Into the Woods

As I mentioned, I was recently traveling about two and a half hours north of my home, in that part of Ontario urbanites call "cottage country" – not quite a truly rural area but close enough for cosseted city-dwellers looking to "rough it" for a little while. Being a cosseted city-dweller myself, that suits me just fine, though, after even a brief time in rustic surroundings of any sort, my thoughts inevitably turn to fantasy. 
As with mushrooms – which I saw in large quantities during my arcadian sojourn – my imagination strongly associates woodlands of any kind with the fantastic. I suspect this is a side effect of my early reading of fairy tales and other myths and legends, many of which feature enchanted, haunted, or otherwise magical forests. Consequently, I frequently found myself pondering what it must be like for the typical D&D adventuring party as they trudged through the woods, never knowing just what they might find there. What I found, in addition to the aforementioned mushrooms, was a lot of insect life, especially moths. I was quite surprised by how many moths I saw fluttering beneath the shadowy canopy of the wood where I took a hike one day. I expected to see plenty of spiders, a prospect that filled me with some trepidation, and, while I did see more than a few, they were not nearly as plentiful as I feared. There were also, unfortunately, plenty of flies, gnats, and mosquitoes, as my itch-ravaged body can attest.
Another thing that struck me was just how dark the woods could become, even during daylight hours. The trees where I was hiking were quite tall and possessed large, leafy branches that obscured the sun more than I had anticipated. I could still see quite well, of course, but it was still far less bright than I would have expected, given conditions outside the forest. Combined with the silence of the place, save for the sounds of a few birds, the overall effect was genuinely eerie at times. Wild berries – raspberries and blueberries mostly – abounded and that got me to thinking about foraging and other survival techniques in D&D and other roleplaying games, the sorts of stuff that has long fascinated me. In principle, I like the idea of delving into the nitty gritty of breaking camp, finding food, and dealing with environmental and other similar hazards. In practice, I tend to lose interest quite quickly and hand-wave a lot of these details, however compelling they seem in my head. 
I'm not entirely sure if that's a function of my own temperament or a reflection of the fact that I've never come across rules that simulate what I want without becoming bogged down in minutiae. Mind you, my hike was following an already-beaten trail, with little signposts and landmarks every so often, and I still managed to lose my way, so it seems plausible I'm too much of city boy to ever fully enter into the right frame of mind to understand and appreciate the wild places of the earth – but I very much want to. 
Even after coming home, I still do.