Morels and Poverty

My husband leaned over to peer under the skirt of a fir tree.  “Are you sure they’re here?” he asked.

“Positive,” I replied.  “Just keep looking.  The conditions are perfect for morels—dark forest, moist soil, fir trees, elevation.  They’re here.”

Another minute or two passed and I was beginning to wonder if I was wrong. Then I spotted it, a tiny one inch tall morel peeking out from under a pile of pine needles.  “Found one!  I TOLD you.”

Photo by Michelle Gluch

My husband grumbled something unintelligible, and my eight year-old daughter excited by our first find skipped off in search of her own tiny delicacy. 

The dark deep woods were quiet and I was alone with my thoughts, which weren’t all that happy.  

My mother’s voice echoed in my head, “I’ll never understand you Idahoans.  You’ll spend your last 20 dollars on gas to go fishing or camping when you should be putting it in the bank.”

Even though I hadn’t spoken to my mother for years, her power to make me feel guilty was as strong as ever.  Mom escaped poverty after she left my father.  It wasn’t luck, she worked hard at building a life for herself and her new husband but she seemed to completely forget what a life of poverty was like.

“You have no business having a hobby, when you can’t afford to feed yourself or your family,” she said. 

I didn’t have the strength to argue with her then.  If I had the conversation to do over this is what I’d tell her.  Every day, I wake up as tired as the day before no matter how long I sleep. My exhaustion is a result of depression which is a result of never ending stress. I am depressed  and stressed because I know that there will be problems that I simply do not have the resources to address—a car repair, a bad tooth that needs fixing, a house repair, an extra expense for school.  Inevitably there will be something.  There always is. 

I could be the most responsible financial wizard in the world, but when you don’t make enough money to survive—even after 20 years of working with children 14 hours per day—there is nothing left to put in the bank.  Period. Nothing.  Trust me, I’ve tried.  Something always pops up to steal that fifty or hundred bucks I manage to squirrel away.   Dreams and obligations are always just out of my reach. I gave up trying to save long ago.  It isn’t worth the pain of getting close only to have my hopes dashed again.

I found another morel—my daughter calls them brain mushrooms—pushing its way up out of the loamy soil next to a decaying tree stump.  I picked it, careful to leave the root intact, hoping that it would fruit again the next year.  But for just a minute I felt guilty for doing so.  After all, that little mushroom worked hard to reach the fresh air and sun. I doubted that I would ever get as far as that fungi did. Poverty can be a dark place where the sun never shines.

I dropped that mushroom in my bag.  It is just one mushroom but the forest is generous. The fungi are there waiting to be found if I work for them, just like the fresh Idaho salmon in the nearby Little Salmon River. Foraging makes me happy, even if only for a short time. It isn’t always necessarily cost effective; sometimes I return home empty handed or with very little. However, when successful that wild, foraged food lessens the stress on my already ridiculously tight food stamp budget. I could never purchase fresh fish on that budget, let alone a delicacy like morels.  For me, those mushrooms and salmon represent much more than wasted gas money, my mother’s judgement, or anyone else’s either.

They represent a few minutes or hours where I feel like I have a little control in my otherwise chaotic existence.  My foraging efforts make a tiny bit of difference in the way things are for my family; at least we will enjoy a delicious meal now and then.  Foraging is real, tangible and right now. And, poor or not, even I deserve to taste a little bite of joy once in a while.