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

Whole Earth, Spring, 2000 by David Arora

As impressive as Getz is, it is the wandering "circuit pickers," as typified by Nancy and her kin, who 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 of Ukiah 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" who had been 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; ever/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.