Som Siharaht, a Laotian immigrant, sorts his matzutake mushrooms in the buyers' tent in Chemult. The mushrooms are priced according to size and quality.
Photo by Bob Pennell
By BILL KETTLER
Thongkio Marisone smiled as she scraped the soil away from a big clump of creamy white fungus.
"Grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and grandson," the Laotian woman said, brushing away the dirt from five matsutake mushrooms an inch below the surface.
With her pocketknife, she separated the three biggest fungi from the cluster and laid them gently in her gathering basket. She pushed soil back over the two smaller mushrooms, leaving them behind to grow larger. Then she moved on, scanning the forest floor for the tiny mounds that mushrooms raise as they push to the surface.
Marisone and hundreds of other mushroom hunters are tramping across Eastern Oregon forests this month, combing the woods for a mushroom prized in Japan.
Most of the pickers are natives of Southeast Asia, war refugees who settled in the United States. Some make a tenuous living harvesting mushrooms and other forest products such as bear grass. Others, like Marisone, leave their jobs for a few weeks to search for matsutake and enjoy some time in the woods.
The sudden appearance of hundreds of people who grew up speaking Vietnamese, Cambodian or Laotian creates a cross-cultural exchange rarely seen in rural Eastern Oregon.
"It's Asia meets Europe in Chemult," said Jerry Smith, who supervises the mushroom program on the Winema National Forest.
Mushroom hunters spend some of their take in Eastern Oregon, boosting the local economy. But the annual influx of more than a thousand Asians worries law enforcement officials because many of the pickers carry firearms and many speak only limited English.
Last year an Asian picker shot and killed his wife. The murder of a picker several years ago remains unsolved.
The harvest is "both a boon and a bane, depending on who you talk to," Smith said.
It's a boon to the Winema National Forest's bottom line. Two weeks into this year's two-month season, the forest had taken in more than $170,000 in fees for mushroom-picking permits.
Joe Fletcher sees a darker side of the mushroom season. A Forest Service law enforcement officer, Fletcher regularly meets Asian mushroom hunters carrying rifles or handguns. He said many pickers carry guns for personal safety or to signal friends, but others have displayed their weapons to chase other pickers off their turf.
Fletcher said some California gang members raided mushroom pickers' camps last year, stealing vehicles and shooting at people. With so many firearms in the mushroom camps, he said there is the potential for explosive violence if the gangs return.
"I think there's a tragedy waiting to happen," he said.
Mushroom pickers reappear year after year in Klamath and Deschutes counties because they have discovered the South Cascades is one of the most consistently productive matsutake regions on earth.
Smith said local mushrooms can account for as much as 8 percent of the worldwide matsutake crop, and the local crop can be worth as much as $20 million in good years.
The mushrooms start to sprout when cooler fall weather chills the soil. A little rain helps the process, but too much rain, or early snow, could end the season prematurely.
Last week buyers were paying as much as $12 a pound for mushrooms that would fetch many times that price in Japan.
"On an average day, people can make $60," said Vibol Yip, a native of Cambodia who now comes to Chemult to buy mushrooms. "The lucky man can make $100 to $200 a day -- those guys who know the best spots."
Dreams of big money lure some Asians to the woods, but many discover it's not as easy to find mushrooms as they had hoped. Buyers pay the most for matsutake "buttons" -- mushrooms that haven't sprouted above the soil. The only way to find them is to see the little mound of duff the buttons raise as they swell just below the surface.
"Mushrooms are harder to find," said Heap Leng, a Cambodian who now lives in Stockton. "So many people are hunting.
"We're having fun," said Leng, who camped with friends near Crescent Lake Junction. "But we're not making much money."
Buyers quickly haul the mushrooms to airports in Redmond and Eugene. Smith said many of the mushrooms will be on the shelves of Japanese markets 36 hours after harvest.
Oregon's commercial matsutake harvest began in 1989. Smith said pickers used to harvest mushrooms primarily in British Columbia. When the crop failed there that summer, buyers sent out scouts looking for the matsutakes in other forests. The scouts discovered
the mushrooms on the Winema, Deschutes and Fremont national forests. Pickers also seek the mushrooms in Northern California and in the Illinois Valley.
Smith said the Forest Service has changed the mushroom program as managers learned from experience.
At first, mushroom pickers were allowed to camp anywhere in the forest, but many left behind trash and human waste. This year the Forest Service hired a concessionaire to create camps specifically for mushroom pickers. The camps feature trash collection,
drinking water and plenty of portable toilets.
The Forest Service also is trying to teach the mushroom hunters to pick responsibly. Everyone who wants a permit has to watch a training video, which explains rules about minimum mushroom size and weapons in the woods. Smith hired an Asian family to
act in the video to make it more realistic for the Asian-born mushroomers.
With the midpoint of the season approaching, Smith said early indicators suggest a good harvest.
"This year has the potential to be astronomical," he said. "It all depends on the weather."
