The Mushroom Pirates: My Experience Picking Mushrooms to Sell to Restaurants

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 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.

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 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, OR, 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 Courier up a dirt road along a cliff just as a storm was hitting, with 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.

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 hands on them. The consumer, with his conspicously 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.