by Jean Hegland
She said, “I suppose you’re right.”
I looked at the piles of tomatoes, hefty with the promise of food next winter, and said in desperation, “I don’t know. Maybe we should go ahead and can anyway. We can’t let them rot.”
“We could dry them,” offered Eva.
“Dry them?”
“Like raisins or prunes. It’s going to be another hot day. Why not use the sun? Anyway, you’ve been so worried about those lids.”
She was so placid I wanted to choke her. Of course we could dry the tomatoes. And the apples. And apricots. And pears. And peaches. And plums. And why not onions and peppers? It will stay hot almost until the winter rains arrive—day after day of dry heat. We could probably even dry pumpkin and chard and beets, if we wanted to.
In the back of the workshop we found two aluminum screen doors and, as we hauled them out into the sunshine, I remembered the day our father brought them home.
“Other people go to the dump to get rid of things, not to collect more,” our mother had said when he drove up. “What on earth do we want with someone else’s old screen doors?”
“But Gloria,” protested our father, pleased with both his doors and his wife, “darling. These are fine doors, first rate doors. Their frames aren’t bent and their screens aren’t torn. The person who threw them out was either immoral or a fool. Besides, I thought they might do for the hen house.”
That silenced my mother long enough for him to lug them into his shop, and there they had stayed, lost behind other, more recent bones of my parents’ fond contention, until we resurrected them to preserve our winter’s food.
Together Eva and I rinsed away the dirt and cobwebs and left the doors on the deck while we went inside to slice the tomatoes.
“The thinner they are, the faster they’ll dry,” said Eva with sudden authority, and so we cut them thin. We dealt the slices out on the screens, row after row, like coins, and then went to work in the garden. But when we came back at noon, the slices were swarming with wasps, and their juices had begun to eat into the screening.
“We’ve got to find something to lay them on to protect them from the metal, and we need something to cover them with to keep the bugs off,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something like cheesecloth or net.”
“Sheets?”
“Too thick. The air won’t circulate underneath them and they won’t get enough sun.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Eva answered and ran into the house, while I worked at prying the discolored tomatoes off the corroded aluminum.
When Eva returned, she was lugging a long garment bag.
“Will this do?” she asked, unzipping the bag to reveal our mother’s wedding dress, with its yards of white netting and voile skirts. “We could spread the net under the slices—and cover them with it, too.”
I lifted the dress from its dusty bag, remembering, as I held it up and squinted against its whiteness, how at some point in our childhoods, each of us had claimed it was the dress we would wear for our own weddings.
“I don’t know,” I said, handing it back to her. “Wouldn’t it just stick to the screens, too? These tomatoes are pretty juicy.”
“Oh,” answered Eva, unconsciously holding the dress to her shoulders, smoothing it down over her hips and across her swollen uterus. “What if we made frames from wood, and stretched the net across them?”
I lifted the hem of the dress, caressed the gauzy fabric between my earth-stained hands, and remembered how the Unicorn Tapestries had been used by peasants to keep their potato crop from freezing during the French Revolution, how after the Reformation, stones from England’s cathedrals were built into pig sties and door stoops, and books from the monastery libraries were torn up—page by page—in outhouses. Then I looked up at the smoke-reddened sun and went back to the house for scissors.
All afternoon we worked, searching through our father’s heaps of lumber for useable boards, measuring and cutting and hammering frames, tacking the net across them, and stopping occasionally to sniff the acrid air and scan the forest. The fire remained invisible, but its existence permeated our work. We sliced tomatoes, spread netting, and moved the drying racks to follow the sun with a fresh urgency.
By the time the sun had left the clearing, our fingers were puckered and stinging with tomato acids, and the first slices we had set out had shriveled to half their size. They looked like wizened scabs on the stained netting of our mother’s wedding dress, but they felt leathery and the bits we nibbled were sweet and intense, a concentrate of tomato and sunshine that seemed certain to blaze through the wettest winter days.
We carried the racks indoors for the night, locked up the hens, ate a cold supper, and settled down again for our vigil on the deck. We’d thought the smell of smoke was fading, but when the waxing moon rose, dull and red in a starless sky, it still seemed inevitable that by morning our clearing would have been added to its blood-glow. Even so, after a night of sleepless worry and a day of work, Eva soon fell asleep. But I was tired with a gritty exhaustion so far beyond sleep that sleep seemed impossible. For a long time I kept my eyes open, studying the night for signs of fire.
When I awoke, the moon was white, the clearing was wrapped in the endless velvet of a summer night, and the only fire I could see was the distant burn of the stars.
I glanced at Eva and saw that even in her sleep she held her belly cradled in her arms. I tested the air for smoke, but all I smelled was the clean tang of fir and bay and dew. It seemed the danger was past, and I suppose we will never know how close that fire came to razing our lives.
The garden harvest is coming to an end. We used every canning lid we had and the pantry shelves are packed with jars of tomatoes, green beans, beets, plums, applesauce, peaches, apricots, pumpkin, and pears. Strings of dried fruit and peppers and beans hang from the ceiling, along with bunches of herbs from the forest. Dried onions fill one tattered grocery sack, and our meager harvest of dried corn fills another. The winter squashes are piled in a corner of the pantry, and a box of potatoes is stacked beside them.
It looks like a lot of food, but when I think of how much we eat, I wonder if that pantry can possibly be full enough to keep us alive.
A mile or so to the east of us, the forest begins to break up. First the redwoods disappear, and then slowly the firs and maples drop out. Finally the madrone and bay vanish, too, and the land opens, levels out onto a wide ridge where only oaks are left—coast live oaks set so solidly across the land they appear more like monuments than trees. Away from the clutter and tangle of forest, they grow massive, their trunks thick, their branches spreading with a vast graciousness above the golden grasses. They are old, quiet trees, laden with tough, curled leaves and clusters of honey-brown nuts, and it is to them we went to learn about harvesting acorns.
If you want to gather acorns, you have to crawl. You have to go down on all fours like an animal or a suppliant and crawl through dust and duff, crawl across the earth on your palms and knees, sorting among the sharp leaves and empty hulls for ripe acorns.
There’s more skill to it than I would have imagined. Yesterday I had collected a whole sackful before I realized that even the tiniest pinprick of a hole in the acorn’s shell means there is a little white worm writhing inside. This morning I had to inspect each nut for holes before I could add it to my sack. But by afternoon I could almost always tell if an acorn would be sound simply by how it felt when I picked it up.
Our hands are busy, but it is slow work. To circle a tree can take hours of careful labor, beginning at the trunk and spiraling out to the drip line. It’s hot and dusty, hard on backs and knees. But there’s a rhythm to it, slow and dreamy. After a while, it’s almost like prayer.
The crickets sang as though the day itself were breathing, a song inhaling and exhaling in the heat, expanding and shrinking and circling back on itself. Sometimes there was the blessing of a breeze. Deep in the sky above us, three buzza
rds wheeled and soared so elegantly I could almost have been persuaded there was something sacred about eating carrion.
For a long time Eva and I worked in silence, filling our canvas sacks and pillow cases. By the time the sun was overhead, all our containers bulged with nuts. Leaning our backs against the trunk of the oak we had been working under, we ate boiled eggs and apples, looking out across the silent, sun-dried hills.
“We could be the only people left in the world,” said Eva in a voice that held no fear or sadness. I nodded a little dreamily, answered her in the same tone, “We could be.”
I dream of the bear. Once again, it shambles out of the forest. Once again, it lumbers towards me. But this time, although I am wet with fear, my fear has a different quality, and I realize that either I do not expect the encounter will kill me or I don’t mind the thought of dying quite as much as I once did.
Again the bear bends over me. But, instead of licking me, it opens its jaws over my face, so wide that my whole head is inside its mouth and I am looking down the dark tunnel of its throat. I feel its teeth meet through my neck, and I know it has bitten off my head. But when it lifts its mouth from my empty shoulders, I can see the world as well as ever—in fact, things have a lucidity I had never before imagined, and I think, What an effort it was to have to lug my head around with me for so long.
The acorns produced by most oaks contain tannic acid, which, although it serves as a natural preservative, causes the nuts to be unpalatably bitter. Consequently, making most species of acorns fit for human consumption involves one of a number of processes of leaching the tannin from the nutmeats.
A fresh acorn tastes like earwax. It puckers your tongue, draws the saliva from your mouth, and leaves a bitterness that lingers long after you’ve spat it out.
It took a few days before I worked out a process for drying, shelling, skinning, pounding, leaching, and cooking acorns. At first I crushed the shelled nuts with a hammer and then used Mother’s marble rolling pin to try to grind them on a flat stone Eva helped me heave up from the creek. But grinding acorns only turns them into a paste impossible to leach because water won’t filter through it. Eventually I traded the rolling pin for one of the steel wedges Father used for splitting logs. My arms still ache, and my hands are blistered and bruised from the hours I spent pounding acorns with the flat head of the wedge, but for my effort I earned a quart of meal a little rougher than coarse-ground cornmeal.
I used an old coffee filter to leach it, pouring boiling water through it again and again until the tea-colored liquid that dripped from the filter had turned clear, and the meal tasted mild, almost empty of flavor, like unseasoned beans. I mixed the leached meal with fresh water and simmered it until the mush was soft.
I’m sure a Porno would have laughed at my methods, but I have to admit I was proud when Eva and I sat down to supper last night. We held hands for a moment across the steaming bowl, and then we ate. It was bland and hefty—like rice or bread—slightly nutty, a little earthy, a food as enduring as oak.
I used to shudder when I cut into an acorn and found a worm writhing there. Then I read that the Porno considered worms to be a delicacy, and now I feel ashamed when I cut them out. I wish I, too, could eat those larvae that in my dreams mean death. I wish I could bite into them, chew them up, swallow them down. I want to learn to eat worms.
Up beyond the redwood stump, we found a grove of valley oaks loaded with the fattest acorns I have ever seen. But when we tried to haul them home, the hike was so strenuous that after a day’s worth of trips up the hill and back, we were exhausted, and we hadn’t collected nearly as much as I’d hoped.
We’d almost decided to concentrate on the scantier and wormier harvest closer to home when Eva suggested we dry the acorns in the forest and store them in the redwood stump until we needed them this winter. So we spent a morning dragging our drying racks up to the stump, along with eight thirty-gallon plastic barrels we’d once used for what we thought back then was garbage.
I don’t think we had been to the stump together since we were twelve or thirteen, and as we tried to maneuver Eva’s unwieldy belly and our first load of equipment up the hill, I felt oddly disoriented, clogged by too many memories, and confused by the novelty of the present—by my pregnant sister huffing behind me, by our urgent need for acorns.
When I finally reached the stump, I was reluctant to intrude on the sanctuary Eli and I had made of it. But as I was hesitating, Eva came panting up. She threw down her load with a grunt and, rubbing the broad slope of her belly, she looked around.
“I guess it’ll do,” she said, “though we’ll have to cut some of those saplings to let in enough light for drying. What’d you and Eli do up here, plant more trees?”
We laughed together a little ruefully, and then Eva hiked home for more barrels, leaving me to cut three of the scrawny firs that choked the space in front of the stump. As each one crashed through the tangle of branches, the circle of sky widened and a little more light entered the clearing. By the time Eva returned, I had the drying racks laid out and waiting in a new patch of sun.
We worked all afternoon, gathering acorns, spreading them on the netting, moving the racks to follow the migrating sunshine. On one trip we found a mountain of blackberry bushes still laden with berries. We harvested a basketful of them, too, and spread what we didn’t eat out to dry beside the acorns.
The air began to thicken and cool. Suddenly it was dusk, and we wanted to be out of the forest and back at home. We poured the acorns into one of the barrels to keep the dew off them, but the berries were still too juicy to move without turning them to jam.
“Let’s just leave them out for the night,” Eva said, bending over the rack and testing first one and then another between her purple fingers. “The dew won’t hurt them much, but we’ll ruin them if we try to move them now.”
“Won’t the squirrels or birds get them?” I asked.
“At night? We’ll be back first thing in the morning.”
We left before the dusk grew any denser.
Just after dawn we scrambled back up the hill, huffing and laughing in the bright mists, carrying cups, plates, a cooking pot filled with ashes and live coals. We were planning a breakfast of mint tea and acorn mush and blackberries over the campfire we were going to build, and I think we were both feeling almost as light-hearted as the children we had once been, happy to be playing together in the forest again.
I reached our new clearing a step ahead of Eva and gasped, too shocked to turn and run.
The drying racks were tossed in opposite directions, their netting hanging in shreds, their frames twisted and splintered. A few berries were scattered among the forest duff. We drew together. The forest was quiet except for the domestic chirp of chickadees. If it weren’t for the mute violence of the torn racks, there might have been no bear.
Then there was a choice to be made, another decision about how we would live, about what risks were worth taking. We had to decide what to be most afraid of. We had to choose between our fear of a hungry winter with a new baby and our fear of a black bear in early autumn. We had to weigh what we could imagine of the dark drizzle of winter—when the pantry had been emptied and we were reduced to boiling shoe leather and eating the cambium of trees—against the claws and muscles of a bear.
In the end we chose to fear winter. The encyclopedia says black bears are shy, we reasoned. It says they’re only aggressive in the spring, only when they’re hungry and their cubs are young. We’ll just make sure we never leave food out overnight again.
Although we constructed logical arguments and elaborate justifications, I don’t think it was logic that finally persuaded us, but the fact that it felt good to be out in the woods, gathering acorns, drying berries, drinking our wild teas, and cooking our meals by the daytime fires Eva kindled in the fire pit we built just outside the door of the stump.
Every morning now, as soon as our chores in the fading garden are finished, we head to the wood
s. In the creek near the stump we’ve opened a pool for collecting water—which I insist we boil before we drink—and well away from the stream we’ve dug a latrine. All day we gather and dry acorns, and in the evening we add our harvest to the barrels. We fasten their lids with bungee cords, block the doorway with sheets of plywood, and as we hike home in the twilight, down through the forest that’s grown so wild it now harbors a bear, I feel a secret elation. In some unfathomable way I feel less alone.
We finished harvesting a few days ago. For our work we have five barrels full of acorns and a quarter of a barrel of dried blackberries. We’ve decided to leave them all in the stump for now and to fill the other two barrels with dried food from the pantry. That way, whatever happens, we’ll always have a cache in the woods.
To have even one barrel full of acorns is to have an immeasurable wealth. When we had emptied the last sackful into the fifth barrel, I bent over it. I worked my hands down through the sleek, cool nuts until my arms were in up to my elbows, and laid my cheek against the acorns in a kind of embrace. I smelled their faint dust, thought of all the rain and darkness and hunger they would forestall, and felt fiercely proud.
The good days linger, though they’re shorter now, and cooler—an Indian summer before the winter rains arrive. The hens stopped laying a while ago, and the garden is just about gone, although we can still glean a few watery tomatoes, some final peppers, and a little chard. All the barrels in the stump are filled with food, a cache I hope could see us through the winter if it had to. I spent the last two days nailing a roof of plywood and corrugated tin over it, so that now it looks more like a hobo shack than the fairy cottage we used to pretend it was.
Eva’s belly has begun to dwarf her, a firm globe where she once had a plane of sheer muscle. Sometimes I can see her whole stomach heave beneath the workshirts she wears. “It’s a dancer,” she’ll laugh, “practicing its frappés.” But her moving stomach sickens me like the paintpots we saw when we went to Yellowstone the year I was eight, the slow, hot mud bubbling stupidly, more threat than life.