Marisone and hundreds of other mushroom hunters are tramping across Eastern Oregon forests this month, combing the woods for a mushroom prized in Japan. Most of the pickers are natives of Southeast Asia, war refugees who settled in the United States. Some make a tenuous living harvesting mushrooms and other forest products such as bear grass. Others, like Marisone, leave their jobs for a few weeks to search for matsutake and enjoy some time in the woods. The sudden appearance of hundreds of people who grew up speaking Vietnamese, Cambodian or Laotian creates a cross-cultural exchange rarely seen in rural Eastern Oregon.
Mushroom hunters spend some of their take in Eastern Oregon, boosting the local economy.
But the annual influx of more than a thousand Asians worries law enforcement officials because many of the pickers carry firearms and many speak only limited English. Last year an Asian picker shot and killed his wife. The murder of a picker several years ago remains unsolved. It's a boon to the Winema National Forest's bottom line. Joe Fletcher sees a darker side of the mushroom season.