By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
It’s that time of year again. The days are getting longer. We’ve had plenty of rain. And if it would just warm up, we’d have morel mushrooms popping.
They’re already finding them in more southern counties, at least according to strangers on the internet. But I don’t know anyone who has found any around us yet. I haven’t even checked my mushroom spots. With the pretty days we’d had recently, I was planning to get out and check over the weekend. Then it got cold again, and I decided it wasn’t worth going out. Maybe that was a mistake. I’ve found mushrooms before that popped when it was warm and were still there after it cooled down. There is the possibility there were mushrooms up in the woods this weekend, even if I thought it was too cold outside.
Mushrooms don’t obey my human sensibilities, and I don’t have any idea how quickly the soil cools down in any particular place after it has warmed up. It could be the sunlight on a slope is enough to keep the soil warm even when the air is cold.
Truth is, the mushrooms could be up any time that you aren’t there. There is no way of knowing unless you go into the woods, and even then, you only know about the area where you are. If Schrodinger had been a mycologist, he wouldn’t have needed a cat and a box, he could have just used mushrooms. They’re both potentially there, under the soil, and not there, until we see the mushroom that proves what we suspected all along, based on trees present or evidence of years before. And once those ephemeral bits of evidence fade away, the fate of the organism under the soil again becomes a mystery, until they open the box again and show us the proof.
Or not.
Either way, I can’t know if I missed out on an opportunity this past weekend or not. The fellas I overheard talking in Tyler’s probably wouldn’t have thought I missed out on anything by staying home. They haven’t heard of anyone finding any up here yet either, or at least that’s what it sounded like. I resisted the temptation to invite myself into their conversation, paid my bill, and got back to work.
There’s a lot to get done if I’m going to get into the woods this weekend. There’s a lot to do before I can prove these mushrooms exist for another year.