Forests Yielding New Treasures But Scramble For Wild Greens, Mushrooms, Moss Can Turn Violent
The van dropped them off just after dawn, and the brush pickers trudged through the fog-chilled forest, their heads down, their quick hands plucking leafy stems from the undergrowth.
If things went well, each of the young men might make $60 for a long day of gathering salal, an evergreen plant used in flower arrangements.
But things would not go well.
By nightfall, one man would be dead and another would be in jail. All for a pile of leaves.
Around noon, the pickers looked up to see a stranger among them. This is my picking area, he said, so hand over that brush.
What gives you the right to take it?
The stranger pulled out a pistol. “This is my permission,” he said.
The horde of loggers that once swarmed through the Pacific Northwest is much diminished today, as is the forest itself. But amid the second growth, a burgeoning crowd now seeks smaller treasures: mushrooms, berries, herbs, moss and leaves.
Largely ignored a decade ago - before Big Timber met the spotted owl - the harvest of such “special forest products” now is worth at least $200 million a year in Washington and Oregon, according to James Freed, a forester with the Washington State University Cooperative Extension.
Some celebrate this new forest economy, which thrives on America’s growing appetite for the good life a la Martha Stewart: the earthy taste of chanterelles in linguine, the just-so splash of green a sprig of salal adds to a bouquet.
Supplying such refined sensibilities, however, can be a rough and dirty business. As ever more gleaners tramp through the forest, the hunt has turned desperate and dangerous.
Nearly all the picking occurs on land owned by big timber companies or the government, which try to regulate (and profit from) the harvest with permit fees and limits on the number of pickers allowed.
But in the woods, where law enforcement is weak, the rules that many live by are straight out of the Old West: Take what you can, don’t get caught - and carry a gun.
Poachers prowl for morel mushrooms in northern Idaho and for bear grass in Washington’s Cascade Range.
Each fall in the Cascades of Oregon, some 2,000 mushroom hunters pursue the matsutake, a cinnamon-scented delicacy prized in Japan. Forest rangers there try to keep the harvest legal, but they are outflanked by pickers who are armed and protective of their secret spots. At night in the mushroom camps, drinking, gambling and fighting are the favored pastimes. Extra patrols helped keep the peace last fall, but 1996 was more typical with five shootings, one of them fatal.
Now trouble has come to the rainy hills of Western Washington, where the gathering of wild floral greens has become big business - a good portion of it illegal.
Where whining chain saws once felled tall timbers, the second-growth forest now hides a furtive scramble for shrubbery, the quiet broken only by the snapping of twigs.
Like Oregon’s mushroom hunters, the brush pickers here are mostly foreign-born: Hispanic and southeast Asian. Many are illegal immigrants, willing to work long hours for piecework wages in exchange for a job that conceals them all day in the woods.
More pickers arrive each year. Now, everyone agrees, too many people compete for too little brush.
“People become cowboys,” said forester Freed. “They shoot first and think later.”
Alfredo Menjivar had advantages over some brush pickers: a green card, a good command of English and a van that worked most of the time.
At 21 years old, he stood just 5 feet 3 inches but was muscular and confident, a leader in his tight circle of Salvadoran friends.
Menjivar and six others shared a tiny rental house in Aberdeen, a timber town where hard times are not unknown but where few live so poorly as Menjivar.
As brush pickers go, Menjivar and his friends were not very experienced. When prices are high and the salal is thick, a skilled picker can make more than $100 a day. Menjivar’s crew usually made $40 to $60 apiece.
On Thursday, Dec. 11, Menjivar drove four or five pickers out to a stretch of forest a few miles northwest of Aberdeen. He dropped them off and returned to town to run some errands.
Around 2 p.m., a friend caught up with Menjivar at the bank.
There’s trouble in the woods! A Mexican guy with a gun, he said, had taken all their brush.
Soon Menjivar and a van full of friends were barreling out to the woods. When they arrived, the guy with the pistol was still there, sitting in a pickup truck in a clearing by the road. His wife was sitting next to him.
Menjivar got out of the van and strode up to the passenger side of the pickup. He banged on the window. Why did you take our brush? he yelled in Spanish.
The window rolled down. More words were exchanged. The man with the pistol extended his arm across his wife’s chest. A single shot exploded, and Menjivar took it full in the face, falling backward to the black rock paving the shoulder of the road.
Sheriff’s deputies stopped the pickup truck 25 miles away and arrested Leonelo Martinez.
Years ago, a handful of brush pickers roamed the forest, unnoticed in a region preoccupied with logging. Now, with worldwide demand growing for the Northwest’s floral greens, it seems as if everyone wants a piece of the brush-picking action.
That’s created tensions and lead to more and more confrontations in the woods.
“We’re getting these calls a couple of times a week,” said Deputy Randy Gibson, who was called out to settle a dispute between alleged salal poachers and a salal harvester who had leased the property. “It’s getting to be a pain.”
Those who mourn Alfredo Menjivar believe he was shot in cold blood.
“For nothing!” blurted his cousin, Jose Menjivar. “Alfredo go up and talk to him. They open the window up. Pfff! For no reason.”
But friends of Leonelo Martinez tell a different story - that of a hard-working businessman trying to protect himself and his wife against a gang of brush rustlers.
The day Menjivar died, his friends walked past “Private Property” signs posted in English and Spanish to pick brush in an area leased by a company called Mount St. Helens Evergreens.
Martinez supervised that company’s brush-picking crews.
“He’s probably the quietest, most soft-spoken person in the world,” said Ray Eveland, Martinez’ boss. “But you back anybody into a corner, and they’re going to lash out.”
Martinez, 26, was charged with second-degree murder, but he got out of jail on $100,000 bail just before Christmas and soon was back at work. He will claim self-defense at his trial in May, said his attorney, Rod Franzen.
“Any reasonable individual can see the dangerousness of the situation,” Franzen said. “It’s like the old California Gold Rush days. You’ve got people jumping other people’s claims, and there’s no law out there to stop it.”