The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (34 page)

Spores vitalize matsutake populations through adding new genetic materials. Mushrooms produce many, many spores, and only a few of them germinate and mate, but it is enough to keep populations cosmopolitan and diverse. Some of that diversity is within the parental bodies that produced the spores. No “one” fungal body lives self-contained, removed from indeterminate encounters. The fungal body emerges in historical mergings—with trees, with other living and nonliving things, and with itself in other forms.

Scientists speculate about open-ended questions, including the evolution and spread of matsutake, in a sporelike way. Most of those thoughts never make a difference, but the few that do can revitalize the field. Cosmopolitan knowledge develops out of historical mergings—with research subjects, living and nonliving, and with itself in other forms.

Patches are productive, but there are also spores.

Interlude

Dancing

F
ORAGERS HAVE THEIR OWN WAYS OF KNOWING THE
matsutake forest: they look for the lines of mushroom lives.
¹
Being in the forest this way might be considered dance: lines of life are pursued through senses, movements, and orientations.. The dance is a form of forest knowledge—but not that codified in reports. And, although every forager dances in this sense, not all the dances are alike. Each dance is shaped by communal histories, with their disparate aesthetics and orientations. To lead you into the dance, then, I step back into the Oregon forest. First I go alone, then with a Japanese American elder, and then with two middle-aged Mien.

To find a good mushroom, I need all my senses. For there is a secret to matsutake mushroom picking: one rarely looks for mushrooms. Every now and then one spots a whole mushroom—probably discarded by animals or so old that worms have consumed it. Good mushrooms, however, are under the ground. Sometimes I pick up the pungent aroma before I
find any mushrooms. Then my other senses are alert. My eyes sweep the ground, “like windshield wipers,” as one picker explained. Sometimes I get down on the ground to look at a better angle, or even to feel.

I am searching for the signs of the mushroom’s growth, its activity line. Mushrooms move the ground slightly as they grow, and one must look for that movement. People call it a bump, but that implies a well-defined hillock, very rare. Instead, I think of sensing a heave, an effect like the inhalation of breath in the chest. The heave is easy to imagine as the breath of the mushroom. There may be a crack, as if the mushroom’s breath escaped. Mushrooms do not breathe like that—and yet this recognition of common life forms the basis of the dance.

There are lots of lumps and cracks in any forest floor, and most of them have nothing to do with mushrooms. Many of them are old, static, and without indication of life’s movement. The matsutake picker searches for those that signal a living thing slowly, slowly pushing. One then feels the ground. The mushroom may be several inches below the surface, but a good picker knows, having sensed its liveliness, its life line.

Searching has a rhythm, both impassioned and still. Pickers describe their eagerness to get into the forest as a “fever.” Sometimes, they say, they didn’t plan to go, but the fever catches you. In the heat of the fever, one picks in the rain or snow, even at night with lights. One gets up before dawn to be there first, lest others find the mushrooms. Yet no one can find a mushroom by hurrying through the forest: “slow down,” I was constantly advised. Inexperienced pickers miss most of the mushrooms by moving too fast, for only careful observation reveals those gentle heaves. Calm but fevered, impassioned but still: the picker’s rhythm condenses this tension in a poised alertness.

Pickers also study the forest. They can name host trees. But tree classification only opens the door, determining the area a picker might search; it is not so helpful in actually finding mushrooms. Pickers do not waste much time looking up into trees. Our gaze is directed below, where the mushrooms rise through the heaving earth. Some pickers mention that they pay attention to the dirt, favoring areas where the soil looks right. But when I press for specifications, they always demur. One picker was probably tired of my asking, and so he explained: the right kind of soil is the soil where matsutake grows. So much for classification. Discourse has its limits here.

Rather than a class of soils, the picker scans for lines of life. It is not just the tree that is relevant but the story that the area around it tells. Matsutake is unlikely to be found in fertile, well-watered places; other fungi will grow there. If there are dwarf huckleberries, the ground is probably too wet. If heavy machinery has been through, this spells death for the fungus. If animals have left droppings and tracks, this is a place to look. If moisture has found a place to hide next to a rock or a log, this too is good.

There is one little plant on the forest floor that depends on matsutake for far more than minerals. Candy cane (
Allotropa virgata
) forms a red-and-white striped stalk adorned by flowers but completely without the chlorophyll that would allow it to make its own food. Instead, the plant drains sugars from matsutake, which in turn takes them from the trees.
²
Even after the flowers fade, candy cane’s dry stalks can be seen in the forest, and they are an indicator of matsutake—whether fruiting, or just a ball of fungal threads underground.

Life lines are entangled: candy cane and matsutake; matsutake and its host trees; host trees and herbs, mosses, insects, soil bacteria, and forest animals; heaving bumps and mushroom pickers. Matsutake pickers are alert to life lines in the forest; searching with all the senses creates this alertness. It is a form of forest knowledge and appreciation without the completeness of classification. Instead, searching brings us to the liveliness of beings experienced as subjects rather than objects.

Hiro is an elder in an urban Japanese American community.
³
Now in his late eighties, he has led an exemplary working-class life. When World War II broke out, Hiro was a young man living on a farm with his parents. His parents lost the farm when the authorities moved them to a livestock yard and then into an internment camp. Hiro joined the U.S. Army and served in the Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, famous for the sacrifices it made to rescue whiter troops. Afterward, he worked in a forge, making heavy equipment. For that long life of work, he receives $11 a year in pension.

From this history of discrimination and loss, Hiro has helped to build an active Japanese American community. One component is
matsutake: a symbol of both fellowship and memory. For Hiro, giving away matsutake is one of the greatest pleasures of picking. Last year he gave matsutake to sixty-four people, mainly older folks who couldn’t get to the mountains to pick for themselves. Matsutake builds a sense of enjoyment through sharing. As such too, it has become a gift that elders can give to the young. Before one even gets to the woods, then, matsutake conjures memory.

During the drive to the forest with Hiro, memory gets personal. He points out the window, “That’s Roy’s matsutake hunting place; over there it’s Henry’s special spot.” Only later do I realize that both Roy and Henry are deceased. But they live on in Hiro’s map of the forest, recalled every time he passes their spots. Hiro teaches younger people how to hunt for mushrooms, and with the skill comes the memory.

As we walk into the forest, memory gets specific. “Under that tree, I once found nineteen mushrooms, a whole row, stretching halfway round the tree.” “Over there I found the biggest mushroom I’ve ever found, four pounds it was, and still a bud.” He shows me where storms have felled a once good mushroom tree; there will be no mushrooms there. We look at the places where a flood wiped off the topsoil, and where pickers have undermined a bush by digging. Once those were good mushroom places: no more.

Hiro walks with a cane, and it is amazing to me that he can still clamber over fallen logs, through brush, and up and down slippery ravines. But Hiro does not try to cover ground. Instead, he goes from one of his remembered mushroom spots to another. The best way to find matsutake is to look where one has found it before.

Of course, if that spot is in the middle of nowhere, under a random bush near a random tree, it’s pretty hard to remember that place from year to year. It would be impossible to catalog all the places one has found a mushroom. But, Hiro explains, one doesn’t have to. When one arrives in the spot, the memory washes over one, making every detail of that time come suddenly clear—the angle of a leaning tree, the smell of a resinous bush, the play of light, the texture of the soil. I have often experienced just that wash of memory. I am walking along what appears to be an unfamiliar stretch of forest, and suddenly the memory of finding a mushroom—just there—bathes my surroundings. Then I know exactly where to look, although finding is still as difficult as you can imagine.

This kind of memory requires motion and inspires an intimate historical knowledge of the forest. Hiro remembers when a road was first opened to the public: “There were so many mushrooms by the side of the road that you didn’t have to go into the forest at all!” He remembers particularly good years: “I found three orange crates of mushroom, and I couldn’t figure out how to carry them to the car.” All of this history is layered on the landscape, threaded in and out of the spots we check for new life emerging.

The power of this dance of memory struck me particularly hard when we spoke of people who could no longer perform it. Hiro brings mushrooms to those who can no longer walk in the forest. Gifting mushrooms re-inserts the ill and the widowed into the communal landscape. Sometimes, however, memory fails, and then, for better or worse, all the world becomes mushrooms. Hiro’s friend Henry told the poignant story of an elderly Nisei with Alzheimer’s, confined to a nursing home. When Henry visited, the old man told him, “You should have been here last week; that hillside was white with mushroom.” He pointed out the window to a clipped lawn where matsutake would never grow. Without the dance of matsutake forests, memory loses focus.

Hiro takes me to a valley where commercial pickers were not so careful with the landscape. Hiro is one of the most generous people I know, and he loves to work across racial and cultural categories. Yet after some hours, tired, he fell back into discouraged repetition: “This was a good place before the Cambodians ruined it. This was a good place before the Cambodians ruined it.” Cambodians is his shorthand for Southeast Asian pickers. And no American should be shocked by the clash of racial profiling through which we stereotype each other. Without wagging a finger at either Hiro or the Cambodians, let me turn to the performance I learned from two Mien pickers. My point is not to show classificatory contrast but to sweep you into another dance.