Twain's Feast (32 page)

Jannette, a member of the island’s Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, has enough energy that I’m entirely unsurprised by her walk. She writes poetry; she makes dolls, traditional clothing, wampum necklaces, leather pouches, and natural and recycled art. She’s putting the final touches on a modern fable. She’s thinking about a curatorial degree; she’s considering a cross-country road trip with her cat. When I arrive on the Vineyard in mid-October, it’s clear that much of it closes down after Columbus Day; signs read LAST DAY—THANK YOU! or SEE YOU NEXT YEAR. To fill the time, Jannette—a few years out of college, with a tied-back bundle of blond dreadlocks—goes to puppet shows, takes the tour of old haunted houses, whatever, and, at least that once, the island’s nonnegotiable borders had her walking the edge of the ocean.

Her first children’s book (“The first of many,” she says) is called
Cranberry Day.
Cranberry Day is why I’m on the Vineyard; it’s a holiday for the island’s Wampanoag, most of whom live near the western-most promontory of Aquinnah (it, and the dramatic gray, red, and orange Aquinnah cliffs, were called Gay Head until the tribe restored the original name). On Cranberry Day many Aquinnah Wampanoag go out to the tribe’s common lands, where they gather cranberries and beach plums and wild cherries that grow in low bogs amid the sand dunes. It’s one of the year’s last harvests and also a time of homecoming; the tribe has more than a thousand members, many of whom return each year to join the three hundred or so still living on the island (the Wampanoag name is Noepe, or “dry land”).

Jannette’s book follows Chris Hawksler, a Wampanoag fifth-grader, as he interviews a tribal elder to learn more about the history of Cranberry Day and how it has changed through the generations. “Never assume that a native child knows his culture—or the history behind it, at least,” Jannette says. “That’s just a stereotype.” Before Chris interviews an elder, he knows only that on Cranberry Day (a school holiday for the tribe’s children) he goes out to the common lands with his family, where they gather fruit, share food with family and neighbors, and gather for drumming that lets him feel, in his feet, what the drummers say is the heartbeat of Mother Earth.

The cranberry harvest once lasted from three days to as long as a week, with many families riding oxcarts to the common lands and camping among the surrounding dunes. It was particularly important for the tribe’s poor; in 1842, when crooked land deals had reduced Wampanoag ownership to Aquinnah, Christiantown, and Chappaquiddick, the cranberries were said to provide “a Staple means of support through the winter” for “the most Indigent of the Women and Children.” That year the Aquinnah Wampanoag asked the state legislature to take action against the “thoughtless White Neighbors” who had been gathering berries without permission, thus harming the tribe’s “means of a living and supporting [its] poor.” Within a few years, the tribe was levying fines on any nonmembers who took cranberries before the season had been open for ten days.

Back then much of the common lands consisted of a single huge bog among the dunes. Cranberries do best in acidic, wet—but not constantly soaked—soil; peat moss is ideal, and the main bog had plenty of it. Sand from the dunes blew over the vines, strengthening their roots; there was enough water for the moss to decompose and release its nutrients, but not usually so much as to stunt fruiting. With such good conditions, it’s no wonder that Aquinnah Wampanoag made the cranberry harvest a mainstay of their year. What’s more, the nutritious berries kept well; stored in cool, dry pits, they were a comforting check against winter hunger and disease. When it was time to cook, they could be mixed with cornmeal to form cakes, which were then boiled in water or wrapped in corn husks and baked in the ashes.

But in 1938 a huge hurricane ripped out root systems, shifted dunes, and dumped sand and soil over much of the peat. There was nothing unnatural about the storm, of course. It was simply a particularly severe natural event, one that transformed already slowly shifting lands. But it cut the acres of good cranberry bog enormously, leading to a certain dilemma: The tribe’s elders care intensely about maintaining the common lands as a natural habitat. But they also want the berries to thrive. Soon after the tribe finally attained federal recognition in 1987, elder Gladys Widdiss said she hoped that Cranberry Day would only become a stronger tradition, a nearly official day of tribal homecoming.

When Bret Stearns, head of the tribe’s Natural Resources Division, drives me out to the common lands, the ocean beyond the dunes is silvered and glassy, the road quiet save for the occasional locals pulling out their boats from a nearby marina before the weather truly turns. The undulations of the common lands make them at once wide open and constrained, expansive even as most sight lines end in a nearby sandy dune or thicket of coastal vegetation. Today few if any Wampanoag live in the gray, shingle-sided, broad-windowed homes—many of them on three acres of land, costing $2 million each—that loom at the edge of the five hundred acres of dunes.

At first I see only shades of brown in the bogs; under the gray sky they seem faded, in a going-to-winter kind of way. Between the dunes three-sided grass spreads out like a minuscule prairie. Ferns stand motionless, waiting for breeze; there are thick, determined patches of bayberry and wild cherry and oak. More bracken flanks the bogs; where an oak does stand alone, it grows low and sprawling, forever clutching the sand against ocean wind. The common lands are dunes and pothole bogs, vines and twisted trees, vegetation wrestling over lobes of sand, and sloping, sandy soil, and flats of peat. And after a while, the colors begin to seem quietly insistent. The reds are like ocher and rust, the browns those of leather and wave-wet sand. The most brilliant are the greens: brush as dark as ivy, vivid bunchgrasses brighter than the day should allow. These aren’t the crimsons or scarlets or tanager yellows of the New England forest autumn. But as we wander the bogs between the dunes, even the ocean quiet, I realize that this is one of the loveliest places I’ve been.

The lack of wind turns out to be lucky. I’ve worn sneakers to the bog, which is as ill-considered as it sounds; the first time I step on what seems like a firm tussock, I smoosh down, ankle-deep, into an instant watery hole in the peat moss (later, in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, I’ll see a horse’s old bog shoes—broad wooden disks nailed to the bottoms of standard iron horseshoes). “We do most of our work here in the winter,” Bret says. “Lots of people hunt out there before then, going for deer and waterfowl—some rabbits, though those are pretty spare—and we want to leave them in peace until the season’s over. Besides, our main work is cutting out the other plants, giving the vines air and light.” He pushes grass aside, revealing a patch of cranberry. Cranberry vines grow flat on the ground, budding thickly into four-inch stolons, or uprights, that look something like sprigs of giant, dark green thyme. When the plants bloom, the blossoms droop like a crane’s neck—their English name may be a corruption of “craneberry.” But now the blossoms are gone, and some have been replaced by bright red fruit, distinct as small holes in a tent.

“The easiest time to cut is when the bog is frozen,” Bret goes on. “Then we can just come in with a tractor, push mowers, and some hand tools and cut straight down to the level of the ice. Give the berries space and they really thrive.” Because of the surrounding dunes and hard winter winds, there’s not even any need to add sand—more than enough will blow over the vines before spring.

Bret started working the overbrush hard about five years ago—just long enough to be able to see some results, since it takes around four years for a new sprout to bear fruit. He gestures at a small bog, cupped cozily between dunes and high ground thick with oaks. “All this is on the chopping block for winter,” he says. But after they tear out invasives like catbrier and spotted knapweed, hauling off the debris to burn, what will be left will still be visibly wild landscape. Dense beds of cranberries will grow alongside bayberries, beach plums, highbush blueberries, and wild cherries; marsh hawks and bobwhites and toads will live in and on and under the thickets. The tribe harvests from the bog but also protects it, consciously and constantly, as a habitat.

Historically, gathering one plant might have helped others to thrive. Kristine Keese, an organic grower who also consults on bog restoration for the Vineyard Open Land Foundation, says that one of the most common weeds on her Plymouth acreage is wild bean, also called groundnut—an important traditional Wampanoag food. “And it’s more than the wild bean,” Kristine told me. “Once I made a list of all our worst weeds and cross-referenced it with a book about traditional medicines. Almost all were medicinals of one kind or another—St. John’s wort, goldenrod, joe-pye weed, boneset, all of them” (she uses the goldenrod to hold down her own ragweed allergy).

As Linda Coombs, an Aquinnah Wampanoag and director of the Wampanoag Center for Bicultural History at Plimoth Plantation, puts it, that sounds like one-stop shopping—gathering groundnuts for food or joe-pye weed for medicine could also have helped to clear away the cranberries’ competition. Meanwhile, controlled winter burns could have cleared brush right down to the level of the ice, leaving the vines safely frozen below. It wouldn’t have been farming as it’s usually understood—certainly nothing like the all-important cultivation of the Three Sisters of maize, beans, and squash that the Wampanoag agricultural year revolved around. But it would have been a kind of farming nonetheless, tending and encouraging the cranberries based on long years of watching the bogs.
¹⁵
Henry Hall’s status as the first cranberry farmer may be only a distinction of degree.

Much of the peat here was covered by the storms of ’38 and ’45; when he wants to open up a new area, Bret grades it down with a tractor, letting water flood in over the newly exposed moss. But he also leaves higher hummocks and woody areas to diversify the landscape, shelter the bogs, support wildlife, and—vitally—maintain strong root systems along the dunes. The area has already been transformed by hurricanes; now Bret is careful to maintain the roots, protecting against another major shift when the next big storm hits.

“What I’d like to do is double the available growing area,” he says. But he’s talking about the vines themselves, not necessarily about fruit. A good harvest depends on more factors than anyone can control, especially given the desire of tribal elders to maintain the bogs as a basically natural landscape. There’s no pumping or water control; they’re reluctant to burn. Still, the goal might well be met—there are about twenty acres of good cranberry ground now, about 60 percent more than just five years back (though that’s still well less than half of what there was before the storms).

A commitment to mostly letting things be makes for a huge gap between good and bad harvests. “Last year everyone spent the whole morning working one pothole bog,” Bret says, shaking his head a bit. But this year there’s no chance of that; though my eyes have grown a bit more educated—an open space flanked by a stand of dense, green growth suggests cranberries, sometimes thick as moss—we see hardly any fruit. In fact, in more than an hour of looking, we see multiple berries only once—five dark red balls lying glistening amid the vines.

“Look over there.” A truck towing an eighteen-foot boat is stopping at the intersection of Lobsterville Road. When it pulls away, water streams from the boat’s bilge. “That’s a big part of the runoff problem, too,” Bret says. “We consider this a sustenance-food area. But that’s pretty dirty water, and it all runs off into the bogs, along with the hydrocarbons and such in the roadway itself.” Now he’s using a federal grant to install catch basins, stopping much of the storm water; filtration units will catch about 80 percent of toxins before they reach the bog.

This constant balance between tradition and recent changes is what Jannette wanted to capture in
Cranberry Day;
she wrote the book, in part, to fight stubborn stereotypes. Some of these are startling—when reading to fifth-grade classes, she says, she’s had children ask where her horse is. “I’m like, ‘Kid! Look, I drive a Ford Escape. It’s 2009!’” she says. “I’ll bring along some buckskin clothing, but I make it clear that it’s really just for special occasions—and it’s clothing,
not
a costume. I really want to give them a sense of what it means to be a native person in the contemporary world.”

Her own sense of what the cranberry harvest means changed and deepened during the writing process. “I learned just like the kid does,” she says. “I only knew it was something we do every year—that’s the thing about culture, it’s just what you do without thinking about it. Maybe you eat matzo, but you don’t know much about matzo until you start looking into it.” That’s why her character Chris starts from a position of ignorance, knowing almost as little about Cranberry Day as someone reading about it in Florida. The book insists that culture is something passed on, something learned; traditions can only offer a still place in a changing world if they’re taught, observed, and tended to.

The harvest itself is only for tribe members. That night, though, there’s an open gathering and potluck at the tribal headquarters, a wood-framed building that suggests more a grand home than a community center. Kids run and tumble on a slope outside, their parents streaming past with trays and covered bowls. Within, a hundred people join hands. Elder Gladys Widdiss, who remembers harvesting in the days of oxcarts, delivers a blessing; she asks the Great Spirit for guidance and offers thanks for the next generation. There aren’t always so many energetic young people, she says, and they need everyone working, all the time. There are too many challenges to wait.

The two long potluck tables are packed. There’s baked ham and roasted turkey; the Three Sisters appear in a sweet casserole, a soup, and a savory dish with broccoli. There are four different corn breads, pigs in blankets, venison chili, and a coleslaw made with striped bass from just off the island. There are noodle casseroles with cheese and corn; there are cookies, coffee cake, toffee, and fudge (my small contribution; I don’t have a kitchen here). Notably, though, I don’t see any cranberries; ordinarily they’d appear as sauce, or chutney, or in a fantastic crisp (the recipe is in Jannette’s book), but this year there just weren’t enough to prepare for such a large group.