Musings
~ by Mark Blackwell
MUSHROOM HUNTING
Back when I was but a sprout, the old folks had a saying about mushroom hunting,“ When Easter is near and May apples are bloomin’, it will soon be time to go out’ shroomin’.”
I grew up where most of the people did not go mushroom hunting. And those who did found them in little cans at the grocery. That was up in northern Indiana. I was born just south of Brown County, but in the exact middle of the 20th Century, my folks moved up north following a rumor that the Studebaker factory was hiring and paying good wages. I spent 16 years in exile before relocating to God’ s backyard.
While most of our neighbors knew and cared as much about mushrooms as they did for persimmon pudding, there were exceptions.
There were“ displaced Hoosiers”( Hill-folks gone north) like my family, and there were involuntary Hoosiers, Kentuckians who failed to make it to Michigan. I will say that culturally we had more in common with the sons and daughters of Daniel Boone than we did with the strudel and goulash folks that surrounded us.
I did have Appalachian-American relatives who were genetically predisposed to ferreting out the elusive morel. My grandfather, on my mother’ s side, was born with a gift for noticing and finding all sorts of things; five dollar bills caught in weeds of vacant lots, Craftsman tools laying beside the road, and most especially, mushrooms. He was a prime example of a successful fungi forager.
One good thing about’ shroomin’ is that there is very little by way of equipment that needs to be invested. Finding our little fungal friends is not
28 Our Brown County March / April 2026