MY FUNGI HUNTING BUSINESS HAS MUSHROOMED

By Tim Colin
When you live way up north you have to come up with creative ways of making a living. One business that I have done well at is giving city people backwoods tour guides. Last year I took people out to the swamp bogs so they could get a good look at quicksand. The funny thing is about half way through the tour everyone would disappear. I guess they thought my tour was boring and took off to the bar. I did learn to take cash up front before I gave a tour. Those people that lit out on me during my quicksand tours ended up not paying and they never answered their phones when I would call them.

This year I have a brand new tour. The annual Martin Mushroom Festival which I believe they have every year, seemed like a great backdrop for my new business, mushroom tours. All I would have to do is advertise in a big city that has a lot of rich people. Well, Detroit is broke but, Chicago has a lot of rich people so I decided to blanket that area with advertising. I did not have any money to spend but, my brother has a cell phone that has unlimited calling during the week provided you call after eleven o’clock at night.

I then offered a buddy of mine a free pitcher of OMB beer if could get me some people signed up for my mushroom hunting tour. He just had to make cold calls some night. It was only a couple of days later that my buddy got arrested for harassing people on the phone. But, before he went to jail he did hook me up with this couple from Chicago who were willing to pay me $500.00 to take them mushroom hunting for the Martin Mushroom festival. Now, not only was I about to make three months wages for just a couple of days work but, I got to drink the pitcher of OMB beer myself since my buddy was in jail and expected to stay there the rest of the spring and maybe part of the summer.

The Chicago couple had lots of bucks. He worked as a store manager and she worked as a nurse. They seemed nice. They were in their forties so they were too old for me to hang out with but, I took them to a nice sports bar where sometimes a former pro athlete drops by. I bought them each a shot of Absolute and then took them to their hotel and put them to bed. It was nine o’clock and I wanted these city slickers to get a good nights rest before I took them into the backwoods. They were both on the pudgy side so, I hoped neither of them would have a heart attack.

After I dropped the old folks off, I went to a topless bar. The next day when we got to the woods I regretted staying out until two. All the birds sounded like they were screaming in my ears and the swamp mold were doing a job to my sinuses. We walked through a swamp and then a black berry briar patch and then, we came across a whole slug of mushrooms. Since we were going to the morel mushroom festival, I figured these must be morel mushrooms. My brother once had his stomach pumped when he ate a mess of poison mushrooms. But, for $500.00 I was willing to take a chance that these were morels and anyway, these people should not be going mushroom hunting if they did not know what they were doing. Furthermore, the people at the mushroom festival would tell us if these were not morel mushrooms the geezers seemed real happy filling up their bag with the stringy pink capped beauties.

After we returned to the car we drove to Martin where the mushroom festival was held. Unfortunately, I was a bit off on my dates and the mushroom festival did not start until the following weekend. The couple was a little perturbed but, I suggested that they come back the next weekend and I would only charge them half price for my services. They agreed.

The couple returned to Chicago with their mushrooms. Three days went by and I had not heard from them in regards to their upcoming redeployment to the mushroom woods during the Martin Mushroom festival. Finally, on Thursday I gave them a call. Some strange lady answered the phone. When I asked to talk to my customers she said that she was their daughter and that her parents were both in the hospital. I immediately envisioned that my middle-aged meal tickets had been in some terrible accident. When I asked the daughter she said no, they had not been in a car accident. Instead, she said, her parents had gone up North to hunt mushrooms with some “creepy backwoods guy”. The daughter then told me that “the creep” had gotten her parents to pick some deadly poisonous mushrooms. She said her parents fried the mushrooms up like “the creep” told them to do and then, ate the mushrooms with steak and red wine. The daughter did say that her parents would be fine but, they would be turning “the creep” into the Better Business Bureau.

When the daughter asked who I was I decided I had better just hang up the phone. I decided that the next time I take people mushroom hunting I would first buy a bag of morel mushrooms and then just find a spot and stick them in the ground. (We do the same thing when we guide deer and moose hunters up here). The people would be happy to find the mushrooms and I would still get paid.