On Keeping Secrets

I’m now getting to the place in this blog where I must be careful not to give away anything really, really important.  This has nothing to do with the caves on Jicarita Peak that I haven’t yet told you about or the hot springs I have found over the years that sit just above and below the rim of that long black scar west of Taos known as the Rio Grande “Box.” And it has nothing to do with the fact that my partner in this new pursuit may be worried that I will tell too much. I mean, he mostly likes to walk in the rain and jump into puddles.

My wife and I went to visit him early last fall and what we found when we got there was rain; It was the kind of rain that, if it occurred in Santa Fe, would find its way through every flat roof, skylight, and foundation in the county—even those featured in back issues of Architectural Digest.  It had been raining for weeks, it continued to rain while we were there and it rained steadily until after we were gone.

In my long career as a more or less observant itinerant, I have discovered that rural folk, especially those in the southern hemisphere, don’t worry about being out in the rain while urban folk, especially those in the northern hemisphere, spend a lot of time trying to get away from it—the rain, I mean. The exceptions to this last rule seem always to be little kids and their grandfathers.

So, when things seemed to get a bit tense for those of us stuffed into a closed-up space, I would ask my young partner if he wanted to go for a walk in the rain. The response was an immediate break for the door; but only after we donned our raingear (T-shirts, shorts and sandals) were we allowed to go outside.

He loved the puddles; but a close second was when I would lift him up so that he could pull a crab apple off a tree and the pull would release a torrent of large drops that got into his eyes, nose and ears making him squeal for more.

And then we saw the mushrooms: zillions of them in all colors and sizes. To be honest, I’m no mycologist but I do recognize a half dozen or so that are very good eating; and I know enough not to sample the others.  I wondered if he knew anything about mycology.

Sure, the kid was only 16 months old but what the heck, it’s never too soon to learn about mushrooms and neither his mother nor his grandmother were there to say “no,” so under my tutelage, before long he could easily tell the difference between a mushroom and a pinecone, between a mushroom and dog doo-doo, and between a mushroom and a Bud Lite can. I have no doubt that he could easily have mastered their scientific names as well except that, like the rest of us, he had trouble saying that weird Latin “æ” sound.

All of this probably makes no sense unless you know that a friend and I had gone out earlier in the year to look for “Brown.”  We had set up camp and a very nice campground lady came by to make sure we hadn’t placed the tent door over an ant hill and she told us that Game and Fish had recently “shocked” the stream and discovered several “Browns” of 36 inches and pointed us in the right direction. After about an hour of hiking up the trail that followed the stream, we sat down to rest and I took out my binoculars to see if I could spot an eagle, an elk or someone else looking for Forrest Fenn’s treasure. Nothing.  What I did see though, was a fairly large pool at the end of a lengthy ripple in the stream about thirty yards below us.  And in that pool was absolutely the largest trout I had ever seen outside of the “Macho Pond” at the fish hatchery north of Pecos.

My friend immediately went down to count coup while I watched from above. To make a long story short, I will leave out the part where I took a nap while my friend did his best imitation of “nija fishing,” and say only that 36-inch trout do not get to be 36-inch trout because they are stupid.

On our way back we ran into a number of cows in a small meadow and while my friend busily practiced his dry-fly casting, I decided to take the “world’s most awesome photograph” of a cow. It was when I zoomed out to include some of the landscape that I noticed the meadow was full of soccer balls.

Except they weren’t. What they were, were Calvatia gigantea, the giant puffball; a royal member of the Lycoperdacæ family and a choice edible. There were enough mushrooms in that meadow to have fed Napoleon’s army with soupe aux champignons throughout his whole campaign.

And now you want to know where they are. No way. Mushroom finds are secrets more tightly held than are the solutions to any of Forrest Fenn’s most difficult clues. You will have to find your own. 

Happæ hunting,

r/