The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (11 page)

Before taking on translation, however, I need to visit the freedom assemblage.

Freedom …

5

Open Ticket, Oregon

In the middle of nowhere

—Official slogan of an aspiring matsutake town in Finland

O
NE COLD
O
CTOBER NIGHT IN THE LATE
1990s,
THREE
Hmong American matsutake pickers huddled in their tent. Shivering, they brought their gas cooking stove inside to provide a little warmth. They went to sleep with the stove on. It went out. The next morning, all three were dead, asphyxiated by the fumes. Their deaths left the campground vulnerable, haunted by their ghosts. Ghosts can paralyze you, taking away your ability to move or speak. The Hmong pickers moved away, and the others soon moved too.

The U.S. Forest Service did not know about the ghosts. They wanted to rationalize the pickers’ camping area, to make it accessible to police and emergency services, and easier for campground hosts to enforce rules and fees. In the early 1990s, Southeast Asian pickers had camped where they pleased, like everyone else who visits the national forests. But whites complained that Southeast Asians left too much litter. The Forest
Service responded by shunting the pickers to a lonely access road. At the time of the deaths, the pickers were camped all along the road. But soon afterward, the Forest Service built a great grid, with numbered camping spaces, scattered portable toilets, and, after many complaints, a large tank of water at the (rather distant) campground entrance.

The campsites had no amenities, but the pickers—escaping from the ghosts—quickly made them their own. Mimicking the structure of the refugee camps in Thailand where many had spent more than a decade, they segregated themselves into ethnic groups: on one end, Mien and then those Hmong willing to stay; half a mile away, Lao and then Khmer; in an isolated hollow, way back, a few whites. The Southeast Asians built structures of slim pine poles and tarps and put their tents inside, sometimes with the addition of wood stoves. As in rural Southeast Asia, possessions were hung from the rafters, and an enclosure gave privacy for dip baths. In the center of the camp, a big tent sold hot bowls of
pho
. Eating the food, listening to the music, and observing the material culture, I thought I was in the hills of Southeast Asia, not the forests of Oregon.

The Forest Service’s idea about emergency access did not work out as it imagined. A few years later, someone called emergency services in behalf of a critically wounded picker. Regulations aimed only at the mushroom camp required the ambulance to wait for police escort before entering. The ambulance waited for hours. When the police finally showed up, the man was dead. Emergency access had not been limited by terrain but by discrimination.

This man, too, left a dangerous ghost, and no one slept near his campsite except Oscar, a white man and one of the few local residents to seek out Southeast Asians, who did it once, drunk, on a dare. Oscar’s success in getting through the night led him to try picking mushrooms on a nearby mountain, sacred to local Native Americans and the home of their ghosts. But the Southeast Asians I knew stayed away from that mountain. They knew about ghosts.

Oregon’s center of matsutake commerce in the first decade of the twenty-first century was a place not marked on any map, “in the middle of nowhere.” Everyone in the trade knew where it was, but it wasn’t a
town or a recreation site; it was officially invisible. Buyers had established a cluster of tents along the highway, and every evening pickers, buyers, and field agents gathered there, turning it into a theater of lively suspense and action. Because the place is self-consciously off the map, I decided to make up a name to protect people’s privacy, and to add some characters from the up-and-coming matsutake trading spot down the road. My composite field site is “Open Ticket, Oregon.”

“Open ticket” is actually the name of a mushroom-buying practice. In the evening after returning from the woods, pickers sell their mushrooms for the buyer’s price per pound, adjusted in relation to the mushroom’s size and maturity, its “grade.” Most wild mushrooms carry a stable price. But the price of matsutake shoots up and down. Within the night, the price may easily shift by $10 per pound or more. Within the season, price shifts are much greater. Between 2004 and 2008, prices shifted between $2 and $60 per pound for the best mushrooms—and this range is nothing compared with earlier years. “Open ticket” means that a picker may return to the buyer for the difference between the original price paid and a higher price offered on the same night. Buyers—who earn a commission based on the poundage they buy—offer open ticket to entice pickers to sell early in the evening, rather than waiting to see if prices will rise. Open ticket is testimony to the unspoken power of pickers to negotiate buying conditions. It also illustrates the strategies of buyers, who continually try to put each other out of business. Open ticket is a practice of making and affirming freedom for both pickers and buyers. It seems an apt name for a site of freedom’s performance.

For what is exchanged every evening is not just mushrooms and money. Pickers, buyers, and field agents are engaged in dramatic enactments of freedom, as they separately understand it, and they exchange these, encouraging each other, along with their trophies: money and mushrooms. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed to me that the really important exchange was the freedom, with the mushroom-and-money trophies as extensions—proofs, as it were—of the performance. After all, it was the feeling of freedom, galvanizing “mushroom fever,” that energized buyers to put on their best shows and pressed pickers to get up the next dawn to search for mushrooms again.

But what is this freedom about which pickers spoke? The more I asked about it, the more unfamiliar it became to me. This is not the
freedom imagined by economists, who use that term to talk about the regularities of individual rational choice. Nor is it political liberalism. This mushroomers’ freedom is irregular and outside rationalization; it is performative, communally varied, and effervescent. It has something to do with the rowdy cosmopolitanism of the place; freedom emerges from open-ended cultural interplay, full of potential conflict and misunderstanding. I think it exists only in relation to ghosts. Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair.

Open Ticket is haunted by many ghosts: not only the “green” ghosts of pickers who died untimely deaths; not only the Native American communities removed by U.S. laws and armies; not only the stumps of great trees cut down by reckless loggers, never to be replaced; not only the haunting memories of war that will not seem to go away; but also the ghostly appearance of forms of power—held in abeyance—that enter the everyday work of picking and buying. Some kinds of power are there, but not there; this haunting is a place from which to begin to understand this multiply culturally layered enactment of freedom. Consider these absences that make Open Ticket what it is:

Open Ticket is far from the concentration of power; it is the opposite of a city. It is missing social order. As Seng, a Lao picker, put it, “Buddha is not here.” Pickers are selfish and greedy, he said; he was impatient to return to the temple where things were properly arranged. But, meanwhile, Dara, a Khmer teenager, explained that this is the only place she can grow up away from the violence of gangs. Yet Thong is a (former?) Lao gang member; I think he is getting away from warrants for his arrest. Open Ticket is a hodgepodge of flights from the city. White Vietnam vets told me they wanted to be away from crowds, which sparked flashbacks from the war and uncontrollable panic attacks. Hmong and Mien told me they were disappointed in America, which had promised them freedom but instead crowded them into tiny urban apartments; only in the mountains could they find the freedom they remembered from Southeast Asia. Mien in particular hoped to reconstitute a remembered village life in the matsutake forest. Matsutake picking was a time to see dispersed friends and to be away from the constraints of crowded families. Nai Tong, a Mien grandmother, explained that her daughter called her every day to beg her to come home to take care of the grandchildren. But
she calmly repeated that she had at least to make up the money for her picking permit; she could not go back yet. The important bits were left unsaid in those calls: Escaping from apartment life, she had the freedom of the hills. The money was less important than the freedom.

Matsutake picking is not the city, although haunted by it. Picking is also not labor—or even “work.” Sai, a Lao picker, explained that “work” means obeying your boss, doing what he tells you to. In contrast, matsutake picking is “searching.” It is looking for your fortune, not doing your job. When a white campground owner, sympathetic to the pickers, talked to me about how the pickers deserved more because they work so hard, getting up at dawn and staying through sun and snow, something nagged at me about her view. I had never heard a picker talk like that. No pickers I met imagined the money they gained from matsutake as a return on their labor. Even Nai Tong’s time babysitting was more akin to work than mushroom picking.

Tom, a white field agent who had spent years as a picker, was particularly clear about rejecting labor. He had been an employee of a big timber company, but one day he put his equipment in his locker, walked out the door, and never looked back. He moved his family into the woods and earned from what the land would give him. He has gathered cones for seed companies and trapped beaver for skins. He has picked all kinds of mushrooms—not to eat but to sell, and he has taken his skills into the buying scene. Tom tells me how liberals have ruined American society; men no longer know how to be men. The best answer is to reject what liberals think of as “standard employment.”

Tom goes to great lengths to explain to me that the buyers he works with are not employees but independent businessmen. Even though he gives them large amounts of cash every day to buy mushrooms, they can sell to any field agent—and I know they do. It’s an all cash business, too, without contracts, so if a buyer decides to abscond with his cash, he says, there is nothing he can do about it. (Amazingly, buyers who abscond often come back to deal with another field agent.) But the scales he lends buyers for weighing mushrooms, he points out, are his; he could call the police about the scales. He tells the story of a recent buyer who absconded with several thousand dollars—but made the mistake of taking the scale. Tom drove down the road in the direction he believed the buyer took, and, sure enough, there was the scale abandoned
by the side of the road. The cash was gone of course; but that was the risk of independent business.

Pickers bring many kinds of cultural heritage to their rejection of labor. Mad Jim celebrates his Native American ancestors in matsutake picking. After many jobs, he said, he was working as a bartender on the coast. A Native woman walked in with a $100 bill; shocked, he asked where she got it. “Picking mushrooms,” she told him. Jim went out the next day. It wasn’t easy to learn: he crawled through the brush; he followed animals. Now he knows how to stalk the dunes for the matsutake buried deep in the sand. He knows where to look under tangled rhododendron roots in the mountains. He has never gone back to wage work.

Lao-Su works in a Wal-Mart warehouse in California when he is not picking matsutake, making $11.50 an hour. To get that pay rate, however, he had to agree to work without medical benefits. When he hurt his back on the job and was unable to lift merchandise, he was given a long leave to recover. While he hopes the company will take him back, he says he gets more money from matsutake picking than from Wal-Mart anyway, despite the fact that the mushroom season is only two months long. Besides, he and his wife look forward to joining the vibrant Mien community in Open Ticket every year. They consider it a vacation; on weekends, their children and grandchildren sometimes come up to join them in picking.