A Sportsman's Life

From the crop of books extolling the abundance of the vegetable kingdom, you get the idea that nature is such an obliging host that all you have to do for a great meal is open your mouth and walk into the woods. Bradford Angier’s guide, for example, is called “Feasting for Free on Wild Edibles.” The blurb on the back cover of “Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide,” by Elias and Dykeman, touts “a nutritious, delicious, season-by-season guide to identifying, harvesting, and preparing over 200 healthful plants from the wild!”

Personally, I’m not finding the green world quite so accommodating. In fact, I’m starting to believe that many plants have no desire whatsoever to be eaten. Read about the plants in the above books and others, and you are nearly always directed to gather the youngest shoots, the smallest basal rosettes, and the earliest stage of the flower buds. Why? Once they flower, most plants become bitter, even toxic. In other words, nature’s supermarket has very limited hours. 

As a novice, I’m spending a lot of time in a Catch-22 scenario. The plants I want to eat are most edible when least identifiable, when every green shoot looks pretty much like every other. When most identifiable, during and after they have flowered, they tend to be the least edible.

One notable exception are berries, including the many varieties of the bramble (Rubus) family, which includes the various species of raspberries, blackberries, and dewberries. In my area, the wineberry -  a type of raspberry introduced from Asia and well-established in disturbed, sunny places - is going gangbusters. The best patch I’ve found is right along the edge of a four-lane highway that skirts the Potomac. The roar of traffic is such that when picking with a companion you communicate using hand signals, like Scuba divers. Yesterday, after picking about three pints of delicious, juicy wineberries, I noticed I was out of time. Looking at my companion, I tapped the face of my watch and made a slashing motion across my throat. He understood perfectly, and we hugged the shoulder trying to get home without getting flattened.

You pick berries where they grow, and Nature apparently doesn’t watch the Disney Channel.

What’s the most unlikely place you’ve foraged, fished, or hunted?

Today’s Sportsman’s Life entry has nothing to do with hunting, fishing, foraging, or gardening - unless you happen to be a parent. If you are growing children, listen up.

Where I live, public school let out last Friday and cranks back up on September 2. In other words, summer vacation in the brave new world of standards-based public education (official slogan, “making the world safe for work sheets”) lasts just over two months.

When I picked Emma, 8, up from her second day of a week-long Junior Naturalist camp at 4 p.m., she was already late for dive practice at our local pool, to be followed by the first dive meet of the summer. I took one look at my child: sunburned, dazed, her face covered with paint from a lesson on how animals use camouflage to avoid predators. And I decided it was time to stop the clock. “Monkey,” I said, “here’s the deal: You don’t have to go to dive practice or the meet unless you want to. For the rest of the day, we are gonna do whatever you want. We’re making this an Emma Day.”

She roused herself and trained a cynical eye on me. “For real?” she asked. For real, I answered. We could even go toy shopping if she wanted: roller blades, a skateboard, whatever. “Even dolls?” she asked. "No dolls," I said. I draw the line at more dolls. She already has so many that the last time the cable guy came, he wanted to know how many girls lived in the house. “One,” I said. “But she’s kind of intense about dolls.”

An hour later, Emma was the proud owner of a Cerberus (3-Headed Dog) Channel 1 skateboard and a pink Kryptonics helmet that rested nearly on her shoulders. She was highly stoked. We adjourned to a nearby church parking lot. I let her be in charge, telling me when she wanted me to steady her and when she wanted me to get out of the way. Emma, being adopted and possessing none of my genetic material, is almost preternaturally athletic, without fear, yet with an intuitive sense of her own limits. She didn’t fall once, and was soon riding as if Velcroed to the board. We stayed until she finally sighed, “Okay. Now I’m really tired.” She even ate tiny bites of her vegetables as we watched a few minutes of a John Wayne movie.

As I put her in bed and prepared to read a few pages of “Sunny the Yellow Fairy,” I said, “Monk, I just want you to know that the luckiest day in my life was the one I got picked to be your daddy.” But she was already out, off chasing rainbows and goblins with all the other fairies.

Foraging is a deeply suspicious activity to most people. On Saturday night, I happened upon a new find, a serviceberry tree right in a county park, with plenty of purple-blue berries still clinging to its branches. I got the plastic tub I now keep in my car, tied it around my waist, and started picking.

It was Saturday evening and there were families out enjoying the cool air. Twenty minutes into my work, I noticed that a small boy had materialized at my feet. He tilted his head up so he could see my face. “Picking berries?” he asked. I nodded. “Try one,” I said. “Get a dark one.” He did. “These,” he pronounced, “are excellent.” His father, hovering nearby on a cell phone, called distractedly for the boy to come back.

Instead, the boy moved around to the other side of the tree and kept picking. “These are awesome,” he murmured to himself. “I love this. Wow.” Some children take to picking berries as if pre-programmed to do so, which, of course, they are. His father, now realizing that an adult man was engaged in some very unusual behavior quite near his son, approached to look me over. “Serviceberries,” I explained, my eyes and fingers not stopping their work. “Very tasty.”

“Dad, we gotta get some of these berries!” the boy called. “I want to come here every day!” The father looked skeptical. No telling what birds, bugs, and God knows what else had been on these things. And here was some weirdo picking them. It was barely a step up from dumpster diving. And while the guy with a blue plastic bucket tied to his waist didn’t look immediately dangerous, it was certainly a suspicious activity for a grown man on a Saturday night.

“Howard, I think that’s enough for tonight,” the man said. You could tell he had more phone calls to make.

“Okay,” Howard finally said, in a tone that indicated he knew all too well that his father’s verdict was not subject to appeal. “But I wanna come back here first thing tomorrow morning!”

“We’ll see, son,” said his dad in a tone that meant, in effect, “No.” 

It occurred to me that this man, presented with the same tree, properly fenced off and with a sign saying, “Pick Your Own Fresh Berries, $2 Per Pint,” would have been quite comfortable forking over the money and letting his boy enjoy a healthy outdoor activity. It was all a question of packaging. 

I raided Paula’s private sour cherry tree the other day, and discovered that breaking your solemn word can be a really smart thing to do. After a disappointing morning in the deep woods, we headed back into town hot, dehydrated, and crabby. We’d gone to a place that has an old dump where she hoped to find bottles to sell at a flea market. “Yuppies’ll buy any old bottles with colored glass or embossed lettering,” she’d told me. “You find both, you’re golden.”

We’d also found plenty of plants that were edible but not yet ready: wild garlic, black raspberries, and blackberries. We came across some wild ginger, but digging it up kills the plant and there’s not a lot of it around. We found some sheep sorrel, a good salad green, by the roadside, but  road runoff isn’t the most nourishing thing to be ingesting, so we just tasted it and moved on. Hopniss, aka ground bean, is a slender vine that produces a nutritious subterranean bean. It grows widely and is easy to find once you recognize it. The only problem with hopniss is that you  expend more energy digging the bean than you get from eating it.  Samuel Thayer, writing in his wonderful wild edibles book “Forager’s Harvest,” states that the Indians solved this problem by raiding the caches of rodents. They left offerings of corn in return, but you can guess who got the best of that particular deal.

At noon, we drove back into town, where Paula took pity on me by disclosing a sour cherry tree heavy with bright fruit by a pre-war apartment complex a quarter mile from her house. “You can take a few, but this is my tree,” she said. The fruit was tart but tasty, and Paula said sour cherries are known for making the best pies. Having agreed to her terms, I dropped her at home. That evening, I went back to the tree with a makeshift blickey (a basket tied around your waist, leaving both hands free to pick) and a berry hook (a hooked stick with a length of rope tied to it, allowing you to pull down a high branch and keep it within picking range by standing on the rope, also leaving both hands free.) I stood there, lost in the meditation of feeling for ripeness and plucking cherries, while a steady stream of commuters headed home just feet away on a bike path. It was as seductive as fishing, and by the time I looked up, I’d lost a couple of hours and gained a couple of quarts of fruit. 

Emma was eager to help pit cherries in the sink until she discovered that every fourth or fifth one , when squeezed to express the stone, squirted juice like a miniature squid. “Gross!” she shouted, peeling off to read fairy books. Two quarts of cherries looks like a lot in a basket, but are barely enough to fill a single 9-inch pie pan. I poured the fruit mixture (with sugar, flour, and a bit of lemon juice) into a store-bought pie crust. I balled up a second pie crust and used a borrowed  rolling pin to flatten it into strips for the top crust. The recipe had insanely complicated instructions for weaving strips of pie crust into a “latticework”, with  “fluted” or “crimped” edges that  create “an attractive presentation.” Emma and I opted for more of  a Jackson Pollock crust. 

An hour and 20 minutes later, my first-ever pie emerged bubbling from the oven. Once cooled, Emma judged it too tart, although she gladly accepted the ice cream that went with it. Me, I loved it: tart, rich, and, above all, the fruit of my labors. I ate half the sucker in the first two hours, accompanied with a pint of vanilla ice cream. Then I called Paula. “Made a pie with those cherries,” I said when she answered. Then I burped. “I’ll try to save you a piece but I’m not promising anything.”

As I hung up I wasn’t sure if she was cursing or laughing. Maybe both.

Several posters on this page have expressed concern that I might not survive this ordeal. Several have expressed concern that I might. Before this train gets too far down the track, I should disclose the following: While there are many things I'm prepared to do for this project, suffering is not one of them.

My goal originally was to subsist entirely off of what I could hunt, fish, forage, and grow on my own. This lasted for about 15 minutes. I quickly realized several things. One is that while I am one rung up from the average doofus on the hunting and fishing side of things, there are few people living who know less about foraging and gardening than I do. I am, after all, a child of the suburbs. I didn't grow up picking berries in the woods or trapping game, I've never attempted a garden of any kind, and the first time I roasted a hot dog over an open fire, a camp counselor pointed out to me that I'd chosen a rhododendron stick, which was potentially poisonous. Further, after several minutes of imagining life without coffee, beer, chocolate, and the occasional cigar, I decided that such a life would not be worthy of the name. 

I'm therefore revising my goal. Broadly speaking, I'm attempting to close the distance between my life and the means by which I sustain it. The interesting thing, for me at least, will be to see how far I get and what happens along the way.

As I once told a woman I was dating, lower your expectations and we'll get along just fine.

The Indians called this late spring, early summer transition “the hungry time,” according to Hue, who I introduced in my last post. It seems counter-intuitive at first. After all, the vegetable kingdom is fairly exploding with greenery and growth. Nevertheless, it’s true. It’s because the first shoots of many edibles – dandelion, stinging nettles, dock, all kinds of stuff – have been up long enough to become bitter, which is a plant’s chemical defense against being eaten entirely. But it’s still too early for the vast majority of fruits, nuts, and seeds.

An experienced forager, however, can overcome this. Not ten feet out of the car, Hue is stripping pods from a red bud tree. Without the telltale buds, I can’t even i.d. the tree, but he says just as the buds are edible, so are the paper-thin green pods, like bean pods only smaller. He says this particular tree wouldn’t have them but for the fact that it receives so little light due to the canopy of larger trees above. He pops one in his mouth and gives me one, while collecting more for me to steam at home. It’s like the undercooked snow pea pods you get in bad Chinese restaurants. It tastes green, succulent, faintly sweet. I wouldn’t go out of my way for these, but it would be a handy thing to know about if you ever needed food.

He tells me how his wife mistakenly mixed up two wild greens that were in the fridge: some kind of wild lettuce and marsh marigold. This lettuce needed only a light steaming to be edible. Marsh marigold, also known as cowslip, contains protanemonin, a toxin that acts like a blistering agent. Marsh marigold should be boiled for 20-40 minutes before eating, and the water discarded. Some people prefer three changes of boiling water to achieve a milder flavor. They were a few bites into the greens before Hue confirmed the mistake. “We just each adjourned to a separate bathroom and stuck our fingers down our throats. Odds are we would have been alright. But internal blisters aren’t really my idea of a good time.” I ask what they did afterwards. He shrugs. “Ah, nothing special. Watched a movie.”