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Sunday, May 11, 2003

By Stephen Siff

BOYNE CITY, Mich. -- If the National Mushroom Hunting Championship were televised, pre-game interviews would take place on five school buses, rumbling in a convoy through unmarked woods 250 miles north of Detroit.

"I'm here for the national notoriety," Ray Liking, a bearded welder from Mineral City, W.Va., said before the contest last year.

	If you go ... GETTING THERE: Boyne City is approximately 540 miles north and west of Pittsburgh, in an corner of Michigan's Lower Peninsula crowded with marinas, forests and fishing spots. The area is served by two airports. Northwest Airlink flies into Pellston Regional Airport, about 35 miles from Boyne City. A little farther away, Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City is served by United Express, Northwest and American Eagle. The schedule is online at www.tvcairport.com. Rental cars are available at both facilities. THINGS TO DO: The area offers a extensive range of lodging options, from ski resorts and bed and breakfasts to more run-of-the-mill roadside motels. Many are listed at www.boynecity.org. As well as searching for mushrooms, many visitors to the area also keep their eyes peeled for Petoskey stone. These honeycombed chunks of fossilized coral -- Michigan's state stone -- are most common on the shores of Lake Michigan near Petoskey, 15 miles northeast of Boyne City. Stone-hunting is permitted in state and city parks. There are nearly two dozen golf courses within short distance of Boyne City. A list is at www.boyne.net/golf/ The Boyne area is also home to numerous art galleries and open studios. A guide to art scene is at www.northquest.com. An extensive list of attractions, including art galleries, petting zoos, Scuba rental shops and hikes is at www.boynecounty.com. Another good information source is the Boyne Area Chamber of Commerce: 28 S. Lake St.; 1-231-582-6222; www.boynecity.org For details about the championship and mushroom festival check out www.morelfest.com. -- By Stephen Siff

In his worn canvas shoulder bag, he carried a collection sack from the 1993 competition, when he found 45 morels within a 90-minute period, nearly enough to make a special championship round.

"I figure I have a chance," he said, watching the woods go by as the police-escorted convoy chugged along to a still-secret location.

For $12 and a dollop of gumption, anyone can have a chance in the 43rd annual playing of the World Series of this woodsy sport.

Next weekend, organizers expect between 5,000 and 10,000 people to pop up in Boyne City for the mushroom championship.

The celebration of morels is a major destination for hard-core mushroom hunters in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. But tourists and novices are also welcome, and the craft fair, picnics and carnival attract many who have never seen a morel in the woods.

They'll see hundreds of morels at the festival, from dancing and guitar-playing mascot Woody Pickme to the chainsaw sculptures at the craft fair. Seminars and guided hunts are offered for those who want to take up the sport.

"To some people, it becomes an obsession," said Joann Miletto, of Wooster, Ohio, who came 450 miles with six friends to get to the festival last year.

Boyne City is about as far away from big-city civilization as you can get in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. A quaint tourist town of 3,500 year-round residents, Boyne City lives off the water at its doorstep and the woods at its back.

Boyne City's main drag, a clean, wide street of sweets, antiques and hardware shops, dead-ends against the waters of Lake Charlevoix, which offers boaters passage to Lake Michigan. Veterans Park, extending a quarter mile along the lakefront, provides space for the mushroom festival's midway and vendors.

The outdoors begins just beyond downtown. A wrong turn off one of the state highways sends you drifting through wooded hills, past more inland lakes and small golf courses than general stores.

Not far away, sophisticated travelers can find The Legend at Shanty Creek Resort, an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course ranked among the nation's 75 best resort courses by Golf Digest, or the wineries of Traverse City. As well as campgrounds, the area offers kept-up motels and classy B&Bs.

But it is the miles and miles of cool, dark woods that make Michigan attractive to mushroom hunters. The No. 1 quarry is morels -- pointy-headed members of the truffle family that vaguely resemble a cerebellum on a stalk. In catalogs, dried morels sell for up to $16 an ounce.

Morels taste like supermarket mushrooms the way venison tastes like ground chuck. They have a woodsy, gamy, chewy flavor, and the novice will find himself constantly reminded that they should never be washed, just gently brushed of dirt and bugs.

Morels can be dipped in flour and fried in butter, added to an omelet or boiled to a broth. Someone will salivate.

"It wouldn't be Christmas without them," said Jennie Smith, 74, of Marinsville, Ind.

For the past 20 years, the white-haired retiree has made the two-day drive north for the mushroom championship, where she swept the senior division in 1994.

During the trip, Jennie, her husband and grown children comb through state parkland for morels. Some she will dehydrate and serve as gravy over biscuits Christmas morning.

"We love them," she said.

Michigan is mushroom country. Morels grow through most the United States, but they are bigger and more numerous here. Then there's the supportive local culture.

"You can't find a plumber some days during mushroom season," said Scott Coe, who works at a plumbing supply company near Boyne City. "They're all out in the woods."

Most competitors at the mushroom championship are serious sportsmen. They remember the day in March the first morel was spotted in their state this year, and carry clippings from local newspapers about particularly notable finds.

But novices are also welcome. The evening before the big hunt, a seminar on finding and identifying morels is available in a tent pitched in Veterans Park. Last year, about 100 people attended.

Contrasted with the cornucopia of mushrooms in summer and fall, only a few mushrooms other than morels sprout in the spring woods, said Marilynn Smith, a Michigan mycologist (fungi expert).

Among them, the only truly toxic species is the spongy, orange beefsteak mushroom, which people do still eat. If not thoroughly cooked, one mushroom can deliver enough toxin to cause liver failure and death within 48 hours, said Smith, who is also a consultant to the National Poison Control Center.

Trickier are the false morels, differentiated from the real thing by their sloppy, loose-fitting caps and fuzz-filled stems. The caps can be eaten, although some people react with a temporary loss of motor coordination, stumbling and bumping into walls, Smith said.

But this was not enough to discourage Joann Miletto and her husband, Paul, a small-town municipal worker, from wanting to give them a try.

"You can eat lots of mushrooms," said Joann. "There are very few you can't."

The first step to finding a morel is locating the right tree. In Pennsylvania, the thumb-sized mushrooms tend to pop up in families around the base of apple and poplar trees; in Michigan, they like ash.

Leonard Pease, a lecturer with the Morel Museum in Tower Hill, Ill., preaches the use of depth perception. Among the dirt, pine needles and leaves of the forest floor, morels stand out not because of their color, but because of their ridged and pitted caps. Only honeycomb and corncobs carried in by animals have that same texture, said Pease, who was also 1998 grand champion.

When you find one morel, you can expect there to be more in the immediate vicinity. Try looking at different angles, from different directions, at different heights.

"They are elusive," said Scott Coe, the man in plumbing supplies. "You would have thought that they had run away."

The National Championship Hunt starts with a siren blast. A wave of men and women in work clothes and denim dash into the woods, bounding from one ash to the next, each hunter hoping to get ahead of the pack.

Soon, they are spread so thinly each competitor is basically alone.

Mushroom hunting is like playing Where's Waldo with nature. You wander in small circles around the trees, staring at the ground like a drunk who dropped a silver dollar.

You hope there is a mushroom under every leaf, and there isn't. Mushroom hunting is a process of continuous anticipation and small disappointment, as fishing can be, or playing the slots.

After 30 straight minutes of disappointment, you begin to doubt that there even are mushrooms in these woods, or that you know how to identify the right tree. Just being outside here in the forest is enough, you tell yourself; you really don't need to find a mushroom.

Then, when you see one your heart jump-starts and the slot machine begins to ding.

Ah, morels.

Stephen Siff is a Warren, Ohio,-based freelance writer.