Saved

by Ben Hewitt

  And there’s this, which I have hinted at but perhaps not overtly enough: I cannot help but wonder if the assumed version of wealth, replete with the means to call forth on a whim whatever goods or services one might desire, actually bespeaks a certain poverty. Rich in anonymous, homogenous things, the gadgets that compel us to camp out on city streets, just so we might be among the first to have a phone we can talk to. Siri, will you be my friend? The expansive houses we endeavor to fill with IKEA’s particleboard furnishings, designed to appeal to common denominators of mass desirability: conveniently flat-packed, assembled with ease (but not too easily, lest we are made to feel inept—even production furniture, it seems, understands the value of playing hard to get), and styled for universal approval. Cheap, easy, and impersonal. But the space is never truly filled; the need is never truly met. Because the space and need are not to be found inside the shell of our homes. Indeed, they are to be found inside of us.

  If I’m right about all this, it could be said that we are both wealthy and poor, as our contrived needs are met over and over without lasting gratification. For proof of the latter, I offer as evidence the constant desire to upgrade and renovate, to obtain and accumulate. Little of this trade is in essentials; most of it is in goods that despite ardent promises to the contrary only complicate our lives and widen the divisions between us and the natural world upon which we ultimately depend. Which is no less a part of us than our very hands or heart. We feel iPhone-poor because we are, in fact, I-poor: Our sense of self and feeling of connectedness have become fragmented and eroded, and so we turn to the easy pickings and short-term relief provided by industry and peddled by masters of emotion-based marketing. But our poverty is one that a talking cellular telephone, for all its digitized genius and touchscreen sensuality, can never heal. In fact, it will only make things worse.

  What I do not yet know is how our monetary system contributes to both our wealth and our poverty, which we can already begin to see as two sides of the same coin. I do not yet understand how our money system works and how it is that money itself can be both abundant and scarce. To be honest, I’m not always sure why we need money at all, for it seems at best little more than a human contrivance mediating between us and our needs, and merely a symbol of the real value it is intended to represent. Even the short-lived $100,000 bill—the largest denomination of currency ever issued by the US Treasury—is by itself worthless. It is only via a collective agreement and faith in our government that any of our currency and coinage, down to the lowly penny, holds any value at all. Maybe this is important; maybe it is not. Certainly, it is an aspect of our money that intrigues me.

  In recent years, as I have begun to grasp how profoundly our narrow view of wealth damages us, our communities, and the environment (as if these can really be placed into separate categories), I have found myself struggling to articulate how we might contemporize and redefine this definition for the betterment of all. This book is part of my attempt to write that definition. But I know that I can’t do it myself, and my hope is that if I keep my eyes, ears, and mind open, Erik Gillard will help me find the right words.

  [ CHAPTER THREE ]

  IN WHICH I GO MUSHROOM HUNTING WITH ERIK AND BREAKFAST, THEREBY PROVING BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WRONG.

  IN LATE May of 2011, at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning, a man named Breakfast piloted an elderly Honda station wagon up a steep gravel road somewhere in rural central Vermont. It was a warm day, knocking on hot, and the sun shone brightly in a cerulean sky. This was a welcome change from the weather of the previous weeks, which had been unyieldingly damp and raw, as if winter couldn’t quite accept that its time was over. If there were a finer morning to be chauffeured through the springing Vermont countryside by a man nicknamed after the morning meal, I’d yet to experience it.

  Only 90 minutes before, I’d received a call from Erik. “I’m going morel hunting with my friend Breakfast,” said Erik, speaking into the phone he’d mounted at the base of a telephone pole down the road from his new home. I drifted for a moment, conjuring an image of him crouched by the pole, telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Naturally, it was a corded phone, so he would be unable to wander. I suspected he was sitting on the ground, leaning his back against the pole; I’d noticed that Erik always seemed to seek contact with the ground. “Want to come?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, because truly, I didn’t know. Like most people in 21st-century America, I generally plan my days ahead of time, and on this Thursday I had somehow neglected to include a note to “go mushrooming with Erik and Breakfast” on my list of tasks. It was a forgivable lapse, I’d argue, given that it was a weekday and that, like most people I knew, I had work to attend to. But I was beginning to learn that if I wanted to spend time with Erik, I was going to have to be flexible because he wasn’t like most people I knew.

  “I don’t kn—” I started to say again, and then: “Did you say ‘with my friend Breakfast?’ ”

  Erik acknowledged that indeed he had, and it suddenly seemed to me as if perhaps there was nothing more deserving of my attention than the opportunity being put before me. Suddenly, I could not imagine any excuse good enough to warrant passing up the opportunity to hunt Vermont’s esteemed morel with Erik and Breakfast. That’s because, of course, there wasn’t.

  As he drove, Breakfast suckled from a gourd of yerba maté, a twiggy tea that smelled like something kept in the dark too long. He lounged in his seat, a moderately heavyset man of 30, his skin marked by perhaps the least menacing menagerie of tattoos ever worn by one person. They were loosely organized around a food-related theme: an eggplant, an homage to coffee, and, my favorite, the words “SNAK TIME” spelled out in capital letters across the back side of his fingers, gangsta style. The “c” had been eliminated so that Breakfast’s message to the world would fit on the eight digits that were visible when his hands were clenched into fists, and I had a chuckle imagining the poor, confused sucker whose last sight before Breakfast’s punches rained down upon him was the phrase “SNAK TIME.” Part of what made this funny was that Breakfast was one of the least-menacing people I’d ever met; far as I could tell, the only danger he posed was to a mature morel mushroom.

  And this is how I found myself seated next to Breakfast, as he nursed from his gourd and steered the Honda with his “SNAK” hand. We were headed for one of the boys’ most reliable and prolific morel hunting grounds, which spanned the flank of a small mountain only minutes from Erik’s home. Not for the first time, I was struck by how Erik managed to extract so much pleasure from such a limited range. He wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud; he made regular trips to his childhood home in southern New Hampshire, and on occasion, he even traveled outside New England. Still, I’d never met someone so appreciative of and knowledgeable about the small piece of world outside his doorstep. He knew where and when to find the most prolific patches of fiddlehead ferns and wild nettles. His hands would sting when he picked them, but it was worth that small pain for the pleasure they would bring, steamed and slathered in butter. He knew where certain animals lived and where large, south-facing rocks protruded from the ground to absorb the heat of the sun. It felt good to sit and lean against them, to allow the warmth to radiate into his body. Come August, he would know precisely where to find the best swimming holes, those refreshing icy pools that lie far off the beaten path, where he’d shuck his clothing and immerse himself in the water, feeling the cold radiate throughout his body like a low–voltage electrical current. And in the winter, he’d head out on his skis, gliding through towering stands of maple and ash, the snow pristine but for the tracks left by moose and porcupine and, in the aftermath of his passing, himself.

  Of course, he knew where the morel mushrooms bloomed and when—middle spring in Vermont. Like most fungi, it grows almost comically fast; it’s not uncommon for the species to put on 3 or 4 inches overnight. It’s a homely bugger, having the misfortune to be at once wrinkled, brown, and oblong, but its questionable aesthetics don’t t
ranslate to its flavor, which is at once meaty and earthy; think beef tenderloin crusted in dirt. My earliest introduction to the morel came courtesy of my grandmother, who gathered them in the woods surrounding her farm in southeastern Iowa. I have a vague recollection of the smell of them frying in her kitchen, although that might have simply been the smell of her kitchen, which in the 1970s Midwest was a room largely devoted to the heating of Crisco to the melting point and beyond. I remember following my grandmother through the Iowa woods in search of them as she regaled me with the story of an encounter with a copperhead and I tried not to scream every time I saw a curved stick.

  In any event, it would be more than a generation before the morel and I would meet again. This time, it would be courtesy of Erik, in the certifiably copperhead-free (though timber rattlers make occasional appearances) hills of Vermont, and I was honored by the immense show of generosity on his part for having invited me. Generally speaking, mushroom hunters are a secretive, if not paranoid, lot, and this generalization doesn’t even account for the fact that on this day, we were after the Holy Grail—the one wild mushroom that reigns over all others in the hierarchy of fungal desirability. The morel is the reclusive celebrity of the mushrooming subculture; sightings are often validated by photographic evidence, and hunts are exhaustively detailed on Internet forums dedicated to the subject.

  But as I had found to be the case with almost everything that Erik does or owns or otherwise perceives as falling under his purview, his prevailing ethos was one of generosity in the extreme. Withholding something as valuable as explicit directions (What could be more explicit than leading me there?) to a first-rate morel repository was as unthinkable to him as denying a cup of water to someone dying of thirst. It wasn’t that he didn’t hold the mushrooms in high esteem; actually, it was the opposite, for in Erik’s view, something as tangible (you can see, hold, taste, and smell a mushroom) and pragmatic (mushrooms are food, after all) as a morel is a true and honest representation of value, more so than perhaps any amount of currency. Moreover, to Erik the time spent hunting the morel was not something to be calculated and then subtracted from whatever appraisal might be assigned to the final haul; rather, the search itself contributed to the mushrooms’ intrinsic worth, even if that worth could not readily be articulated in numeric values.

  For his part, Erik put it a bit more simply: “It’s so fun to walk around and look for things that may or may not be there,” he said at one point late in our ramble up, across, and ultimately over the mountain.

  And it was fun, although I must admit to no small degree of frustration at my inability to spot the things that may or may not have been there. Only minutes after Breakfast parked at the road’s shoulder and we set foot into the forest beyond, my two companions were scurrying from one patch of the coveted mushrooms to another, while I scanned the ground furiously and mostly futilely, trying to establish visual parameters for distinguishing fungal growth from the backdrop of the previous autumn’s fallen leaves, which composed a nearly uninterrupted carpet of brownish organic matter. Sensing my gathering angst, Erik pointed toward a stand of mushrooms, or what I presumed to be a stand of mushrooms. Frankly, I couldn’t tell; they might have been piles of dog shit for all I knew.

  “See, there’s some,” he said.

  I squinted. “Where?”

  “There.”

  I squinted some more, until everything began to get dark the way things get dark when you close your eyes, thus defeating the purpose.

  “Where?” I said again, and it must have sounded to Erik as if I might cry, for he all but took my hand and led me to the bounty.

  Lo and behold, there they were: my first morels, although it’s really not fair of me to take any credit for their capture. After all, an expert ’shroomer had led me by my nose, and not merely to the general site, but also to these specific mushrooms, a quartet of wrinkled fungi I quickly and mercilessly liberated from their resting spot. I did this without compunction, as I’d done a bit of research into the subject of mushrooming and knew that the aboveground morel is merely the “fruit” of an expansive network of a rootlike structure called mycelium. While it is beneficial to leave at least some intact mushrooms to spread their spores for future generations (and because it would simply be greedy to take ’em all), it is difficult to overpick any particular spot, since the mycelium is the actual organism from which the mushroom grows, and there’s no practical way (or logical reason) to take that. Harvesting apples from a tree is an apt analogy, I suppose.

  Per Erik’s suggestion, I’d worn a baseball cap, not so much for protection from the elements but because, when removed and carried upside down, it formed a convenient mushroom satchel. I removed it now, and dropped my stash into the makeshift bowl. I stared at my prize a moment; they really were ugly, but they captivated me nonetheless, if only because I knew my hat contained something that transcended the caloric value of the mushrooms therein; I knew that all across the region—perhaps on this very day, at this very hour or even minute—mushroom hunters, cameras cocked and loaded, were combing the woods for the elusive morels. And I had some.

  I am ashamed to say that a rush of self-congratulatory contentment washed over me as I gazed into my brimming hat. I could actually feel it passing through my body; it was cozy, like slipping into a bath on a dark January night. Still, I am even more ashamed to say that I’m fairly certain my reaction was based not merely on the satisfaction of finding the morels, but on the fact that I had something others wanted. This does not speak well of me, I realize, but at least I had the good sense to stop myself from sharing this view with Erik and Breakfast, who would surely have found it crass. But what can I say? I’m only human, and no more so than in the small-mindedness of this humble victory over an untold number (but surely, surely it was a large number) of morel seekers.

  Having held the quarry in my bare hands seemed to somehow tune my eyes and psyche to the task at hand, and for the first time I experienced “mushroom eyes.” I’d been introduced to the term by another mushroomer; he’d uttered the words with quiet, almost whispering reverence, as if the words and the powers they described were so fickle, they deserved the benefit of superstition and could not be spoken of loudly enough that the mushroom gods might overhear. At the time, I’d merely nodded dumbly and a bit dismissively, because the majority of devoted mushroomers share a common loopiness, the mild madness of the obsessed, and are fairly easily dismissed. But now I understood precisely what he’d meant. It was if my eyes were an instrument; where before they’d been playing slightly out-of-tune, now they rang in harmony with the world around them.

  An exaggeration? Not at all, because suddenly the morels stood in sharp relief to a backdrop that had previously rendered them all but indistinguishable. This is not to say I saw them everywhere; even in a hot spot such as this, morels are relatively scarce. But whereas I’d previously felt uncertain and tentative, I now felt quietly confident, almost predatory. Whereas before I’d tiptoed through the woods, hoping I’d be blessed enough to catch a glimpse of something that might or might not be there, now I stalked and prowled, absolutely certain the mushrooms were there, equally certain I’d find them, and very much assured of my right to claim them. My hat was nearly full, but I wanted more, more, MORE.

  I shook my head, and hard. Goodness. What was happening to me? Somewhere deep inside me, in a place where emotion usurps intellect, the morels had triggered a compulsion to accumulate and, perhaps even more alarming, hoard. Because I wasn’t much interested in sharing my little (hopefully soon to be large) stash with anyone but my family. I wanted to return home with not just a hatful but a bagful, and a garbage bag, at that. I wanted my family to admire my treasure and remark over my prowess. Hell, I thought I might even post some pictures on one of those Internet forums.

  In one sense, this all seemed innocent enough: Morels are desirable. It was my first hunt, and I could be forgiven for displaying the enthusiasm of a neophyte. But in another sense, it seem
ed little more than a mirror of the very behavior I had come to see as problematic and even amoral. So I had to wonder: Is it merely human nature that compels us to amass so much more than we truly need, even in the face of mounting evidence that doing so actually undermines our well-being? Maybe, I thought, we just can’t help it.

  This was a dispiriting line of inquiry, from which I was gratefully distracted by the discovery of yet another patch of mushrooms. I’d figured out a key secret to finding morels: They are extremely fond of standing dead elm trees, and almost as happy growing in the soil of abandoned apple orchards. In mushrooming parlance, the elm and apple are “indicator trees,” which is to say they are indicative of a relatively high probability that morels can be found in the surrounding soil. This is good news, because it’s a hell of a lot easier to spot a standing dead elm or an apple tree than to find the mushrooms themselves.

  With this bit of information tucked into my small holding of mushrooming knowledge, and the focus of my mushroom eyes shifting confidently between the ground and the tree canopy, it was as if I’d been invited to a private morel party. Within 20 minutes, my hat was overflowing, and I moved through the forest with one hand clenched around my impromptu mushroom bag, and the other pressed against my chest, cradling half a dozen specimens in the shallow hollow of my ribcage. I wished like hell I’d brought a camera to document my incredible success, and I could already imagine myself at some future party, holding court over a rapt audience: And then, just when I thought that surely there couldn’t be even more . . . here, let me show you some pictures.

  Erik had long ago filled his hat and removed his shirt, despite the clouds of blackflies that accompanied us through the forest. I’d always thought of him as skinny, but now I saw that he carried an ample supply of muscle. It was not the sort of puffy, cultivated musculature developed in the cold fluorescence of a gym; rather it was as if his limbs and torso had been purposely built to do what human bodies were originally intended to do: Hunt. Forage. Survive. His body mirrored the stripped-down nature of his relationship to abundance; the superfluous had been jettisoned, leaving him with precisely what he needed and little more. I’d long before embraced the notion that Erik’s frugal nature was good for his emotional health; now, I saw that perhaps it was good for his physical health, too.