The Way of the Wild
Mushroom
David Arora
My first encounter with "mushroom pickers” was
not by design. I arrived at a normally deserted campground in the Sierra
Nevada, one that I have used annually for a spring mushroom workshop,
only to find it occupied by a weather-beaten band of migrant mushroom
pickers—three adults, four children, and assorted dogs and cats that lived
and traveled in a 30-year-old school bus. They had been “sitting on the
burn” (a nearby burned area) for more than a month waiting for conditions
to produce a profitable flush of morels. Having seen sensationalized newspaper
accounts of overly territorial, gun-toting mushroom pickers, I was surprised
that they didn’t try to chase us off. At the very least I expected them
to resent the sudden intrusion and competition that my class of 35 citified
adults (and nearly as many SUVs) represented.
But the next day I understood their unconcern.
One of them, a teenager, picked more of the elusive morels in two hours
than my entire class (under my “expert” guidance) was able to find in
two days. I was impressed—and more than a little humbled. In a society
where practically all children get their knowledge of nature secondhand,
from schools and television, these young mushroom pickers were striking
exceptions.
Nancy (where requested, I have honored the first-name-only
tradition of mushroom pickers), the matriarch of the clan, explained that
she came from a long line of fruit pickers. “Fruit is what I grew up in.
Children used to be able to pick fruit, but not any more. Mushroom picking
is the only thing left. It’s legal for the children, and good for them
because they get sunshine, fresh air, an’ they get to experience what
[kind of work] their parents do, which is real important.”
Like most migrant mushroom pickers, Nancy has
no bank account, no checkbook, no credit card. “In the last ten years
I haven’t taken a steady job once,” she says with obvious pride. “It’s
pretty much been mushrooms and huckleberries.” That night they enthralled
us with tales of their exploits and adventures on “the mushroom trail”—a
string of obscure logging and mining communities, crossroads, and frontier
outposts stretching from Alaska to California. Cranberry Junction. Nass.
Bella Coola. Boston Bar. Forks. Hungry Horse. Gospel Hump. Crescent Lake.
Granite. Prairie City. Happy Camp. The names meant nothing to my class
of weekend naturalists, but in the lives of these professional mushroom
pickers they clearly loomed larger than San Francisco, Seattle, or New
York. As one who has devoted his life to studying the worldwide harvest
of wild mushrooms and other nontimber forest products, I resolved that
evening in 1993 to join the “mushroom trail,” and have been on and off
it ever since.
Wild mushrooms have been praised by Roman and
Chinese emperors and have long provided an important everyday food source
for rural people around the world. Until recently, however, a deep and
exaggerated distrust of wild mushrooms has denied them a cherished place
at the North American dinner table. That changed in the 1980s, when rising
demand overseas caused mushroom lovers in other countries to look abroad
for new sources. At the same time, Americans’ palates grew bolder and
more sophisticated. American and Canadian entrepreneurs rushed to fill
the rapidly growing market for gourmet foods. And out-of-work rural Americans
and recent immigrants (particularly from Southeast Asia) saw picking mushrooms
as a chance to make a decent living in a familiar environment—the forest—while
maintaining their personal dignity and cultural autonomy.
The “mushroom trail” is actually a migration route
that begins in British Columbia with the late summer harvest of matsutake
and chanterelles. In September and October the migration snakes (or loops)
southward, following warmer weather through Washington and Oregon, reaching
the Siskiyous of southern Oregon in November, and northern California
in December. Many migrating pickers overwinter in California, where the
mild coastal climate yields a “winter pick” of chanterelles, black trumpets,
and hedgehogs that tides them over until the spring morel season.
Then, in April, as morels and king boletes begin
to show around Mount Shasta and in the mountains of eastern Oregon, pickers
climb into their “rigs” and drive northward again. By July and August
they have fanned out over more than a dozen states and provinces. Some
range into Alaska and the Yukon, where thick carpets of morels grow in
burns accessible only by helicopter, floatplane, or river raft. Others
opt for tamer pickings such as lobster mushrooms and summer chanterelles
on the fogbound coast of Oregon. Still others prospect in the northern
Rockies for boletes and huckleberries, and a few head east toward Saskatchewan
and Nova Scotia in search of chanterelles, until the lucrative matsutake
begins to appear in the Northwest in August and September. This most valuable
of wild mushrooms, with the allure of big bucks (seldom realized but constantly
dreamed about), acts like a magnet, drawing the widely scattered pickers
to a few “famous” hotspots like Cranberry Junction and Crescent Lake for
several weeks of frenzied picking, before frost and snow drive them southward
again.
I run into Nancy and her family two years later, camped outside
the tiny town of Ukiah in eastern Oregon. Each spring the bountiful crop
in the surrounding Blue Mountains helps to set the global price for fresh
morels. As we fan out into a fir forest looking for "naturals"
(morels that do not grow in timber burns), Nancy totes her youngest daughter,
two-year-old Caitlin, in a "crow’s nest" on her back. Caitlin
is already able to gurgle "murrrrl" when she spies one that
her mother has missed. Consumed with the search, they soon disappear over
a ridge, and I find myself walking alongside two of her older children
and their father, Miles.
“We’ve bought an’ sold mushrooms everywhere from
California clear up into the Yukon an’ Tok in Alaska,” he says. “If there’s
something that the mushroom industry has done for these kids, it’s taught
them how to be self-reliant and take care of themselves with confidence.
It’s taught them how to work.”
“We haven’t actually learned how to work,” protests
14-year-old David. “We’ve just learned how to play and make money at the
same time!” “And they learn a little about contributing to a household,
which is something that no kids get anymore,” adds his dad.
“Dad, you might want to keep an eye out while
you’re talkin’,” interrupts nine-year-old Stacy. “You walked right past
a whole bunch, so I had to pick ‘em!”
Not all of the permanent residents of Ukiah welcome
the annual influx of mushroom pickers and buyers. But Doug Vincent, the
owner of a small gas station-cafe-pool hall, points out that everyone
welcomes the money that the so-called “trailer trash” have breathed into
his tiny community and dozens like it.
“These people are doin’ a helluva lot for our
society because they’re producin’ something,” says Vincent. “Many tons
of these mushrooms go overseas, and that brings an income back into America
that we otherwise wouldn’t have.... These people work their butts off.
And they’re the last of the independent Americans that we’ve got. They’re
nonconformists. They’re not on somebody else’s payroll. And every dollar
they make they spend in our economy.... Even the really good mushroom
pickers seldom get home with any more than just barely enough to squeak
through the winter with. The wealth is spread up and down the mushroom
trail. It’s done nothin’ but good for everybody.”
But the mushroom harvest has brought more than
prosperity to isolated frontier outposts and timber towns like Ukiah.
It has also generated a degree of genuine “mushroom consciousness” unimaginable
a decade ago. One has only to wander into a rural bar or small café anywhere
on the mushroom trail to witness the transformation. Everyday conversation
is as likely to be peppered with terms like “flowers” and “flops” (mature
and overripe mushrooms, respectively) as with “five-point racks” and “bull
trout.” “Pines” are not trees, but pine mushrooms (matsutake); terms of
endearment such as “matsies” (matsutake) and “naturals” (morels) are beginning
to replace “hoot owls” and other expressions of bitterness and derision
so prevalent a few years ago. Now, bragging rights are as apt to be fought
over “cauliflowers” and “lobsters” of the fungal variety (see sidebar)
as over deer and elk.
Mushrooms are the seasonal “fruit” of mostly perennial
fungi living in the ground or on decaying wood. The mycelium, or network
of threadlike fungal cells that produces the mushrooms, is often long-lived
and usually unseen. Imagine an underground apple tree, invisible but for
a few “apples” that miraculously appear on the ground after it rains,
and you can see why mushrooms dazzled and mystified the ancients. Most
of the commercially valuable wild species derive their nourishment from
the rootlets of living trees in a mutually beneficial relationship called
mycorrhiza. This fungus-root partnership means that mycorrhizal mushrooms
cannot be grown artificially with the ease of mushrooms that live on dead
organic matter, such as shiitake and portabellos. They can only be harvested
from the forest, where they appear in the same places, or “patches,” year
after year (though not necessarily every year because of weather conditions).
Pickers likewise tend to reappear in the same
spots year after year (though, again, not necessarily every year). Not
only is it easier to harvest known patches than to continually look for
new ones, but pickers also develop strong attachments to particular places.
A picker once drove me through several miles of clearcuts to yet another
clearcut indistinguishable to me from all the others. “Here’s where they
logged me,” he says bitterly. “I picked my first chanterelles right here,
15 years ago. I’d go in the woods all day an’ find my way out in the dark.
I didn’t need a compass, ‘cause this is where I learned, this is what
I spawned off of, right here. This spot. My spot. An’ this is what they
left me...”
Thousands of people
in the Pacific Northwest now gather and sell wild mushrooms. Most of them
pick locally or opportunistically for a little extra cash or as one of
several seasonally based strategies for survival. But the notoriously
fickle nature of mushrooms—they may be overwhelmingly abundant one year
and frustratingly scarce the next—has created the need for skilled pickers
and buyers (many do both) willing to go where the rainbows lead them.
Ample public lands and an abundance of private vehicles -- a combination
rare elsewhere in the world -- makes it possible for whoever so chooses
to do just that.
The result is an incredible mix of men and women.
Over a period of five days in one tent city, I dined with ex-loggers and
trappers, gold miners, Vietnam vets, four stocky Mexicans (one of whom
spoke Cambodian) sharing morel-stuffed tacos with three towering young
Czechs; a second-generation Norwegian buyer fluent in six languages (including
Latin); a family of Laotians preparing som tum and sticky rice
for a retired Australian sailor learning to pick mushrooms “for the fun
of it”; Nancy and her kids; an ex-body builder; a bellydancer; a wandering
band of Ulkatcho from Canada; a Cree Indian who ran away from home at
age 13 to join a carnival, then left the carnival 16 years later to join
the mushroom trail; a Democratic congressional candidate from Michigan;
a female couple who fight fires during the summer and then pick morels
on the same burns the following spring; a 75-year-old French forager;
a visiting Russian rocket scientist out for some weekend cash; a barefoot
student from Arcata; a female African-American beargrass picker preparing
pancakes for survivors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields; a telecommunications
executive who had just given up his career to “pick mushrooms and listen
to the coyotes”; a Guatemalan refugee fluent in Korean and English; and
three young snowboarders from Florida. I have documented the uses and
harvest of wild mushrooms in more than 30 countries, but nowhere else
have I witnessed such a remarkable assemblage of people, food, and languages
under one roof—or more accurately, one blue tarp (the dominant form of
shelter in the mushroom camps.)
These makeshift camps have evoked comparisons
to the gold rush, and there are similarities, with everyone scrambling
to find the “mother lode” first. But wild mushrooms, unlike gold, recur
year after year, and because they are highly perishable, they cannot be
hoarded. Matsutakes in particular must be sold immediately if they are
to have value, so the roadside buying stands are beehives of activity
and information about what is growing and in what condition and quantity.
Everyone gets to see what everyone else has found, and the more successful
pickers (or those who boast too much) can expect to have their “rigs”
followed by competitors. Add in wild price fluctuations, bidding wars,
and the whims of the weather (which may freeze, desiccate, or waterlog
a bumper crop on a day’s notice), and the atmosphere of urgency can be
electric.
Since most of the picking takes place in rugged
ravines and on remote ridgetops far from roads and trails, success requires
knowledge, toughness, determination, and a good deal of wilderness savvy.
“And don’t forget the big M— memory,” says one proficient picker. “You
have to remember all your spots. I can’t remember what day of the week
it is. I can’t even remember to pay my bills. But I remember every single
place I’ve ever found a mushroom—even if it’s in the middle of a forest
miles from nowhere—because no two trees are quite alike, no two pieces
of ground look and feel exactly the same. It’s more than the way a place
looks; it’s how it smells and feels.”
Not all full-time mushroom pickers are travelers,
however. John Getz does most of his picking near his home in Oregon Dunes
National Recreation Area on the Oregon coast. The mushroom crops in this
area are fairly consistent from year to year. So consistent, in fact,
that matsutake have been harvested commercially from the pine-studded
sand dunes since the 1930s, long before the land became a National Recreation
Area.
Getz’s knowledge of the dunes is so thorough and
so intimate that mushroom hunting with him is strictly a spectator sport.
When we went out together he let me find a few, but it was rather like
going Easter egg hunting with the person who hid the eggs. He moved quickly
and silently through the forest, stopping only at known matsutake spots
long enough to deftly run his fingertips over the sand, as though massaging
it lightly. By this method he is able to locate the prized matsutake buttons
while they are still deep under the moss and sand, invisible to everyone
else. Time and again, where I saw nothing to indicate a mushroom—not the
slightest mound in the moss nor telltale crack in the sand—he would insert
his forked fingers like a divining rod, locate a mushroom deep underneath,
and then, after grasping and twisting it gently, pull it out of the ground
like a white rabbit out of a hat.
“I’ve been gifted with this ability to key into
certain things,” he says with understatement. “When I’m predicting the
pop, I measure the growth on the trees, an’ then time it to the weather
bounces. It’s all with the triggering of the sap [in the trees] goin’
up an’ down. And there’s this density to the air. The ground lifts
up about a half of an inch, becomes fluffy an’ the sand sticks to yer
finger, one grain’s layer, almost like it was sprayed with hairspray.
That tells me they’re there. Then when you get in the heat of the season,
just before a big flush, it feels like there’s steel wool mixed in the
sand, [because] all those little filaments [mushroom hyphae] are really
pumped.” In mycological circles, mushrooms simply aren’t talked about
this way; I’ve never seen a mycologist uncover 20 pounds of invisible
grade-one matsutake, either.
As impressive as Getz is, it is the wandering
“circuit pickers,” as typified by Nancy and her kin, that intrigue me
the most, for they are quintessential outsiders: figuratively, because
they stand outside the mainstream, and literally, because they spend most
of their waking existence outdoors. They are the latest (some say the
last) incarnation of a wandering community as ancient as humanity itself—one
that is nature-immersed and moves with the seasons, dispersing and coalescing
as conditions dictate. Knowledge is acquired through days spent in the
woods and is communicated orally. Respect in this traveling community
is won through the expertise that flows from that knowledge; trust and
camaraderie are cemented and sustained through the exchange of nature—the
buying, selling, and bartering of mushrooms—and just as importantly, from
the exchange of stories about nature and mushrooms.
“It’s the last of the nomad life,” says Linda,
a 42-year-old grandmother and ex-waitress turned mushroom picker. “There’s
no more gold minin’ goin’ on. It’s the last thing to be discovered: the
freedom of it, the independence, the sense of self-worth you get when
you find them.”
But while the migrant pickers may be footloose,
they are not carefree. As Doug Vincent observes:
“This mushroom [the morel] has to be picked when
it’s right. It’s not a thing that stays out there forever. These people
scour the earth up here to find these mushroom beds. They spend days and
days and days endurin’ a wet camp and cold food and strugglin’ to hang
around til it comes on. And when they pop, they’re there to pick ‘em.
Then everybody oohs and aaahs over a guy goin’ out here and makin’ two,
three hundred dollars a day pickin’ mushrooms. But if they added up all
the days that he didn’t get enough to pay his gas bill, you see, it wouldn’t
even be minimum wage.”
Mushroom pickers pay a heavy price for being outsiders.
They are politically powerless and are consistently ignored by agencies
whose decisions affect them. So why do they persist? Because it is a fundamentally
old-fashioned business that rewards know-how, not know-who, and because
it offers “freedom of heart,” as Linda puts it.
In southern Oregon, on a freezing December night,
I spent an evening with an immigrant family from Laos. They were ethnic
Mien—fiercely independent “hill people” recruited by the CIA to fight
the Communist insurgency in Laos and Vietnam, with the explicit promise
of safe haven in America if they lost. When the Communists triumphed,
they fled—not so much for a better life in America, but for the same reason
their ancestors had fled China: to preserve their autonomy and cultural
identity.
This particular Mien family had been camped out
for two months under a blue tarp. Most of the other pickers had left weeks
ago. There was frost on the ground and the family had no sleeping bags;
every night they huddled together under blankets around the fire. After
sharing their simple but delicious meal of rice, dried fish, some unidentified
greens from the forest, and ahun chi (a dried wild mushroom from
Southeast Asia), I asked them how much they were making. Altogether, about
$50 a day, they said—barely enough to cover expenses. Why didn’t they
go back to their flat in Sacramento, where they could stay warm and watch
TV, I wanted to know.
One replied, “Because nothing to do there, nowhere
to go. Here, life hard, yes, but nobody own us. We [can] walk all day,
see nobody. No gas, no electricity, sleep on ground, cook on fire, just
like Laos.”
To spend significant
time with full-time mushroom pickers is to be continually impressed by
their familiarity with the natural world and their ability to read every
nook and nuance of the landscape.
One evening around a campfire in a muddy mushroom
camp in British Columbia, while the pink and green Northern Lights shimmered
ethereally overhead, I listened to nine pickers reminisce about “blackouts”
(carpets of black trumpets so thick the ground couldn’t be seen) 1,500
miles to the south and two years in the past. The conversation narrowed
from the forests of northern California to a certain watershed east of
the coastal town of Fort Bragg, then to one mountain toward the back of
the watershed, and to a system of finger ridges emanating from that mountain,
and finally, to a particular stand of tanoaks and manzanitas under which
the world’s most spectacular “blackouts” occurred. Seven of the nine pickers
knew of the watershed and the mountain, and four were sufficiently familiar
with the stand of tanoaks that they were able to independently supply
details of aspect, slope, vegetation, and timing, even down to details
of the humus composition, distribution of woodrat nests, the shapes of
the shiros (a term for a mushroom colony they have appropriated from the
Japanese), and other kinds of mushrooms present.
In a time when “local control,” “stakeholders,”
and “land stewardship” have become buzzwords in conservation circles,
migrants tend to be viewed with suspicion and denied standing in all three
clubs. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find four residents of Fort Bragg
as conversant in the local landscape as these wandering mushroom pickers
sharing a campfire in British Columbia. Such specific and intimate knowledge
of far-flung localities belies the bioregionalist assertion that kinship
to the land is predicated upon being rooted to one spot (a criterion,
incidentally, that would eliminate much of the world’s population). Instead
it suggests that kinship and stewardship develop out of less exclusive
and more elusive criteria such as passion and curiosity, and perhaps some
more measurable ones such as actual number of hours immersed in nature.
To suggest that these mushroom pickers do not “belong,” that they do not
have as much stake in a place as its permanent residents, is like saying
that migrating geese do not belong to the lakes to which they flock in
the winter, or that steelhead have no stake in the streams in which they
spawn.
Though wild mushrooms, like pine nuts or huckleberries,
can be harvested without visibly altering the forests in which they grow,
some people have questioned whether the mushroom harvest is sustainable
at current levels. While this is a complex subject beyond the scope of
this article, studies show that intensive picking has little negative
effect on future crops, as long as the ground isn’t dug too deeply, and
may even have a stimulating effect. This isn’t terribly surprising, because
the commercially valuable species tend to be more plentiful in second-growth
forests or those impacted to some degree by human beings—which is probably
why we came to value them in the first place.
The good news, then, is that ordering wild mushrooms
in a gourmet restaurant probably comes at less cost to biodiversity than
wine, coffee, strawberries, beef, or almost any other item on the menu.
The bad news is that overly restrictive policies and unrealistic permit
fees imposed by the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies are turning
an already marginal existence into a well nigh impossible one, and making
mushroom picking profitable only as an occasional opportunistic activity
that neither conserves a variety of lifestyles nor encourages land stewardship.
Such policies portend a future in which packets of dried mushrooms labeled
“Buy Wild Mushrooms — Help Conserve Forests” will refer only to forests
that are not our own.
Mushroom
David Arora
My first encounter with "mushroom pickers” was
not by design. I arrived at a normally deserted campground in the Sierra
Nevada, one that I have used annually for a spring mushroom workshop,
only to find it occupied by a weather-beaten band of migrant mushroom
pickers—three adults, four children, and assorted dogs and cats that lived
and traveled in a 30-year-old school bus. They had been “sitting on the
burn” (a nearby burned area) for more than a month waiting for conditions
to produce a profitable flush of morels. Having seen sensationalized newspaper
accounts of overly territorial, gun-toting mushroom pickers, I was surprised
that they didn’t try to chase us off. At the very least I expected them
to resent the sudden intrusion and competition that my class of 35 citified
adults (and nearly as many SUVs) represented.
But the next day I understood their unconcern.
One of them, a teenager, picked more of the elusive morels in two hours
than my entire class (under my “expert” guidance) was able to find in
two days. I was impressed—and more than a little humbled. In a society
where practically all children get their knowledge of nature secondhand,
from schools and television, these young mushroom pickers were striking
exceptions.
Nancy (where requested, I have honored the first-name-only
tradition of mushroom pickers), the matriarch of the clan, explained that
she came from a long line of fruit pickers. “Fruit is what I grew up in.
Children used to be able to pick fruit, but not any more. Mushroom picking
is the only thing left. It’s legal for the children, and good for them
because they get sunshine, fresh air, an’ they get to experience what
[kind of work] their parents do, which is real important.”
Like most migrant mushroom pickers, Nancy has
no bank account, no checkbook, no credit card. “In the last ten years
I haven’t taken a steady job once,” she says with obvious pride. “It’s
pretty much been mushrooms and huckleberries.” That night they enthralled
us with tales of their exploits and adventures on “the mushroom trail”—a
string of obscure logging and mining communities, crossroads, and frontier
outposts stretching from Alaska to California. Cranberry Junction. Nass.
Bella Coola. Boston Bar. Forks. Hungry Horse. Gospel Hump. Crescent Lake.
Granite. Prairie City. Happy Camp. The names meant nothing to my class
of weekend naturalists, but in the lives of these professional mushroom
pickers they clearly loomed larger than San Francisco, Seattle, or New
York. As one who has devoted his life to studying the worldwide harvest
of wild mushrooms and other nontimber forest products, I resolved that
evening in 1993 to join the “mushroom trail,” and have been on and off
it ever since.
Wild mushrooms have been praised by Roman and
Chinese emperors and have long provided an important everyday food source
for rural people around the world. Until recently, however, a deep and
exaggerated distrust of wild mushrooms has denied them a cherished place
at the North American dinner table. That changed in the 1980s, when rising
demand overseas caused mushroom lovers in other countries to look abroad
for new sources. At the same time, Americans’ palates grew bolder and
more sophisticated. American and Canadian entrepreneurs rushed to fill
the rapidly growing market for gourmet foods. And out-of-work rural Americans
and recent immigrants (particularly from Southeast Asia) saw picking mushrooms
as a chance to make a decent living in a familiar environment—the forest—while
maintaining their personal dignity and cultural autonomy.
The “mushroom trail” is actually a migration route
that begins in British Columbia with the late summer harvest of matsutake
and chanterelles. In September and October the migration snakes (or loops)
southward, following warmer weather through Washington and Oregon, reaching
the Siskiyous of southern Oregon in November, and northern California
in December. Many migrating pickers overwinter in California, where the
mild coastal climate yields a “winter pick” of chanterelles, black trumpets,
and hedgehogs that tides them over until the spring morel season.
Then, in April, as morels and king boletes begin
to show around Mount Shasta and in the mountains of eastern Oregon, pickers
climb into their “rigs” and drive northward again. By July and August
they have fanned out over more than a dozen states and provinces. Some
range into Alaska and the Yukon, where thick carpets of morels grow in
burns accessible only by helicopter, floatplane, or river raft. Others
opt for tamer pickings such as lobster mushrooms and summer chanterelles
on the fogbound coast of Oregon. Still others prospect in the northern
Rockies for boletes and huckleberries, and a few head east toward Saskatchewan
and Nova Scotia in search of chanterelles, until the lucrative matsutake
begins to appear in the Northwest in August and September. This most valuable
of wild mushrooms, with the allure of big bucks (seldom realized but constantly
dreamed about), acts like a magnet, drawing the widely scattered pickers
to a few “famous” hotspots like Cranberry Junction and Crescent Lake for
several weeks of frenzied picking, before frost and snow drive them southward
again.
I run into Nancy and her family two years later, camped outside
the tiny town of Ukiah in eastern Oregon. Each spring the bountiful crop
in the surrounding Blue Mountains helps to set the global price for fresh
morels. As we fan out into a fir forest looking for "naturals"
(morels that do not grow in timber burns), Nancy totes her youngest daughter,
two-year-old Caitlin, in a "crow’s nest" on her back. Caitlin
is already able to gurgle "murrrrl" when she spies one that
her mother has missed. Consumed with the search, they soon disappear over
a ridge, and I find myself walking alongside two of her older children
and their father, Miles.
“We’ve bought an’ sold mushrooms everywhere from
California clear up into the Yukon an’ Tok in Alaska,” he says. “If there’s
something that the mushroom industry has done for these kids, it’s taught
them how to be self-reliant and take care of themselves with confidence.
It’s taught them how to work.”
“We haven’t actually learned how to work,” protests
14-year-old David. “We’ve just learned how to play and make money at the
same time!” “And they learn a little about contributing to a household,
which is something that no kids get anymore,” adds his dad.
“Dad, you might want to keep an eye out while
you’re talkin’,” interrupts nine-year-old Stacy. “You walked right past
a whole bunch, so I had to pick ‘em!”
Not all of the permanent residents of Ukiah welcome
the annual influx of mushroom pickers and buyers. But Doug Vincent, the
owner of a small gas station-cafe-pool hall, points out that everyone
welcomes the money that the so-called “trailer trash” have breathed into
his tiny community and dozens like it.
“These people are doin’ a helluva lot for our
society because they’re producin’ something,” says Vincent. “Many tons
of these mushrooms go overseas, and that brings an income back into America
that we otherwise wouldn’t have.... These people work their butts off.
And they’re the last of the independent Americans that we’ve got. They’re
nonconformists. They’re not on somebody else’s payroll. And every dollar
they make they spend in our economy.... Even the really good mushroom
pickers seldom get home with any more than just barely enough to squeak
through the winter with. The wealth is spread up and down the mushroom
trail. It’s done nothin’ but good for everybody.”
But the mushroom harvest has brought more than
prosperity to isolated frontier outposts and timber towns like Ukiah.
It has also generated a degree of genuine “mushroom consciousness” unimaginable
a decade ago. One has only to wander into a rural bar or small café anywhere
on the mushroom trail to witness the transformation. Everyday conversation
is as likely to be peppered with terms like “flowers” and “flops” (mature
and overripe mushrooms, respectively) as with “five-point racks” and “bull
trout.” “Pines” are not trees, but pine mushrooms (matsutake); terms of
endearment such as “matsies” (matsutake) and “naturals” (morels) are beginning
to replace “hoot owls” and other expressions of bitterness and derision
so prevalent a few years ago. Now, bragging rights are as apt to be fought
over “cauliflowers” and “lobsters” of the fungal variety (see sidebar)
as over deer and elk.
Mushrooms are the seasonal “fruit” of mostly perennial
fungi living in the ground or on decaying wood. The mycelium, or network
of threadlike fungal cells that produces the mushrooms, is often long-lived
and usually unseen. Imagine an underground apple tree, invisible but for
a few “apples” that miraculously appear on the ground after it rains,
and you can see why mushrooms dazzled and mystified the ancients. Most
of the commercially valuable wild species derive their nourishment from
the rootlets of living trees in a mutually beneficial relationship called
mycorrhiza. This fungus-root partnership means that mycorrhizal mushrooms
cannot be grown artificially with the ease of mushrooms that live on dead
organic matter, such as shiitake and portabellos. They can only be harvested
from the forest, where they appear in the same places, or “patches,” year
after year (though not necessarily every year because of weather conditions).
Pickers likewise tend to reappear in the same
spots year after year (though, again, not necessarily every year). Not
only is it easier to harvest known patches than to continually look for
new ones, but pickers also develop strong attachments to particular places.
A picker once drove me through several miles of clearcuts to yet another
clearcut indistinguishable to me from all the others. “Here’s where they
logged me,” he says bitterly. “I picked my first chanterelles right here,
15 years ago. I’d go in the woods all day an’ find my way out in the dark.
I didn’t need a compass, ‘cause this is where I learned, this is what
I spawned off of, right here. This spot. My spot. An’ this is what they
left me...”
Thousands of people
in the Pacific Northwest now gather and sell wild mushrooms. Most of them
pick locally or opportunistically for a little extra cash or as one of
several seasonally based strategies for survival. But the notoriously
fickle nature of mushrooms—they may be overwhelmingly abundant one year
and frustratingly scarce the next—has created the need for skilled pickers
and buyers (many do both) willing to go where the rainbows lead them.
Ample public lands and an abundance of private vehicles -- a combination
rare elsewhere in the world -- makes it possible for whoever so chooses
to do just that.
The result is an incredible mix of men and women.
Over a period of five days in one tent city, I dined with ex-loggers and
trappers, gold miners, Vietnam vets, four stocky Mexicans (one of whom
spoke Cambodian) sharing morel-stuffed tacos with three towering young
Czechs; a second-generation Norwegian buyer fluent in six languages (including
Latin); a family of Laotians preparing som tum and sticky rice
for a retired Australian sailor learning to pick mushrooms “for the fun
of it”; Nancy and her kids; an ex-body builder; a bellydancer; a wandering
band of Ulkatcho from Canada; a Cree Indian who ran away from home at
age 13 to join a carnival, then left the carnival 16 years later to join
the mushroom trail; a Democratic congressional candidate from Michigan;
a female couple who fight fires during the summer and then pick morels
on the same burns the following spring; a 75-year-old French forager;
a visiting Russian rocket scientist out for some weekend cash; a barefoot
student from Arcata; a female African-American beargrass picker preparing
pancakes for survivors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields; a telecommunications
executive who had just given up his career to “pick mushrooms and listen
to the coyotes”; a Guatemalan refugee fluent in Korean and English; and
three young snowboarders from Florida. I have documented the uses and
harvest of wild mushrooms in more than 30 countries, but nowhere else
have I witnessed such a remarkable assemblage of people, food, and languages
under one roof—or more accurately, one blue tarp (the dominant form of
shelter in the mushroom camps.)
These makeshift camps have evoked comparisons
to the gold rush, and there are similarities, with everyone scrambling
to find the “mother lode” first. But wild mushrooms, unlike gold, recur
year after year, and because they are highly perishable, they cannot be
hoarded. Matsutakes in particular must be sold immediately if they are
to have value, so the roadside buying stands are beehives of activity
and information about what is growing and in what condition and quantity.
Everyone gets to see what everyone else has found, and the more successful
pickers (or those who boast too much) can expect to have their “rigs”
followed by competitors. Add in wild price fluctuations, bidding wars,
and the whims of the weather (which may freeze, desiccate, or waterlog
a bumper crop on a day’s notice), and the atmosphere of urgency can be
electric.
Since most of the picking takes place in rugged
ravines and on remote ridgetops far from roads and trails, success requires
knowledge, toughness, determination, and a good deal of wilderness savvy.
“And don’t forget the big M— memory,” says one proficient picker. “You
have to remember all your spots. I can’t remember what day of the week
it is. I can’t even remember to pay my bills. But I remember every single
place I’ve ever found a mushroom—even if it’s in the middle of a forest
miles from nowhere—because no two trees are quite alike, no two pieces
of ground look and feel exactly the same. It’s more than the way a place
looks; it’s how it smells and feels.”
Not all full-time mushroom pickers are travelers,
however. John Getz does most of his picking near his home in Oregon Dunes
National Recreation Area on the Oregon coast. The mushroom crops in this
area are fairly consistent from year to year. So consistent, in fact,
that matsutake have been harvested commercially from the pine-studded
sand dunes since the 1930s, long before the land became a National Recreation
Area.
Getz’s knowledge of the dunes is so thorough and
so intimate that mushroom hunting with him is strictly a spectator sport.
When we went out together he let me find a few, but it was rather like
going Easter egg hunting with the person who hid the eggs. He moved quickly
and silently through the forest, stopping only at known matsutake spots
long enough to deftly run his fingertips over the sand, as though massaging
it lightly. By this method he is able to locate the prized matsutake buttons
while they are still deep under the moss and sand, invisible to everyone
else. Time and again, where I saw nothing to indicate a mushroom—not the
slightest mound in the moss nor telltale crack in the sand—he would insert
his forked fingers like a divining rod, locate a mushroom deep underneath,
and then, after grasping and twisting it gently, pull it out of the ground
like a white rabbit out of a hat.
“I’ve been gifted with this ability to key into
certain things,” he says with understatement. “When I’m predicting the
pop, I measure the growth on the trees, an’ then time it to the weather
bounces. It’s all with the triggering of the sap [in the trees] goin’
up an’ down. And there’s this density to the air. The ground lifts
up about a half of an inch, becomes fluffy an’ the sand sticks to yer
finger, one grain’s layer, almost like it was sprayed with hairspray.
That tells me they’re there. Then when you get in the heat of the season,
just before a big flush, it feels like there’s steel wool mixed in the
sand, [because] all those little filaments [mushroom hyphae] are really
pumped.” In mycological circles, mushrooms simply aren’t talked about
this way; I’ve never seen a mycologist uncover 20 pounds of invisible
grade-one matsutake, either.
As impressive as Getz is, it is the wandering
“circuit pickers,” as typified by Nancy and her kin, that intrigue me
the most, for they are quintessential outsiders: figuratively, because
they stand outside the mainstream, and literally, because they spend most
of their waking existence outdoors. They are the latest (some say the
last) incarnation of a wandering community as ancient as humanity itself—one
that is nature-immersed and moves with the seasons, dispersing and coalescing
as conditions dictate. Knowledge is acquired through days spent in the
woods and is communicated orally. Respect in this traveling community
is won through the expertise that flows from that knowledge; trust and
camaraderie are cemented and sustained through the exchange of nature—the
buying, selling, and bartering of mushrooms—and just as importantly, from
the exchange of stories about nature and mushrooms.
“It’s the last of the nomad life,” says Linda,
a 42-year-old grandmother and ex-waitress turned mushroom picker. “There’s
no more gold minin’ goin’ on. It’s the last thing to be discovered: the
freedom of it, the independence, the sense of self-worth you get when
you find them.”
But while the migrant pickers may be footloose,
they are not carefree. As Doug Vincent observes:
“This mushroom [the morel] has to be picked when
it’s right. It’s not a thing that stays out there forever. These people
scour the earth up here to find these mushroom beds. They spend days and
days and days endurin’ a wet camp and cold food and strugglin’ to hang
around til it comes on. And when they pop, they’re there to pick ‘em.
Then everybody oohs and aaahs over a guy goin’ out here and makin’ two,
three hundred dollars a day pickin’ mushrooms. But if they added up all
the days that he didn’t get enough to pay his gas bill, you see, it wouldn’t
even be minimum wage.”
Mushroom pickers pay a heavy price for being outsiders.
They are politically powerless and are consistently ignored by agencies
whose decisions affect them. So why do they persist? Because it is a fundamentally
old-fashioned business that rewards know-how, not know-who, and because
it offers “freedom of heart,” as Linda puts it.
In southern Oregon, on a freezing December night,
I spent an evening with an immigrant family from Laos. They were ethnic
Mien—fiercely independent “hill people” recruited by the CIA to fight
the Communist insurgency in Laos and Vietnam, with the explicit promise
of safe haven in America if they lost. When the Communists triumphed,
they fled—not so much for a better life in America, but for the same reason
their ancestors had fled China: to preserve their autonomy and cultural
identity.
This particular Mien family had been camped out
for two months under a blue tarp. Most of the other pickers had left weeks
ago. There was frost on the ground and the family had no sleeping bags;
every night they huddled together under blankets around the fire. After
sharing their simple but delicious meal of rice, dried fish, some unidentified
greens from the forest, and ahun chi (a dried wild mushroom from
Southeast Asia), I asked them how much they were making. Altogether, about
$50 a day, they said—barely enough to cover expenses. Why didn’t they
go back to their flat in Sacramento, where they could stay warm and watch
TV, I wanted to know.
One replied, “Because nothing to do there, nowhere
to go. Here, life hard, yes, but nobody own us. We [can] walk all day,
see nobody. No gas, no electricity, sleep on ground, cook on fire, just
like Laos.”
To spend significant
time with full-time mushroom pickers is to be continually impressed by
their familiarity with the natural world and their ability to read every
nook and nuance of the landscape.
One evening around a campfire in a muddy mushroom
camp in British Columbia, while the pink and green Northern Lights shimmered
ethereally overhead, I listened to nine pickers reminisce about “blackouts”
(carpets of black trumpets so thick the ground couldn’t be seen) 1,500
miles to the south and two years in the past. The conversation narrowed
from the forests of northern California to a certain watershed east of
the coastal town of Fort Bragg, then to one mountain toward the back of
the watershed, and to a system of finger ridges emanating from that mountain,
and finally, to a particular stand of tanoaks and manzanitas under which
the world’s most spectacular “blackouts” occurred. Seven of the nine pickers
knew of the watershed and the mountain, and four were sufficiently familiar
with the stand of tanoaks that they were able to independently supply
details of aspect, slope, vegetation, and timing, even down to details
of the humus composition, distribution of woodrat nests, the shapes of
the shiros (a term for a mushroom colony they have appropriated from the
Japanese), and other kinds of mushrooms present.
In a time when “local control,” “stakeholders,”
and “land stewardship” have become buzzwords in conservation circles,
migrants tend to be viewed with suspicion and denied standing in all three
clubs. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find four residents of Fort Bragg
as conversant in the local landscape as these wandering mushroom pickers
sharing a campfire in British Columbia. Such specific and intimate knowledge
of far-flung localities belies the bioregionalist assertion that kinship
to the land is predicated upon being rooted to one spot (a criterion,
incidentally, that would eliminate much of the world’s population). Instead
it suggests that kinship and stewardship develop out of less exclusive
and more elusive criteria such as passion and curiosity, and perhaps some
more measurable ones such as actual number of hours immersed in nature.
To suggest that these mushroom pickers do not “belong,” that they do not
have as much stake in a place as its permanent residents, is like saying
that migrating geese do not belong to the lakes to which they flock in
the winter, or that steelhead have no stake in the streams in which they
spawn.
Though wild mushrooms, like pine nuts or huckleberries,
can be harvested without visibly altering the forests in which they grow,
some people have questioned whether the mushroom harvest is sustainable
at current levels. While this is a complex subject beyond the scope of
this article, studies show that intensive picking has little negative
effect on future crops, as long as the ground isn’t dug too deeply, and
may even have a stimulating effect. This isn’t terribly surprising, because
the commercially valuable species tend to be more plentiful in second-growth
forests or those impacted to some degree by human beings—which is probably
why we came to value them in the first place.
The good news, then, is that ordering wild mushrooms
in a gourmet restaurant probably comes at less cost to biodiversity than
wine, coffee, strawberries, beef, or almost any other item on the menu.
The bad news is that overly restrictive policies and unrealistic permit
fees imposed by the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies are turning
an already marginal existence into a well nigh impossible one, and making
mushroom picking profitable only as an occasional opportunistic activity
that neither conserves a variety of lifestyles nor encourages land stewardship.
Such policies portend a future in which packets of dried mushrooms labeled
“Buy Wild Mushrooms — Help Conserve Forests” will refer only to forests
that are not our own.
