It's a testament to our marriage that despite wanting to potter in the shed, Jamie asks me if I'd like to go mushroom hunting. We've only just got back from a whole ten days away in the bush and the thing he offers me is going bush again? He knows me too well. We're both already a little sad to be indoors again, although a hot shower with good pressure is delightful and we've caught up on all the Australian series of Alone.
We take Wally with us. A few months ago we told Mum and Dad we were driving over with Wally and they weren't too happy, not knowing who he was, and entirely forgetting that was what we named the Defender. Wally's actually a girl - she's named after my German grandmother, Wally. But 'Wally the 130' or 'wan 30', phonetically, had a nice ring to it. Wally even helps out by holding the mushroom basket for us.
We're searching in the HVP pine plantations near us. We know they're out as a friend had collected a lot of them and made us saffron milk cap mushroom soup, but the pine forests have been absolutely decimated by foresty as they were old enough to utilise. The hillsides are no man's land of broken wood and dirt, great brown expanses that once hid birds, animals, and many, many mushrooms. I try not to think of the mycorhizal zones disrupted and ended, and focus on the little pockets of forest that hide in steep valleys where brown streams warble and rush after the rain, thick with tree ferns and where pine and eucalypt mingle. We find a tree we're not sure of, perhaps a cypress - the leaves are almost plasticky and there is barely any scent. Still, it captures our interest in the way wild things do.
There's slippery jacks, slimy and unappealing - I'm get to dehydrate them, as I hear they're good for soups and stews - because I'm always focussed on the more appealing saffron milk caps. Still, they go in the basket. The saffies do start to appear in little patches and I pluck them one by one, squealing as I find them. Every few hundred metres or so, Jamie goes back and gets Wally, and drives him down to meet where I'm searching.
The tracks are muddy and wet and we're grateful for the Defender. A car becomes more than a car sometimes - it gains a personality. It houses everything we need to stay warm, fed, dry. It takes us on adventures. We jump in and thump the dash and say 'thanks Wally!' for taking us to the great outdoors.
It's out in nature foraging and fossicking that we're happiest. We're so at peace out here, enjoying each other's company and the small discoveries we find - a patch of psilocybes, a copse of birches, the lichen and mosses on the shady side of the trees, a fox, baby wallabies.
On the way home we drive past a reservoir where we jump the fence to see if we can find any more mushrooms, but we only find slippery jacks. We do find a heap of pinecones for the fire, though, and six logs that Jamie drags on top of Wally to take home for the fire. Today life feels real, and close, and important. Foraging for our needs always feels better than paying for it.
When I ask if we can do this again tomorrow, he says maybe. He likes to keep me on my toes. I make a lentil and brown rice risotto with leeks and dried porcini, and bake the saffies with garlic and olive oil and thyme from the garden, laying them on top and sprinkling with lots of pepper. The fire is lit with the pinecones and we feast: all is good in the forest of our marriage.
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