I take off one afternoon to run up a mountain above my home to look for the false morels that sometimes grow in the burned forests there. It’s one of the mountains that feeds my family, one of the mountains on which we are fortunate enough some years to take a deer or an elk, and this one day, strolling through the maze of standing, fire-gutted black spars and also among the trees that survived the fire, I’m fortunate enough to find a patch of morels.
The mushrooms will be delicious when cooked in the same skillet as the elk itself, which also came from this mountain: the decomposing rock, the soil itself, bringing to springing life both the elk and the morel, as well as me, so that if we are not mountains ourselves, moving and gifted briefly with life, we are always a part of these mountains, the arms and legs of these mountains, wandering here and there though returning always to these mountains, which feed our bodies and our imaginations.
There is a certain recipe for preparing elk meat, when one is fortunate enough to take not just an elk in autumn, but later in May, morels. You lay the slice of meat in a heated iron skillet with some melted butter and a little salt and pepper, and slice in the morels, sautéing them with the meat, and after only a short while you shut off the flame and let the elk’s muscle, warmed in that skillet as if back into life, continue cooking on its own.
Because there’s no fat in the meat, the elk muscle conducts heat quickly, as copper wire conducts the galvanic twitchings and shudderings and pulsings of electricity; and the flavor of the morels is absorbed into that warming meat, as the elk in life once browsed on the same terrain, the same soil upon which those morels were growing; and in that manner, once again the meat is suffused with the flavor of the mountain, so that you are eating the mountain straight from the black skillet, so delicious is it.
Timing this last wave of skillet-heat, knowing when to turn off the flame and simply let the meat cook itself is like catching a wave, a surge, and riding it on to shore. The deliciousness of such a meal is no less a miracle than a blackened field turning to green life almost overnight.
The elk roaming through our chests and arms, the elk galloping in our legs, the mountain sleeping in our hearts, whether we are waking or sleeping – rhythms within rhythms within rhythms, which we will never know, but can always honor.