A forest

The weather has been chaotic enough in the Baltics to produce perfect conditions for forests to offer their annual gifts: berries, mushrooms, all sorts of plants, accompanied by a bunch of horseflies and mosquitoes. I went picking mushrooms with my dad last Friday. It’s just something you do as a Latvian who grew up near a forest. 

Some of my core childhood memories are from when I was around five, pulling a child-size bucket with me, a semi-sharp knife, tied with a cloth string around my neck because I kept tripping and falling, losing everything in my hands. The mushrooms would escape the bucket as I fell; I’d get up and keep looking.

The mushrooms have always favored Dad’s gaze much more than mine; I scan the space around me but I just can’t spot them as fast as he can – as if the mushrooms were hiding from me in particular.

But not this week. We packed our rain boots, buckets, my dad gave me a super-sharp knife (I’m now a proper adult mushroom picker), and off we went. Mushroom season is already in full swing, and Dad has been out quite a few times this summer. I try to join him at least a couple of times every year. We went to a forest near the Estonian border. And as we stepped out of the car, Dad hung a hunting whistle around my neck – for Mom’s peace of mind, he said.

True! The bears have had a massive comeback recently, and northeastern Latvia is now a little on edge: every visit to pick berries and mushrooms comes with a small calculation – will this be the time we meet a bear? I laughed about the whistle, but ended up doing a control-whistle every now and then during the rest of our forest session. Once everything goes quiet, the distant cracking of branches does make you wonder what your first reaction would be if you actually saw a bear come your way. 

Anyway. Here’s what we saw: many, many, many chanterelles; two or three dozen russulas (or « birch-leaf mushrooms », as we call them in Latvian, because it’s easy to mistake them for fallen yellow birch leaves, or vice versa); zero boletes (finding those is a real treat, but weather has been too dry and too hot for them so far, but the season is not over yet); many wild raspberries, put directly into our mouths; two frogs and zero bears (yay).

We returned to the car with two buckets full of chanterelles. It had been a good hunt. We found soooo many mushrooms in the moss and had to become picky – oh these are too old, too dry, too whatever. This is not what you normally do; the game of mushroom picking is too exciting and you want to pick them all. Way too often has my extended family returned from the forest with buckets so full that mushrooms also ended up in hats, shirts, an accidental plastic bag discovered in someone’s pocket, even undershirts.

Other things people are currently picking in Latvian forests: blueberries, lingonberries and all kinds of mushrooms. The most important common rule, however, is: if you don’t know it, leave it out of your bucket.