By M. Winfrey
There’s a place near my village, where the animal track around the mountain emerges from the forest into a meadow, that on a certain week every September erupts with mushrooms.
It’s the best spot. After the forest settles into Indian summer, the porcini and chanterelles sprout like a carpet among the beech trees and the chunks of basalt that villagers piled into walls hundreds of years ago after cutting down the forest to grow their crops.
It’s not half a mile from the main road, and there’s a post with a plaque saying the park starts there, right at the head of a faint trail. But down at the pub run by the widow and her daughter, also a widow, no one has ever heard of it.
I’ve never seen another human print there. Only those of deer, red and roe, and chamois and of course the bulldozed turf of wild pigs. If people only knew. A single visit supplies us for the year.
Mushroom hunting is like this: First you think you came at the wrong time, or mistook the place, and that even if you got those two things right you’ve become blind to them and think that they’re there, but you just can’t see them.
Then you calm yourself. You’re in the forest, so nothing can go wrong. Sometimes you go home empty handed and all you got was a few hours among the trees. But if it’s the other kind of day, you see the first one and wonder why you ever doubted yourself.
A perfect porcini looks like a dinner roll. A toasted brown top with a fat white leg that doesn’t give easy when you tug. Some people call them boletus or cepes. Where I live, on the edge of an ancient, extinct volcano in the northern Czechlands, they’re known as hriby. When they get bigger the top darkens and the creamy sponge undercap turns yellow and they can get as big as a hat.
In Europe at least, they’re impossible to mistake for anything that will kill you. There’s just one — called a Satan — that will make a meal bitter and might upset your stomach. If you’re not sure, you can touch it to your tongue and know right away if it’s the good one. Never eat anything you don’t know is okay.
The best thing to do when you spot a hrib is to stop moving and crouch down. They always have brothers, and in this spot on the shoulder of the mountain, it’s a big family and there’s a danger of trampling. Closer to the ground, it’s like you have just snapped an imagined reality into being, and suddenly there’s another mushroom, then three more, then even dozens that weren’t there a second ago.
I have favorite spots in the patch. There’s one pocket under a beech root that offers an apple-sized specimen, always worm-free without fail. There’s another seam in a pile of the hex-shaped volcanic rocks where five or six come up in a staggered line. If we’re lucky, there’s a mossy place in the sun on the way there, where handfuls of orange chanterelles pop out of the trail bank. But that’s a different story.
Because mushrooms fruit from a dense tangle of fungus spread out like a vast tree underground, they emerge from the same places year after year. Some people don’t know this, so after they’ve driven their families and parked at the bottom of the village, they wander through the woods with their baskets like pilgrims seeking maize in a desert.
When we came to the new place, we did this too. It took us years to find the places on the edges of fields, just inside the tree line, where its boggy and sunny but not too much of either. Or near the sandstone towers, which exhale the sunlight and moisture they’ve drunk in all winter and then put it back into the soil.
It’s the thing that happens when you work over the same routes again and again. Then curiosity sags into boredom and you leave the paths, and maybe later it changes to wonder, when you ken that the forest is as crowded as a train station and every being in it has work to do and somewhere to be.
If we hit the time exactly right, we come home with a hundred. It means risottos and pasta for days and an hour of slicing and lining them up on racks on the terrace for the autumn light and slowly chilling breeze to dry them for soups and sauces and stuffings.
Then they go into glass jars and into the larder. A year later we’ll tread the mossy floor among the trunks wondering if we remember things we’ve learned from all those previous years.
— M. Winfrey is a journalist who lives in northern Bohemia. He spent much of his life trying to grow up but quit when he discovered that all he ever wanted to do was play in the woods.