Can We Still Hang Foragers?

Forget grass fed cows and organic shiso. Spurn the local free-range ducks and non-GMO beets. Get out in the field with long gloves and haul in the nettles, pick up the purslane, chomp on burdock roots. Gnaw on salads grisly and deeply bitter with dandelion greens, tiny sour sorrel, and the evil garlic mustard. Smoke your road-kill squirrel on the Weber in nests of fallen oak leaves. And take a chance on that pretty mushroom popping up on a log after a dewy night. Foraging is the new farming! And it's easy. You just go out and pick stuff off the ground.  

And chances are that if you own some woods and an old apple orchard, you also have at least one forager creeping on to it when you aren't around or early in the morning when sane people are asleep. These are deceptive humans, often attractive, all smiley and natural when they emerge from the woods, innocently coming upon you walking up Your Own Path and asking, "Oh, are those your woods? I didn't know that." They are typically clean, earnest, full of good will. Often Democrats. Possibly even contributors to Bernie Sanders' campaign. Foragers have the purest of intentions. They even have a code! But don't be tricked! They are cunning Gollum-like creatures, sneaking onto your land to seek out Their Preciouses – mushrooms, berries, black walnuts, rooty treats -- which are actually, by law, Your Preciouses.  

One fateful day a couple of years ago, when we were still weekending, Dave, our friend and landlord, brought over some oyster mushrooms, which, he explained, were given to him by Brenda (not her real name for reasons that will emerge), a forager who lived near by and taught students at the local college how to steal food from others. Dave owns the barn we live in, the old migrant quarters next to it – now a woodshop and garage for his tractors -- and the land and house across the road. We had bought the other half of the property, which surrounds his barn, selling an adjoining parcel to him where he keeps his bees. Dave said that he had told Brenda she could forage on this property, but she had wandered beyond his up into our woods and found a stash of oyster mushrooms. She had given him "some" of hers and he gave us half of his, which in retrospect seemed to be have been about five pounds.

"God, how much did she get?"

"I don't know. It was a lot."

"That's so cool. I wonder if she'll teach me how to find them," I said naively.  

A few weeks later, I was in our back yard and saw a woman talking to Dave outside the old migrant quarters. I went over to say hello and was introduced to Brenda.  

"Oh. Hi. I've been hoping to meet you. I understand you found some oyster mushrooms [like a truck load] on our property."

"Oh, was that yours? I thought it was Dave's."  

"No, our land starts a few hundred feet west of the barn. Anyway, I'd love to learn more about this. Where did you find the mushrooms?"

Long, seemingly thoughtful, pause. "Oh, I don't remember…"

Alarm bells . She's a mushroom expert! Mushrooms show up in the same spot every year. She has the oyster mushroom location stored on her GPS! I squinted back. "Well, let me know when you want to forage on our property again."

Brenda flashed me an open-faced cheesy lying smile, "Sure." 

The path on our property that leads west of Dave's barn is lined each year with thick black raspberry bushes, which I pick for syrups and jam or I just freeze fresh in bags. Two weeks after I met Brenda, the berries ripened. I spotted them on Sunday, already shiny and black, right before we had to head back to the city. Back upstate the following weekend, steel bowl in hand, I trotted eagerly up the path and stopped at the first berry bush. It had been stripped, and the grass around the briar patch was tamped down. I walked up to the next one. Same horrifying denuded nubs. On and on up the path. No berries, just evidence of someone or something tromping around the ravished bushes. "The forager!" I growled.  

In my knee-jerk socialist days, I would quote Proudhon: "Property is theft." Now that I owned property, however, what ran through my berry-greedy brain as I walked from fruit ruin to ruin was a comradely affinity with the old English squires, righteous in their anger at poachers, fortunate in their ability to nab these thieves, rabbits dangling from their belts, and to string them up without any consequences. Viva la ancien regime!  

Once I learned from Dave that Brenda and a friend had been there earlier that week swimming in his pond, I needed no other proof. I sat down and wrote her what I believed was a reasonable and irate letter. She was renting a house near us and I drove by and stuffed it into her mailbox. Michael says I called her a "thief". I don't remember that, although in hindsight, I think that that I was one rant away from cutting and pasting the words from tabloid headlines. I might have gone a little overboard.

I added my phone number to the letter, and a couple days later I heard Brenda on my voice mail insisting on her innocence and suggesting that a bear might have eaten the berries. "Ha!" I said out loud and subsequently to all my friends and a few strangers, "A bear does not gently pluck single berries off a bush and carefully tread around it."  

I returned Brenda's call but only got her voice mail. I left a message, but she never returned it. She did call Dave, however, and argued her case to him because he's far cuter than I am, saying that she would never have picked my raspberries and always obeyed the forager code. "We only take a handful of anything we pick," she piously told him (forgetting, I guess, the 15-pound oyster mushroom haul she had pulled out of my woods).

To my relief, Brenda moved out of our neighborhood in the fall, and I figured that was the end of her. I relaxed my vigil. The following raspberry season was both bear- and forager-free, and I bagged about three gallons of them.  

Then, last spring, I found a morel. I had long suspected that these yummy mushrooms lurk beneath the old apple trees that spider among the thorny webs of multiflora rose and nasty honeysuckle, which coat most of our acres. Morels might be the safest wild mushrooms to forage. With their blonde spongy bee hive hairdos, they seem to have few toxic twins, and even those apparently don't kill you.

So last year, I Googled around and discovered a great site called morelhunters.com. I learned that they hit our area around mid-May. It was then too late in the month, but I decided to check anyway under the dying trees of the old orchard.  There, I discovered a wide well worn path skirting through masses of brush from apple tree to apple tree. Too wide and well trodden even for morel-loving bear. Foragers! Grrr.

I followed the path, poking about, until, under a battered old trunk, I found one soggy and forlorn morel. I brought it home in triumph, set it on a plate, and a slug crawled out of it. The mushroom lay there for a couple weeks, getting creepier every day until I finally tossed it out. But it was an inspiring event, and I was intent on getting started early this year.

Morels emerge when the soil temperature reaches 50 degrees, but this winter was so cold and the spring so dry that I failed to spot any when I started checking the trees in early May. I did, however, spot Brenda. That same week, sitting on the swing and reading my Kindle in the back yard, I saw a car drive up and a woman and her dog get out, walking up the path toward the top of our hill where our apple orchard lies. She didn't look over and didn’t see me. I headed over to the base of the path, silently (and I hope with a Squire-like menace) watching her peer about in the grass, her cute muttish hound pouncing around beside her. He started to trot toward me. She looked up and slowly followed him down until she was within stringing-up distance.

"Hi," she said, "I'm Brenda," and held out her hand.

"I know. I'm Carol." I shook her hand as if she wasn't in any danger, "I met you a couple years ago. We had an altercation."

Not missing a beat, she responded, "Oh, you know, I never took those raspberries."  

"Well…"  

She glanced back up toward the hill, "I've been looking for nettles." Right. "Dave said I could check for them on his property."

"Well, actually, you were on our property."

"Oh, really? I didn't know that. I thought it was Dave's property." She added carelessly, "I didn't see anyone around." 

"Our car is in the garage. We're up here full time now."  

"Oh, well, I thought it was Dave's property." She repeated.  

"No." I waved at a flagged stake a short distance up the path behind us. "That marks the end of Dave's land and the beginning of ours." She had been wandering about 50 feet beyond the stake.  I was too gracious to mention that we had pointed this out two years before.

"Oh, that's good to know…" Pause, then awkwardly. "So, I was looking for nettles. I'm really a mushroom expert, but I'm trying to learn about other things." Nettles are trash plants, growing on every available patch of earth throughout the Northeast. So what a coincidence that an expert fungi poacher would seek the ubiquitous nettle in mid-May right by the thief-worn path where I had found my slug-infested morel. And why wasn't she wearing gloves? Nettles sting.  

But it was a beautiful day, she was earnest and friendly, and her dog was adorable. "Look. If you want to forage on our land, just call me. I'd really like to follow you around and learn about nettles..and other things."  

"Sure." Same open-faced deceptive smile, but I had grown bored with revenge.

We exchanged phone numbers, just like new BFFs would do, and she gaily got back into her car with her bouncy cute dog and took off. I guess she hadn't been all that excited about the nettles. And she missed the wild strawberries.  I hope she calls.