Autumn is my favourite season, the richness of the colours, the chill mornings that give way to sunny, hot afternoons, the twilight and colours of the light as evening approaches, the flocks of starlings to be seen like clouds of smoke above the flats or by the river, the apples and plums on stalls by the side of the road.
It’s also a favourite season because it’s the time when mushrooms appear. I’m a great fan of fungi and a couple of weeks ago we took a train out to Podkowa Leśna, a small town whose hospital was made famous by the soap Na dobre i na złe. We were intent on picking some mushrooms of our very own. The journey takes about 40 minutes, although the hard plastic seats of the rumbling, lurching, thundering WKD train make it feel longer. We passed through Pruszkow, famous for its gangsters and out into the countryside, alighting at our stop in an almost different world, where sounds are more natural instead of the constant roar of Warsaw traffic. An old train was sitting at the platform but we weren’t interested in that and headed off – after a brief glance at a map – towards the forest.
At first I thought it was going to be a let down, the road we followed allowed cars along it and was dusty and noisy but as soon as we reached the forest proper it got infinitely better and we followed a path that wound along the edge of the trees. After a while we struck into the forest itself and all the sounds from the town gradually quietened. A woodpecker was calling, a dog barked in a far-off garden, a plane rumbled over head, but the best sound of all was the gentle breath of the wind in the treetops, the movement of branches and, above all, the silence of the outdoors.
Collecting mushrooms isn’t as easy as it sounds. For a start, all the ones you find immediately, the white ones, the tall ones, the red and white fairytale ones, they’re all deadly poisonous. If you do eat one that's a bit dodgy you can look forward to symptoms that include stomach ache, vomiting, high temperature, heavy diarrhoea and muscle ache. Obviously, the safe ones, the ones you can eat grow low down, in shady places and they’re coloured green and brown, khaki and grey to blend in with the undergrowth and leaf mould on which they grow. In the dappled sunlight of a September afternoon they’re bloody hard to spot. After a while, and after you’ve found the first few, you get used to looking, and it becomes easier. We moved deeper into the forest to find more, I got really excited that, for probably the first time in my life (excluding blackberries and Mrs Orrell’s apples) I was foraging for something I would later eat. Every so often we’d meet other people, some old men pushing bikes, big plastic buckets full of mushrooms, or a family with little wicker baskets, all gathering for the winter like connoisseur squirrels. For me, the delight of the day was being in the forest, searching, in the peace and quiet. Lately we’ve talked of moving to Gdynia, or somewhere else on the coast and I realised that it isn’t just the sea I miss, it’s the silence of the countryside, away from the roar of traffic, the smell of fumes and the crowds of people.
We stopped to eat our sandwiches on a gate, seeing as there were absolutely no benches to be found. An old woman shuffled past, taking an even older-looking dog for a walk. She disappeared into the distance, muttering and shuffling along in her slippers but the dog grew tired and wandered back the way they had come. She never even noticed and the last we saw, she was stood at the edge of the trees, looking for something in the undergrowth. A mushroom maybe, or a long lost jewel, or a memory.
At some point in the afternoon, the foraging stopped being fun. I think it was when we decided that we didn’t know exactly where we were, that the afternoon was wearing on and we had no idea how long it would take to get to Otrębusy for the train back. The last hour or so was a - still enjoyable but slightly less so - brisk walk, along some fairly unpleasant roads full of drivers trying to beat land speed records and it was with some relief that we got to the station to wait for the train. The seats on the return were much comfier, due mainly to the train being a new one, not one of those old bone-shakers we’d travelled out on.
Back home the mushrooms were sliced, threaded onto string, draped over the clothes horse and left to dry. The next day they were put in the oven to dry them further as they still seemed to be damp. It turned out that what we’d picked (a full carrier bag full) were fairly wet and of course when they dried, they shrank. So our carrier bag of forage is now down to a couple of hundred grams in an empty mayonnaise jar. One day I’ll make some soup with them but for now I’ll remember the afternoon I became a hunter gatherer again and went into the forest to pick mushrooms. As the weather is still warm and sunny we may get another chance to forage for provisions, before the cold, dark days of winter leave us snuggled in front of the television.
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