Morels and Rutledge

The last couple weekends I've gotten in on outings with Ryan Walker, a baler engineer named James, and their buddy Steve from Centerville. James' dad is the dealer in North Carolina whom I mentioned in the previous post. Last weekend, we hunted morel mushrooms in ditches in the Centerville area, which is where Ryan is from. There's a certain skill to spotting the little fungi, which upon spotting seem very spotable, yet are still oddly camouflaged. They're either yellowish or gray, and look like brains. There is neither rhyme nor reason to where they decide to pop up. According to Walker, they had picked morels out of the ditches we looked through that day by the bagful, but those may have been fish stories. After several hours looking in two different places and walking many miles, we had found about half a plastic bagful. It was great day to be out in the woods though, not sitting at a desk or driving for countless miles, and I didn't have to even look at a mower.

This weekend the four of us made a mini road trip to Rutledge, Missouri to see the massive flea market they have there. I wasn't sure what to expect, but this was quite a redneck affair. It was pretty rainy so both the crowds and vendors were sparse, but there were still enough of both to make the day. Imagine the most interesting junk and the most worthless junk you've ever seen at yard sales, gather enough of that to fill a 25-acre field, add some guns, and you've got the Rutledge Flea Market. Until you visit Rutledge, you simply wouldn't believe that someone not only has an old old old clothes washer, complete with wringer rollers for drying, but that they are trying to SELL it. And they have three of them, right next to a stack of recorded VHS videos, next to a Milwaukee Ice pool table light, next to a case full of knives, next to...you get the idea. Classy stuff here.

The only thing I found that I couldn't live without was a ridiculously tiny cast iron pan, in which I planned to cook an egg at a time in for sandwiches. It didn't work that well though, because even with lots of oil, the egg didn't dislodge from the pan easily enough. It's a little too ungainly to be a keychain bobble, but it was only a dollar. I almost bought a plastic child's accordion to mail to my niece unexpectedly, but walked away and it got rained on. Your home will remain accordion-free, Court and Aaron...for now.

We scared up another batch of mushrooms on the way back to fill out the day. Morels are prepared by deep fat frying, and are quite delicious.

To top off the weekend, I swapped a couple tunes with Deanna Smith, who met Riley's sessioneers Will Harmon and Dawn Buckley at an Irish music camp in Portal, Arizona last year. Deanna lives south of Des Moines, and was my connection into the session scene in Des Moines.