The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (35 page)

For Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi, matsutake picking is both a livelihood and a vacation. Every matsutake season since the mid-1990s, they have made their way with their husbands from Redding, California, to the central Cascades; on weekends their children and grandchildren sometimes
join them. When the season is over, Moei Lin’s husband stacks crates at Wal-Mart; Fam Tsoi’s husband drives a school bus. In a good year, matsutake picking is a better living than either of these alternatives. Still, they look forward to the season for multiple reasons, including the exercise and the fresh air. The women, in particular, feel released from the confinement of the cities. The neighborly shelters of their Mien encampment are the nearest they have come, in the United States, to a village in upland Laos. Mien mushroom camps are full of the bustle of village life.

There are also reasons to forget, as Fam Tsoi reminds me when I ask about memories of home. Because many Hmong pickers have told me that hiking the Oregon forests reminds them of Laos, I wonder about Mien. “Yes, of course,” she says. “But if you just think about the mushroom, you can forget.” Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi came to the United States with the tragedies of the U.S. war in Indochina. After spending years in Thailand, they were accepted as refugees and moved to the mild weather and agricultural wealth of central California. They had no English and no urban job experience. They grew their own foods, and their husbands forged traditional tools. When they heard that money could be made picking mushrooms in the forest, they joined the autumn harvest.

For them, pioneering new landscapes is an old skill, once necessary to migratory shifting cultivation. It is a useful skill for commercial mushroom picking, which, unlike heritage picking, requires covering a lot of ground. Unlike heritage pickers, for whom a half-bucket of mushrooms is a good day’s haul, commercial pickers know that a half-bucket won’t pay for gas. Commercial pickers can’t afford to just check a few remembered spots. To make a living, they pick for longer days and in wider ranges and more diverse ecosystems.

Unlike refugees from cities, Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi do not fear the forest and rarely get lost. Their group feels so comfortable that there is no need to stay close together. When I pick with them, the men go off on their own, quicker trajectories, while the women forge their own way, returning to meet the men much later. “Men run off chasing big bumps,” explains Fam Tsoi, “while women scratch the ground.”

I scratch the ground with Fam Tsoi and Moei Lin. Everywhere we pick, other pickers have been before us. But rather than cursing their messy digs, we explore them. Moei Lin leans over and touches her stick to the area where soil has been disturbed. No heave is in evidence
because the surface has already been broken. But sometimes there is a mushroom! We follow the tracks of earlier harvesters, touching their remains. Because matsutake, anchored to trees, come up again in the same spots, this is a surprisingly productive strategy. We align ourselves with invisible pickers who have gone before us but left us traces of their activity lines.

Nonhuman pickers are at least as important as humans in this strategy. Deer and elk love matsutake, eating it in preference to other mushrooms. When we find the spoor of deer or elk, it often leads us to a patch. Bears turn over logs with matsutake underneath and create quite a mess, digging up the ground. But bears—like deer and elk—never take all the mushrooms. To find a recent animal digging is a sure sign that mushrooms may be around. Following the traces of animal lives, we entangle and align our movements, searching with them.

Not all tracks guide one well. How often I find a lively bump, which, pressed, reveals just air: the tunnel of a gopher or a mole. And when I ask Moei Lin if she follows the guidance of candy cane, she frowns and says “no.” “Other people will have already been there,” she explains. It is too obvious a sign for the subtle entanglements we seek.

To view trash in this light is a big revelation for me. White hikers and the Forest Service hate trash. It mars the forest, they say. Southeast Asian pickers, they say, leave too much trash. Some have spoken of closing the forest to pickers because of trash. But out looking for life lines, a little trash helps. Not the mountains of beer cans white hunters leave, but a little trash tracked through the forest. A wrinkled piece of tin foil, the discarded vial of a ginseng tonic, a soggy box of Zhong Nan Hai Super Cheap Chinese cigarettes: Each of these is a sign that a Southeast Asian picker had passed through. I recognize the line; I align myself with it; it keeps me from getting lost; it puts me on the track for mushrooms. I find myself looking forward to the lines on which trash leads me.

Trash is not the only Forest Service bugaboo. Another concern is “raking,” which means digging up the ground. Anti-raking spokesmen describe raking as the work of single egotistical or ignorant men. Rakers dig the ground with their big sticks, heedless of the results for others. But women pickers show me something different. Sometimes the disturbed ground labeled as raking is the work of many hands. When many hands have touched an area to find its life lines, a collectively
produced trough can form. Raking is sometimes the result of many consecutive and entangled life lines.

The ground where Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi pick is not the sculpted moss and lichen carpet of Hiro’s special valley. In the volcanic high desert of the eastern Cascades, the ground is dry; the trees are windblown, sickly, and sometimes sparse. Fallen trees litter the ground, their uprooted butts blocking passage. Waves of logging and Forest Service “treatments” have left a trail of stumps and roads and broken earth. It seems strange to argue that pickers are among the worst threats to the forest. Still, their tracks are there. For Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi, this is an advantage.

By following life lines and aligning their movements with them, Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi cover a lot of ground. We rise before dawn, and after a meal we are in the forest at first light. We may be out in the forest for four or five hours before we contact the men on the walkie-talkie to find out where they have gone. And although the general contours of the hills are familiar, we are always checking new places. This is not the forest of familiar attachments. We scout new territory by following the lines of life.

At lunchtime, we sit on a log and pull out plastic bags of rice. Today, our topping is carp, made into small brown nuggets, mixed with red and green bits. It’s tantalizingly rich and spicy, and I ask how it’s made. Fam Tsoi explains, “You have a fish. You add salt.” She falters; that’s it. I imagine myself in the kitchen with a raw salty fish dripping in my hand. Language has met its limit. The trick of cooking is in the bodily performance, which isn’t easy to explain. The same is true for mushroom picking, more dance than classification. It is a dance that partners here with many dancing lives.

The mushroom pickers I have described are observers of others’ life performances as well as performers of their own forest dances. They do not care about all the creatures of the forest; indeed, they are quite selective. But the way they notice is to incorporate others’ life performances into their own. Intersecting life lines guide the performance, creating one mode of forest knowledge.

Part IV

In the Middle of Things

I
N
O
PEN
T
ICKET, PICKERS ARE GATHERING FOR A
meeting with the Forest Service to discuss racial profiling in stopping cars and handing out fines. Two Forest Service employees have come and some twenty pickers, a tiny fraction of those in the woods for the season. The Khmer organizer grimaces in appraisal. “Cambodian people don’t come to meetings,” he quips privately, “since they think someone might get killed.” He is thinking of the Khmer Rouge regime, under which so many died. Our meeting, however, has other issues. It starts with lively repartee, but soon a forester drones on about regulations, and the meeting deteriorates into rules-explanation with only short questions to interrupt it. It’s hard to glimpse a revolution here. Still, it is unexpected that the Forest Service is meeting with pickers at all. And there is something new, at least to me. After each statement, we hear sequential translations in Khmer, Lao, Mien, and, after a quick scramble to find someone, Guatemalan Spanish. Each presents the ear with a jarringly different cadence, and each hangs in the air, haunting. Even simple questions or explanations of rules take a
very
long time. In
my discomfort, I understand that we are learning to listen—even if we don’t yet know how to have a discussion.

Meetings among pickers and with the Forest Service take place because of the legacy of Beverly Brown, a tireless organizer who decided to listen to the precarious workers of the northwest forest, including mushroom pickers.
¹
Brown brought pickers together through a practice of translation that, rather than resolving difference, allowed difference to disturb too-easy resolution, encouraging creative listening. Listening was Brown’s starting point for political work. She had begun not with languages but with gaps across city and countryside. As she explains in a memoir recorded before her death, Brown grew up knowing that urban elites never listened to rural folks—and that she was determined to do something about this.
²
She began by listening to disenfranchised loggers and other rural whites.
³
But thus she was introduced to the commercial foragers who collect mushrooms, berries, and floral greens. These folks were more diverse than the loggers. Her work grew ever more ambitious as she set up scenes for listening across greater gulfs.

Brown’s advocacy for political listening inspires me to think past a disturbance in our aspirations. Without progress, what is struggle? The disenfranchised had a common program to the extent that we could all share in progress. It was the determinacy of political categories such as class—their relentless forward motion—that brought us the confidence that struggle would move us somewhere better. Now what? Brown’s political listening addresses this. It suggests that any gathering contains many inchoate political futures and that political work consists of helping some of those come into being. Indeterminacy is not the end of history but rather that node in which many beginnings lie in wait. To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas.

When we take this form of awareness out of formal meetings into everyday life, yet more challenges appear. How, for example, shall we make common cause with other living beings? Listening is no longer enough; other forms of awareness will have to kick in. And what great differences yawn! Like Brown, I would acknowledge difference, refusing to paper it over with good intentions. Yet we cannot rely on expert spokesmen, as we have learned in human politics. We need many kinds of alertness to spot potential allies. Worse yet, the hints of common
agendas we detect are undeveloped, thin, spotty, and unstable. At best we are looking for a most ephemeral glimmer. But, living with indeterminacy, such glimmers are the political.

In this last mushroom flush, a final upsurge in the face of varied coming droughts and winters, I search for fugitive moments of entanglement in the midst of institutionalized alienation. These are sites in which to seek allies. One might think of them as latent commons. They are latent in two senses: first, while ubiquitous, we rarely notice them, and, second, they are undeveloped. They bubble with unrealized possibilities; they are elusive. They are what we hear in Brown’s political listening and related arts of noticing. They require stretching concepts of the commons. Thus, I characterize them in the negative:

Latent commons are not exclusive human enclaves
. Opening the commons to other beings shifts everything. Once we include pests and diseases, we can’t hope for harmony; the lion will not lie down with the lamb. And organisms don’t just eat each other; they also make divergent ecologies. Latent commons are those mutualist and nonantagonistic entanglements found within the play of this confusion.