Pointers for the pickers
CRESCENT, Ore. – It’s not easy to build a sturdy, waterproof shelter for 10 people using only tarps, twine and poles nailed together.
But as a group of men stood beneath a frame last week, discussing how to secure the plastic sheets, Enrique Santos and Vern Oden jumped right in to help.
As monitors with the Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters, they are spending the annual matsutake mushroom season at the camp south of Crescent Lake Junction, acting as interpreters, advocates and helpers for the 1,000 or so mushroom harvesters – many of whom are originally from Southeast Asia or Latin America and speak little to no English.
Dispensing tent-building advice is just one of the many jobs Oden and Santos tackle as monitors at the Crescent matsutake mushroom camp. Oden, Santos and a third monitor share hints with harvesters about where to go pick and how to pop the mushrooms out of the ground. They act as a go-between with the U.S. Forest Service, which manages most of the mushroom patches, and take harvester concerns about logging projects and off-highway vehicle trails to the federal agency.
“If they need help, I’ll help them,” said Oden, a 59-year-old Marine Corps veteran who has been harvesting matsutakes for decades. “They come to me with all their problems.”
The mushroom harvesters’ camp is a sprawling patch of forest just south of the junction between the Crescent cutoff road and Oregon Highway 58, occupied only during the two months a year when the pickers come to town.
Families come back to the same campsites every year, outfitting the shelters with wood stoves and makeshift showers. They scour familiar mushroom patches during the day, looking for bumps on the ground that indicate fungi beneath. At night, they sell their harvest to buyers in makeshift markets set up in Crescent Lake Junction.
“When I started this 20 years ago, it was $600 a pound – more than a load of logs,” Oden said, adding that it didn’t stay that high for long. “They called it white gold.”
The mushrooms are sold to Japan, where they are seen as a delicacy. The prices have dropped as other sources of matsutakes were found. Recently, the price was closer to $25 a pound.
Last week, Oden heard complaints from some harvesters that others were using rakes to dig up the valuable mushrooms – which damages the fungi, preventing it from fruiting in future years.
“I try to teach new people. I don’t want them out there raking and digging. I want them to do it right,” Oden said. “Our purpose is to try to keep what we have, and be good stewards of the forest.”