And I will have enjoyed every minute of it.
I meet my 55-year-old cousin in front of my great aunt's house, five minutes after I've hopped out of bed. She hands me a wicker basket and my walking stick. She asks me if my dad went into town, for her pack of Ronhill cigarettes and chocolate. These provisions won't merely sustain her, for all of that nicotine, sugar and caffeine act as jet fuel for my cousin. She can launch into the wood deftly, like a chain-smoking, chocolate-chewing Istrian ninja in a baby blue windbreaker. An excited, Istrian, windbreaker-cloaked ninja, on the hunt for the fungal darlings of the Bay Area food scene -- Chantrelles and Porcinis.
The kindly man who helps my aunt with household chores (let's call him Luka), drives us to one of my cousin's "spots." He leaves us to slosh through the wood. Oh, and the wood? It looks a little like Blair Witch, and it's impossible not to get your ponytail stuck in a branch, or on a leaf, or, if you're as graceful as I am, on the very ground littered with twigs and the occasional jagged rock. I was bending down to pick up my walking stick, and next thing I knew, I was glued to the forest floor. My cousin had the height advantage of being about five inches shorter than me -- truly a plus when you're weaving your way through fallen branches, brambles, molehills, or maybe around a hornets' nest (maybe).
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| If you forage for mushrooms in Tinjan, Croatia, the "path" ahead of you might look like this. |
"Okay, now, you go this way, and I go that way." My cousin makes vague zig-zagging gestures with her walking stick while explaining this to me. It would have confused any non-Croat, but I got it. And we seemed to do okay -- we found some purple-capped mushrooms my aunt loves, and other mushrooms that were pretty but, as my cousin explained, "not good for eat."
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| Mushrooms like these are wonderful to come across on the Croatian forest floor. Just stunning little toadstools. But definitely "not good for eat," because you will die if you do. |
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| Coral mushrooms. Look, don't eat. |
I lose my cousin about a dozen times. If she can't hear me scream her name, or the occasional "GDJE SI TI?!" (Where are you?! [I'm admittedly ashamed of my accent, so I avoid the phrase as much as possible]), I look for the faint smoke signals of her Ronhills, which might lead me to her zig-zagging path.
Having found very little that morning, we make our way back to our chauffeur. I have no idea how my cousin foraged without a mobile phone, her sense of direction being so poor, but Luka seemed to know those forests like the back of his hand. Note to self, I thought: invest in compass when pursuing this hobby seriously back in the Bay. Sprint won't cut it on the Sonoma Coast.
"Okay. So from where you are, you should head northwest. So that the sun is on your left shoulder," he told her. Details like that revealed how keen a forager has to be -- where the sun comes up, when, during what times of the year, where exactly those mushrooms grow, etc. In fact, each mushroom hunter extraordinaire I came across seemed to have their "spot" they were reticent about, their closely-guarded knowledge of why Chantrelles grew where, why Porcinis in another spot. In one outing, with my aunt, we pulled over at the side of the highway, climbing over garbage to search for Chantrelles in a hidden clearing. "Eh?" was my only verbal reaction when the car stopped (and we found nothing).
* * * * *
We did find little that September morning; my cousin went back out with the farm dog later that afternoon, only to find yet more of very little. Instead of accompanying her, I slept, exhausted from the five hours of stomping, tangling and searching.
We resolved to go again, not to be daunted by the crapshoot that is foraging. It would rain in the next few weeks, so there would be Chantrelles, and Porcinis, and other lovely little morsels, and we'd go again, damnit.
That's what coursed through my veins in my afternoon nap, as I dreamed of venturing back into the woody abyss once more.
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