But I really go for deeper reasons: there is an annual tryst with the world that I must make, a reunion with Nature after the astonishing rebirth of the winter landscape. In addition to mushroom hunting, I go to enjoy the parkway, to see whether the shadbush is blooming, to find out whether the bloodroot has appeared and to note when the first trilhum lifts its white petals. I almost hold my breath for the rare sight of a showy pink orchid. I listen for the cheerful call of a Carolina wren, the scratchy song of a scarlet tanager and the distant drumbeat of a pileated woodpecker. I’ve been doing this since I was 10, nearly half a century ago.
When I meet others in the woods, they are always good-natured and polite. It is hard to figure out who they are, since we wear flannel shirts and jeans, boots or sneakers. We go our separate ways, respecting each other’s territories. Some smoke while they are in the woods, which makes me nervous, for forest fires start easily in the dry duff of dead and fallen trees. Usually the spring woods are damp or even wet, for which I give thanks as I watch a man flick his cigarette over a fallen limb into a tangle of grapevine. He doesn’t even check to see that it’s safely out.
However, we are unfailingly polite; we nod but rarely speak. If and when we do, it is to say what a nice day it is, or to ask, “found any?” or to answer, “a few.” We smile and go our solitary ways. Rapists and murderers, I like to think, do not hunt morels in the mountains of Virginia.
My impression is that we are all there because we love tramping through the spring woods, and because we love what we find and see and hear. I believe we share a reverence for the places we are privileged to visit. We would no more trample a wild orchid than we would purposely run over a dog. I think they, as I do, watch for deer and raccoon tracks. We are often miles from highways, in places where humans don’t regularly go, and have trudged down or up dangerous boulder-choked hillsides and braved gnats, mosquitoes, ticks and even snakes to be where we are. Our journeys are not without peril.
So why is it that some of these people, who seem just like me, will toss rubbish from their cars or litter the woods with potato-chip bags, aluminum cans and wads of paper napkins? It isn’t just owners of shiny Volvos and Lincolns who are reluctant to soil their slick upholstery. I’ve also seen paper bags and plastic cups spewing out of the windows of old Toyotas and battered trucks.
Some of these otherwise good people leave McDonald’s wrappers and plastic deep in the woods, damaging dells of May apple and jack-in-the-pulpit. Can it be they are not jarred by the sight of tattered bags and half-eaten sandwiches in these sacred places, not dismayed to find broken pop bottles and bent beer cans all over the tender green woods?
I think of the ugly Americans who trash everything they touch, who enjoy vandalizing a cemetery or a carwash, simmering in their own misguided angers fueled by abuse or poverty. I understand destroying public places where these people, mostly young, feel their disenfranchisement most keenly. I don’t condone it; but I do understand it. I sympathize with their rage at a world that won’t take them into consideration in any meaningful way, that won’t give them their share because of the circumstances they were born to. I also understand their frustration at never having been able to get ahead. They are acting out, but tragic as it is, there is a reason.
Yet many of these gentle spring motorists and hikers who choose the parkway over the Interstate, quality over speed, and who seek gorgeous scenery or the delicate fungi that hide in the underbrush are so careless. Why?
There seems to be no angry statement in the scattered papers, the beer bottles, the discarded used diapers, the pink plastic bag slowly rolling along the ground in the spring breeze, that holds, when one checks it out, nothing more than a plastic spoon. It’s not even the drunken stupidity of college kids winding miles of toilet paper around trees on the campus, making needless work for whoever has to clean it up. That can be explained away by youthful ignorance and mob mania.
No, this trash is not the have-nots ruining the world for the haves. It’s not misdirected adolescent humor. There is something in the American mentality that doesn’t see anything wrong with tossing rubbish - or anything that is inconvenient to carry - into a lovely forest or along a scenic highway. Some Americans simply don’t care about ugliness (as long as it’s not in their cars). As with many issues in our society, the assumption is that others will clean up our messes.
We clearly view the natural spaces we have I left differently from Europeans. I believe we are the only civilized country in the world that doesn’t have a cabinet-level position that deals with land-use planning. I recall from a trip I took years ago how Germans who hiked through the Black Forest picked up debris as they went along to ensure that their woods remained clean; in America we act as we have acted for centuries, as if there were still virgin space to move into once we’ve used up what we have.
Each year thousands of tourists visit Colonial Williamsburg for its beauty. Yet these same people tolerate and patronize the miles of garish commercial strips-abysmal concrete landscapes studded with every vain and tawdry thing we materialists ever dreamed of-that fine every entrance to that lovely historic town of restored gardens and houses. Apparently, few see the irony.
Similarly, how could anyone sensitive enough to hunt mushrooms be so unaware? It’s a mystery I can’t fathom.
