Frostwriting

The Search, The Find

by Michelle Valois

In the autumn we gathered baskets, donned thick woolen sweaters, slipped our feet into hiking boots, packed sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, pocketed compasses, a jackknife, and a small brush.  We took the subway to Central Station, switched to a commuter rail that connected the orderly bustle of Stockholm city proper to the suburbs and beyond.  At the near end of that line, we disembarked and waited for a red bus that would carry us to a dense, mostly pine forest, with a needle-strewn floor, moist with moss and yesterday’s rain.

The first leg of the journey was a hill where the ground had been trampled.  There are no secret places ninety minutes from Sweden’s capitol city, but with enough persistence we always found a few pockets of undisturbed woods.  More than the plucking, the digging, the smelling, and later the cleaning and cooking, this silent walk was what mattered.  No sounds of traffic to break the trance, we roamed alone, unable to see the other but close enough to call and close enough to be heard. 

I could walk like this for hours, more patient than I had ever known myself to be, and then, suddenly, see the golden bouquets shooting up from the ground in flowery, fragrant clumps: chanterelle, queen of the fall fungi, the trophy mushroom.

Sometimes I shouted for Anna to come and sometimes I remained alone, falling to my knees and sliding my hand down the stem of the largest of the chanterelles, deep into the mossy earth.  If I was lucky, the mushroom grew four or five inches below the surface.  The soil, newly shaken loose by the mushroom’s bursting forth, yielded to my fingers; the chanterelle easily taken.

The mushroom’s stem was chalky white and caked with brown earth, green moss, and a few pine needles.  I lowered my face into the empty place where the chanterelle, only moments before, had been connected to its vast underground network of root and stem.  I inhaled the rich, moldy scent of damp, broken earth.  The fruit itself, the flower of the chanterelle, smelled like oranges and cinnamon.

Sometimes we returned to the city with our baskets full of chanterelles and the lesser known Karl Johan, black trumpets, red trumpets.  Sometimes we rode the bus back to Central Station with a mere handful.  Always, in the evening, a cold, October, Sunday evening, with work waiting the next day, we would sauté the mushrooms with cream and wine and rosemary, fry pork cutlets in butter, open a bottle of Spanish wine, and light candles: the wilderness tempered by spices and wine; the woods in our home, the earth at our table.