It’s an unusually warm Saturday in March, and bright yellow swamp lilies are blooming in the mucky bottoms of the Siuslaw River in western Oregon. John Getz and his wife, Connie, are traveling upriver, barreling north along Highway 36 in their battered gold Volkswagen Vanagon.

Occasionally John waves an arm at the steep hills sloping up from either side of the river valley. Those hills over there, they’re good for chanterelles, he says. Those other ones, over there, he used to see deer there all the time. Not anymore. But the chanterelles, they keep coming back. He’ll check the hills for them early this fall.

Today John and his wife are going truffle-hunting. It’s the end of the truffle season in Oregon, which usually begins in late fall and winds down in early spring. Truffling is a nascent industry here, more of a hobby than a job, even for experienced mushroom pickers like John. He’s been picking mushrooms professionally for more than 20 years; he’s only been searching for truffles for the past five, ever since he found one by mistake while picking chanterelles. Because truffles, unlike their mushroom cousins, never break the surface of the ground, finding them takes a good deal more guesswork. Hunters in Europe use dogs and pigs to sniff them out. John relies on his wife.

“Are we almost there?” Connie asks. She’s rolled down the window on the passenger side of the van and is calmly sniffing the air — the stink of the swamp lilies, the cool scent of the river, the pungent odor of gas exhaust. When she first climbed into the van, back in the small riverside town of Mapleton, she had paused, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “What’s that smell?” she asked. “Don’t you smell it? Like detergent. A strong chemical smell.” John had shrugged. She eventually shrugged it off, too. But odors are more potent for Connie than for most people. Even before she went blind, she says, she had an unusually strong sense of smell.

On this unseasonably warm day, Connie is wearing multiple layers: a black sweater under a red hooded sweatshirt under a yellow-and-black nylon vest. She has fibromyalgia and gets chilled easily. Her long black hair, streaked with gray, is pulled back into a ponytail, and she wears thick wraparound black sunglasses, the blocky kind that the elderly often wear over their regular glasses. Connie wears hers because she’s legally instead of completely blind, and the little light she can see is often glaringly harsh.

She and John have been married for three years. John was married once before and has three teenagers; Connie was married once before, too, and has a teenaged son. They met when he showed up at her house one day to lay flooring — his summer job, when mushrooms take time off — and she fell for his low, slow voice. He brought her a mushroom on their first date.

A hand-painted wooden sign on the left-hand side of the road announces, “Welcome to Deadwood / Where Diversity Lives.” John, a lanky, slouchy man with a thin face, gray stubble and a couple of missing teeth, has been quiet while his wife chatters, and now he says, in the measured, almost drawly way he has of talking, that he should check on Bill. Bill Murphy, another professional mushroom forager who apprenticed under John nearly 20 years ago, lives in Deadwood. John hasn’t told him about today’s truffling expedition, but he doesn’t want to drive by Bill’s place without at least stopping to invite him along.

Bill’s house, an L-shaped structure nearly obscured by a greenhouse, three trucks and a vast assemblage of rusting appliances, is just off the highway. In the bare space that serves as both yard and driveway sits a white pickup truck with several mountain bikes strapped together in the back. Bill is indeed home. He was just about to head into town to sell the bikes, but he’s thrilled to see John, and he’s sorely tempted by the idea of spending the afternoon tromping through a dark fir forest hunting for truffles. He waves his arms around for a bit, whips his baseball cap on and off, scratches his short, graying hair, and finally calls his dog. “Beau! C’mere, we’re going to look for truffles!” A small beige pug waddles out from the house, snorting heavily in that pompous way of pugs. Bill has been training Beau to find truffles, and he can’t resist the chance to rationalize a few hours in the woods as a training exercise.