Mush Rush

Even so, vehicles with Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Alberta, and even Quebec plates are rattling around local roads. One picker who’s not rattling around is a lanky fortyish man named Doug. Doug has a car, but he decided to leave it at home, “because you lose more than you gain by pounding the shit out of your car on these blasted roads.” He hitchhiked to the Yukon from Squamish, just north of Vancouver, and when he arrived, he had only $1.80 in his pocket. Four days later, he has almost $2,000.

Camped in a lonely spot off North Fork Road, he doesn’t seem to mind the company of a writer, especially when that company promises to hand over all the morels he finds. It’s eleven o’clock at night, a pleasantly cool and relatively mosquito-less time to search (the midnight sun provides the necessary light). Doug pulls out a government-produced map of the burn sites and points to an area in the Stewart Plateau, several kilometres from his camp.

At the edge of the burn in question is an almost impenetrable jumble of downed trees, brambles, and underbrush. Doug hacks through the more difficult sections with an axe. In the easier sections, the only morels are “cheerios”—hollow stems that indicate a fellow forager has been here first.

“The morel prefers the southeast or southwest parts of a well-drained slope,” Doug observes. “Also, you’re not going to find any unless there’s some tree canopy overhead.”

Shortly after uttering these words, he exclaims: “Look! There’s a nice blonde” He’s referring to a light-coloured morel rising from the blackened ground. A few centimetres away is another. Then another. And yet another. Doug enters a beatific state, cutting off each mushroom at the stem and placing it in his basket. An hour later he’s still in more or less the same place, hunched over a batch of darker morels, called “greens.” A second basket is nearly full. At one point he stops, lights a cigarette, and offers this bit of advice: “What you gotta do is be low, eh, creep down low, and then you can see if they’re around. ‘Down and dirty,’ that’s the name of the game, and it’s why I’m covered from head to toe with charcoal.”

Could this large fruiting of morels be the proverbial motherlode so eagerly sought by pickers?

“I’ll let you know after Wolfgang pays me for it.”

As it happens, Doug makes $597 from his ten-and-a-half-hour excursion into the Yukon’s burnt backcountry. Two days earlier, the same trip would have netted him $900, but the price has dropped to $4 a pound. A mega-shipment of morels from Asia hit the European market yesterday, causing the global price to plummet and local buyers to respond accordingly.

Doug admits that he could probably make more money if he dried his morels and trucked them to Vancouver himself, or joined one of the teams being helicoptered in to remote burn sites. But if he did this, he would no longer be his own boss. “Right now I’m dancing to my own tune,” he says. “I can set my own schedule, go to sleep or wake up when I want, pick when I want. I’d rather make less money and be happy than be rolling in it and have ulcers.”

He seems to have found the motherlode, although it doesn’t consist entirely of mushrooms.