The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [194]
I gathered that Paulie Porcini was part of the subculture of mushroom hunters who travel up and down the West Coast, following the seasonal fruiting of the fungi: porcinis in the fall, chanterelles in winter, morels in the spring. “These are people living out of vans,” Ben explained, “not the types who ever watch the five o’clock news.” They cobble together a living selling their mushrooms to brokers who set up shop in motel rooms near the forests, post signs, and pay the hunters in cash. Anthony and Ben aren’t really a part of this world; they hold jobs, live in houses, and sell their mushrooms directly to restaurants. “We don’t think of ourselves as professionals yet,” Anthony said.
We drove for several hours through the valley and then gradually ascended into the Sierra to Eldorado National Forest, a twelve-hundred-square-mile swath of pine and cedar stretched between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. As we climbed into the mountains the temperature dropped down into the thirties and a frozen rain began to pelt the windshield. Along the roadside patches of old, dirty snow grew steadily larger and fresher until they expanded to cover everything. It was early May, but we had driven back into winter.
The morels come up on pine fire lands just as the snow cover retreats and the soil begins to warm, so after entering the burn area at about five thousand feet we descended along a logging road, looking for the frontier of white snow and blackened earth. At about forty-five hundred feet we found it: a forbidding moonscape in black and white. We knew our altitude because Anthony and Ben, like many mushroom hunters these days, carry portable Global Positioning System (GPS) locators—to mark good spots, calculate their altitude, and keep from getting lost.
We parked the SUV and had an initial look around. Soon after, Paulie Porcini appeared, a bearded, self-contained fellow in his twenties who carried a walking stick and had a bandanna wrapped around his head. Paulie, a man of few words, seemed like someone who was very comfortable in the woods.
The forest was gorgeous, and the forest was ghastly. Ghastly because it was, for as far as you could see, a graveyard of vertically soaring trunks that had been shorn of every horizontal, every branch, by the fire. For five days the previous October the “power fire,” as it was called (it began near a power station), had roared across these mountains, consuming seventeen thousand acres of pine and cedar before a change in the wind direction allowed firefighters to contain it. The fire had been so fierce in places that it had vaporized whole trees. The only reason you knew this was because the flames, still ravenous for wood, had followed the trunks all the way down beneath the forest floor to consume the tree’s roots, creating voids that reached deep into the earth. These blackened craters resembled molds that were you to fill them with plaster would yield a ghostly model of a pine tree’s entire root system, accurate to the last detail. Not much lived in this desolate landscape: a handful of raptors (we heard owls), the occasional dazed squirrel, and here and there a fresh green spray of miner’s lettuce that shocked the black ground.
And yet if you achieved a slightly more aestheticized view of the scene, the same landscape exhibited a tranquil, almost modernist abstraction that was just beautiful. The dead-straight black verticals ordered the hillsides as evenly as bristles on a brush, their steady rhythm varied every so often by a heavy black slash angled weirdly across the grid. The underlying shapes of the land, which was deeply creased into