The transient nature of the wild mushroom business ensures that the animosity flows both ways. Pickers pull into town, set up camps or park their RVs, leave trash in the woods and fire guns--if not at each other, then to signal their location, as they often spread out for miles.
Then there's the money. The wild mushroom trade is frequently cited as the largest legal cash transaction in the United States. Southard often carries $100,000 or more in cash, which is why he's licensed to carry a firearm, and does. "If we did this job in the city," he says, "somebody'd gun us down in a heartbeat."
Like most other buyers, Southard is paid on commission for buying and drying the mushrooms. He works only two crops a year, morel and matsutake, but as long as the buy goes well, he does well. "I got 40 acres and two houses; we got a ton of horses. It will put my kids through school," he says. "There's money there if you're in the right spot on the food chain."
Circuit pickers, too, can be well positioned, and in addition to picking mushrooms, many forage wild crops such as bear grass, salal, moss and fronds for florists and seasonal markets.
"You know, we're riff-raff, or we're hobos," says Southard. But "I could take you to a community in Washington where a lot of these Asians live, and they've got their Toyota picking rig parked next to their Jaguar. They're making $100,000 a year."
As point man in Tok for Alpine, Southard will get the infrastructure in place: the phones, the garbage, the Portosan. Then he'll stay through the harvest, ideally through the end of July.
"It burned different. It burned high. There's no [tree] canopy left," he says of the fires around Tok. "It's like the face of the moon up there, is what they're telling me. Should produce."
From a plane landing in Anchorage on Memorial Day, one can see no evidence of forest fires, only glacial lakes the color of mint toothpaste, at the base of mountains that appear not to have changed since the beginning of time.
"People seem to think things are understood better than they are," says Tricia Wurtz, a boreal ecologist with the USDA Forest Service, on the way to the Boundary Fire, as the 600,000 acres that burned near Fairbanks are known. She drives past dead peat mines and active gold mines, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and mile after mile of charred black spruce.
