Burn Morels
The buyer’s name was Stanislaw, but everybody at the camp called him Stosh, and he sat at a folding table under a blue tarp at the edge of a gravel pit outside Conconully, Washington, with a hanging scale and a cash box and a cigar he never lit. That was where you sold your morels. Twelve dollars a pound in the first week of the season, eight by the end. He’d been buying in the burns for thirty years, from British Columbia to Oregon, following the fires.
When I walked up to his table the first morning, a twenty-four-year-old with a borrowed truck and a mesh bag and no idea what I was doing, he looked at me a long time over the cigar. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and handed me an index card. It had been photocopied so many times the letters were furry.
“First year,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Read it. Do what it says. You’ll make money and you’ll come back.”
I still have the card. I’ll copy it here exactly.
BURN RULES — READ THEM TWICE
1. Pick in daylight only. Out of the burn by sundown. The burn is not the same place at night.
2. Use a mesh bag, never plastic. The spores have to fall back on the ground. You owe the burn that.
3. Flag your way in with orange tape. Follow your tape out. If you find tape that’s not yours, or tape that’s yours where you didn’t tie it, don’t follow it.
4. If you hear a chainsaw, it’s a crew. If you hear a chainsaw and there’s no crew, walk downhill and don’t look back.
5. Never pick morels that are growing in a ring.
6. Every burn has one green tree. One tree the fire went around. Don’t pick under it. Don’t sit under it. Don’t touch it.
7. If somebody calls your name in the burn and they’re not standing where you can see them, don’t answer.
8. If you break any of these rules, tell me before you go to sleep.
The fire had been the summer before, forty thousand acres of the Okanogan highlands, ponderosa and lodgepole and fir, burned so hot in places that the ground was white ash a foot deep. In the spring, when the snow melted and the soil warmed, the morels came up. They always do, after a fire. Nobody knows exactly why. The fungus lives underground in the roots of the trees, and when the trees die, it fruits all at once, everywhere, like the forest’s last word.
And with the morels came the pickers. A hundred, maybe more, camped in tents and trucks around the gravel pit. Laotian families who’d been picking for two generations. Retired couples in RVs. Kids like me. Old men who’d been doing it so long they had ash ground permanently into the creases of their hands.
The burn itself is the strangest place I’ve ever been. Black trees standing for miles in every direction, without a needle on them, bark peeling in charcoal sheets. Black ground, soft as flour, with green shoots of fireweed just starting to come up through it. No birds, at first. No shade. The light comes straight down through the bare branches and it’s very quiet, so quiet you can hear the morels push up through the ash, a tiny ticking sound, if you stand still.
And morels everywhere. Little dark honeycombed cones, gray and black and tan, standing up out of the ash in their hundreds. The first day I picked eleven pounds. The second day, fifteen. I followed the rules. I used my mesh bag. I flagged my way in with orange tape and followed it out. I was out of the burn by sundown, every night.
I thought the rules were superstition. Pickers are a superstitious bunch. I followed them the way you knock on wood.
The first one I saw break was Rule 4.
It was the end of the first week, in a draw about two miles in. I was picking alone on a slope when I heard a chainsaw. That’s not strange in a burn; Forest Service crews go in to drop hazard trees. I looked down the draw. No truck. No crew. Just the sound, coming from somewhere below me, revving and dying and revving again, the way it does when someone’s bucking up a log.
I walked downhill, and I didn’t look back, and the sound stopped.
When I came out of the trees at the bottom, there was a man picking there. An older guy in a red flannel shirt. I said, “You hear that saw?”
He said, “What saw?”
He didn’t come back to camp that night. His truck was there in the morning, and the next morning. The sheriff’s search-and-rescue went in on the third day and found his mesh bag, half full, hanging from a branch in the draw where I’d heard the chainsaw. The branch had been cut clean off the tree a few inches above where the bag hung. Fresh sawdust on the ash below. No other trace.
Stosh didn’t say anything when I told him. He just tapped Rule 4 on my card with his cigar.
I saw my first ring in the second week.
It was in a flat on the top of a ridge, a perfect circle of morels maybe fifteen feet across, all the same size, all exactly evenly spaced, like someone had planted them with a ruler. They were bigger than any I’d seen. Fat, pale, the size of my fist. Beautiful. There must have been three or four pounds in that ring. Forty dollars of mushroom.
The ash inside the ring was smooth and undisturbed. There was nothing growing in it. But it wasn’t empty. When I looked at it a long time, I started to see that the ash in the middle was very slightly raised, in a long low shape, about six feet long, like something lying down under a sheet.
I walked around it. I didn’t pick one.
That night at the fire, I heard two of the old-timers talking. One of them said the rings come up where something died in the fire and isn’t finished. Deer, sometimes. Elk. Once in a while, he said, a person. A firefighter, a camper, somebody nobody ever found. He said the morels in a ring aren’t the forest’s. They’re the dead’s. You pick them, you take something that’s theirs, and they’ll come and want it back.
Then, in the third week, I found the green tree.
I’d gone farther in than I’d ever gone. The morels were thinning out in the easy places and you have to go deep at the end of a season. I’d been flagging my way in for hours, down a long burned valley, and around three in the afternoon I came over a low rise and there it was.
One ponderosa pine, alive. Huge and old and green, every needle on it, standing in the middle of a hundred acres of black. The fire had gone around it on every side. You could see where the flames had stopped, in a perfect circle around the trunk, maybe forty feet out. Inside that circle the grass was green and long and there were wildflowers. It was the only living green thing for a mile.
Under the green tree, in the shade, there were morels. Thousands of them. Packed so close they touched. Big pale perfect ones, the most I’d ever seen in one place, a carpet of them around the trunk.
I knew the rule. I stood at the edge of the green grass for a long time and thought about Rule 6.
And then I thought about the money. My truck payment. Rent. The sum I’d need to be able to call this a summer worth having. I thought, there’s three hundred dollars under that tree. Maybe five hundred. And I thought, it’s just a rule on a photocopied card.
I stepped over the line into the grass.
It was cool under the tree. Very quiet. It smelled like pine sap and summer, after weeks of smelling ash. The morels came up out of the ground into my hands so easily, like they wanted to be picked. I filled my mesh bag in twenty minutes. I filled my backup bag. I sat down with my back against the trunk to rest for just a minute before the long walk out, because I’d been walking since dawn, and the shade felt so good.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was going down.
I don’t remember falling asleep. I only remember waking up with the bark against my back and the light gone orange and long through the black trees, and the burn ticking all around me as it cooled.
I got up and grabbed my bags and found my orange tape at the edge of the clearing and started following it out, fast, faster than you should walk in a burn. The sun went behind the ridge. Then I was walking in the blue light after sundown, which Rule 1 says you shouldn’t be in at all.
And the burn was not the same place.
I don’t know how else to put it. The trees were all still there, the same black trunks. But there were more of them. The spaces between them were smaller. And the ash under my feet was warm, warm as if the fire had gone through that morning, and there was a smell of smoke, fresh smoke, very faint, the smell of a fire close by.
I kept following my tape. Orange strips tied to black branches every fifty feet, the way I’d tied them that morning. And then I came to a strip of tape tied at the height of my face, and I stopped. I always tie my tape low. At my hip. I’m short.
This tape was tied at the height of a much taller person’s eyes. And it was my tape. The same roll; I’d bought it at the hardware store in Omak. And past it, a little further on, at the same height, another strip. A trail of my tape leading off at an angle into the dark trees, toward the smell of smoke.
Rule 3.
I didn’t follow it. I stood there in the warm ash until I found a strip at the height of my hip, off to the left, and I went that way.
And somewhere behind me, back toward the green tree, someone called my name.
It was my mother’s voice. My mother lives in Yakima. She’s never been within a hundred miles of a burn.
“Kip? Kip, honey, wait. You forgot something.”
I didn’t answer. Rule 7. I kept walking, and I kept finding my tape, my real tape, at my hip, every fifty feet, and the voice followed me all the way out, never closer and never farther, always just behind my left shoulder. Saying my name. Saying I forgot something.
I came out of the burn onto the logging road at about ten at night. I didn’t look back.
I went straight to Stosh’s tarp. He was sitting there in the dark with his cash box, like he’d been waiting, and I put my two bags on his table and told him everything. Rule 8.
He listened to the whole thing. He didn’t weigh the bags. When I was done he looked at me, and I’ll never forget the way he looked, like a doctor looking at an X-ray.
He said, “Did you sit down under it?”
I said yes.
He nodded slowly and opened the cash box and counted out three hundred and forty dollars and pushed it across the table at me, more than the morels were worth, and he took the bags and put them under the table, and he said, “Go home tonight. Don’t sleep here. Don’t come back to this burn. Don’t ever come back to this burn.”
I said, “What happens if I do?”
He said, “It’ll keep your place for you.”
I drove home to Yakima that night. That was four months ago. I haven’t been back to the Okanogan.
I’ve been fine, mostly. I sleep a lot. More than I used to. When I wake up there’s sometimes a smell of pine sap in my room, and once, on the pillow, a single long green ponderosa needle, fresh, which I put in a jar on my dresser and haven’t thrown away.
And last week, in the shower, I found a little bump on the back of my neck. Not painful. Just a small raised place under the skin, at the top of my spine, about where my head rested against the trunk of that tree.
It’s softer now. It’s growing. When I touch it in the mirror it feels pitted, like a honeycomb.
I called Stosh. He doesn’t own a phone, but the camp keeps a number. They said he’s moved on to a new burn in Oregon. They said they’d give him the message.
I’m told the green tree is still standing. That every burn has one. That they always grow back in the same place.
I think it’s waiting for its morels to come home.