The Last Word On Nothing

Next in the penspective series is something I recently ate.

First, is it organic or manufactured? Don’t scroll down to see the pen for scale. Let your imagination wander. It looks marine to me, like an anemone bed, little feelers reaching up. Or the bristles of a scrubbing device made of plastic, which I can’t imagine eating.

Hint, it is the underside of something I found growing in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado around 10,000 feet in elevation. After a spate of excellent rains, all sorts of oddities have been springing and oozing from the ground. When I found this one, I cut it off with a knife, took it home, cooked it, and ate it. 

It was good, a bit woody in flavor, like aged and slightly bitter beef.

This is the underside of a Sarcodon imbricatus, commonly called hawks wing mushrooms, or scaly hedgehog. Scaly because if you turn it upside down, you find not gills but fleshy, brittle teeth or spikes which release reproductive spores. These are the tubules you saw in the picture above. The species is edible, but considered strong in taste.

I’m a fan of eating off the ground. It seems an important thing to do if you have access and what you put in your mouth is not saturated in poisons. One friend I go out with, we eat grasshoppers and grubs, not handfuls, but one discovered morsel at a time. I hear the cicada feasting across North America was at an all time high earlier this summer. My brother-in-law in Baltimore told me he took the wings off, let them sit in melted butter with fresh rosemary and Old Bay for a minute, then skewered them and placed them on the grill, a minute each side. The taste of these hemipterans he described as, “Peanut-buttery, mild oyster and mussel flavor. A little earthy, but not mineral. Shell is thin and brittle, but solid crunch.”

This is eating local, putting the isotopes of your own geography into your bones. My wife is a mushroom hunter, thus I am a mushroom hunter, too, and she has her secret grounds she’ll lead me to. The last few years they have been meh for mushrooms, but this summer, with big rains on top of drought, her locations are blooming like summer thunderheads. You can’t turn around without finding a dark nest of hawks wings, yellow brains of chanterelles, or boletes lined up like bongo drums.

While skies have been choked with fire smoke, mostly from the Dixie, and reservoirs in the Southwest are nearly below their penstocks and turbines, the mountains in Colorado where we live got this blast of utter goodness. Summer monsoons that have been gone for years came back like a tidal wave. This has meant extreme flooding, deaths in washes and cars, and buildings damaged from Moab to Tucson. Did you see the flood going through Miami, Arizona? An acquaintance of mine was half-crushed by rocks but survived a flash flood in the Grand Canyon where she was working. She lost a kidney, bones were broken, and she required three blood transfusions, while another person in the same flood did not survive. When we conversed online about rain, she wrote, “Damn right I wouldn’t ever ask the rains to stop!”

A tidal wave of monsoonal weather is good news only where you can find it, great for mushroom hunters. If we were in a climatic equilibrium and could expect this kind of weather for the next ten or twenty years, I’d be all in. I’d love to see our high desert rivers raging. Cottonwoods and willows would rise like green clouds, and the mountains would be dew-dropped with mushrooms. Screw this megadrought, I’m sick of it. One summer of good rain is like suddenly catching your breath. You think for a moment it might be ok, while the Pacific Northwest is broiling and in a month, the Southwest may have forgotten about cool blue storms. This is when you eat from the ground. Pluck dandelion leaves and desert beeplant for a pot of boiling water. Scrape out the gills of king boletes and let moisture bubble out of them in a pan. Add butter and salt. Appreciate each drop of rain.

Photos: Craig Childs