April, or A Shortcut To Mushrooms

Somewhere near Lame Deer

The end of April finds me close to Lame Deer, Montana, well into Eastern Montana, and yet still quite far from leaving the state, because Montana, let me say one more time, is very big. Once I pass through Wyoming, I resolve to stop posting pictures of wide open spaces and to stop writing about barely-populated places, but for now, here we are. Lame Deer has a population over 2,000, but it is another census-designated place, something less than a town.

About those mushrooms: I found another morel today, and I have now found nine in total in the woods near my house. Arlo and I walk by those woods every morning, and most days this week I walked into the woods and did some looking. Morel mushrooms are a family tradition that stretches back all the way to Ohio almost 60 years ago - back at least as far as I can remember. We stopped hunting for them when we moved to California, until someone found a place in the Sierra foothills where they grow, and the family started taking a weekend each year to camp and hunt for mushrooms. I have not been on that camping trip for the last 24 years, I think, and had only found one morel in Washington in my 27 years here until this year. As long as I live in this house though, and as long as they don't cut the forest down, I have a place to look now.

For the month of April, I walked 10,000 steps every day but one, a day when I walked 9,700 steps and forgot to walk the extra three minutes to finish it off. In four months, I have missed 10,000 steps four times.

More importantly, I averaged over 12,000 steps per day for the month. This is because of that walk Arlo and I take each morning that takes us next to the woods - I feel good most mornings, and the weather keeps getting warmer (still mostly 50s), so I walk extra. It's a nice walk on a gravel and dirt path under some power lines, and not many people walk there, and Arlo and I like it.

At the end of February, I was just on pace at 10,000 steps per day to that point. Now, I am 120,000 steps, or twelve days, ahead of the pace and thinking about how quickly I can get this done.