Boom in Brush Hunting Brings Old West-Type Violence to Woods

The van dropped them off just after dawn, and the brush pickers trudged through the fog-chilled forest, their heads down, their quick hands plucking leafy stems from the undergrowth.

If things went well, each of the young men might make $60 for a long day of gathering salal, an evergreen plant used in flower arrangements.

But things would not go well. By nightfall, one man would be dead and another would be in jail. All for a pile of leaves.

Around noon, the pickers looked up to see a stranger among them. This is my picking area, he said, so hand over that brush.

What gives you the right to take it?

The stranger pulled out a pistol. This is my permission, he said.

*

The horde of loggers that once swarmed through the Pacific Northwest is much diminished today, as is the forest itself. But amid the second growth, a burgeoning crowd now seeks smaller treasures: mushrooms, berries, herbs, moss and leaves.

Largely ignored a decade ago--before Big Timber met the spotted owl--the harvest of such “special forest products” now is worth at least $200 million a year in Washington and Oregon, said James Freed, a forester with the Washington State University Cooperative Extension.

Some celebrate this new forest economy, which thrives on America’s growing appetite for the good life a la Martha Stewart: the earthy taste of chanterelles in linguine, the just-so splash of salal in a bouquet.

Supplying such refined sensibilities, however, can be a rough and dirty business. As ever more gleaners tramp through the forest, the hunt has turned desperate and dangerous.

Nearly all the picking occurs on land owned by big timber companies or the government, which try to regulate (and profit from) the harvest with permit fees and limits on the number of pickers allowed.

But in the woods, where law enforcement is weak, the rules that many live by are straight out of the Old West: Take what you can, don’t get caught--and carry a gun.

Poachers prowl for morel mushrooms in northern Idaho and for bear grass in Washington’s Cascade Range.

Each fall in the Cascades of Oregon, about 2,000 mushroom hunters pursue the matsutake, a cinnamon-scented delicacy prized in Japan. Forest rangers try to keep the harvest legal, but they are outflanked by pickers who are armed and protective of their secret spots. At night in the mushroom camps, drinking, gambling and fighting are the favored pastimes. Extra patrols helped keep the peace last fall, but in 1996 there were five shootings, one of them fatal.

Now trouble has come to the rainy hills of western Washington, where the gathering of wild floral greens has become big business--a good portion of it illegal.

Where whining chain saws once felled tall timbers, the second-growth forest hides a furtive scramble for shrubbery, the quiet broken only by the snapping of twigs.

Like Oregon’s mushroom hunters, the brush pickers here are mostly foreign born: Latino and southeast Asian. Many are illegal immigrants, willing to work long hours for piecework wages in exchange for a job that conceals them all day in the woods.

More pickers arrive each year. Now, everyone agrees, too many people compete for too little brush. Rustlers without proper permits steal millions of dollars in brush. Private security patrols chase them through the woods. Tempers flare, and the threat of violence drums as steadily as the winter rain.

“People become cowboys,” said forester Freed. “They shoot first and think later.”

*

Alfredo Menjivar had advantages over some brush pickers: a green card, a good command of English and a van that worked most of the time.

At 21, he stood just 5 feet 3 inches but was muscular and confident, a leader in his tight circle of Salvadoran friends.

Menjivar and six others shared a tiny rental house in Aberdeen, a timber town where hard times are not unknown but where few live so poorly as Menjivar. The living room was furnished with a set of barbells, a picture of the Virgin Mary, and two seats pulled from his van.

As brush pickers go, Menjivar and his friends were not very experienced. When prices are high and the salal is thick, a skilled picker can make more than $100 a day. Menjivar’s crew usually made $40 to $60 apiece.

But picking brush helped sustain Menjivar’s American dream. He had an Anglo girlfriend, whom he’d take to the mall and movies. Every month, he would send money home to El Salvador: $150, sometimes $200.

When his van was running, Menjivar made extra cash by shuttling other pickers to the woods at $5 per rider.

That was the plan on Thursday, Dec. 11. Menjivar drove four or five pickers out to a stretch of forest a few miles northwest of Aberdeen. He dropped them off and returned to town to run some errands.

About 2 p.m., a friend caught up with Menjivar at the bank.

There’s trouble in the woods! A Mexican guy with a gun, he said, had taken all their brush.

Soon Menjivar and a van full of friends were barreling out to the woods. When they arrived, the guy with the pistol was still there, sitting in a pickup truck in a clearing by the road. His wife was sitting next to him.

Menjivar got out of the van and strode up to the passenger side of the pickup. He banged on the window. Why did you take our brush? he yelled in Spanish.

The window rolled down. More words were exchanged. The man with the pistol extended his arm across his wife’s chest. A single shot exploded, and Menjivar took it full in the face, falling backward to the black rock paving the shoulder of the road.

Sheriff’s deputies stopped the pickup truck 25 miles away and arrested Leonelo Martinez. At first, he denied any involvement, but then he broke down: Yes, he’d pointed his gun out the window. No, he didn’t recall pulling the trigger.

*

“There’s no brush out here worth anybody’s life,” Lennie Morris said.

That said, Morris understands how tension can mount in the woods. He is president of Mill Creek Floral Greens International, a big player in Washington’s brush-picking trade.

These days, Morris is pretty tense too.

Years ago, a few brush pickers roamed the forest, unnoticed in a region preoccupied with logging. Now, with worldwide demand growing for the Northwest’s floral greens, it seems to Morris as if everyone wants a piece of the brush-picking action.

He trades in all sorts of wild greens: huckleberry, ferns, bear grass, moss. But salal (pronounced suh-LAL) is the biggest seller, with large and leathery leaves that keep their color for months in cold storage.

Morris said his operation is strictly aboveboard. He spends tens of thousands of dollars a year for brush-picking rights to private land and charges each of his pickers $75 for a two-week permit.

But he must compete with fly-by-night buyers who ask no questions and pay in cash, thus giving poachers a market for ill-gotten brush. Each year, he said, thieves pick up to 35% of the salal on his leased land and cost him more than $1 million.

All of which explains why, one recent February evening, Morris sat in a pickup truck outside a dilapidated motel, staring through the windshield at a van parked across the road.

He was on “rat patrol,” and he knew a rustler’s van when he saw it--windows darkened, license plates caked with mud, seats pulled out to make room for brush.

A bicyclist soon appeared out of the gloom. Pedaling up to the empty van, he stashed his mountain bike inside and drove off--trailed discreetly by Morris and two other brush patrollers in the pickup truck.

A wrong turn cost the pursuers two minutes, and by the time they caught up with the van, it was parked at a gravel turnout, crammed with five rain-sodden Latinos and 1,000 bunches of freshly picked salal.

The pickup truck boxed in the van, and Morris whipped out his cell phone. “We’ve got a brush theft in progress,” he told the sheriff’s dispatcher. “Yes. A brush theft.”

Deputies arrived 20 minutes later, taking pictures of the brush, the van and the bike.

“We’re getting these calls a couple of times a week,” said Deputy Randy Gibson. “It’s getting to be a pain.”

The pickers insisted that they had gathered nearly all their salal 20 miles away, in an area where they had a permit to pick. A trail of leaves leading into the woods behind the van suggested otherwise.

The deputies confiscated the salal, worth about $850, and turned it over to one of Morris’ fellow patrollers, whose company owns the brush-picking rights to the surrounding forest. The pickers drove off glumly, relieved of their day’s work and facing the prospect of $100 fines.

Morris tempered his good cheer with the knowledge that the pickers probably would be in the woods again the next morning.

“This is just one of 40 to 50 vans poaching brush out here,” he said. “We need help patrolling the forest. What we get from everybody is, ‘We don’t have the manpower.’ ”

*

Those who mourn Alfredo Menjivar believe that he was shot in cold blood.

“For nothing!” said his cousin, Jose Menjivar. “Alfredo go up and talk to him. They open the window up. Pfff! For no reason.”

But friends of Leonelo Martinez tell a different story--that of a hardworking businessman trying to protect himself and his wife against a gang of brush rustlers.

The day Menjivar died, his friends walked past “Private Property” signs posted in English and Spanish to pick brush in an area leased by a company called Mt. St. Helens Evergreens. Martinez supervised that company’s brush-picking crews.

“He’s probably the quietest, most soft-spoken person in the world,” said Ray Eveland, Martinez’s boss. “But you back anybody into a corner, and they’re going to lash out.”

Martinez, 26, was charged with second-degree murder, but he got out of jail on $100,000 bond just before Christmas and soon was back at work. He will claim self-defense at his trial in May, said his attorney, Rod Franzen.

“Any reasonable individual can see the dangerousness of the situation,” Franzen said. “It’s like the old California Gold Rush days. You’ve got people jumping other people’s claims, and there’s no law out there to stop it.”

*

More than 150 people attended Menjivar’s funeral, singing and reading goodbye letters in Spanish.

Melissa Manwell understood little of it, but she cried a lot anyway. Melissa lives a few doors down from Menjivar’s house, and the two had planned to get married this June, when she will turn 16. She’s going to have his baby.

Others may call Menjivar a rustler. But Melissa will tell her child of a man who baby-sat for friends and loved to talk, even to strangers he met on the street.

After the shooting, Melissa started a scrapbook. In it are snapshots of Menjivar, sympathy cards and newspaper stories that got his name wrong. On one page, pressed carefully under plastic, is a single leaf of salal.

Melissa put it there in December, but the leaf is still green.