A Sportsman's Life

This is one of my plant gurus, Rick Hueston, who has just taken a bite of Datus carota, aka wild carrot or Queen Anne's Lace. Evidently it is not the previously mentioned poison hemlock, because Hue is still upright.

About once a week, Hue shows up around half an hour before our stated meeting time and takes me into the field. If we get that far. We barely made it out of the front yard on an early outing. Standing almost in place, Hue started rattling off names - purple dead nettle, seaside plantain, star chickweed, gill-over-the-ground, burdock, wild lettuce, Pennsylvania bittercress, wild garlic, poke - and telling me about them. He tasted some, handed over bits for me to taste. Some were awful, some he said would be quite palatable cooked, and some weren't bad raw.

This is changing how I think about my lawn. The idea that I need to buy expensive, powerful chemicals, most of which will end up in the nearest stream, so that I can impress my neighbors with a lush, green carpet of one kind of plant is starting to lose its appeal.

Hue got into edible plants when he tried to run away from home at the age of 7 and discovered he had neglected to bring a sandwich. A sympathetic schoolteacher gave him My Side of the Mountain, the classic by Jean Craighead George. It's the story of a boy who succeeds in running away from home and living off the land, who then decides to return home. "After that, I was pretty much hooked," he says.

Hue spent more than 20 years in the Army. His eyesight wasn't good enough for Special Forces, which he now recognizes may have been for the best. As he puts it, "A fair number of my best friends are currently dead." He was a helicopter mechanic in the 82nd Airborne. He has degrees in wildlife biology and strategic intelligence. Now "retired," he works 60-hour weeks running a team of analysts for one of those three-lettered agencies of the U.S. Government that he'd prefer I not name. When I see him, he's often nursing an injury from the Brazilian Jujitsu classes he takes. On the weekends he goes into the woods and does primitive skills stuff: flint knapping, shelter, fire, edibles, tools, weapons, and mastodon hide preparation for all I know. He co-runs a school, Earth Connection, and often teaches at another, Ancestral Knowledge.

He is a warrior at heart, and the warrior's mission-oriented mindset permeates every aspect of his life. He's always early because in the environment in which his character was formed, being late meant that other people might die because of your error. So now I adjust, knowing if he says 3 o'clock, he'll be there well before 2:45.

Plants grow in dirt, which I wish had been brought to  my attention before I started this project. Because dirt is gross. Until now, I’ve gotten all my vegetables at the supermarket, where they are displayed  under color-enhancing lights with musical accompaniment and an automatic mister hitting them every five minutes. The mist keeps them fresh and ensures  that you are buying the heaviest produce possible. Your celery may have been  fertilized with hazardous waste sludge from the slums of Caracas, Venezuela, harvested and packed by dozens of people suffering from God-knows-what diseases, but it looked nice. 

Dirt, I’ve discovered, contains parts of formerly living creatures. These can range from insects and  worms to guys who made the mistake of financing their bassboats through the local representative of an unauthorized Sicilian bank. Dirt can also include poop. In fact, I’ve heard many gardeners wax ecstatic about the quality of the poop in their  gardens. I recently sent off three little boxes of dirt from my garden to the  state Cooperative Extension Service for a soil test report. It cost about $25. The report came back looking like a Farsi translation of the Mexican tax code. I walked it over to my neighbor, Matt, who took science in high school. He  studied it carefully for a few moments and concluded, “They’re saying you need  5 lbs. of lime per 100 square feet. And more poop, best I can tell.” 

Reluctantly, I went on a poop run (okay, “manure” to you  specialists) to Home Depot. After half an hour I found an empty pallet with a sign indicating that it had formerly held 40-lb. bags of dehydrated dairy cow manure. I then walked around the inside of the store twice, nearly getting  dive-bombed by birds, and eventually found a group of employees lounging by the double doors to the back of the store. “You guys are out of manure on the  floor,” I said. “I was wondering if you had any more in the back.” They  immediately cracked up. “Dude, we don’t keep anything in the back,” one  said. “If we had it in the back, it’d be up front.” He said this as if pitying my lack of common sense.

I asked if they’d be getting any more manure soon. “We probably will,” said one. “But you’d better be here the day it comes. That s$#% just flies off the shelves this time of year.” Realizing he’d made an inadvertent joke, he exchanged high-fives with two co-loungers. Now I call the store every day and ask if the poop has come in. Soon, they  say. Very soon.

I’m not sure anybody but my mom and sister noticed, but for several months I’ve been absent from the tenuous portion of reality known as the blogosphere. Now I’m back. And I’m in trouble.

I wish I had a more colorful version, but the truth is as follows. My recent semi-best-selling book, “If You Didn’t Bring Jerky What Did I Just Eat?” (which Eddie Nickens terms “a hastily thrown together collection of your less-offensive stuff”) actually did better than the publisher expected. On the strength of that, I decided to pitch them a second book idea. Look, I said, I’m already an incredibly successful hunter and angler. What if I added foraging for edible plants and threw in a vegetable garden in the back yard, and then tried to see how much of my own food I could get over the course of a seasonal year? (I wanted to include theft – primarily, though certainly not exclusively, from more successful local gardens – but was told this was not in the cards. Something to do with a branch of epidemiology called “ethics.”)

Anyway, the book industry must be really hard up for ideas, because they bought it. I even got an advance. And now that I’ve spent the money (by the way, once you start wearing custom-made camo, you’ll never go back to buying off-the-rack) I have to actually write the damn thing. And I’ll be checking in two or three times a week to let you know how it’s going.

Right now, I’m hitting the foraging books pretty hard. And finding out that Mother Nature can be less than maternal. One of the first plants I came across in my nearest woods at first looked like Queen Anne’s Lace, Daucus carota, aka wild carrot, an eminently edible root vegetable. I looked it up in my Peterson’s “Edible Wild Plants” and found that I was looking at Conium maculatum, aka poison hemlock. Both have lacy, delicate leaves, a white flower that typically blooms starting in May, and a white, carrot-like root.

The only problem is that even small amounts of poison hemlock can cause “paralysis and death.”

I’ve invited Dave Petzal to come over for stir-fry.