Secret Ingredients (30 page)

Gibbons paused to say that he apparently developed in that era what some people who know him well have called his “hobo instinct.” Few American hoboes of the 1930s knew much about wild food, he said, but he acknowledged nonetheless that there are hobo overtones in his approach to his specialty—his excited way of seeing wild plants as wild coins, and his affection for roadside foraging. He said, “There is nothing I would rather do than eat my way through a roadside ditch.”

At times, in California, Gibbons lived in ding camps. “‘Ding’ is the hobo word for bum. When you go bumming, you go dinging.” In the ding camp at San Jose, he took a course in Spanish, and he worked in the camp variety show as a blackface minstrel, a juggler of vegetables, and a trick roper. The San Jose troupe traveled to other camps—in Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco—and also played in theatres, where Gibbons got three dollars (tops) for an appearance. “The thing that broke that up was marijuana smoking. About half the guys in the troupe were hay burners. Five cents a stick.”

“Were you a hay burner?” I asked.

“No, I never was a hay burner.”

Gibbons pushed the logs in the fireplace closer together. “I went to a few Communist meetings with men from the transient camps. We would hear lectures on the labor situation and put money in the collection plate. But my left-wing activities really began after I got a job as a laborer for Continental Can in San Jose. I met a girl there who was a Party functionary—she was subsidized by the Party. I fell in love with her. I had a little one-room shack I had been living in, and she moved in, and we painted it white. There were fig trees beside it, and we gathered walnuts, prunes, oranges, figs, and lived on those. I sold newspapers to make dimes, and I wrote leaflets for the Party. We worked to organize Continental Can, and we finally got them out on strike. After the plant settled the strike, we were fired. They wanted the agitators out, and we were agitators. To tell you the truth, my Communism at that time was all mixed up with my love affair. I was not a member of the Party. She was a militant Communist. I was in love with her, but she was not in love with me. I was just convenient—I wrote leaflets. I finally got tired of living with Karl Marx, and in the summer of 1934 I caught a freight. I ended up in a ding camp in San Luis Obispo, where they had hot showers.”

The camp in San Luis Obispo was on a vast private estate. Gibbons and the other transients built roads and bridges for the owner and were paid by the federal government—five dollars a month, plus tobacco, work clothes, and meals. Gibbons swam in the Pacific, dug clams, caught fish, and began to develop a lifelong metaphysical fondness for islands and the sea. He and other Communist sympathizers—an Englishman called London Fog, an Icelander called Whitey, an American named Sam—drifted together and discussed world revolution. One day, when they were fed sandwiches that consisted of two pieces of bread that had been dampened with gravy, they walked off the job, shouting, “We want better food!” When Whitey tried to get the whole camp to strike, he, Gibbons, Sam, and London Fog were jailed. They managed to get off a telegram to the San Francisco office of the International Labor Defense, which, in Gibbons’s words, was “a non-Commie organization that was to the left of the American Civil Liberties Union and defended many Commies.” An ILD lawyer came to help them. They were given suspended sentences, with the provision that they leave San Luis Obispo County. Gibbons went to Seattle and joined the army.

When his hitch was done, he worked in Seattle and Puyallup (near Tacoma) as a carpenter, a surveyor, and a boatbuilder. He formally joined the Party and became a district organizer, or “messenger boy from higher up to the local level.” There were about fifty members in his district. He worked with front organizations like the American League Against War and Fascism, and he picketed Japanese ships that were hauling scrap iron out of Seattle. “We picketed the ships because we thought scrap iron would go into munitions and come back at us.” He married a girl named Ann Swanson, and they had two sons. (One of them is now an electrician in Albuquerque, and the other is an airman in Vietnam.) Gibbons and his wife caught crayfish in Washington lakes and sold most of the catch. They also gathered and sold dewberries, and, just for themselves, they collected salmonberries, blackberries, raspberries, salal berries, serviceberries, sea urchins, crabs, clams, mussels, moon shells, lamb’s-quarters, purslane, wild mustard, and camass (“very much a local wild food, a sweetish and smooth-flavored bulb”). During those years, he gave more time to his political activity than to his work, and more time to wild food than to politics. When the Russians attacked Finland in 1939, he resigned from the Party. “I couldn’t jump through hoops. It was the peacekeeping part of Communism that had interested me. I wasn’t working for any foreign power. I was working to improve things right here. When the Russians attacked Finland, it was as if the Quakers, now, suddenly decided to support the war in Vietnam.” With the coming of the Second World War, he went to Pearl Harbor, as a civilian but without his family, to build small boats for the Navy.

Gibbons and I stayed up fairly late that first night on the Appalachian Trail, in part because we could feel the curtain of ice-cold air at the front of the lean-to and we wanted to keep the fire going. In the course of a long and digressive conversation, I asked him why he had wanted to become a Communist in the first place, and he said, “A thousand men in a freight train, old women digging in garbage cans—the Communists were the only people who were trying to do anything about it. The Party was legal. I didn’t see that it was decent to be anything but a Communist at that time.”

“Did you believe in God while you were a Communist?”

“Yes, I guess so. I would have used a different vocabulary then. I believed in a higher right. For that matter, I’d have an awfully difficult time articulating my belief in God right now.”

The perforated-steel bunks in the lean-to may have been designed to give maximum ventilation, and therefore coolness, to hikers in summer; at any rate, they gave some sort of maximum that night. Cold came up through each perforation like a separate nail. Around 3
A.M.,
choosing what turned out to be a warmer place, I took my sleeping bag and went out and lay down on the frozen ground. Gibbons snored right through the night, in comfort, in his bunk. At 6:45, when we got up, the temperature was seventeen degrees. Ice in the big pot was an inch thick. The fire was dead, and Gibbons was cheerful. He said, “Well, you couldn’t say we’re suffering like the early Christians.” After we had rebuilt the fire, he asked me to husk a couple of hundred ground-cherries. I threw the husks into the flames, one by one, and they blazed like Ping-Pong balls. He, meanwhile, brewed wintergreen tea, which was hot and delicious and left an aftertaste that was clean and fresh. We put in very little sugar, because Gibbons was anxious that the subtle essence of wintergreen not be lost. We ate red wintergreen berries in lieu of orange juice or grapefruit, and they were like small mints and had the same effect as the tea. Then he stewed the ground-cherries, which were flavorful and went down very gratefully, as Gibbons might have put it. That was the entire breakfast, and it was all we needed after the heavy dinner of the night before. We were in the fourth day of the trip, and we had not felt hungry after any of the meals we had had, nor were we likely to from then on, for that noon we were going to introduce flour and baking powder, and, that evening, bacon. Before we left the campsite, I cracked and shelled a cupful of hickory nuts and stowed them away while Gibbons hung a mirror on an eave of the lean-to and shaved, for the first time since leaving home. He tried to comb his hair, which was standing almost straight on end, and he seemed to be in even better spirits than he had been in the day before. He said that he almost felt ready to keep on going, foraging across the land indefinitely.

During the morning, we made a fairly long detour to buy the supplies we needed, and we rejoined the trail just before lunch. Gibbons talked all morning about breads, cakes, and muffins, and he told me that wild-rose-petal jam is outstanding in crêpes. We had lunch beside the trail. Gibbons mixed a batter with the flour and baking powder, and into it he put the cupful of hickory nuts and a large gob of mashed persimmons. Neither then nor as the trip continued did I ever see him measure anything, nor did he once fail in his eye for proportions or in his considerable understanding of the unstable relationships between time and flame. He said not to worry about the persimmons in the batter, and he was right. Pan-baked, they gave a sweet and quiet flavor to the persimmon-and-hickory-nut cakes he served that noon. We both stuffed ourselves on them and, at my request, finished the meal with wintergreen tea.

It had been a clear morning, with the temperature going up into the middle thirties, but now the sky darkened quickly and a light rain began to fall. We had intended to forage that afternoon. Instead, we went on to the nearest campsite and took shelter. We felt smug, because our previous foraging had more than taken care of our needs; we had plenty of food and could avoid the cold rain. When we had a fire going and were getting warm and dry, I asked Gibbons what was the longest time that he had ever lived on foraged food. His answer was three years. As we sat there looking out at the rain coming down through a stand of tall white pines, he told me the story of those years.

In 1946, he found himself alone in Hawaii without a job and without much inclination to find one. His marriage had been, as he termed it, a casualty of the war, and he had learned that his wife did not want him to return to Seattle. He was something of a casualty himself, he said, because he had become debilitated by alcoholism. During the previous five years, he had built and repaired boats in Pearl Harbor until a time, near the end of the war, when a hospital ship tied up at the pier where he was working and medical corpsmen needed three full days to remove all the maimed young men whose arms, legs, and faces had been blown away. Soon thereafter, Gibbons became a conscientious objector and asked to be released from his obligations to the Navy. He was told that he could work as an attendant in a mental hospital if he preferred, and he did so until he complained strongly about the way some patients were being treated—as when he saw a powerful hose turned on a man who was locked in a barred cell. Gibbons was fired. He tried boatbuilding for a time as a private contractor, and failed. After struggling within himself over what seemed to be poor prospects for building a sound future, he decided to shelve the future and become a beachcomber in the South Pacific. He soon found that he might almost as easily have secured an appointment as a United States envoy to Tahiti. It took money and contacts to become a beachcomber in the South Seas. For example, islands that were under the control of the British or the French required all beachcombers to register and to post sizable bonds. Permits were needed for beachcombing on islands under the military control of the United States. Gibbons decided to do his beachcombing in the Hawaiian Islands, where no one cared. He bought classified space in the Honolulu
Advertiser
and described himself as a writer who would exchange yard work and maintenance work for a place to live. A deal resulted, and soon he was living beyond Diamond Head in a hut that had a thatched roof and siding of matted coconut leaves. The hut stood under a kamani tree that had a limb spread of eighty feet and released frequent showers of kamani nuts (Indian almonds). He gathered, among many things, guavas, thimbleberries, ohelo berries, coconuts, wild bananas, figs, dates, wild oranges, breadfruit, papayas, mangoes, fish, crabs, turtles, and panini (the fruit of a Hawaiian cactus). In season, he always had baskets of pineapples in the hut, for Hawaiian pineapples are grown to fit machines and those that do not fit the machines are often left in the fields. He ranged the islands hunting wild pigs, wild cattle, wild goats, wild sheep, and axis deer. At one point, he became so successful at trapping and selling fish and lobsters that he almost lost his status as a beachcomber. He cooked over homemade charcoal and lathered himself with homemade coconut soap. He made swipes, the quick-fermented liquors of the islands—pineapple swipes, panini swipes. And he gave wild luaus, at which people drank, danced, sang all night, and ate crayfish cocktail, crab salad, broiled lobsters, charcoal-broiled teriyaki venison steaks, wild beef, roast boar, palm-heart salads, avocados, seaweed, guava chiffon pie, passion-fruit sherbet, and mangoes covered with whipped coconut cream—all at a cost to the host of no dollars and no cents. He served the food on banana leaves.

When he had been living in the hut for a couple of years, he applied for admission to the University of Hawaii, and entered as a thirty-six-year-old freshman. He majored in anthropology, studied creative writing as well, and won the university’s creative-writing prize. Student life gradually drew him away from the hut and ended his full-time beachcombing. He worked part-time for the Honolulu
Advertiser
and made up crossword puzzles in the Hawaiian language, although he could not speak it. “That’s no trick,” he told me. “There are only twelve letters in the Hawaiian language—seven consonants and five vowels.” In 1948, during a summer session at the university, he met a schoolteacher named Freda Fryer, who had come to the islands from Philadelphia. She, too, was divorced. They were married a year or so later. Together, they made an exhaustive effort to find a church they could agree upon, and eventually they decided to join the Quaker Meeting. “I became a Quaker because it was the only group I could join without pretending to beliefs that I didn’t have or concealing beliefs that I did have,” Gibbons told me. “I could be completely honest. I’m not very orthodox.” Before long, they moved to the island of Maui, where they both taught—she kindergarten and he carpentry and boatbuilding—in the Maui Vocational School. Gibbons had been given custody of his two sons, who had lived for a time with his mother in Albuquerque, and the boys joined him in the islands. He gathered more wild food on Maui than he had on Oahu, he told me, for he had more people to feed. He kept a banana calendar. He walked the woods, made notes on the condition of ripening wild bananas, went home and marked his calendar, and returned for the bananas when they were ripe. He took his wife for long, rugged hikes in the Maui brush. She worried about centipedes and scorpions while he looked for wild pomelos and wild oranges. Week in and week out, he brought home so much wild food that they had to throw at least half of it away.