Chapter 5: The Morel Challenge
On the one hand, if you knew nothing about morel mushrooms, paying money to get on a bus that’s quickly filling up with nothing but morel mushroom hunters (all strangers you’ve never met) might seem uncomfortably odd. Especially when you realize none of the morel hunters has any idea where they will be going.
They know this:
In a few minutes they all will be driven to someplace very secret near a forest, climb out of the bus, then wait for a signal. At that moment they will begin running into the woods with empty bags and knives.
This is a morel challenge, a competition where foragers race to find as many morel mushrooms--more and bigger morels than anybody else’s morels--as fast as they can, before the final signal is fired.
It would all seem very strange. And not in a good way, especially to those people who know nothing about morels.
Reasonable people would chuckle.
They know this is weird.
If you were one of those reasonable people, now backing away from the bus, you would have absolutely no interest in going wherever these people are going.
Look at them.
The bus is loaded with insane people.
But there they are, nodding back in agreement, smiling with that guiltless look of happiness.
We are all crazy, morel hunters laugh, and everybody knows it.
And joining a contest to see who’s really the crazy one, reasonable people should decide as they purchase their empty bag and step onto the bus, is the only way to settle this crazy talk.
