June 30, 2007By K.C. MEHAFFEY
THE WENATCHEE WORLD (Washington State, USA)CONCONULLY, Wash. -- Hong Vorng sits on a folding chair next to a table and digital scale in his makeshift office on Conconully's main street, waiting for the mushroom hunters.
It's late afternoon in early June, and he and his wife Chatha expect a slow day because of the rain. They stay protected under the tan plastic tarp that forms the walls and roof of this 10-foot by 20-foot office. Stacks and stacks of flat, empty baskets and lids sit on the dirt floor in the back. An ice-filled tub with Budweiser, Arrowhead water and root beer at the entrance are an invitation to sellers.
The Vorngs are mushroom buyers, and they've been in this small tourist town since mid-May, when Salmon Meadows camp eight miles to the north started filling up with tents and pickup trucks, and blue and brown tarps held up with poles and bungee cords for shelter.
In a few days to a week, some of the wild morels they buy today will be served up in fancy restaurants across the United States. Some will be dried and sold later around the world - particularly in Europe, where morels are a common ingredient in dry soups and other dishes.
These fungi that resemble domed sponges on stems - treasured for their earthy flavor - are being picked a dozen miles west of Vorng's tent-office, on the steep slopes of the Okanogan and Wenatchee National Forest. The mushrooms emerge next to dead, black trees on ground covered in rust-colored needles and white ash, a few sprigs of green braving the harsh environment every dozen yards.
Morel hunters follow the big fires, and the 175,000-acre Tripod Fire west of Conconully was one of the largest in the West last summer.
The Vorngs - born in Cambodia, but now permanent U.S. residents living in South Bend - have been doing this for 12 years. Hong Vorng says he was tired of making $4.95 an hour at another job, so he quit and went to work as a private contractor for Foods in Season, a Washougal company that does from $1 million to $2.5 million annually in the sale of mushrooms and other fresh, dried and frozen foods.
Right now, he says, he hates morel mushrooms. "I'm almost broke. I make no money for two years and I don't have other job," he says. He's paid a per-pound commission, so his income depends on how much he sells. With seven buyers in town, the competition is fierce.
But it's early in the season, and everyone's hopeful that once the weather warms, the mushrooms will really start popping.
His wife, Chatha, is smiling, though. She says she has four children who are all in school.
At 6:30 a.m. on a weekday morning, a steady stream of pickup trucks drive down Conconully's main street from the north. With a population of only 190 people, this often sleepy town is used to its busy times. It swells with snowmobilers on long winter weekends and fishermen as soon as the season opens each April. Last summer, with the Tripod Fire raging in the nearby hills, firefighters brought extra business to the stores and restaurants.
But Cherrokee Merz, general manager of the Conconully General Store, says even the firefighters didn't bring this much business.
She's opening the store - which has the only gas station in town - two hours early, at 6 a.m., and staying open an hour late, until 8 p.m.
Merz said she doesn't know how much extra business the store has done. "I'd hate to even guess, but it's a lot," she says.
On this day, Chris Woody of Cottage Grove, Ore., pops into the shop shortly after 7 a.m. to pick up a six pack of Smirnoff Watermelon and a pack of Camels. He catches a ride to a campsite eight miles up the West Fork of Salmon Creek Road where he meets up with Walt Jones, a Quincy man who he met just a few days ago.
Jones injured his foot and can't hike to pick mushrooms, but he has a four-wheeler, so the two decided to head into the forest together.
The area is a maze of dirt roads labeled with numbers, and they take Road 415 to its end, where more than a dozen rigs are already parked. They zoom up the trail in search of a morel patch. Soon, the path narrows, and Woody ventures farther on foot, a seven-gallon bucket and four flat, white plastic baskets strapped to his backpack.
After a short hike, the dense, green world opens up into a long expanse of black, limbless trees climbing their way up the mountain.
Early in the season, there may be mushrooms in this fully burned landscape, Woody says. But as summer rolls on, they're more likely to poke up in places where some trees survived and can protect the ground from the hot sun - often on the edges of where the fire burned this hot. Depending on the weather, hunters could continue to find mushrooms on these high elevation slopes through the summer, he says.
It appears as though everything died here, but Woody finds a few morels, hiding in the shadows of a downed log.
He learned about picking chanterelles - a different kind of wild mushroom - from his grandpa when he was 12 years old. Later, when he worked as a firefighter, someone told him about the "fire" morels that come on strong the year after a wildfire. Now he hunts for mushrooms and other wild edibles all year.
"When the morels are done, I pick huckleberries. Then I go to Crescent Lake to pick matsutakes. Then it goes into chanterelles, hedgehogs...," he says, listing off a few more mushroom types. "Then in the spring I dig truffles in Oregon until the morels start popping."
He pulls a receipt from his pocket with yesterday's date, and several numbers scrawled on it. Altogether, he picked nearly 49 pounds, and at the going rate of $6 a pound, he netted $293.94. Not bad for one day's work, he says.
But that's not why he does it
"To me, this is like going to church every day. I love the woods," he explains.
He starts work when he wants, and takes a day off whenever he decides.
He says he hopes he never has to look for another job. "Smell that," he says, pulling in a whiff of air that's stronger than a scented pine pillow. "It doesn't get any better."
Woody says he's made a lot of friends of many different nationalities at the mushroom camps that pop up with the morels each spring. Most of the people on this circuit are immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. Some are from Thailand or Mexico. Some from other parts of the United States, mostly Washington and Oregon, although one family at the camp is from Ely, Minn.
It's best when the camps are big enough for someone to set up a soup kitchen and sell a hearty dinner each night for $5, Woody says.
But this camp isn't big enough, at least not yet, for a kitchen.
More than 30 campsites dot the edges of this flat field above Salmon Meadows Campground, each with several campers.
It doesn't cost anything to stay here. The Tonasket Ranger District left portable toilets and a dumpster for the mushroomers, so the regular campgrounds wouldn't fill up. Rules for campers and mushroom gatherers are posted in English, Spanish, Laotian and Khmer, the language of Cambodia.
Shannon O'Brien, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman in Tonasket, says they've issued 500 free permits to pick in the Tripod Fire area for personal use, and 300 commercial permits - which include both the $100 permit for the full season, and the $20 permit for four days.
There have been no problems, O'Brien says. "The issues we've had dealt mostly with educating folks about the proper building and care of a campfire," she says.
At the camp, Sinath Hay builds a fire in a clearing several yards from his tent. He says he came just a few days ago after losing his job at a doughnut shop in Texas. He came here with his brother to learn how to pick morels.
"It is a lot of hard work looking for mushrooms, but these couple of days have been pretty good," he says. The mosquitoes have been bothersome, he adds. But his biggest worry: "The forest is too big. I'm just afraid of getting lost."
An aroma that would bring some people back to a memory at their favorite Thai restaurant floats over from the camp next door, where four people are sitting around a campfire. Several blue tarps are stretched overhead, and Thai music fills the air.
Nang Phothong stirs the pot on the fire while her husband, Phieng Phothong attaches soft Styrofoam to the shoulder straps of a backpack.
Koy Chounlabout, who's perched on a round of firewood next to the fire, says these are her crew members. They're immigrants from Laos, and like most of the mushroom pickers, they do this because they don't speak English very well, and can make a good living this way, she says.
It's early evening now, and back in town, several trucks are parked at Vorng's buyer's tent. Some are here to fill their five-gallon water jugs before they head back to camp. Others wait to sell Vorng the mushrooms they picked today.
"You have permit?" Vorng asks, and when he sees the piece of paper, takes the basket and pours the mushrooms onto a slanted screen. The morels tumble down the screen and drop into two baskets on the floor, while dirt and twigs fall through the screen to the ground.
One couple brings four baskets and leaves with $343. Another brings in almost three baskets, and walks off with $261.
When the baskets are full, Vorng snaps on a lid and stacks them with others at the back of his tent.
They'll be stored in the refrigerated truck just outside, until he has enough to drive them to Washougal, his company's headquarters near Vancouver, Wash. "Hong just brought us about 2,000 pounds yesterday," says Ian Brandon, a salesman for Foods in Season, in a telephone interview.
Brandon says wild mushrooms are a "multi, multi, multi-million dollar business in Washington state." The state Department of Agriculture does not track the wild mushroom industry, according to Alan Funk, statistician for the agency's mushroom survey. Commercially grown mushrooms ranked 28th in the state's top agricultural commodities in 2005, with a gross value of $17.7 million, the department reported.
Although morels grow all over the United States, Washington and Oregon are the capitals of the commercial business, he says, because there are so many mushroom varieties, pickers can stay busy all year. In addition to morels, the Okanogan and Wenatchee National Forests sells commercial permits for matsutake mushrooms when weather creates good growing conditions, officials say.
"It's not something you can just go out and start doing. This is something you have to learn, as far as how to pick, how to clean them, where to go, when to go and who are the network of people who can tell you, 'Oh, I didn't find anything there,'" Brandon says.
He would not say how much he'll get when he sells mushrooms that Vorng brought him.
He says all companies that sell fresh, wild mushrooms are very secretive about their prices because it's such a competitive market.
After they arrive, his company will sort them for quality and ship them almost immediately to restaurants in Chicago, Los Angeles, Tampa, and Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.
Brandon says he recently looked up a list of the top 50 restaurants in the world, published by a British magazine. Ten of them are in the United States, and Foods in Season sells to seven of them, he said.
"I'm talking about places that you and I could go to dinner, not get drunk, and spend $500," he says. "These chefs are not looking for the cheapest, but for the absolute highest-quality product in everything they buy. They're extremely finicky about their product. They're very difficult people to please," he says.
