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 wicker basket in one hand and a stick in the other. They wait for the light the way one waits for permission. Then they go in, and for the next two or three hours the world shrinks to a square metre of fallen leaves.
Seen from the outside, it is hard to explain. They walk far from the paths, on slopes no one would choose for a stroll, bent over, often alone, for a mushroom that sells for a few dozen francs a kilo and that cantonal law limits to three kilos a person in any case. And yet every autumn, when the good rain arrives after the heat and the ground begins to cool, thousands of people feel the same call. And every autumn, someone does not come back.
The place you do not tell
Italy’s Alpine Rescue speaks of hundreds of mushroom hunters who need rescuing every year, and of several dozen deaths. In the second week of September this year, in the province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola alone, a few kilometres from the Swiss border, three men were found dead at the bottom of gorges and ravines within five days. In August, in the hills above Prugiasco in the Blenio valley, a seventy-five-year-old hunter fell some fifty metres from a rock.
The news reports always use the same words: a foot placed on wet leaves, a stone hidden in the undergrowth, a drop that could not be seen. And almost always there is a detail that makes everything harder for the people who have to search: no one knew exactly where he had gone. The place where the porcini grow is not something you tell. Sometimes it is handed down from father to son, an inheritance that appears in no will. But it is not told.
It would be easy to read these accidents as simple carelessness. It is more interesting to ask why experienced people, cautious in every other part of their lives, lose their sense of measure precisely there, in woods they may have known for fifty years. The answer, most likely, does not lie in the mushroom. It lies in the gaze.
The eye that learns
In the late 1950s the Dutch ethologist Luuk Tinbergen, studying great tits in a pine forest, noticed something curious. The birds did not hunt insects in proportion to how many there actually were. For days they would ignore a species, then suddenly begin 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.
Anyone who has hunted porcini knows this transformation. 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 forest changes. The brown cap, that matte sheen, that particular swelling among the leaves: the eye has learned. And others appear, exactly where a minute earlier there was nothing.
But a sieve, to work, must leave 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. On the contrary, he is as attentive as he rarely is in any other situation of his life. It is precisely this attention, so complete, that makes him vulnerable.
Neuroscience has given a name to the engine underneath. Jaak Panksepp called it the seeking system, the oldest of the mammalian emotional circuits, the one that drives an animal out of its den to explore the world. Kent Berridge later showed that the brain distinguishes wanting from liking, and that it is far more sparing with the mechanisms for the second than for the first. Brian Knutson, watching the brain at work, found that the possibility of a reward is more stimulating than the reward itself. This is why, back home, a full basket brings a surprisingly brief satisfaction. What one was really looking for was the morning.
What cannot be ordered
The porcino has a peculiarity 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 symbiosis with the roots of chestnut, beech, fir and oak, trading water and minerals with the tree in exchange for sugars, through a network 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 preceding days, the temperature of the soil and the humidity of the air finally align, it appears and grows within a few days, sometimes a couple of centimetres in a single night.
You cannot order a porcino to be born. You can only know the conditions in which it is born. The expert hunter is not the one who walks the most, but the one who has learned to read the rain of two weeks before, the exposure of the slope, the age of the trees, the chill of the night. His knowledge does not produce the mushroom. It makes it possible to find.
Perhaps this is where hunting for porcini stops being a pastime and becomes a form of education. In a world where almost everything can be ordered, planned and measured, the porcino remains one of the few outcomes that refuse to be forced. You can come home empty-handed after doing everything right, and you can find ten by chance at the edge of a well-trodden path. Merit and outcome do not coincide. The hunter accepts this, because it is precisely in that gap that the fascination of what he does resides.
The work we love
John Cage, the composer who brought chance into music, was also a passionate mycologist. In 1959 he won five million lire on the Italian quiz show Lascia o raddoppia, answering Mike Bongiorno’s questions about mushrooms for five weeks; with the money he bought a piano and a van for Merce Cunningham’s dance company. He wrote that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to mushrooms. And he admitted, with an honesty rare among experts, that the better you know them, the less sure you feel about identifying them. Once he served his guests a dish that sent them all to hospital.
Cage’s remark holds a connection that goes beyond the anecdote. Those who love their work practise it the way one hunts for porcini. Years of practice build a professional search image: the doctor who sees the symptom before the patient names it, the craftsman who feels the flaw in the wood under his fingers, the consultant who catches, in a meeting, the one sentence that reveals the real problem. This is what we call 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 this expertise meets a challenge equal to it. Time bends, self-consciousness dissolves, each gesture follows the last as in a jazz improvisation. It is the most desirable state in human work, the one that makes people say they would never work for any other reason. And it is the same state as the hunter’s in the woods, with the same risk. Flow narrows the field. Someone who loves what they do can work for 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 by the leaves.
The danger, then, is not indifference. It is passion that forgets the ground it walks on.
Finding without getting lost
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, two psychologists who devoted their lives to the relationship between mind and landscape, distinguished between two kinds of attention. There is directed attention, deliberate and effortful, which modern work consumes 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. The porcini woods ought to be a place of the second. They become dangerous when the hunt turns them into a place of the first, when the gaze stops wandering and starts to hunt.
Perhaps a hunter’s true mastery is measured not by the weight of the basket but by a small gesture that almost goes unnoticed from the outside. Stopping, every so often, and straightening up. 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, nor caution imposed from outside. It is the part of expertise that concerns not the mushroom, but the one looking for it.
The same is true of any work we love. It is not a matter of wanting less, or searching with less intensity: without that intensity nothing would be found, in the woods or anywhere else. It is a matter of keeping, within the passion, the ability to raise one’s eyes. 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 inside what they do without ceasing to know where they are.
At seven, the woods open. The porcino, if it is there, has been there for a few days, the fruit of work no one saw. What remains to the hunter is the hardest part: to find it without getting lost.
