The Mushroom Pirates

The first time I made money picking wild fungus for the restaurant trade was when a friend offered to let me keep all the gambones (boletus edulis, aka cepes, aka porcinis) I could pick on his parcel of land on the Coast in exchange for keeping other people away. The next thing you know I was rooting around in the underbrush, clearing a hundred bucks a day, tax free, and kicking out the local tweekers who knew a good thing when they dug it out of the leafmold. What I sold went to a buyer who lived in a shack out in the pygmy forest and drove an old blue Ranchero down to the Bay Area once or twice a week.

Within a few weeks I had extended my effective range into a State park, and become a pirate myself. That first winter, as I followed the seasons deeper into the woods, I began to glimpse a world few civilians have any idea exists. Least of all, I am quite sure, those fine diners who pay through the nose for the snobbishly appealing wild mushroom risotto.

By the next year, I had gone pro, but also learned what to do with the odds and ends I was sometimes stuck with.

Each mushroom has its own distinctive character, and none of them are in the least like the bland white meadow musrhroom (agaricus bisporus) the average consumer gets at the local market. Some are subtle, with emotional overtones capable of loosening panties at twenty paces, others more assertive, and demanding of true culinary skill. I discovered, slowly, exactly what chefs do to make fungus delectable.

I discovered this because I soon found that the buyers a wildcrafter depends on are cheats, charlatans, liars and impostors, most of whom live underground lives and come out only when the skies are overcast and the days brief, in darkest winter.

In general, the best recipes are the simplest. Sautee your beauties in some butter with shallots or garlic and serve with rice or pasta. Gravies, sauces and the like are easily created, and if you like you can make a wonderful risotto or whatever without much trouble. The stronger-flavored varieties hold up well to red meats, though chicken probably takes up flavor better without overwhelming what you’ve added to it. You really can’t go wrong unless your overcook the dish or add a lot or irrelevant spices. Salt and pepper and maybe some cream or sour cream usually suffice.

Of course, and I hope it goes without saying, if you aren’t 100% sure of what you have, don’t eat it. Toxic mushrooms kill very slowly and painfully from what I’ve heard. They usually attack the nervous system which is really a bad way to go, and undignified at that.

So I started taking my catch directly to the restaurants and bargaining for the best price I could get, anywhere from $6 to $15 a pound for the good stuff. Sometimes I ended up trading straight across for fine dinners, which got me into places with starched tablecloths and delicate, expensive wines I otherwise would have never seen.

I worked two California coastal counties over about 15 years, which happened to be the era when wild mushrooms started to show up in the markets, alongside the commercially-grown varieties, which also expanded in number. It has become a true cottage industry, supporting dope habits up and down the coast.

Around this time of year, the buyers are setting up shop in motel rooms in Willits, which becomes, for a month or two, the epicenter of the mushroom world. I’ve stood in line with some of the shadiest characters this side of Washington DC to be cheated, swindled and lied to by a bunch of intinerant degenerates, fungal in nature and capitalistic to a fault.

I’ve seen two of these characters trade baskets of mushrooms back and forth, at the whim of their brokers, trying to hook each other for a 25¢ per pound profit, at my expense, naturally, as if I wasn’t even in the room. And I once got swindled out of $200 that wasn’t even really mine because I got talked into “minding the store” and buying from other pickers as they wandered in out of the Eureka gloom.

It all went sour when the broker decided he had advanced my buyer all the cash he was going to, and left me holding the shitty end. It was a transaction with deep ramifications. Let’s just say, when I was helping my first wife move out, I found one of her diaries, open, quite by accident, to the page where she confided that she hoped I’d break a leg in the mushroom woods and die miserably of exposure, to save her the trouble of going through a quite inevitable divorce.

I once got involved with a buyer who promised to take me to the top of the mushroom world. We did this by driving all night through snow, sleet and black ice to Portland, Oregon, where we waded out in the slush at daybreak in a nice neighborhood, and delivered a fine batch of hedgehogs (dentium hydnum) I had picked the day before in a secret place I know about but am willing now to sell to the highest bidder. It’s a proven moneymaker, so the coordinates won’t come cheap. I’ve seen patches sold for $500 or more, a pittance compared to what they can earn over the course of a few seasons.

It’s cheaper but not easier to find your own patch. What you do is drive up a dirt road until the No Trespassing signs look sincere but neglected, get out of your beat-up old rig, and walk up the nearest road until your feet are soaked with dew and it looks like rain. Then cut cross-country until you can smell the chanterelles (cantarellus cribarius) and black trumpets (cantarellus cornucopiodes). Then you get down on your hands and knees in the gloom and start making money.

The third-most exciting experience I had as part of this career was driving a beat-up old Ford Courier up a dirt road along a cliff just as a storm was hitting, while lightning and snow, always a thrilling combination, raked the Coast Range. I made it to Willits after about three hours, got cheated but still walked away with several hundred entirely untraceable dollars, stopped at Safeway for grub and liquor, and headed north up 101 an hour or two after dark. Just about the time I hit Rattlesnake summit, the truck crapped out cold and I spent the night freezing in the front seat, with big rigs roaring past about every half hour and flurries of snow and sleet freezing the windshield to a solid block of ice.

Finally a little after dawn, a CHP officer stopped and let me get in his car for the ride back to Laytonville. I had to keep the (now-frozen) bag of weed in my pocket, because of all the things I was supposed to bring back to camp, that was the most important.

Once in Laytonville, I bargained with a garage to get the heap of bolts and primered fenders towed in, then set about hitchhiking north again. Although the night had been sheer misery, it was a vacation compared to standing on the side of the road in wet boots and snow flurries, trying to get back to Garberville to meet up with my partner in the van.

I eventually did get back to camp for more rummaging about in damp woods with melting snow now falling out of the trees in big clumps down the back of my neck. Yeah, it was natural.

The first and second most exciting moments were so illegal it doesn’t behoove me to mention them, and the fourth involved a Simpson Timber security guard who knew I was there, the way a dog knows he has a rat cornered but can’t spot him, crouch though he may. But it was Thanksgiving after all so he eventually drove away and left me to go about my business. I think he was a little afraid, since he didn’t know what I was up to, and that section of road is notorious for harboring some of Humboldt County’s most dangerous crank labs. Another good reason to buy your goods at the local store. 

This all came back to me the other day when I stopped by the produce aisle at Sacramento Natural Foods and Co-op to inspect the fungus. A nice lady was filling up bags with two or three kinds for her feast, probably a hundred dollars’ worth in hand. She could see the look in my eye and asked me if I knew my mushrooms. I only told her enough to help her plan a good meal, and kept the details to myself.

For sheer contrast and irony, it’s hard to match the difference between what it takes to get these items into the kitchen, and what happens when a good chef gets his/her hands on them. The consumer, with his conspicuously consumptive but very tasteful dinner, steaming and delicate, can hardly guess at the sheer human misery and subterfuge involved. But it doesn’t matter at that point. Money not only talks, it makes up the rules as it goes along.