A Mushroom Mystery
Last weekend I went on a roadtrip with the boys. We drove to the town I grew up in, to visit their grandparents.
After a 4h drive we arrived in the tiny village in the middle of the forest. When I was a teenager, this place felt incredibly constraining, it’s now this spot of beautiful open nature, silence and clean air.
Rudi (my older son) loves to eat mushrooms and he had been out with my parents a few times in the past in the nearby forests. It seemed just natural that we’d head out and see whether there were any more to find. (unlikely in November)
Equipped with rubber boots, bags and knives we set off.
You may remember those 3D image books from the 90s. At first glance they just look like pages of random patterns, colors and shapes. When held in the right angle and close enough to the nose, just with the right softness of focus, something might emerge. Ohh look a picture of a cute bunny..
Anyways, I was never good at seeing those, I guess my red-green blindness doesn’t help. The forest floor looked exactly like one of those images. Red and brown leaves everywhere, in between moss, pinecones, needles etc. It was Rudi who spotted the first (edible) mushroom - large brown cap, nice stem, picture perfect!
I saw nothing but leaves and random patterns, so I settled my mind on “this is just going to be a nice walk in the forest for me” then the weather changed. We went from crisp temperatures with grey skies to the occasional patch of blue with some rays of sunshine all the way to a pouring rainstorm.
At first, I was pretty annoyed with the rain. We didn’t have another change of clothes for this trip, if we got drenched then it would be a really uncomfortable drive in the afternoon… Then I saw the upside - little, round, shiny things on the ground. Turns out that the mushrooms shine in a particular way when they get wet, different than the leaves, the moss and all the other stuff. Boom! Suddenly I was in the game.
It took maybe 30 minutes and my bag was half full. Oh what joy! I think this was the first time in my life that I found that many mushrooms. I heard the kids somewhere in hedges nearby - “Woow, look at this!! We found a patch… “ Everybody had a grand time.
After a while we decided to head back down for the valley when I spotted something on the ground a little further up the hill. When I got closer I noticed a bunch of really nice mushrooms cleanly cut off and laid on a little pile. That was puzzling, who would do that !? Who would cut off these beauties and then put them on a nice little pile and then abandon them. What a waste - in my bag they went.
A little further down the trail, I noticed the next pile - WTF!? Someone had been here just before us? Cut those off, put them on a neat little pile and left!? Unlikely - Still puzzled, I shoved them in my bag and continued my hike, when I noticed it:
Ahhhhh - well it looks like the mysterious mushroom piling culprit was: Me! That bag must have given up under the moisture and weight of my haul and slowly turned into a mushroom-dripper until eventually the whole floor fell out.
Everyone got a great laugh out of it including myself. In the past this would have really annoyed me, to be so silly. Now, it’s just a funny anecdote, a memory with the fam.
There is probably some deeper, philosophical lesson in this story, for me right now, it’s enough to remember that we all do silly stuff at times, that’s for sure. How we react makes the difference between a great day or a shit day.
