Mushroom Mania

We pitched our tent at dusk in the woods next to a giant misty meadow with colorful green, yellow and reddish grass. I knew the woods around us were full of mushrooms because we found some even in the dim light of the evening, but I was completely unprepared for what I saw the next morning as I climbed out of the tent to find my toothbrush. Popping out of the pine needles covering the ground were beautiful brown mushroom caps that I recognized immediately as good to eat. I crawled around and kept picking them until I had filled an improvised plastic container withour going further than a few meters from the tent. Tonie, a mushroom hunter since childhood like me, was also excited to see so many Maronen-pilzer, as they are called in German, but it was quite imossible for her or anyone to approach my level of excitement. She tried to reason with me that we had no cookware and that we would have to carry the mushrooms around all day until we reached Berlin, but her arguments had little effect even on her, as she uprooted family after family of victims. For a mushroom-gatherer in gathering mode it is psychologically impossible to stop picking while mushrooms are still in sight.

Finally, after clearing the immediate tent vicinity, I was persuaded to continue to the nearest town for breakfast, in the hopes of finding a suitable basket for carrying my precious cargo back to Berlin. The final solution, if I may use that term during a bike trip involving a German and a Russian half-Jew, was a simple box, balanced precariously on top of my bike's touring bags behind my seat. The remainder of the day we had to go at a rather gentle pace to keep the box from falling off. Although we promised each other not to pick any more mushrooms until the final stretch before we reached the train station, each of us regularly broke the promise as we spotted more and more mushrooms right along the road. Only signs warning of possible unexploded WWII ammunition deterred us from entering some of the forests.

We returned to Berlin and cleaned the mushrooms with help from Tonie's mother, who is a mushroom specialist as well. Then we cooked up some onions and potatoes and I had my first real forest mushroom meal of the season. It was quite delicious and no hospitalization was necessary for anyone, which in my book counts as a pretty good day.