For the past three days, I was in the deep forest in Transylvania, with my girlfriend and her family. On Friday morning, we packed the trucks full with supplies, and set off from their home in their little village, called Kézdialmas, and hit the dirt roads. I’m in the front seat bring driven by a man named Árpád, who works for my girlfriend’s dad, who doesn’t speak english and who chain smokes cigarettes on our way up. He talks to my girlfriend about work, summer, and the forest, and she translates for me as they both explain the intricate legal mechanisms about logging, hunting, and mushroom picking. 

We lose phone signal within 15 minutes, and very quickly I’m told to take my seatbelt off, as it’s safer than keeping it on. I find out why very quickly, as we twist our way along the sunken dirt roads at 15 kilometres an hour, the truck bouncing so hard my head nearly punches through the roof. My girlfriend’s dad is ahead on a quad bike; he shoots rubber pellets from his handgun at wild dogs to keep them front jumping on the vehicles, and interrogates people who’d come to fill their trucks with mushrooms from the forest to sell in the cities. They don’t have permits to do so, and they tend to leave a trail of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts in the forest.

There’d been a storm the day before, when we’d first arrived in Transylvanian {erdely}, and as we’re nearing the end of our journey we turn a corner to see dozens of trees that had fallen and now lay blocking the road, completely obscuring the far side. It would take 4-5 hours of chainsawing to get through, apparently. It was looking like we’d have to call it off at the last minute and go back. My girlfriend had been waiting for this for a long time, and she stood there, dejected, until either her father or Árpád said that we needed to go by foot anyway, to make sure the cabin was okay. The four of us set off, the two men with their hunting rifles, now pushing our way through dense forest, hopping over streams, climbing over electric fences and making our way across plains to make it there.

Later, when we had limited wifi, I sent some photos of the journey to my mum, who joked that I was going to be held captive there, my life becoming like the plot of Midsommar. She said that these photos were like a complete 180 to me, and I had to agree with her — a visible outsider pretty much every aspect: cultural, visual, personal. If I were to speak kindly of myself, I would consider myself to be a more “modern” man, that my skills lie in computers, science, knowledge work. If I were to speak without the language of self-marketing and condescension, I would have to say I’m a bit of a pansy, and that even I cannot deny that the thought of myself with an axe or rifle in hand is nothing but absurd and hilarious. 

It turns out that there was another way to the cabin through the forest, which took much longer and was much more of a technically challenging drive, and on top of that, the distant cracks of thunder and the heat being sucked from around us marked the arrival of yet another storm, possibly even bigger than the one that had felled the trees and blocked our path. The race was on, and the race was quickly lost, and we spent the next hour or so skidding and bouncing along muddy roads until our convoy made it, finally, to the cabin, and we rushed to unload the trucks in the pissing rain. 

But after that, the forest was calm, and we spent our time cooking, collecting logs, fishing, and playing board games. As my girlfriend has been telling me for the longest time, the air up there is different, it both relaxes you and saps your strength. All of my thoughts were largely focussed on the task at hand, as if I were in a trance. A welcome change for someone who chronically lives amongst multitudes of possible future plans. 

Yet there was a voice in my head that was crying out, completely at odds with my current situation. It asked me if I knew how dumb I looked, doing things that were so natural to my girlfriend’s family, yet so foreign to me. How ridiculous it was to think of someone like me taking a live worm and putting it on a hook, or talking about wild boar and deer in a mashup of broken Hungarian/english with my girlfriends dad as we drove on the quad bike to collect logs for the fire. You’ll get hurt, the voice said, and even worse, you’ll make a fool of yourself. 

I’ve thrown myself outside of my comfort zone enough times now, and it gets easier and easier each time. The way out is through, as the cliché goes. The voice has a point — I am an outsider, and I probably do look ridiculous, and I probably do cause more trouble when I try to help out with things they’ve done hundreds of times yet I’ve never even heard of. That can all be true, and at the same time, I can tune out that voice and into another, which is more curious, which wants to learn a new way of doing things, and to put all of the attention onto the task at hand. 

When you go to pick mushrooms, you call out every now and then, to know where the others are. The women sing a little as they do it, and a rhythm takes over. You don’t take mushrooms unless you’re certain that they’re good, and you can tell that by many different things: if they’re too moist, the stems have a spongier, more fragile texture; you can see little holes from where insects or snails have eaten at them. The ones that are too old go green or purple, rotting away, and the poisonous ones are visibly so; evil red with spots of white. There are some old ones that release a cloud of dust when you step on them. I wondered what happened if I knelt down and breathed the spores in. Obviously, I wasn’t too keen on trying.

We worked a lot, we ate very very well, my ears grew a little more used to the sounds of the language. And I got a little more comfortable with feeling like a strange alien along the way.