The Last Incorruptible Thing
Life lessons from the morel majority.
I was five miles in the woods, looking for the Last Incorruptible Thing.
“Aren’t you a brave soul,” a woman said when I emerged. She wore jogging clothes and a knowing smile. I looked like the Unabomber’s little sister.
“Not brave,” I said. “Just walking round the river. Get that springtime weather while it lasts! I went in the woods to watch birds. Plants and birds and rocks and things.”
America lyrics, the last refuge of an American mycological liar.
“Mmm-hmmm,” she said. “You find any mushrooms?”
“If I did, I’d tell you no. And if I didn’t, I’d tell you yes,” I said, since she knew my game. She laughed and jogged away.
I had a pocket full of Missouri Gold: morels, the most elusive of mushrooms. A successful morel hunt is a victory. But the search is the real reward.
The morel is the Last Incorruptible Thing. You cannot plant them. You cannot buy them in stores. You can only spot them in the wild. Morels demand complete surrender to nature’s whims. They grow for three to four weeks each spring, and no one knows when or where. They pop up like middle fingers to corporate control.
Morels encourage revolt against the digital panopticon. No self-respecting morel hunter posts their hot spots online or reveals their finds in real time. Morels cannot be recorded by Ring or tracked by GPS. They are immune from AI chicanery. Make an AI morel and watch no one care: digital tricks hold no power here. Morel hunters guard their secrets in the analog world: in the depths of the forests and the recesses of their minds. Morels are escape artists, and you escape with them.
I am a member of the morel majority. Every spring, I wait for the surface of the world to shred and the last pure truth to show.
In the forest, you have one mission. You stagger like a zombie until a morel emerges like a brain. You extract it with a loving touch and guard it until it’s time to feast. Nothing tastes as sweet as serendipity.
A proper morel hunt requires that you walk the woods for hours with eyes to the ground. The outside world fades into irrelevance, a distant realm of misplaced priorities like mortgages and jobs. In the real world, the morel world, you seek loamy soil, south-facing slopes, fallen sycamores. You go slow. You dodge branches and climb creek beds. You take nothing for granted.
With this knowledge, you learn not only the mushroom but the land. What you can grasp from the crunch of a leaf or the rise of a flower. You sense when the season is starting and when it’s getting too late. You know that you could be wrong, and that being wrong is the most pleasant surprise of all.
* * *
I have had a banner year for morels and a terrible year for most everything else. I found dozens in three counties and would have found more if the first morels had not appeared when I was across the country at my father’s funeral.
The day after I returned to Missouri, I left at dawn and came home late. I walked miles through the forest, grateful to have a singular and uncomplicated goal. As Townes van Zandt sang, Sorrow and solitude, these are the precious things. It hurt to be near people.
Morels don’t wane like sympathy.
I’m obsessive enough to know when I’ve found barren terrain or got beat to the punch by fellow obsessives (respect), but I keep moving. A highlight of the hunt is stumbling upon bizarre shit in the woods. This year, I found the ruins of a 19th-century monastery, a shipwreck so far from the river that it rots in a meadow, and a stone staircase to nowhere, making me wonder if morels found there would be haunted.
Did I actually find morels in these places? Shit if I’d tell!
I got scratched, bruised, bloodied, and sore, but never bored. My thoughts stayed captive to the forest floor. When grief ripped through me, I retraced my steps, wondering if I’d missed one, and often I had. That’s the mercy of morels: they are reticent by nature, and when they reveal themselves to you upon your return, it’s like getting the do-over you don’t get in life.
Live fast, die young, leave a good-tasting corpse. Morels aren’t meant to last, so you can’t mourn them when they’re gone.
A week into my quest, the temperature rose. I grew apprehensive. Morels are immune to the evils of the modern age: surveillance, commodification, even industrialization. In St. Louis, they paved paradise and put up parking lots, and morels grew in the cracks. St. Louis is no paradise, more a paradise lost, and its underground rises up on the regular. Morels are no exception. A St Louisan will spend all day scouring distant forests only to spot one in the bushes behind QuikTrip on the drive home.
April’s heat wave ended my season. I stayed in denial and sweated out the hunt, knowing the soil was too dry, the grass was too tall, and, in my heart, that it was over. I had an irrational fear that this was the last time. Then I read of Americans elsewhere enjoying their bounty and knew nothing could outwit the morel. They are incorruptible. They aren’t meant to make sense. They defy prediction, including bad predictions. I could keep on believing.
My real regret was personal. If morel season was over, and I lost my singular goal, something else would arrive to fill the time. I knew it would be grief, and it was.
There were days where I found nothing, but nothing is good enough for me. There are people for whom nothing is good enough, meaning nothing ever satisfies them, and people for whom nothing is good enough because the point is the quest.
The latter type thrives in morel season, when life is brutish, short, and magical.
* * *
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The World’s Largest Morel in Nevada, Missouri. Photographed December 2022. Now folks can always brag they found a big one.
A morel in An Undisclosed Location.
The remains of a boat in the woods. Imagine wandering along and then having that appear. I know little about it; some locals say it was a military boat that washed up during the Great Flood of 1993. It is not the Shipwreck on Zombie Road I found earlier!
Inside the mystery boat.
The monastery ruins.
My last two of the season. Until next year!
* * *
Looking for reading about corruptible things? Check out my books HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT and THEY KNEW or the newsletter archives!
The morel as Last Incorruptible Thing is the line that earns the whole essay. Most back-to-nature writing is sentimentality dressed as resistance. This isn’t. The morel actually meets the criteria: untrackable, unfarmable, indifferent to the surveillance stack we’ve built around everything else worth having.
What you’re describing is a practice, not a hobby. The hours, the south-facing slopes, the do-over upon retracing steps. It rewards the same cognitive posture good fieldwork rewards: slow scanning, pattern recognition trained by repeated failure, comfort with negative results. “Nothing is good enough because the point is the quest” is the spine of the piece.
The grief structure underneath is what makes it land powerfully. Singular and uncomplicated goal as protection against what’s waiting to fill the silence. We pretend hobbies are leisure. They’re often scaffolding.
I hunt in Switzerland (chanterelles and the occasional bolete around the Sihlsee) and Colorado (porcini above 9,000 feet, morels at burn scars the year after a fire, which is its own kind of incorruptibility). They show up in the worst-looking ground and reward you for going where no one wants to go. Your St. Louis observation is the same point in cosmopolitan form: the system can’t reach everywhere.
Some things route around it by being too quiet, too local, too analog to capture.
Sorry for your father. Glad the woods held.
Johan 🐌
Beautiful essay, Sarah!
The only morels I have ever managed to find were in my old backyard. They appeared to us as my daughter and I were playing frisbee in the spring of 2021. I had spent the year homeschooling her in my attic as an unemployed TV producer and we had spent most of that time away from other people out of fear of COVID. She threw the frisbee, the wind caught and carried it, and it landed at the base of one of our trees. I spotted one, then two, then a dozen. That old tree was dying, but I refused to cut it down when we lived there because I didn't want the roots to die off and the morels to disappear.
The new owners cut down the remains of that old tree a year ago. I didn't tell them about what we used to find under it. Morels will always be special to me because they symbolize new life in times of grief, renewal, and serendipity.