Secret Ingredients (31 page)

The rain stopped, or nearly, and Gibbons and I had dinner—huge, steaming mounds of winter cress with interstitial bacon, and stacks of oyster mushrooms. Winter cress is as excellent a green vegetable as there could ever be. It is tender, it has a mild and pleasant flavor that is somewhere between watercress and spinach, and it is in season from late fall until early spring. Italian Americans harvest it voraciously, Gibbons said, but most people don’t even know it exists. After dinner, he reached up to a bough of one of the tall pines and gathered several hundred needles. He put them into a pot and poured boiling water over them. After steeping them for perhaps five minutes, he poured out two cups of white-pine-needle tea.

In the morning, at six-thirty, the eastern sky through the pines was orange red. The temperature was twenty-nine degrees. We decided that such a splendid day deserved to start with more white-pine-needle tea. It had in its taste the tonic qualities of the scent of pine, but it was not at all bitter. I had imagined, on first trying it the night before, that I would have a feeling I was drinking turpentine. Instead, I had had the novel experience of an outstanding but unfamiliar taste that was related to a completely familiar scent—a kind of direct translation from one idiom to another. As we stood by the fire drinking the fresh morning tea, Gibbons said that in the pine needles he had used there was about five times as much vitamin C as there would be in an average lemon. For the rest of that breakfast—the best one of the trip—we had persimmon bachelor-bread covered with maple syrup (made from the remains of the maple-sugar block) and a side dish of sautéed dandelion roots. “My God, I have enjoyed the dandelion roots on this trip!” Gibbons said. While I was cleaning up the pots, he wandered around in the woods and found a witch-hazel bush in bloom. He called to me to come and see it. Witch hazel sheds its leaves in the autumn, and then, when the forest around it is bare and winter is close, it blooms. Gibbons was excited by the find. He said that a drink of witch-hazel tea was thought by American Indians to be nearly as stimulating as a draught of rum, and he suggested that we have some for lunch. The blossoms are yellow and look something like forsythia blooms. We ran several branches through our fingers and stripped them clean.

Gibbons and I left the Appalachian Trail that morning, and, having recovered his Volkswagen, we foraged overland, slowly and miscellaneously and for the sheer pleasure of it, in a generally southerly direction. He seldom went faster than twenty-five miles an hour, but the ride would have been only slightly more dangerous if he had been driving blindfolded. As the beautiful countryside spread out before him, with all its ditches and field fringes and copses of nut trees in the sun, his eyes were rarely on the road, and he wove back and forth across it, scudded past stop signs, ignored approaching traffic, and nearly overran ten or fifteen tractors. Meanwhile, he read the land as if it were language—dock, burdock, chicory, chickweed, winter cress, sheep sorrel, peppergrass, catnip—and where something particularly interested him he stopped. We had no immediate need of all the things we gathered that morning, but Gibbons, having found them, could not pass them by. He showed me how to winnow dock seed and said that dock is a relative of buckwheat. We sat in a field and ate wild carrots. He found a wild asparagus plant—just so that I could see it, for it was out of season. We gathered brandy mint, walnuts, winter cress, watercress, dandelions, sheep sorrel, chicory, and the fruits of staghorn sumac. Once, when we were working our way along a roadside ditch opposite a farm, a woman came out of the farmhouse and craftily went to her mailbox (nothing there), the better to observe us at close hand.

Gibbons greeted her, and said, “We’re just trying to find out what kinds of weeds grow here.”

After she had gone back to the farmhouse, I said to him, “If you had told that lady that you were looking for something to eat for lunch, she would have thought you were crazy.”

He said that would not have bothered him, but that he had learned to avoid saying he was looking for food, because when he did so people tended to feel sorry for him and to insist that he go into their houses and have a hot meal.

Angling this way and that on the old crown roads of Adams County, we came, as we had hoped to, at lunchtime, to the battlefield at Gettysburg. We stopped in a wooded cul-de-sac between two pylon monuments to Berdan’s U.S. Sharpshooters. The unseasonably cold weather seemed to be gone; the temperature that noon was fifty-seven degrees. The sky was three times as blue as it had been for weeks. There was a warm breeze. Oak leaves rattled in the trees, and the leaves of other trees covered the ground and formed drifts, in places a foot deep. Gibbons went into the woods, picked up a rock that weighed at least seventy-five pounds, and carried it to a patch of sunlight, where we established a walnut-shelling factory—shell buckets, meat buckets, reject buckets—and produced a cupful of walnut meat in twenty minutes. We introduced cornmeal at that lunch, and the menu was black-walnut hush puppies and witch-hazel tea. The hush puppies, hot and filling and pervaded with the savory essence of walnut, made the second-best lunch of the trip (we still had one to go). The witch-hazel tea smelled like a barbershop, stimulated nobody, but was agreeably mild in taste. Gibbons said that its flavor had a faint hint of eucalyptus and that he didn’t like it. I liked it well enough, but after the white-pine-needle tea it seemed quite ordinary. As we were leaving the battlefield, Gibbons stopped beside a long row of cannons and dug up a cluster of wild garlic.

Rain—a really heavy rain this time—came in the middle of the afternoon and ended the warmth of the day, and the foraging as well. We drove north, intending to stop for the night, and to have our final dinner of the trip, in a state park. We had been riding without conversing for a while when Gibbons cleared his throat and said, “Come listen to this little tale about the lowly, humble snail. He doesn’t think, as on he labors, that he is better than his neighbors, nor that he is a little god; he knows he’s just a gastropod.” He kept going in this vein at some length—“False pride is never his asylum; he knows Mollusca is his phylum”—and then he explained to me that he frequently writes “biological verse,” and publishes it in prose form in, among other places,
Frontiers: A Magazine of Natural History.
He also said that some of his serious verse has been published in the
Friends Journal,
and that in his long search for his own phylum as a writer he had tried all kinds of things and had spun some wild tales, such as a novel he once began about spacemen returning to earth after a thermonuclear tragedy and trying to forage wild food in the wasteland. I asked him if he thought he would ever start another novel, and he said he hoped to, but that, even with regard to his wild-food writing, his mind was forever swaying on a shaky fence between confidence and fear. He went on to say candidly that this sort of vacillation was characteristic of him generally, and that he didn’t mind telling me now that he had even been afraid to start out on this trip because he had had no confidence that he could bring it off. He said he had been haunted for as long as he could remember by a sense of fraudulence, and thought that he had created failure for himself time after time in hopeless servitude to this ghost. It had been all he could do to weather the success of his published books, even though he had also been haunted for years by a desire to find himself as a writer. He said he imagined that some kind of desperate restlessness arising out of these crosswinds had made him leave Hawaii in 1953.

From the fall of 1953 through the spring of 1954, he taught at a Friends school in New Jersey, and then he moved to a six-hundred-acre farm in Greenfield, Indiana, where he became a co-founder of what he hoped would be a large agriculturally based cooperative community. “I was hot on intentional communities at that time,” he said. “I had studied them, and we had even considered joining specific ones in New Zealand and Costa Rica. In Indiana, I wanted to create a community that would produce its own food.” The community started on perhaps too narrow a base, having a charter population of five. The other four were Gibbons’s wife, his partner (whose family owned the farm), his partner’s wife, and his partner’s child. Gibbons developed a truck garden and explored the area’s ample varieties of wild food, but his partner spent all his time raising corn. “The corn was being bought by the government and stored until it rotted,” Gibbons told me. “We were getting nowhere, so I decided to go.” Before he left, he became concerned about a thirteen-year-old boy whose father and two older brothers were in prison. The boy’s future was in the hands of an Indiana court. Gibbons got the court’s permission to take the boy with him, and the boy lived with Gibbons and his wife for five years as a foster son. Gibbons spent most of that time at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center in suburban Philadelphia, where students from all over the world enroll to do private study, to write theses, and to take courses under teachers such as Henry J. Cadbury, a retired professor from the Harvard Divinity School, and Howard H. Brinton, the leading American authority on Quaker history. Pendle Hill is itself a kind of cooperative community, and Gibbons became a member of the staff, taking responsibility for the maintenance of the grounds and buildings, and cooking breakfast for everyone every day. He also went to Cadbury’s and Brinton’s lectures and took courses in Bible, literature, social studies, philosophy, and writing. He fondly remembers Pendle Hill as “a hotbed of pacifism and peacemongers.” Experimentally, he grew pokeweed in a basement there, in the hope that he could serve bleached poke to the others. They didn’t like it.

Gibbons went on to tell me that in 1960 his wife volunteered to support him through her teaching for as long as he needed to write—and do nothing but write—until he was satisfied that he had won or lost his long conflict with that particular genie. “Freda pushes me, and I resent it sometimes, but I couldn’t get anywhere without the pushing,” he said. “She is quick and simple, and I am complicated. No matter what situation she finds herself in, she can rise to the occasion and do the sensible thing, and, of course, I’m not like that at all. She doesn’t like to forage, and when I come home with wild food she sometimes says, ‘Euell, could you please leave that stuff on the back porch?’ Yet she supported me for two years while I wrote my first book, and it never would have been written without her.” They moved from Pendle Hill to an old farmhouse at Tanguy Homesteads, a rural interracial cooperative community near Philadelphia. Within a year, he had produced
Mr. Markel Retires,
his novel about the schoolteacher who retreated into a world of wild food, and another year was required for
Mr. Markel
to be boiled in three waters and utterly metamorphosed into
Stalking the Wild Asparagus.
Gibbons had been hesitant to try a straightforward handbook of wild food, mainly because several of them existed—Nelson Coon’s
Using Wayside Plants,
Oliver Medsger’s
Edible Wild Plants,
sections of the Boy Scout
Handbook,
and, most detailed of all,
Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America,
by Merritt L. Fernald, Reed L. Rollins, and Alfred C. Kinsey—the same Alfred C. Kinsey who attracted a much wider audience with reports on sexual behavior. Gibbons had never been fully satisfied with any of the wild-food manuals, however. Fernald, Rollins, and Kinsey, in Gibbons’s view, had written a “dry list” and may not have tried out some of the recipes they suggested. “I can’t believe they ever cooked skunk cabbage,” he told me. Gibbons gathered, cooked, and ate everything he wrote about, and he rejected some foods that had been generally reported to be edible because he had found them unpalatable. “I have never successfully eaten arrow arum,” he said, to give me an example. “Same with golden club. Both of them prickled my throat and burned my mouth.” He sent wild food to Pennsylvania State University for analysis of its nutritive values. He read
The Journal of Lewis and Clark, The Journal of George Vancouver,
the observations of Captain John Smith on wild food, and the work of other early observers. He read ethno-botanies of the Iroquois, the Abnaki, the Menomini, the Cherokee, and other Indian tribes. Then, as he wrote, he included his own experiences with the plant he was discussing, gracefully and relevantly weaving his autobiography into his work. When
Stalking the Wild Asparagus
was published, it quickly established him as the master of his field—which shook him up no end.

(I was to make a visit, some weeks later, to Tanguy Homesteads, and to find that while Gibbons was doing his research for the book he was a wild Hans Christian Andersen to the children there. He fed them the foods that he tested in his kitchen, took them fishing and foraging, and one day showed them twenty-five wild foods growing within a hundred feet of a supermarket. Gibbons has been gone from Tanguy for five years now, but the children there still collect meadow mushrooms, still make cattail-flour muffins, and, at his invitation, regularly visit him in Troxelville in the summertime. “Without the common weed, Euell wouldn’t have his career,” one child said to me. I also learned that Gibbons had run for Thornbury Township constable on the Democratic ticket while he lived at Tanguy, but his campaign ended in failure.)

Gibbons moved to Troxelville in December 1963, but he had owned his house there for some years, having noticed in the
Friends Journal
an ad offering, for five thousand dollars, a farmhouse on eleven acres, with a peach orchard and a stream. He has let the peach orchard go wild, preferring the cornucopian wilderness that has now grown up among the old trees. There are 111 houses in Troxelville. Most of them are on one street and are as close together as houses in Manhattan, and their fronts abut the sidewalks. Gibbons’s house is one of the few that is remote from this compact center. The town looks European, clustered like a walled village, with miles of open land surrounding it. The country is Pennsylvania Dutch, and the people are burghers. “People have a sort of tolerant attitude toward me there,” Gibbons said. “However, it took my neighbors a long time to decide that I wasn’t completely crazy.” (After the trip, I asked a young man in Troxelville what he thought of Gibbons’s fondness for unusual foods, and the fellow said, “It’s okay, if that’s his interest, but to me a weed is a weed.” Several doors down the street, an old man who was sweeping the sidewalk told me proudly that Gibbons had once made violet jelly for the entire town.) Gibbons’s home freezer usually contains items like fresh-frozen day-lily buds, frozen seaweed, Birds Eye lima beans, Pepperidge Farm bread, frozen gooseberries, and hickory nuts, which are easier to crack when they are frozen. Next to one another on the kitchen shelves are things like Decaf, Bisquick, dried elder blow, rose-hip jam, and boneset tea. Gibbons pays taxes of seventy-five dollars a year on his Troxelville property, and he also has to pay something called an Occupation Tax. When he told the assessor what he does for a living, he was listed as a part-time day laborer.