The Same Spring

The ground doesn't get older. The people who walked it with you do.

The cane helps on the flat stretches and does almost nothing on the climb, which is about what I expected. I've had a bad hip for years now and a worse one this spring, and I'd told myself back in March that if I was going to make this hike one more time, it had better be this year, because I wasn't going to bet on next year showing up the same way. I don't say that to anyone out loud. I don't think you have to. You just start noticing which trips you're doing "one more time" and which ones you've quietly stopped scheduling at all.

This particular slope, off a lesser-known drainage in the High Peaks, isn't on any map I'd hand to a stranger, and I like it that way. I've been coming up here for morels every spring for more than forty years, and before that I was coming up here for deer, with two other men who are no longer around to argue with me about any of it.

Harry and Dan. Harry's been gone eleven years now, Dan almost six. We hunted this same drainage every November for the better part of three decades, and if you'd asked any one of us who the best shot of the three was, you'd have gotten three different, extremely confident answers. Harry kept a running tally in a little spiral notebook he wouldn't let either of us read, and Dan swore up and down for years that the notebook was fiction, right up until the year Harry actually produced it to settle an argument and turned out to be telling the truth the whole time, which Dan never really forgave him for. Dan, for his part, refused on principle to sit still in a stand for more than about forty minutes at a stretch, which meant he moved more deer toward Harry and me than either of us ever moved toward him, a fact Dan considered strategy and we considered him being unable to sit down.

They were good men and I'm not going to make a speech about it. We drank bad coffee out of a thermos that leaked, argued about whose truck was less reliable, and gave each other grief for forty years running. That's the whole memory, most days. It's enough.

The trail bends around a big boulder about two-thirds of the way up, and past that there's a spring that comes straight out of the rock, cold enough in May that it aches in your teeth. Harry and Dan and I used to stop there every single trip, no exceptions, whether we needed water or not — it was just where you stopped. I got down as best I could with the cane, cupped my hand under it the way I always have, and drank. Cold, mineral, a little metallic at the back of the throat. Exactly the same as it was the first time I put my mouth to it, however many decades ago that was now. I couldn't tell you what's changed about that water. I don't think anything has.

That's the part that gets me every year and got me again today, worse than usual. The ground doesn't know how much time has passed. The spring doesn't know Harry's gone. The slope where we used to glass for deer movement is exactly the same slope, down to the same downed birch that's been rotting in the same spot since before either of them died, just a little more rotten each year, the way everything up here changes at its own slow, patient pace and nothing else's. Everything out here holds still except the people who come to it.

I found the first morel maybe twenty minutes past the spring, right where they always turn up on this slope — half-hidden at the base of a dying elm, that honeycombed grey-tan cap looking exactly like it's looked every May of my life. A few more after that, scattered along the same rough line the good ones always follow here, like the mycelium underneath has never once forgotten where it's supposed to fruit.

I picked them anyway. Knelt down slow, because that's the only speed I've got left, and cut each one at the base the way I was taught, same as always. It didn't feel like a big moment. It felt like exactly what it's always felt like — bending down for a mushroom on a hillside I know better than most rooms in my own house. Maybe I won't make it back up here next spring. Maybe I will. Either way, the morels won't care, and neither will the spring. They'll just keep coming back, the same, right on schedule, whether or not anyone's left who remembers who used to come up here with me.

— James Conklin, Founder, Spore & Scout