"It's slow, scary slow," he says.
He and the others here to buy for Alpine--Al Rankin, a wild-meat butcher who's worked the mushroom circuit for 20 years, and Dave, a picker from Oregon who declined to give his full name--bought 450 pounds yesterday, which today are already dried and in cardboard boxes. They're paying $4 a pound, twice as much as Jonquil had anticipated paying, and may have to go higher, as two competitors are paying $5.
A couple pulls up in a Ford Escort, wanting to buy mushrooms. Southard says he does, too.
The men wait. Though it's after 6 p.m., the sun shows no sign of dropping, and the sky in fact will not ever get dark, but from about midnight to 3 it will take on an eggshell-blue wash. This does not mean it doesn't get cold; the previous night it dropped to 28 degrees.
"Let's go inside," says Southard, heading into the building, where the men have set up sleeping tents and other amenities. Rankin fires up an 80,000 BTU torpedo heater, which makes the living area toasty in minutes. The men sit around a long folding table with a centerpiece of a jar of peanut butter, a deck of Iraqi most-wanted playing cards and a book titled "Alaska Bear Tales," which they've been reading aloud to pass the time, including the true story of a man who had a top quadrant of his face torn off by a bear and, as he ran blindly from the scene, "reached up to confirm that it was my eye bouncing on my cheek like a pingpong ball."
The phone rings, and Rankin answers. It's Jonquil, who says he doesn't want to raise the buy price, not if he doesn't have to.
Southard thumbs though the bear book. "Volume will solve every problem," he says.
At 8:25, the red van pulls up. The eight Mexican pickers, in dirty sweatshirts and baseball caps, get out of the van and open its back doors. Inside are baskets full of morels. Linda Garcia and her husband, Jose, the lead pickers, approach the buying table. A guy down the road, they say, is offering $5.50. Rankin says he's paying only $4, and can understand that they have to make their money.
"Fifty cents, I don't care," says Jose, meaning he'll take $5.
Rankin is silent. "I'll do five," he says, deciding it's in Jonquil's best interest to stay in the game.
The pickers begin pulling out baskets, lining them up on the ground, more than 40 of them, each filled with 10 pounds of morels. The air takes on the smell of wet dirt and something funkier, vaguely post-coital. Southard weighs morels and works a calculator; Dave transports the baskets to the dryers. Linda watches Rankin give the first picker his cash, more than $400 in hundreds and twenties.
