Tales Of Adventure, Nature Love, And Money On The Globalocal Mushroom Trail

Whole Earth, Spring, 2000 by David Arora

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, fifteen 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. In North America, ample public lands and an abundance of private vehicles--a combination rare elsewhere in the world--make 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-bodybuilder; a belly dancer; 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 sixteen 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 thirty 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).