Wild Mushrooms

word count: 1,954

If you eat mushrooms you find, you are doing so at your own risk.

I was adjusting my tripod beside a stretch of sandy road when I noticed him. Dark and lithe, he strode with a confidence earned from a lifetime in the bush. Jet-black hair, combed back, framed his shaven, leathery face and two eyes as dark as a moonless Saskatchewan night gazed at me.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Is the buyer here?” he replied, pursing his lips and pointing them off to my left.

I looked over my shoulder and noticed a big canvas tent and a portable garage shelter in the forest with a sign that read “Mushroom Buyer”.

“Ah…I don’t think so,” I responded. My keen eye for detail is second only to my reputation for witty responses. A white plastic basket contrasted the scene and it was filled to the brim with mushrooms, each a soft egg-yolk orange colour in various contorted forms. Chanterelles. A wild mushroom. And what I was looking at was a wilderness harvest that would be exchanged for cash, on this occasion. The gentleman continued on his way and left me with a desire to know more about this wilderness crop and the people who harvest it, but he didn’t share his mushrooms with me.

That was over a year ago and I’m back on the same sandy road, but this time I’m photographing mushrooms. I’ll be the first to profess that I am no expert on the subject. My past experience with mushrooms has been using the ones I found on my lawn as field goal practice and ensuring my follow-through was correct. I had no idea what their function was in this world; what was their purpose? These days, for every mushroom I can identify as edible there seem to be at least five that are poisionous but look quite similar and since I’m not usually a lucky kind of fellow I just avoid them all.

The corner store explanation of what a mushroom is and what it does is actually quite simple. Mushrooms are a fungi and are among nature’s great recyclers. They break down dead wood and dead leaves. What is odd is that while you see a lot of dead leaves and decomposing wood out there, you don’t see many mushrooms. A mushroom may pop up above ground in a week, in a year — or maybe every few years. Like an apple on a tree, the portion of the mushroom we see is the fruit, while the roots remain hidden underground. Without mushrooms and other fungi we would have miles and miles of logs, and soon there would be no room for anything to grow.

The mushrooms must have been working overtime on this particular section of forest. The saturated moss held was home to numerous types of mushrooms and made photographing them an interesting endeavour: How to capture them on film at ground level and remain dry. The ubiquitous blue tarp helped – a bit.

It was early afternoon and the late August sun saturated the forest floor while off to my left a trio of women sauntered along, baskets in hand: mushroom pickers. Conversation comes easily in the North country and soon they were telling me about where their favourite mushroom haunts were and how they could pick more often now that two of the women had retired… . Juxtaposed to wild rice harvesters or commercial fishermen this style of harvest seemed more social driven and less volume orientated. And so it seemed throughout the day as I watched and listened to the parade of pickup trucks filled with mushroom pickers, usually comprised of friends and families, laughing and chatting as they bounced along.
For the most part, three species make up the majority of the mushroom harvest in Northern Saskatchewan: Morel mushrooms (Morchella spp.), Golden Chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius) and Pine mushrooms (Tricholoma magnivelare). Like any harvest, Mother Nature plays a major role and a serious picker can make in the range of $100 - $200 a day and upwards of $500 a day, if the conditions are right and they stay off the beaten track. The conditions were right in the 1999/2000 season and pickers harvested over $1-million worth of mushrooms. The Morel mushroom grows in vast quantities in forest fire burns the first season after the fire and the 1998 season was a bad forest fire year.
The Pine Mushroom is highly prized in Japan and commands prices of $100 a mushroom. Sliced…thinly of course, the Matsutake mushroom is used in soups and added to rice as a delicacy. Pine mushrooms are picked as far north as Johnson River, roughly 800 kms north of Saskatoon, and arrive fresh in Japan a few days later, so the price is understandable.

Saskatchewan’s prime market for its morels and chanterelles are Germany, Switzerland and France and our mushrooms are considered to be the finest in the world due to their high quality but Saskatchewan’s mushroom business is facing increasing competition from abroad. Russia, Poland, Pakistan, Turkey and numerous Eastern European countries have always had excellent mushroom crops but lacked the infrastructure to access the world market but technology is slowly changing this situation and with it so is Saskatchewan’s position as a mushroom supplier.

The following morning I am back in the forest wandering and searching for these elusive fungi. Well, elusive to me. In the last two hours I’ve found three Chanterelles…I think, and my mushroom manual remains at the ready. It’s a beautiful August day and I must admit that I can see what draws folks to this. What better excuse to pack a lunch and spend it meandering throughout the forest than to make money…or the pretense anyway. I ease out through the brush and onto the narrow sandy road and in front of a mushroom buyer’s campsite. The helter skelter placement of tents and tarpaulins remind me of squatters’ shacks in a city park. It has all the indications of a short-term stay.

“Hello,” I yell. “Anybody home?” The sole response was a soft breeze that drifted through the boughs of a nearby jackpine. I walked in a bit further and called again.

“Wait a minute,” a woman replied, “I’m not dressed!”

What do you say to that? I responded with one of my witty responses.

“Uh – okay”.

A few minutes later I made the acquaintance of Danusia Urbanski, a mushroom buyer from Vancouver Island. We sat at a nearby picnic table and I asked her what a mushroom buyer’s life was like. She laughed at the question and began to talk in a rich Polish accent. I listened.

“If you like camping, then this life is for you,” she laughed. “our season begins in the spring when we travel to areas where there have been serious forest fires the year before. We check the various provincial forest fire sites with a computer and locate the best sites. That dictates our travels for the season, which add up to roughly 25,000 miles a season throughout B.C., Alberta, Yukon and Saskatchewan and about five months in a tent.”

As we chat a mushroom picker drifts in and she excuses herself as she goes to see what he has brought to sell. Chanterelles. I watch her as she sifts, inspects for mold, discards poisonous mushrooms picked by mistake and weighed…all in a short amount of time. Cash changes hands and she returns to the picnic table. I ask where she learned her trade.

“Ah” she smiled. “ I emigrated from Poland with my mother and father many years ago. I spent 10 years as a picker and then became a buyer. That’s how I learned. But mushroom picking isn’t the same anymore,” she lamented and took a long draw on her cigarette. “Back in the 80s Pine mushrooms were $100 a pound and there wasn’t as much competition. But now…,” she spreads out her arms in exasperation. She tells me that today’s prices for Pine mushrooms are $5 a pound and Chanterelles go for $12-$13 a pound.
“What you see today are pickers to whom money isn’t a priority. Retired folks, people who use it to relieve stress, that sort of thing. What everyone has to be careful of are the poisonous mushrooms.”
An old pick-up rattled up to the camp and clattered to a stop. When the dust finally settled a group of First Nations teenagers hopped out with baskets of mushrooms.

“Hey, we’ve got mushrooms,” they yelled. “Are you buyin’,” and then they broke into laughter. Our talk was over.

Poisonous mushrooms have long held a place in history. Very old religious writings suggest that the Amanita family of mushroom (extremely poisonous) may have played a part in ancient religious ceremonies as a hallucinogenic. And there is the False Morel (Gyromittra esculenta). This species is made deadly poisonous for humans by its content of gyromitin, a constituent of rocket fuel. Some folks parboil this mushroom to drive off the chemical, but the released fumes, however, have been known to kill the cook. And then there is the Inky Cap (Coprinus atramentarius), a very desirable and edible species…with one major reservation: It cannot be consumed with, before or after alcohol without very disagreeable results. The good news is that if you do, then recovery is usually within a few hours. Even the non-posinous mushrooms have been responsible for many deaths. From Henry VIII to the American Civil War, mushrooms that caused dry rot plagued the oaken-hulled ships of Britain’s Royal Navy and there were instances where rotted hulls collapsed at sea, drowning entire crews.

I found the nuances of mushroom picking quite similar to my passion for fly-fishing. Both require a desire to understand Nature’s complexities and how everything has a reason and a purpose.
My friend and his son were out cutting a load of winter wood when they came across a mushroom patch. They quickly picked a bunch of Pine mushrooms (or so they thought) and dropped by Danusia’s camp to make a dollar or two. She looked at the mushrooms, looked at them and said in a stern voice “Go straight home and wash your hands well and don’t ever touch those mushrooms again.” So much for mushroom identification.

Sidebar: How to be a Mushroom Picker

The best way to start is teaming up with someone knowledgeable. Mushroom I.D. courses are almost impossible to find. There are numerous mushroom books available with excellent close-up photography that are a great help. Beware of wives tales. There are numerous ones that have been disproved over the years. For example:

• Boil them with a silver dollar. If the coin turns black, they’re poisonous (that one will send you to the emergency ward!)
• It’s edible if it’s growing on wood (There is a deadly species that grows on wood too).
• Watch the deer and squirrels and eat what they eat. Bad idea. There are three different digestive systems here. A deer can eat poisonous Amanitas that would kill a human.

You are allowed to pick mushrooms throughout Saskatchewan, with the exception of the Prince Albert National Park. Regardless of where you go mushroom picking there are some basic principles to bear in mind:

• Make absolutely sure of the mushroom identification through a knowledgeable person or another book.
• Eat only small amounts first- to test for allergic reactions.
• When you collect mushrooms save at least one in a brown paper bag in the refrigerator. If there is a problem later, then you’ll have a readily identifiable specimen.

Suggested reading: Guide to Western Mushrooms, by J.E. Underhill/Hancock Publishers, Surrey,B.C.

Mushrooms of the Boreal Forest, by Eugene F. Bossenmaier/University Extension Press/University of Saskatchewan.