"I think people just assumed it was gonna be like it was in '91, and they were really shocked when they found the state was taking the lead in trying to make mushroom picking a state economic situation," says Will Rutherford. "Why should the state make anything? Is the state going to provide any compliance for these rules and regulations?"
Rutherford and Alex Sinyon share one side of a booth at a Tok diner, drinking coffee and smoking. They make up the bulk of Tetlin Native Corp. ("We have two board members," says Rutherford, "but we don't know where they're at most of the time"), which controls 100,000 acres of privately held tribal land, some of which was immolated during last summer's fires and is accessible from the Taylor Highway. Sinyon, a full-blood Athabascan, is not so sure he wants morel pickers on that land.
"What if they get mauled by a bear?" he asks, adding that this afternoon he and Rutherford will be posting No Trespassing signs. "We don't have liability insurance."
"We're in the interior of Alaska, where the best policy is no policy," says Rutherford. "People hate government up here. They hate restrictions."
Back in 1991, Rutherford wound up at the center of the morel boom. He'd just started working with the Tetlin Native Corp. when he received a call from a mushroom buyer out of Oregon, who told Rutherford to phone him the minute he saw the first morel come up.
"Nobody up here knew anything about mushrooms, or morels, or what the potential of morels was for a cash crop," he says. "I was doubtful whether I even knew what I was looking for."
But with a buyer in place, Rutherford and several others set up a buy-and-dry: a shack and some plastic sheeting on which to sun-dry the crop. They paid pickers $2 a pound, and bought 200,000 pounds over the next two months.
"Everybody in the community picked," says Rutherford. "Some of them [quit their jobs] because it was so lucrative out there. I know a family that, between a mother and a father and kids, made as much as $15,000."
Rutherford thinks this season will be just as successful. "But it worries me that there are so many buyers, and what that'll do to the pricing," he says. "If they don't make money up here because they get into a pricing war, maybe they don't come back again."
Vuth Ouk says he doesn't know what the building he's renting used to be, but judging from the engine blocks, motorcycles and boat motors tossed to one side of the warehouse, a machine shop is a good guess. Ouk, who lives in Oregon, has been in Tok since mid-May, buying for a distributor in Canada.
