Anytime the subject of morels is on the agenda, attendance at the monthly meetings of the Illinois Mycological Association goes up. That was the case last month when Milan Pelouch, the group’s former foray chairman, came to talk about his book, How to Find Morels, encouragingly subtitled Even as Others Are Coming Back Empty-Handed.
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Plenty of books have been written on the spongy, phallic morel, which in Illinois usually makes its annual appearance right about now. But Pelouch says most are focused on identification and taxonomy and fail to include practical advice, such as how to identify the particular species of tree the fungi grow around. It’s also important to be aware of differences in the behavior of subspecies, he notes—yellow and gray morels may sprout in the same spot year after year, for example, but black morels probably won’t. Like many ‘shroomers, he has a tendency to speak of fungi as if they were sentient; the morel, he told the group, is a “wily creature” that, once spotted, may disappear if one glances away, as if “it figured it was in mortal danger and just hid.”
Pelouch began hunting mushrooms as a toddler in southwestern Czechoslovakia, and in his book he imparts the fundamental tactics his grandfather taught him while they were off in the woods searching for boletes (better known in markets as cepes or porcinis). In the old country, though mushrooming was far more popular than it is here, it wasn’t competitive—foragers didn’t tail one another or eavesdrop at campsite latrines to discover secret spots. Pelouch doesn’t stoop to such tricks either: mushroom hunting, in his view, should have a higher purpose, which is what led him to share his knowledge. “I really think it’s good for people to become more in union with nature,” he says. “I think it brings out good qualities in people.”
Pelouch spoke to the IMA just a few weeks before the group’s annual morel foray in Kankakee, which will take place this Saturday. But he won’t be joining them: though Illinois seems to go crazy for morels every spring, he doesn’t think the state’s a very good place to hunt them. Instead, each year around mid-May he and Lila hitch up their 2002 Airstream and head for northern Michigan, where there’s far more public land to collect on, the soil is a morel-friendly mixture of organic leaf litter and sand, and the competition is less intense. “It’s wonderful to pick mushrooms in this country because so few people do it,” says Lila.
