Edible Gold Sprouts in Northwest

CRESCENT LAKE JUNCTION, Ore. —  Somewhere out in the darkening trees there is a sound: a shrill scream like the death wail of an animal, if you could only think of an animal wild enough. Then another screech, this time from another part of the woods. Then the report of a gun. Then silence.

Out in the dense pine forest that carpets the eastern Cascades of southern Oregon for a hundred miles, the sound brings all footsteps to a halt. But to scan ahead, or behind, is to confront a wall of brush, bark and pine boughs.

Greg Schmaus keeps striding along, barreling through the brush, leaping over fallen trunks, his only weapon an eight-inch screwdriver clenched in his right fist. “That’s the way they signal,” he says tersely, and moves on. The news has upped the stakes. Someone else is out there in the woods, and they’ve struck gold: the spongy, fragrant fungus gold that is the pay dirt of southern Oregon’s fabled matsutake mushroom harvest.

Back on the road, a Toyota pickup with six Cambodians packed in it rumbles by, loaded to the gunwales with mushroom buckets and rifles. Schmaus watches them pass, then grimly points his GMC in the other direction. A few miles up, he parks and plunges into the trees again. When he hunts, he hunts alone.

Nowhere in the world do the matsutake, so exquisitely scented they can fetch hundreds of dollars a pound in a good year, sprout so abundantly and so consistently as on these wooded ridges along the California-Oregon border.

The annual hunt, which began in 1989, moves like a wave from British Columbia down through Northern California with the onset of chill autumn nights. It has become a multimillion-dollar economic engine for the Pacific Northwest and the closest thing left on the American frontier to a gold rush in the woods.

By the first week of October, there were 1,460 pickers plying the Deschutes and Winema national forests, hauling in a harvest that is expected to produce up to 1.2 million pounds of one of the most valuable mushrooms on earth. In a good year, southern Oregon pickers will take home upward of $18 million. The U.S. Forest Service, which sells $50 permits for a five-day hunt, figures it is making 81 cents a minute.

“I’ve just tried to imagine how much money is being generated here per day. All the people buying food and gas alone, it’s gotta be up in the couple hundred thousand dollars a day, maybe even a million,” said Peter Stayner, a private contractor who manages one of two designated Forest Service camps for the pickers. “It’s an amazing, an incredible event.”

The matsutake sprout like pale jewels out of the loamy undersoil of northern Klamath County, nourished by the blanket of moisture that comes with early autumn’s frosty nights and sunny mornings.

In Japan, the primary market, the matsutake is to autumn what the turkey is to Thanksgiving: an aromatic seasonal delight perfect for shaving onto a hot soup or dicing into a dish of sukiyaki. Well-to-do families package a single perfect mushroom on a bed of ferns and wrap it as a gift.

Korea, China, Turkey, Bhutan and even Mexico export matsutakes, but the Pacific Northwest is known for the consistency of its production and the plenitude of its fungal fruit. While Northwest matsutakes rarely command the $100-a-pound prices of their superior Asian counterparts, there are exceptions--in 1993, the price hovered at $300 a pound and hit $600 for half an hour--and those exceptions are enough to keep hungry pickers motoring in from every corner of the continent.

“One day, you get $300, and two days, you get nothing,” said Bee Yang, a Laotian immigrant from Sacramento who is among the 80% of the harvesting force that is Southeast Asian. “But that one day just keeps going in your mind: $300. $300. That’s why you keep coming back.”

To roam these hills in a mushroomer’s pickup is to step into a dimension apart, a place where there are no jobs and no bosses, where reality is a knife and a bucket, the barrel end of an automatic pistol and a prospector’s map, a pale golden mushroom looming up under a lodgepole pine, and the promise of another one.

Hardly anyone ventures into the woods without being armed to the teeth, mostly for protection; for the Southeast Asians, who hunt in large family groups, it’s also for signaling, along with the shrill cry that is the hallmark of a matsutake mega-patch; it is also, authorities say, in recognition of the Asian gangs that have begun to explore the prospects inherent in thousands of people roaming the woods with hundreds of dollars stashed in their pockets.

“Some lazy guy will wake up at 2 o’clock, and he’ll run out with a gun and say, ‘Give me your mushrooms or die,’ ” Yang explains.

Last year, there were four shootings in eight days at the camp near Crescent Lake Junction. Only one found a target: 38-year-old Trach Sarp, shot to death by her husband in a dispute over money. Authorities have not made an arrest in the 1992 murder of another Klamath County picker.

“This is not a violence-free endeavor,” admits Jerry Smith, who oversees the hunt for the Forest Service. But he said new regulations limiting the number of campers at a site and closing buying stations at 10 p.m. have produced a trouble-free season so far. “When you think about it, we’ve had up to 2,400 people in these camps, and we’re not talking about the Ritz. You have all these people packed in small areas, and they’ve handled themselves pretty well.”

*

Schmaus pulled into town on a Friday night after driving two days from Montana. The Forest Service told him of the mandatory camp for pickers; he didn’t say anything, but figures he’d have to be crazy not to bed down on the air mattress in the back of his GMC, right wherever the picking is good.

“I will not pull into a concentration camp of 2,500 Asians. They play that wacky music I don’t like, they’re all packing guns, and I’m sorry, I’m not gonna camp there,” says Schmaus, standing outside the Forest Service office in Chemult, Ore., with a new picking permit in his pocket.

“It’s the Forest Service trying to control everything,” interjects Ron Kidd, a picker from nearby Bend, Ore. “They put more restrictions on us than they do the loggers now. They put up checkpoints where they will stop you--they say they have the right to look at your vehicle because you’re on federal property. Any time they start where they can pull me over and say, ‘We wanna make sure your papers are in order,’ that’s communism, man.”

“Clear across these Western states, people are fed up with the Forest Service,” Schmaus says. “You know what we did to the British when they started doing this stuff.”

“We dumped their tea,” Kidd says.

“We dumped their tea, and then we dumped them.”

Out in the woods, Schmaus sounds decidedly less interested in arguing with the government and a lot more interested in finding a mushroom. Although he has scouted mushrooms for years in Montana and surrounding states, this is his first foray into southern Oregon, and he has little to go by but a map and a few crude circles around promising areas sketched by friends.

Look, he has been told, for places where lodgepole pines and Shasta red fir grow together: the matsutakes will bloom in a circle around the firs. For hours, Schmaus trudges up and down steep, brush-covered ridges, stopping to pry up an occasional mushroom. By midday, he has half a bucket to take back to the truck.

It is discouraging. With four children and a pregnant wife at home, Schmaus isn’t sure how he will feed everyone in the long winter ahead if these mushrooms don’t come through. His logging work ran out with the end of major timber harvests in the national forests. He had a gold mine a few years back, but had to sell it when his partner backed out before it started producing; he still prospects for gold, but the first two nuggets he panned are the biggest he has ever found. More recently, Schmaus has been prospecting for dinosaur bones; but the 100-pound fossil he hauled in 1 1/2 miles from a field turned out to be a rock.

His wife, he says, urges him to get a job like his brother, who earns $18 an hour working for a nearby mine. “My family, sometimes they just look at me and shake their heads, say: ‘There goes another million-dollar idea, and not a dime to do anything about it,’ ” Schmaus admits.

“I may go home with my tail between my legs, like I’ve done a thousand times before. On the other hand, I could go home with $20,000 in my pocket, in which case we could face the winter fairly nicely, with all the bills paid. I’m a gambler. . . . My brother, he’s the practical type. He keeps his house up, the bills paid. His grass is cut. Me, I run and look and search and try,” Schmaus says.

The weird cries start sounding on a remote ridge--a sure sign that somebody, somewhere, has found mushrooms--and it is not long after that Schmaus starts hitting his own pay dirt: a fringe of forest where pine and fir sprout up together, and on the border, mound after mound of white-breasted matsutakes. Schmaus sits down contentedly with a paintbrush and begins dusting them off before lovingly placing them in his bucket. Soon, the bucket is full, and then he fills a bag, and another bag.

At the end of the day, long after dark has settled over the woods, Schmaus pulls into the carnival-like buying station at Crescent Lake, where top-grade mushrooms are going for $7 per pound. He sells his whole load for $195: a really good day. Not a great day, but a good day.

Standing behind him in line, Jim Black, a tall beanpole of a man from Humboldt County, tells of outrunning a Forest Service agent through the woods that afternoon. “He asked me if I had a permit, and I said, ‘Hell no, why would I buy a $50 permit for a $30 day of work?’ ” Black recounts with a grin.

Did he get caught? “Of course not,” he says. “I was in the woods, and after I’m in the woods, nobody catches me. See, I used to grow pot for a living. Now I do this. As long as I’m in the woods, it doesn’t matter. But everything I like to do in the woods is illegal anymore.”

Schmaus heads back to his truck, stocked full of empty baskets, spare clothes, a cooler of beer, tins of macaroni and cheese and a sleeping bag. The showers are closed. It’s too late for anything but a call home and sleep. Tomorrow, he will go back to the patch he mined today, gathering all the matsutakes he had to leave today to the oncoming darkness. But still, Schmaus figures, he hasn’t found the big one, the mega-patch, the thousand-dollar day. That could still be out there somewhere. Or maybe not.

“These guys say, ‘There’s so many mushrooms this year.’ And you say, ‘Where?’ And they say, ‘Oh, all over them hills.’ Basically from Crescent Lake to Diamond Lake.” Schmaus shakes his head. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “There may be a lot of mushrooms. But there’s one heck of a lot of country.”