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More morels …

June 17, 2007 cmf

Forest fires are a huge drag when they’re happening, although I have to say last summer as we watched this column of smoke rise behind Livingston peak, we were thinking of morels. The Jungle Fire was scary — it roared down seven miles of drainage in an afternoon — my friend Scott who was over there covering it for the paper said it sounded like the loudest jet engine you’ve ever heard. And yet, a few months later, here’s what’s happening in the burn — morels. Lots of morels.

I went up early yesterday morning and it’s fascinating up in the site. New grasses and plants are everywhere on the forest floor. The trees are burned, and it went through so hot that there are many many big granite boulders that have had the first layer or two just popped right off — shards of granite in piles around a newly-white boulder. And then there are the morels. I didn’t take my camera into the burn with me, which is probably good considering that the wet ash got on everything. It was so exciting — for a long while at the beginning I thought I was going to get skunked, but then I started following a little seep uphill, and there they were. Clumps of morels tucked into the root systems of big burned out trees. It was like hunting Easter eggs — look! Over there! Another clump! The dogs had a great time running big circles around me, and we all shared a ham sandwich for lunch, and I came home looking like Pigpen, with a daypack full of morels and smudges of ash on my face. The MH estimated I probably had 18 or 20 pounds.

These are the nicest ones, washed and draining. Last night we had veal chops on the grill with a morel cream sauce — morels, lots of butter, a little bourbon (since I don’t have any brandy), a little garlic and some cream. Yum. And then this morning it was morels and spinach with scrambled eggs. Tonight I’m thinking some variation on the Barefoot Contessa’s chicken with morels — I might have to see if there’s any asparagus left in the stores too — not local, but morels and asparagus are so nice together.

And then there are these, drying for winter: . Three baking racks full and my whole kitchen smells like woodsy morels. That fire was crazy last summer –it went up so fast and so hot that they found leaves and pine needles as far away as Wisconisn, but despite the destruction, the forest is doing it’s thing — it’s full of new growth and new flora. And the gift for all of us after fires like that is the mysterious bumper crops of morels.

Puffballs!

June 14, 2007 cmf

Look what I found at the dog park this afternoon! I’ve always wanted to find a Giant Western Puffball, and I found two! They were a pound or so each, and the size of a grapefruit — growing right there in the long grass in the woods — so I snatched them up and brought them home.

Where I cleaned off the edges where the dirt and the bugs were (a few maggot holes, but nothing like the boletes later in the summer). then I sliced them up, brushed them with olive oil infused with the parsley/basil I put up last summer, sprinkled them with salt and cooked them on the grill.

They were delicious. Very mushroomy. Imagine an enormous white button mushroom — that taste. Not the earthy morel-kind of mushroom taste, but that clean, slightly spongy, white mushroom flavor. They grilled up nicely. I have a lot of them … not sure what I’ll do next … mushroom parmigiana perhaps?

Morels

June 13, 2007 cmf

We had several big forest fires here last summer — and while all that smoke and destruction was awful, in the wake of a fire, come the morels. Morels. Yummy, yummy morels.

I went up last weekend and only found a few. Eight, to be exact. Here they are:

And then on Monday, the MH went up and found the big pile in the first picture. We’ve had three warm days since then, and I plan to go back out on Saturday, when I don’t have to work. It’s a big burn, and if things don’t dry out too much, we should have more mushrooms.

I love mushroom hunting. I got really sick in graduate school — ran a low-grade fever on and off for three years — and it was mushroom hunting that cured me. Mushroom hunting gives one a chance to hike really slowly; to get outside and look with care at exactly what is in front of you. It’s like meditation, but not so hard. And the dogs like it — they run big doggy circles around me — smelling birds and rabbits and other woodsy creatures. A good day all the way around.

White Pelicans on Clark Street

May 10, 2007 cmf

Driving across town yesterday, I looked up and saw a small flock of white pelicans, probably ten or twelve of them, doing big slow turns as they rode a thermal. The white pelicans come back every year about this time, and the thrill never diminishes. For one thing, they’re enormous — watching a white pelican come in for a landing is like watching a big bomber plane come in — one is always astonished that something that big, and that body-heavy can be as graceful as it is.

Years before I moved here, when I was doing my PhD work, I relied on Jack Turner’s terrific book The Abstract Wild. And every year, when the pelicans return, I reread “The Song of the White Pelican,” an essay that begins with Turner … lounging on the summit of the Grand Teton surrounded by blocks of quartz and a cobalt sky. It is mid-morning in July — warm, still, and so clear the distant ranges seem etched into the horizon. … … I rest and enjoy the clarity and count shades of blue as the sky pales into the mountains. then I hear a faint noise above me, and my heart says, “Pelicans.”

The sounds are faint, so faint they are sometimes lost — a trace of clacking in the sky. It is even harder to see them. Tiny glints, like slivers of ice, are occasionaly visible, then invisible, then visible again as the sheen of their feathers strikes just the right angle to the sun. With binoculars, we see them clearly: seventeen white pelicans soaring in a tight circle …

The white pelican (Pelacanus erythrorhynchos), one of seven species in the world, is a large bird often weighing twenty pounds, with some individuals reaching thirty pounds. The only other pelican in North America, the brown pelican, is smaller and restricted to the coasts. The white pelican’s wing span reaches nine and a half feet, equal to the California condor’s. Of North American birds, only the trumpeter swan is consistently larger.

…

Some people fear that extending a human vocabulary to wild animals erodes their Otherness. But what is not Other? Are we not all, from one perspective, Other to each and every being in the universe? And at the same time, and from another perspective, do we not all share an elemental wildness that burns forth in each life?

When I see white pelicans riding mountain thermals, I feel their exhaltation, their love of open sky and big clouds. Their fear of lightning is my fear, and I extend to them the sadness of descent. I believe the reasons they are soaring over the Grand Teton are not so different from the reasons we climb mountains, sail gliders into great storms, and stand in rivers with tiny pieces of feathers from a French duck’s butt attached to a barbless hook at the end of sixty feet of sixty-dollar string thrown by a thousand-dollar-wand. Indeed, in love and ecstasy we are closest to the Other, for passion is at the root of all life and shared by all life. In passion, all beings are at their wildest; in passion, we — like pelicans– make strange noises that defy scientific explanation.

One of the things I love most about living here is that while driving down Clark Street, at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning I can look up and see something as wild as a flock of white pelicans, wheeling their way upward into the dead-clear blue sky. In the middle of town, in the middle of a weekday, there it is, an eruption of wildness in the sky above me.

Bear Trap!

April 15, 2007 cmf

After the bear came back a second night, and bashed in the Mighty Hunter’s front door, he called the game warden who brought this impressive culvert trap over and parked it in the back yard. About eight last night we heard clanging noises and went out to watch the warden set the trap and bait it with bacon and raw chicken … there we were, the MH, me, and all the neighbors, watching the game warden and thinking about bears.

So, off to sleep we went, half an ear cocked for bear noises outside. I had bear dreams all night … first the bear drove up in a green Subaru Forester, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat like the bear in Richard Scarry. The bear got out of the car, took off his hat and then, as if it was his job, morphed into an enormous scary bear in the backyard. Sort of like the great big bear that stood up and woofed at me and the dogs two years ago in Suce Creek. A big big dream bear on all fours looking at us and swinging his head back and forth, mad at us for wanting to trap him.

Alas, the bear either moved on to greener birdfeeders, or was wise to the ways of culvert traps, because this morning the trap was still there, door wide open, empty. Let’s hope the bear took the hint and moved along — because as exciting as the prospect of trapping a bear in the backyard might have been, I’d really rather the bear was out there doing what it should be doing — being a wild animal.

Bears Bears Bears …

April 13, 2007 cmf

The MH called this morning to tell me there was a bear in his neighbor’s yard last night. Looks like it came up the creek from the river, and took out the neighbor’s birdfeeder. He said there wasn’t too much damage, but the sliding glass door is covered in big bear paw prints.

We discussed whether I should take my feeder down — I’ve really come to love my little birdfeeder. It’s right outside the kitchen window and watching the birds is such a pleasure when I’m doing dishes. They’re just ordinary little birds: sparrows and finches and chickadees with the occasional woodpecker or flicker for excitement.

I think I’ll keep it up for a few more days and see what the bear situation in town looks like. The MH lives down by the river, where there’s more wildlife than up here in my part of town. Even in the fall when my apple trees are dumping ripe fruit all over my yard, I’ve never had a bear up this far (although I am only two blocks from Fleishman Creek). I’m in the middle of the block, and a bear would have to come up a long alley to get to my backyard. There’s no sweet little creek to follow. We’ll have to see, I’d hate to lose my feeder, but birdfeeders are a real problem out here in bear country. To a hungry bear, a full birdfeeder is a gift — all that protein and fat — and as the saying goes “a fed bear is a dead bear.” So, time to keep an eye on the situation. If the bears are coming into town, the word will be out, and the feeder may have to come down.

Snow and Woodpeckers

February 8, 2007 cmf

It’s snowing this morning. Peaceful still snow. Sometimes big flakes, sometimes tiny, but the air is still and a quiet trickle of snow falls outside. It’s as if we’re all inside some quiet, gentle, still place.

Looking out the back window as I did the breakfast dishes I saw a woodpecker on the birdfeeder — since my cat died last fall, I finally felt I could get a birdfeeder (Patsy in her prime was quite a birder. She once caught a hummingbird and brought it to us when we were barbequeing on my front porch in Salt Lake — as if we’d put her little hummingbird on the grill with the chicken). Since I put the feeders up, I’ve kept the The Sibley Guide to Birds next to the toaster, where I can grab it quickly. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the woodpeckers. I’d looked them up before and I figured it was either a Downy or a Hairy woodpecker, but because I’m really bad at estimating size (I can’t tell you for example, how many yards away anything is — yards, inches, feet, they’re all just too abstract) I wasn’t sure which one it is. I went back to the New York Times online and when I got up a few minutes later, there was a much bigger woodpecker on the suet cage. It had bright red patches on it’s head and I pulled out the bird book — that was the Hairy woodpecker! It’s significantly bigger. It hung around for a couple of minutes, just long enough for me to get a good look at it, then off it went, flying through the snowflakes.

So now I know the difference between a Hairy and a Downy woodpecker. It’s what I love about the birdfeeders — a little visit from the wild, a flash and they’re gone, but for a moment, there was a new bird, a bird I hadn’t seen before. The things you can learn while doing the breakfast dishes …

Bear Season

June 16, 2006 cmf

They’re back! It’s spring in the Greater Yellowstone area, and the bears are awake and afoot. Some of you may remember that the dogs and I had a little encounter last year (see Not the Top of the Food Chain, and Bear Update). Well, this year it was three local girls, who got pinned up in Suce Creek for two or two and a half hours by a grizzly. They were hiking, they saw the bear, the bear charged and they all yelled at one another to drop and cover their necks. They dropped to the fetal position, covered the backs of their necks with their hands, and hung in there as the bear charged, charged again, jumped over one of them, and essentially wouldn’t let them move. The story is here, in the Livingston Enterprise (you might have to scroll down). They did everything right, and came through it unscathed, and with a major life experience under their belts.

Then a couple of days ago, the paper ran a follow-up piece. The girls had gotten a photo just as the bear charged them and my buddy Bill Campbell circulated the photo to his bear scientist buddies, and they all agreed, it looks like it was a grizzly. Bill’s classic quote in the paper was that knowing the bears are up there adds “a dynamic tension” to hiking. Dynamic tension?
…

Tis the Season

October 23, 2005 cmf

For big dead animals. I drove up to Suce Creek this morning to run the dogs, and there were two guys standing looking into the bed of a pickup truck. Once of them was wearing camoflage, always a tip-off. So as the boys ran up the hill in search of grouse, I walked over and took a peek. “What’d you get?” I asked. “A moose,” the one guy said. “That’s not a moose!”I said looking at the big black dead animal, “The antlers are wrong.” It was a very beautiful, dark, almost black elk. He was nestled in the bed of the full-sized pickup truck and just as I was thinking that it was sort of odd that he fit, I noticed that his legs were cut off below the “knee”. It was a little startling. “That’ll keep you fed all winter,” I said to the guy in the camoflage. “I know,” he said. “I’m grateful.”

We exchanged pleasantries, including the location of the gut pile, always important if you’re hiking with dogs, and they told me they didnt’ think the bears would have found it yet since he’d just killed the elk this morning. I told them about my bear encounter this spring, and they agreed that bear spray and bells on the dogs are a good idea, and off I went. As I left I heard the one guy saying to the other, that the elk made missing church worthwhile, and the other guy said, I know, but I really wanted to go this morning.

It’s one of those things that separates us from the rest of the country. I’ve encountered guys in the woods with guns here who don’t scare me at all. Guys who look like the caricature of what folks on the coasts think of as rednecks — and thus far, I’ve never had anyone be anything other than polite and kind and sweet to my dogs.

And that elk — he was a beauty. That guy and his family will eat that elk all winter — it’s good clean meat that’s never seen an antibiotic or a feed lot. And my dogs didn’t get into the gut pile, so I’m pleasantly disposed toward him in a way I wouldn’t be otherwise.

Bear Update

June 22, 2005 cmf

All last week I kept hearing people say they’d seen grizzly tracks up in Suce Creek, and for a while there it sounded like perhaps I’d had an encounter with the Big Bear himself. Luckily, my friend Bill, who did a beautiful documentary for the Discovery Channel on grizzlies went up there on Sunday and checked out the tracks. It wasn’t a grizzly, he said. It was a very large black bear, but not a grizzly. Which caused me enormous relief — I”m really not ready for a close encounter with a grizzly bear.

From what we hear, the morels are up in the high country these days, so Maryanne and I are off this afternoon to Suce Creek to see if we can find some. We figure with the two of us talking to one another, and with four dogs, we’ll be just fine. And morels — more morels! It’s been such a wet spring that there’s a bumper crop, from what we can tell. The Big Guys still won’t tell us where they are, but some friends found morels in Suce Creek, so that’s our plan.

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