The Lucy's Cabin Experience...

The air in the mountain cabin was frigid and, as he awoke, he saw his frozen breath drift toward an empty green bottle of Takatenjin where it lay on the pine-plank floor. Sitting upright, his head hurt and his equilibrium was not what it had been when the real drinking had started after supper the previous evening. On the other side of the single communal room, his third cousin Lucy Penobscot lay curled up asleep like a kidney bean on a rope bed with her lover/brother-in-law Swede drawn up tightly behind her under a heavy wool blanket. Trying to shake his synaptic blur loose, he reached over to stuff a handful of wadded newspaper and kindling into the Jøtul stove. Lighting a match and igniting that tinder, he decided to boil a pot of coffee and at least try to warm the place before heading out to forage the woods for the wild mushrooms of the season.

Filled with dry hemlock chunks, the black box fired up easily and the aroma of camp-style java permeated the crude log structure within ten or fifteen minutes. He pulled his thermos, a dented Stanley relic he’d inherited from his Grandpa Floyd, out of his rucksack and poured it full from the enamelware pot before hanging it back on the handle of the chimney damper. Slipping the thermos back into its pocket, he stood, buttoned his dark blue union suit, cinched up his suspenders, tied his bootlaces and swung the door wide to reveal a verdant world of mud and morning drizzle. Closing the door behind him, he picked up a small wicker basket and a pocket knife from the rocking chair and walked along the shoulder of the road toward the big culvert.

Five feet or more in diameter, the culvert undercut the cobble-rock surface of the low road to permit a small rivulet passage on its way from a bubble spring source to the Abiqua creek down in the main canyon which lay a few miles northeast of Lucy’s grandparent’s property. At the near edge of the galvanized tube was a steep embankment which he found, as he clambered down, was punishingly tangled with thorny Devil’s club and prickly brush. Though his arms were scratched to hell by the briary clutch, he found a way through to a grassy patch beside the trickle. Kneeling alongside the water, he cupped his palms and splashed his forearms, washing away the thinned blood and dulling the sting of his skin.

Picking up his basket and adjusting his pack, he followed the heavy trace of elk and deer tracks into deeper shade. A quarter mile past the place where he entered, he saw the bright mixed forest of the roadside dissolve into a honeycomb of interlocking glades littered with moldering logs and sparse vegetation. The scene was set beneath a dense canopy built of mature timber whose foliage he read as easily as though they were organic calling cards: Doug-fir with sharp looking needles the color of ashen-green olive leaves; Western Hemlock with pendulous boughs punctuated by delicate tips; Red Cedar dangling flattened fans and compact cones. He stood for a moment and unconsciously turned in a slow circle through three-hundred sixty degrees. Surrounded by a landscape which enthralled him, he breathed deep and found it easy to imagine that his own brief inspiration drew an extra dose of vitality from the quiet expiration of the forest.

As he spun to a rest, it was the sight of a shiny mylar birthday balloon lodged in a leafless huckleberry bush which catalyzed his retreat from natural magic back to consensual reality, back to the malignant hive in which he played the role of willing worker, back to the knowledge that his current environment constituted nothing more than one quiet island in a rising flood of diesel exhaust, plastic bags and asphalt cancer. Struggling to shake these thoughts from his mind, he turned his wrist only to see that lunchtime was coming quickly, that he needed to shift gears or risk returning to the cabin as a foraging failure.

Turning his wrist back down, he lowered eyes and followed the continuing wend of the game trail as it meandered toward the distant glow which marked the ending of the trees. Methodically and with practiced purpose, his gaze swept the floor of the forest before his feet. Tuning out as many random thoughts as he possibly could, he waited for the peach-skin blush of Hedgehog caps and the involuted Yellowfoot tops to catch the edge of his peripheral vision and cue his knife-hand to cut their stems.

The first mushrooms which appeared were remnant golden chanterelles showing the bruises and wear of dozens of frosts and as many following rains. Their fringes had mostly browned and turned the texture of thick apple-butter like his great-aunt used to make. Gracefully fluted specimens which would have been wrapped gently and tucked safely atop the pick of an early season day were of no more interest at all. Flawed and compromised, they joined the broken antler in the water and the jellied remains of a long ago sliced Sulfur Shelf in reminding him that autumn is nothing if not a long fade from prime life to dead rot. Crushing the last of these afterthoughts beneath his boot, he saw, five feet ahead, a tight cluster of Yellowfoot mushrooms growing from the moist seam beneath an old blowdown fir.

Somewhere between that tight cluster and the end, he walked smack into the plenitude he’d expected of these woods. Without effort, he picked more than enough to satisfy his own growling hunger and that of his friends. Whether driven by that same unsatisfied appetite or by his desire to warm himself and dry the soaked legs of his pants by radiant firebox, he found himself hustling around the last curve of the road and into sight of Lucy’s cabin. Reaching the front porch out of breath, basket full, sweat-soaked and hangover-free, he laid his hand on the latch of the door and swung it open to reveal a sleeping sheep dog on the mat, crackling sounds emanating from the stove, soft diffuse light from several kerosene lamps, two good friends playing cards, and the first brief conversation of the day.

Holding a glass of red wine in one hand and a cheap cigar in the other, Lucy looked him up and down slowly before speaking her words plainly. “Uhhh... whatcha plannin’ to do with all them mushrooms?”

Glancing first to his bounty and then to Lucy Penobscot as she sat, feet propped up, in all her Arkansas fashionista glory, the Farmer de Ville responded quietly with the best suggestion he could come up with. “Sautéed with butter, onions, sour cream, akvavit and then poured over dark rye toast…”

Lucy nodded and smiled slightly from the edge of her lips, set her wine glass back on the table, picked up her hand of cards, set a run down face up, and whispered, just loud enough to hear. “Better get started then… cause some of us is pretty dang hungry...”