This morning we woke early to go mushroom foraging in Brandenburg; remote, cloaked forests full of secret things.

Hans father picked us up in a tiny car with a miniature bulldog in the backseat and we drove the 45 minutes out of the city before pulling into a wooded area and dispersing, rubber-booted, amongst the trees.

My friend Kai and I trudged wearily, seeing nothing. Hans, Tracy, and his father had lots of luck, and returned with many mushrooms, large and moist. Later, they told us that they were calling our names loudly, in five minute intervals, trying to draw us over to where the mushrooms were, and that they’d found a sudden red meadow covered in strange, unnatural mosses.

We didn’t hear them, but we did see a fat man in a striped shirt, walking proudly with a cane, a young man alone in an orange sweater, not seeming to be there for the mushrooms at all, and many, many old things: crumbling towers, bunkers, trapdoors opening into dark places filled with trash, waist-high coils of rusty wire. It’s funny what things history makes seem natural.