have faded.

Metaphor

I have the time and encouragement to do the things I love best: playing with my nephews, cooking and watching Rachel Maddow with my mother, planning get togethers with old and new friends, and of course having the luxury to putter around outside.  I'm very aware that this "break from reality" is a great gift that not a lot of people have, especially in these times of economic crisis.  Trust me, I spend a lot of time thinking about how grateful I am.

In other news, spring has arrived! 

The Bradford Pears are blooming!

Out at the Sand Hills to see how those spring mornings are coming along...and they're
coming along quite nicely.

I'm constantly reminded of one of my all-time favorite quotes, a line a from a book called Truck by Michael Perry, who has long been a favorite author of my family.  Granted he's referring to a growing relationship, but I like to think he wouldn't mind if I used it to describe the feeling of making it through the storm and finding your dreams still waiting for you on the other side.  (Though he may not appreciate the unintended cheesiness of that sentence.)

"And so now I am in the car driving home in the dark nursing a quiet little blend of excitement and hope.  God bless our unkillable hearts."

Red River, NM. Go there.

Heart rate increases.

Breathing faster.

Light-headedness.

Persistent nausea.

The disturbing symptoms of a girl in love? Or the welcome indications of early altitude sickness?
Answer: Both.

This past weekend, my parents and I went in search of winter and we found it in New Mexico.  It's been extremely mild here in south-central Kansas, and the miniscule amounts of snow makes it quite difficult to engage in our family's favorite winter pastime: cross-country skiing.

Papa Bear hauling butt on the incline.

First, we had to spend nine hours in the car and drive through western Kansas, Oklahoma, and the boring bit of New Mexico.

95% of the journey looked like this.



Or this



Occasionally this.

Somewhere around Cimarron, New Mexico, something pretty exciting happened.

Precipitation!  We must be getting close...

Sure enough, the landscape (and the weather) began to finally change and we found ourselves on a mountain pass in a snow storm.

The new view out of the backseat window

There aren't a lot of pictures from this segment of the trip, and it is greatly embarrassing to explain why:

If I'm in the car for more than a few hours, and I'm not in the driver's seat, I...get motion sickness.

By the time we hit the seven-hour mark, and then began the twisty-turvey journey into the mountains, I was curled up in the backseat with my eyes squeezed shut and my headphones in trying to drown out the noise of the car and passing semi-trucks.  I would move only to snag a swallow of Sprite I made Mama Bear buy me at the last stop. 

But at last, Bobcat Pass ended and we coasted into our destination, Red River, New Mexico.  Worth it.

Red River, NM

I cannot say enough good things about the town! I loved being there and saw why my parents go back year after year to get their winter fix.  Maybe it was because everyone was so nice, and I'm pretty sure it was the genuine kind of nice.  Maybe it was because we apparently caught the town during one of the many off-seasons so it wasn't very crowded.  Maybe it was because it was the complete opposite of the commercialized and mendacious Aspen. [Note: Aspen is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I could ever step foot in the actual town again.]  Maybe it was because my motion sickness was finally cured by the healthy-sized rueben sandwich from Brett's Bistro.  Corned beef = mircale drug.  Maybe it was because we had the best pizza ever at The Pizza Place.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was because of the close proximity to this:

Enchanted Forest Cross Country Ski Area

Welcome to Enchanted Forest, a few miles outside Red River, with cross-county, snow-shoeing, dog trails, and all the fresh mountain air a body could ask for, all nestled in the Carson National Forest in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Majestic beauty? Check

Great people? Check

Chocolate lab named Ruby to greet you at the door? Check.

More reasons you should makes plans to go at least once in your lifetime:

Awesome trails.
Day 1: Skied these trails plus Sherwood Forest, Sven Wiik, Little John, Long John, and Jackalope. 
Papa Bear and I saved the best for Day 2.  Mama Bear took on the snowshoe trails.

Wheeler Peak Overlook along the Little John trail

Trees!



More trees!



Have I mentioned the awesome trails?

Day 2: Powderpuff to Sven Wiik to Little John to Long John to the
Mother of All Blues: Northwest Passage

For the record, I am agonizingly slow.  Most of the time it's because I'm lost in my own little world and just farting around on the trail, but on the downhill sections it's quite purposeful.  Snow-plow style with my heels digging in and my poles dragging behind me, I refuse to lose control, because when I lose control I panic, and when I panic I go flying off a curve into a steep ravine where I'll be stuck for three hours until Search and Rescue pulls my frozen body out.  Or something like that. 

But I don't mind that I'm slow, and that's probably why I love xc skiing so much more than straight up downhill.  Downhill just isn't fun for me, and honestly when it's compared to cross-country, downhill's kind of a wuss sport. 

Because lifts are for wimps.  I ski uphill.

...then I go downhill.

Blind turns and all.

I'm just being conceited, downhill is great if you like hurtling down a treeless slope with fifty other people.  I'm just saying you should respect the kick-and-glide.

After Papa Bear and I finished up with the Northwest Passage, and after Mama Bear tackled the Yeti Trail on Sunday, we all took a drive down to nearby Taos to visit one particular shop on the plaza.

Garden & Soul is this nifty little store that sells greeting cards, local artist specialties, books, and a hodge-podge of other things.  I, of course, spent twenty minutes browsing and then bought some of The Chocolate Cartel/Xocoatl's Mayan Hot Chocolate and dark chocolate covered almonds, both spiced with red chiles "the way chocolate was meant to be."  The almonds are long gone, but I have yet to break into the hot chocolate.  I'm a big fan so far!

On Monday, we began the long drive back to Kansas a little tired and sore, but quite pleased with ourselves and already planning the next trip back.

And the world went whizzing by. 
Not really, it was a long and boring trip home, but I'd happily do it all over again.

Hope in the Unseen

Beware:  A philosophical tangle of a blog post follows.

Hope in the Unseen is a title of a book I read several years ago, and it seems the author might have derived the title from Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen."  I have no wish to bring in religion, religious behavior, or even discuss the ways we humans explain our world (e.g. Science and the tangible world vs. Supernatural and the intangible world), but faith, in a sense, is indeed the topic.

In the book, this kid faces the kind of adversity that I, as a privileged middle-class white woman, will never completely understand. It's best if you read the summary here, or even better track down a copy and find a comfortable place to sit for awhile.  Suffice it to say that this kid's 'hope in the unseen' and mine are very, very different, but it's a concept I really like and have latched on to, albeit for different reasons than this particular protaganist.

Exhibit A:  I'm from the land of the tallgrass prairie, the creation, restoration, and/or management of which depends entirely on trusting in processes we can't always immediatley detect.


This past weekend I met up with a longtime friend of mine (we met when we were two...big shout-out to Sunflower Day Care) and went hiking through one of my favorite places: Konza Prairie Biological Station just outside of Manhattan, KS where I did my undergrad studies in Wildlife Bio and Anthropology.  Thanks to the Wildlife classes, I spent some quality time out in the Konza learning how to sample, collect, measure, identify, quantify, and all that good wholesome Science-y stuff.  I also remember taking an amazing nap in a clump of bluestem, watching the prairie chickens do their bizarre "dance," and thinking that it must really be awful to be a stream ecologist in the spring when the water is still quite frigid.

Brrrrr

Though not as protective as bluestem, this is still prime napping habitat

The Konza Station does some pretty amazing research on tallgrass ecosystems, like studying the effects of fire at different year intervals and cattle grazing vs. bison grazing on plants, mammals, birds, insects, and reptiles of the prairie.  When you consider the various combinations of flames, chomping and tearing teeth, and trampling hooves the seemingly monotonous prairie...

becomes an almost aggressive mosiac of habitats born out of some kind of destruction(s)...

Grasses and forbs and woody species, oh my!

The six mile hike ended up being a bit grueling, yet awesome in every sense of the word.  The weather was sunny and in the 40s, but with 30 mph wind roaring through the stark landscape we felt like we were in a very foreign place.  I hate to use a word like "lonely" to describe the Konza, considering it's the home of the aforementioned research projects, at least a dozen other hikers, and I was in the company of a good friend.  But it's going to happen.  I'm going to say it.

It's a lonely place

But not too lonely.

Prairies impress me. They're shaped by the most violent of forces: fire, extreme wind, drought, summer storms, unobstructed sun, and its components have adapted, survived and thrived.  It is a place of sacrifice. The very things that wipe the prairie grasses from the surface are the same forces that make the ecosystem viable and able to fight off, so to speak, other encroaching ecosystems.  The prairie is created by a certain amount of destruction. That same fire that destroyed the visible parts of the bluestem is the same fire that returned nutrients the soil, opened the way for sunlight, and cleared away any woody competition, allowing the roots that had been protected in the soil to send new shoots skyward.

Sadly, the vast majority of native tallgrass prairie has long since been plowed under or buried under pavement.  The estimates vary, but somewhere around 96% of the tallgrass prairie is gone.  So the Konza is pretty big deal when it comes to figuring out a way to restore the prairie (and all the nifty insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles that come with it).

But here's where things take a turn for the daring.  Remember all those destructive forces that make and remake the tallgrass?  Yeah, now imagine turning those into experiments.  As you walk along the public trails, you see markers that designate a certain plot of the Konza to a specific burn or grazing regimen, and sometimes a combination of those.  Researchers, in effect, destroy their plot by various methods to see if what they think will grow back actually will.  Cattle and bison have different grazing patterns, and it's interesting to see if those patterns make any difference, but the real show is of course, the fire.

Photo courtesty NPS (Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve)

Here's my point: researchers have SET FIRE to their experiment. BURNED it out of visible existence.  They did this because other research and past experience has told them that the grasses will come back, strong and healthy.  A charred piece of acreage on the hilltop does not look like it left survivors to the naked eye, but under the surface the root system remains, and with no blanket of dead leafy debris to smother it in cold and darkness and no trees to steal the sunlight, life returns to the surface.

Call me a romantic, but I would argue that ecologists have the strongest conviction in the unseen out of all of us.




Exhibit B:   Cerulean warblers are little migratory songbirds that breed in the spring and summer months up in the Driftless, and are listed as "Vulnerable" since its habitat is quickly being replaced by farms and cities. On guided hikes, and often in the middle of conversation, I would make people be still and listen to the Ceruleans' distinct zzzzzzzzzip song and ramble on about why they're worth saving and why the decline in their numbers is disconcerting. Here's the kicker: I've never actually seen a Cerulean. Ever. I hear them all the time up in the Driftless, but never laid eyes on one. They like the high tree tops, where even my Amazonian height fails my curious eyes.  I lobby for a thing I know only through indirect means.

I'm not alone.  Replace "Cerulean warbler" with any charismatic animal that's been used in environmental campaigns: whale, panda, cheetah, take your pick, and just try to tell me that the $20 you just donated is going to ensure that you will see a [insert endangered animal].  But you do it anyway (or can imagine that a fair amount of people do it).  Why?

Call it intrinsic value, aesthetic value, or even take your pick from the utilitarian values (that we should care for the environment for our own good), the point is that it happens.  Hope happens.

Anyone who has ever recycled, planted a tree, planted a flower, planted anything, donated to an environmental cause, taken their children outside, gone fishing, gone hunting, done anything that remotely resembles an environmentally-beneficial behavior is just guilty as hoping in the unseen as I am.  Hoping that somehow, our actions will help save a world we may never see.

What an amazing capacity we humans have, to act in a way that benefits a bird, a whale, a prairie, a future we'll never know.  A blind, yet hopeful, conviction.  And what a sadness when the opposite occurs, when we knowingly worsen a concern.  I have seen humanity do both, and my own experiences tell me the former is thankfully more common than the latter.


Metaphors are a-plenty in the Konza.

It's taken me a long time to sort out my thoughts on things unseen, and I have a feeling I will continue to do such sorting until the bitter end.  I like tangible, measurable, observable things, but after a few years in the conservation outreach game, I'm learning to trust and believe that the things I do are working in the way I hope they are...at least I do so for my sanity's sake, and because at this point another career path is unthinkable, so I might as well have faith in it. 

Simply put, I hope that one day there will be more views like this, even if I never get a chance to visit them.

For more pretty pictures of the Konza: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shamelesslyaimless/sets/72157629193373795/