Curtis Cluckey, mushroom finder
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
His work is washing windows, but his passion is mushrooms. His dream is to grow them commercially.
Cluckey meets me at Art’s Bar on Lake Street in Glen Arbor on a muggy May morning. He’s just come from washing the windows at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church across the street. By reputation and in person, he’s the Glen Arbor version of legendary Johnny Appleseed, a quintessential backwoodsman with good skills, good stories, and palpable integrity, a great window washer and a gifted mushroom finder.
“There’s a lot more to Curt than meets the eye,” says Anneke Wegman of Lake Leelanau, wife of Guy Plamondon who owns Plamondon Shoes on Front Street in Traverse City; Cluckey’s been a family friend for two decades. “We love his stories. Once we held him hostage until he put in five pieces of a very hard 1,000-word puzzle just so we could hear his stories,” she says. “The most important thing about Curt is that he’s always been very good to our children.” She’s hoping to have Cluckey teach her youngest son, a budding naturalist, some of his mushroom lore. “I trust him. We could use more good guys like Curt.” In a day and age when being trustworthy is coming back into vogue, Cluckey has that old-fashioned quality in abundance.
When Curtis “Curt” Cluckey was a young man, he tells of how he rode a bicycle north from Ludington, where he’d been staying with his grandparents, to the Leelanau Peninsula. “The bike was a one-speed Huffy. I think it probably had three speeds at one time, but it was broken.” He laughs. “It took a week.” Today with a good bike, he says, a person could do it in a day. I ask if he was wearing a helmet and spandex and he says he wasn’t, but it probably wouldn’t have helped with that particular bike. “I slept in pastures. You’d be amazed at how close you can be to the road and still be invisible. I had a pup tent and a sleeping bag. It was May. It was cold in the morning. I had to get up and get moving.”
He found the Leelanau Peninsula to his liking, got a job washing windows with Bill Burmeister of Northport and, except for some time out in Montana and a few different excursions around the United States, has been here ever since. “I worked for Bill for 13 years,” Cluckey says. “A few years ago I bought the business from him.” Leelanau Window Cleaning is listed in the Leelanau phone book.
When Cluckey traveled, he says he rode the freight trains and hitchhiked. “I found I could take an empty can and put in paraffin and cardboard and make a little cooker. I ate beans. Potatoes. I never ate anything that cost anything. I shopped at the co-ops.”
“I always worked. I was a dishwasher at a Big Boy. Wherever I went, I’d go to the temp agencies. They’d put you to work right away. In Seattle I put in foundations. I went east, too. I shoveled snow in Boston. There was a lot of warehouse work. I took odd jobs. Anything to earn a few dollars. One place they paid to check the size of your aorta. My aorta was good-sized because of all that work.” Like Jack London and Woodie Gutherie before him, and of course, Johnny Appleseed, he loved his country and wanted to see it in its most unvarnished state.
“In all of my travels I always spent time in nature. I think the United States is so beautiful. In Washington State there were farms and forests,” he says. “Now it’s all developed. The forests are becoming farms and the farms are becoming cities.” Once he bought a used bike from a yard sale and traveled along a western lake.
“I’ve had the same clients for years, “Cluckey says about his window washing. “I do advertise, but mostly I get referrals. People don’t hire someone to come in their house unless they know someone who had him do work for them.”
He had said over the phone that he didn’t usually eat in restaurants, not in the habit of it and also saving his money for his mushroom-growing business. Eating at Art’s Bar in Glen Arbor is a festive occasion. He’s wearing what looks like a new Carhartt t-shirt and definitely new Dickies canvas pants because the tag is still on a back pant leg where he hadn’t thought to look for it. He’s dressed up for this. It’s adorable. Cluckey is exactly the kind of guy you’d trust to teach your son how to find morels or come to your cottage and clean the windows. He’s as genuine and gentle as a leaf or bird.
“He’s a very honest person,” says artist Beth Bricker. On a recent day, Beth says, “when it was cold and sunny, Curt was working with my sister and Bill [Cherry and Bill Stegge], at my grandparents’ old cottage. He does a great job. He entered into the conversation with us.” Cluckey says he charges by the window, not by the hour, so that way if he and his customers get into a conversation nobody needs to worry about the time. It makes for a more congenial work atmosphere.
When morel mushrooms were more plentiful on the Leelanau Peninsula and Cluckey lived down in what’s called “the hollows” on Plowman Road, he would find the morels and sell them at the nearby upscale Burdickville restaurants, La Becasse and Funistrada, according to Josephine Arrowood who was his neighbor at the time. “He was a good neighbor,” she says. “One spring he plowed for me.”
Cluckey says that in that earlier time in his life, about 20 years ago, the morel hunting was better. “The hills above Glen Lake were great for ‘em because they haven’t been logged [since the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was established in 1970]. The habitat is intact. Logging changes everything.”
One of the reasons Cluckey says he wants to grow mushrooms to sell is that they’re disappearing from the woods. “The mushrooms that grow on trees, have been there thousands of years. They don’t move around. They have a symbiotic relationship to the trees. If the trees are gone, the mushrooms go dormant [in the soil]. They won’t come back until the trees come back.” Cluckey has a business partner and together they hope to go into the mushroom-growing business. “We’re looking at a 20,000-square-foot building in Cheboygan. We’ve got a business plan.”
Cluckey says he comes from a long line of American pioneers. “I’m named for my great-grandmother. Her name was Violeta Curtis Pierce. Pierce was the last name of his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side, a frontiersman who was an aide for Kit Carson. “My grandfather Pierce helped Kit Carson map the Oregon Trail.”
He thinks he likes to be out in the woods because that’s his family’s background. He learned the names of the trees from his grandfather. “They came, probably, from England, probably 400 years ago.” Like many of the early English pioneers, the people in the Pierce and Cluckey families kept moving west as the eastern United States became more developed.
Mushrooms, Cluckey says, are rich in Vitamin D. They’re also a source of protein and boost the immune system in ways scientists are just beginning to define. Shitake mushrooms have been proven to fight cancerous tumors in mice, according to a classic book on the subject, The Mushroom Cultivator, by Paul Stamets and J.S. Chilton, a copy of which Cluckey carries in his truck. The Chinese have been finding medicinal uses for shitake mushrooms for centuries.
One of the ways he cooks morels, Cluckey says, is to dip them in batter — the same kind of batter one would use for onion rings — and then deep fat fry them. Morels have to be soaked in salt water first and then allowed to drain on paper towels. And of course one needs to know how to identify morels or to trust that the morel hunter knows. Morels are the northern Michigan version of French truffles, rich-tasting and uniquely satisfying. People who grew up in the wilds of northern Michigan learn their value as a cooking ingredient. They can make an ordinary meal exquisite.
Morels can be chopped up, browned in a little butter, and used as a steak sauce. A dish made with small green zucchini, morels, heavy cream, ziti and a grating of Reggiano Parmigiano is delicious, with the cream making everything taste like the wild mushrooms; the black morels are best for this. Morels dry well and once they’re dried can be kept for years. The dried morels are great crumbled and added to spaghetti sauce.
“I like to be outdoors,” Cluckey says. “I like to be in the woods. It’s cool under the trees. It’s good exercise.” He doesn’t stick to the woodland trails in his mushroom hunting but goes up and down the hills, through brush and over treefalls. “I like to explore new places. Mushroom hunting has taken me all over Michigan, down to Cadillac and up to Munising. It’s like a sport, except you don’t need a license.”
Other areas of the state, away from Lake Michigan, are often better habitat for mushrooms, according to Cluckey. “This area is arid, maybe because it’s a peninsula sticking out into the water, but it’s dry and breezy.” More humid, inland woods are often better for mushrooms. Mesick, for example, is prime morel habitat.
“Morels grow under ash trees, mostly, and some under elm trees,” Cluckey says. “But with the emerald ash borer coming in and killing all the ash trees, morels are harder to find. Last summer I was in the places where I used to find morels under the ash trees and they weren’t there anymore. And every weed was covered with the ash borer.” Ash borers are a small beetle and, true to their name, are a brilliant emerald green. It’s a rare and unforgettable shade of green with a flashy metallic sheen to it.
“I’ve studied mushrooms,” Cluckey says. “Elm oysters, they grow on trees and they’re delicious. I’ve grown shitake, brick-top mushrooms.” He wants to grow mushrooms indoors and sell them to grocery stores around Michigan. “If we actually do it, we’ll be selling at least 1,000 pounds of mushrooms a week.”
He finishes his lunch and pushes back from the table. It’s time to head back to the church job across the street. It’s beautiful outside. “It’s a dream,” he says of the idea of growing mushrooms. “We all need to have a dream. It might happen. I’d be happy if it did.”
This is the first installment in Kathleen Stocking’s series of local love stories. Find her latest book The Long Arc of the Universe — Travels Beyond the Pale at the Cottage Book Shop and other local bookstores.
