The photograph shows only part of a person. A chunky cream sweater, a pair of jeans, rubber boots sinking into moss, cranberries and flowering heather. The face is out of frame. A wicker basket hangs from one hand, and at the bottom of it lie just a few yellow mushrooms, chanterelles perhaps. This is not the moment of the harvest. It is the moment of walking: the stretch between one find and the next, when you have almost nothing yet and are looking at everything.
People who do not hunt for mushrooms rarely understand that this is where the whole thing happens. People who do know it perfectly well.
In Ticino, the law allows mushrooms to be gathered only from seven in the morning. Between eight at night and seven, the woods belong to others. Anyone who knows the local fungiatt, as the mushroom hunters are called here, knows that at five to seven they are already there, at the edge of the chestnut grove, the car parked far enough away not to give the spot away, a basket in one hand and a stick in the other. They wait for the light the way you wait for permission. Then they go in, and for the next two or three hours the world shrinks to a square metre of fallen leaves.
From the outside, it is hard to explain. They walk far from the paths, on slopes no one would choose for a stroll, bent double, often alone, for a mushroom that sells for a few dozen francs a kilo and that cantonal law limits to three kilos per person per day in any case. And yet every autumn, when the good rain comes after the heat and the ground begins to cool, thousands of people feel the same pull. And every autumn, someone does not come back.
The place you never tell
In Italy, the news each year reports hundreds of Alpine Rescue call-outs for mushroom hunters who are lost or injured, and several dozen deaths. This year, in the province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, a few kilometres from the Swiss border, two men died within hours of each other on 9 and 10 September: one fell into a gorge above Druogno, in the Vigezzo valley, and the other was found at night in the woods of Quarna Sotto. A month earlier, in the mountains of Promesciallo above Prugiasco, in the Blenio valley, a seventy-five-year-old hunter from the Locarno area fell some fifty metres from a rock face. He died in hospital two days later.
The reports always use the same words: a foot on wet leaves, a stone hidden in the undergrowth, a drop no one could see. And there is often a detail that makes everything harder for the people who have to search: no one knew exactly where he had gone. You never tell anyone where the porcini grow. Sometimes the spot passes from father to son, an inheritance that appears in no will. But you never tell.
It would be easy to put these accidents down to carelessness. The more interesting question is why experienced people, cautious in every other part of their lives, lose their sense of proportion in exactly that place, in woods they may have known for fifty years. The answer, most likely, is not in the mushroom. It is in the eye.
The eye that learns
In the 1950s the Dutch ethologist Luuk Tinbergen, studying great tits in a pine wood not unlike the one in the photograph, noticed something odd. The birds did not hunt insects in proportion to how many there actually were. For days they would ignore a species, then suddenly start finding it everywhere. Tinbergen called this a search image: after a few encounters, the eye learns a shape and from then on lifts it out of the clutter like a sieve. What was camouflaged becomes obvious. Tinbergen died young, in 1955, and his study was only published in 1960, but the idea has been in every textbook of behavioural ecology ever since.
Anyone who has hunted for porcini knows this shift. For the first hour you see nothing: leaves, chestnut husks, pine cones, a rounded stone that fools you for an instant. Then you find one, and the wood changes. The brown cap, that matte sheen, that particular swelling among the leaves: your eye has learned. And others appear, exactly where a minute earlier there was nothing.
But a sieve only works by leaving things out. The search image that makes the porcino appear makes everything else disappear, including the edge of the slope. The hunter is not distracted. Quite the opposite: he is as focused as he rarely is anywhere else in his life. It is precisely this attention, so complete, that makes him vulnerable.
Neuroscience has a name for the engine underneath. Jaak Panksepp called it the seeking system, one of the oldest emotional circuits in mammals, the one that drives an animal out of its den to explore the world. Kent Berridge went on to show that the brain separates wanting from liking, and that the machinery of wanting is far more extensive and robust than the machinery of pleasure. Brian Knutson, watching the brain at work, found that anticipating a reward activates the circuits of motivation more than receiving it does. That is why, back home, a full basket gives a surprisingly brief satisfaction. What you were really after was the morning.
What cannot be ordered
The porcino has one trait that sets it apart from almost everything we put on the table: it cannot be grown. Decades of attempts have failed to domesticate it. It lives in partnership with the roots of chestnut, beech, fir, pine and oak, trading water and minerals with the tree in exchange for sugars, through a web of underground filaments that reaches far beyond what we can see. The mushroom we pick is only the fruit, the small visible part of an organism that works out of sight for weeks. Then, when the rain of the previous days, the temperature of the soil and the humidity of the air finally line up, it appears and grows within a few days.
You cannot order a porcino to appear. You can only know the conditions in which it does. The expert hunter is not the one who walks furthest, but the one who has learned to read the rain of a fortnight ago, which way the slope faces, the age of the trees, the chill of the night. His knowledge does not produce the mushroom. It makes the mushroom possible to find.
Perhaps this is where hunting for porcini stops being a pastime and becomes a kind of education. In a world where almost anything can be ordered, scheduled and measured, the porcino remains one of the few results that cannot be forced. You can come home empty-handed after doing everything right, and you can stumble on ten at the edge of a well-worn path. Effort and outcome do not line up. The hunter accepts this, because the whole fascination of what he does lives in that gap.
The work we love
John Cage, the composer who brought chance into music, was also a devoted mycologist. In 1959, during a run of several weeks on the Italian quiz show Lascia o raddoppia, he answered Mike Bongiorno’s questions about mushrooms and won five million lire; with the money he bought a Steinway piano and helped pay for a Volkswagen bus for Merce Cunningham’s dance company. He wrote that he had come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom. He also knew the price of being too sure. Some years earlier, at Stony Point, he had gathered a wild plant for himself and his friends that he took to be edible and that was in fact poisonous hellebore. He ate more of it than anyone, out of sheer enthusiasm, and a doctor had to pump his stomach.
Cage’s remark points to something beyond the anecdote. People who love their work practise it the way you hunt for porcini. Years of practice build a professional search image: the doctor who sees the symptom before the patient names it, the cabinetmaker who feels the flaw in the grain under his fingers, the consultant who catches, in a meeting, the one sentence that reveals the real problem. We call this expertise, and at bottom it is nothing more than an eye trained to lift the shape that matters out of the clutter.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow the state in which that expertise meets a challenge equal to it. Time bends, self-consciousness dissolves, each move follows the last as in jazz improvisation. It is the most rewarding state human work can offer, the one that makes people say they would never work for any other reason. And it is the same state the hunter is in among the trees, with the same risk. Flow narrows the field. Someone who loves what they do can work ten hours without noticing, just as the hunter walks for three hours without feeling his legs. At work, the slope goes by other names: neglected health, relationships put on hold, an exhaustion that arrives without warning, like a drop hidden under the leaves.
The danger, then, is not indifference. It is passion that forgets the ground beneath its feet.
Finding without getting lost
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, two psychologists who spent their careers on the relationship between mind and landscape, distinguished two kinds of attention. There is directed attention, deliberate and effortful, which modern work uses up to the point of exhaustion. And there is what they called soft fascination: the effortless attention that a forest, running water or clouds can draw from us, leaving the mind room to rest while it looks. Mushroom woods ought to be a place of the second kind. They turn dangerous when the hunt makes them a place of the first, when the gaze stops wandering and starts to stalk.
Perhaps a hunter’s real mastery is measured not by the weight of the basket but by a small gesture that hardly registers from the outside. Stopping every so often and straightening your back. Looking up, towards the light between the branches, towards the point where you came in, towards the fall of the slope. Then bending down again. It is not distraction, and it is not caution imposed from outside. It is the part of expertise that concerns not the mushroom, but the person looking for it.
At this journal, Calm Performance is our name for a way of working that judges performance partly by what it manages to preserve. It is not about wanting less, or searching less intensely: without that intensity you would find nothing, in the woods or anywhere else. It is about keeping, inside the passion, the ability to look up. The people who last, in the forest as in a profession, are not the least involved. They are the ones who have learned to be wholly absorbed in what they do without ever losing track of where they are.
Back to the photograph. The basket is almost empty, yet the stride is unhurried. We cannot see the face, so we do not know where the eyes are looking: perhaps down, into the heather, perhaps further ahead, to where the wood begins to fall away. It is the right image for something that cannot be grown. It does not show the result. It shows the search, and leaves open the only question that matters.
At seven, the woods open. The porcino, if it is there, has been there for days, the fruit of work no one saw. The hunter is left with the hardest part: to find it without getting lost.
