What's in a mushroom hunt?

Nothing! After a few hundred of
fruitless checks, mushroom hunting
loses its appeal... Until the next trip!

I came across this amusing article today, which attempts to explain why Russians are so fond of mushroom hunting, or "quiet hunt".

I think it very rightly captures the essence of mushrooming joy: you never know what you are going to get, and every next tree could host a potential treasure... or not! I have to point out though, that after checking 500 trees or so with no results things can get rather tense. Therefore it is important to have a planning element to your spontaneous mushroom adventure: when the extreme frustration comes in, you need to head for a spot where you know there'll be mushrooms. This is the reason why I generally dislike hunting in strange forests since in them you don't have this option.

Loved the bit about Nabokov's mother, who'd bring home lots of mushrooms and then totally lose interest in them, letting her kitchen staff to do the processing. I do my own processing and I love cooking the mushrooms I gather (as is witnessed by this blog), but if I did have "kitchen staff", who knows... The temptation of leaving dirty work to someone else is strong in this one.

The only thing that the author got wrong in the article, is that her linguistic coinage (which I dare not reproduce here, but for the curious, the complete text is here) is not really family friendly. The article author's HRH aka "Handsome Russian Husband" must have failed to explain that nuance of meaning. But well, it's men for you. Can never trust them.