In November, I went to Troxelville, and on the morning of the fourth Gibbons and I started by car for the river. He remarked that no Indian, except perhaps a frightened Indian, would ever have set out on such a trip without gathering provisions first, so we foraged the countryside for an hour or two and collected an initial supply of Jerusalem artichokes, persimmons, hickory nuts, black walnuts, and several kinds of mint, which we stored in plastic bags in a pack basket. The weather had become unseasonably raw, and we were under a snow sky, but sunlight came through the clouds at intervals. A wind was blowing. The air temperature, according to an outdoor thermometer we had with us, was just below freezing. The canoe we had, a borrowed one, was an Old Town Guide, and it was strapped to the roof of Gibbons’s Volkswagen bus. We planned to put in about fifty miles north of Harrisburg at a point just outside of Selinsgrove. Selinsgrove is a small town where a bronze plaque of the Ten Commandments is set up at eye level on the main street. In a hardware store there, we weighed ourselves on what we were assured was an accurate scale. Gibbons, who was wearing a red jacket, a red bandanna around his neck, a red hat, dungarees, and sneakers, weighed 198 pounds. No one in Selinsgrove gave us a second glance, for we were obviously hunters. In woods by the river as we prepared to shove off, with no guns and a pack basket full of nuts and tubers, a passerby might well have wondered what kind of hunting we intended to do.
Before going onto the river, we ate the first of sixteen wild meals. It was an agreeable cold lunch, and the principal utensil was a hammer. Gibbons set out a mound of walnuts and hickory nuts and a small bucket full of persimmons. “This is the wildest bunch of supplies that were ever taken on a camping trip,” he said. His voice was soft and seemed to have traces of a drawl. He picked up the hammer and pounded a hickory nut, using as an anvil a water-smoothed stone. The shell split. With a nutpick, he flipped out two intact halves of hickory meat. He picked up another nut and held it on the stone between his thumb and forefinger, its point at the top; then he tilted it about ten degrees on its axis, explaining that this was the optimum angle. He paused for a moment before he brought the hammer down, then split the nut perfectly. “Indians used to boil these and make a kind of beverage called pawcohiccora,” he said. “‘Hickory’ derives from that word.” He tilted another nut and studied it as if he were about to split a ninety-carat diamond. He pounded it. “Ouch! Goddamn it!” he said, and he handed me the hammer while he rubbed the end of his thumb. We went on cracking hickories and walnuts for about an hour. To be comfortable, we had stretched out on a narrow beach of smooth stones by the edge of the water, and it was pleasant there in the sunlight, although the breeze off the river was cold, and in the middle of lunch our joints began to stiffen. Gibbons showed me the best way to disassemble a black walnut, reducing it to eighths with seven blows, and while I was having my walnuts he ate persimmons. The persimmons were soft and sticky—almost but not perfectly ripe. Dark orange and about the size of large grapes, they were full of sugar and tasted something like fresh apricots, but because they were not quite ready they had an astringent aftertaste. Gibbons put three of them into his mouth, chewed them up, and spat out the seeds. “We’re going to scatter persimmon seeds from hell to breakfast,” he said. “You know, I think I could eat a hamburger now, but not a whole filet mignon.” He put his hand back into the persimmon bucket in order to rout his retreating hunger. I was eager to get onto the river while the sun was still fairly high. Gibbons was looking out over the water, and it apparently appealed to him less than ever. “Why don’t we stay here tonight?” he said. “Then we can get a good early start in the morning.” I pointed out to him that it was only two-thirty in the afternoon. Forlornly, he got into the canoe.
The Susquehanna was about three-quarters of a mile wide, and the water level on that day was so low that in most places the river was only a foot deep. As we began to move downstream, we picked our way among hundreds of islands. Around the small ones the current made rips, where the canoe rocked slightly and picked up speed. Every two or three miles, we came to long, low mountains—Hooflander Mountain, Fisher Ridge, Mahantango Mountain. The mountains ran with level summits to the eastern and western horizons and stood like successive walls before us. When these mountains first folded into existence, Gibbons said, the river was already there, and it cut through the mountains as they formed, creating a series of portals for its own passage. The mountains, when young, were vastly higher than they are now. In the course of eons, they have almost wholly disintegrated and been carried away by the river. The small mountains that remain today are the foundation stubs of fantastic peaks. As we moved along, we could see the stratification lines in the water gaps tilting one toward another, and, extending these lines into the air, we could all but see the high silhouettes of the mountains when they were new. The remnants, the forested mountains of central Pennsylvania, with their flat ridgelines, looked as soft as Scottish wool—their trees gray and bare against a background of fallen leaves on rising ground—and the implied mountains of Pennsylvania, miles high between the actual ones, cast a kind of shadow that was colder than the wind on the river. Near the west bank of the river, there was a highway that now and again came into view. Tractor trailers moved in and out of sight, flying streamers of diesel smoke from their stack exhausts. Two or three times, we saw black carriages, drawn slowly up the highway by single horses. These Amish carriages swayed in the wind made by the big trucks.
The paddling had made us warm. The canoe was dry, and the clouds had spread enough to give us a steady afternoon sun. Gibbons saw a promising section of riverbank, and we stopped for a snack—sheep sorrel, peppergrass, and winter cress. “You don’t need vinegar with a salad if you’ve got sheep sorrel,” he said, and he moved along until he found some dandelions, which he wanted to have for supper. He dug them up with something that he called a dibble stick. It was actually a dock-and-thistle killer—a kind of spade with an extremely narrow blade. Although we found groves of riparian dandelions, he applied the dibble stick with considerable selectivity, bending over and studying one plant after another, excluding multiheaded dandelions and ramming the stick home when he found single-headed specimens, which have larger integral roots and crowns. “I must say these dandelions look excellent,” Gibbons said. “They should be good now. In summer, they get so damned bitter you can’t take them.” As he put more and more dandelions into one of his plastic bags, his regard for the world became brighter. “Gosh, they’re a delicacy!” he went on. When one bag was full, he started on another.
“You act like a man who’s finding money,” I told him.
“That’s exactly it,” he said. “That’s exactly the way I feel.”
Gibbons is a tall man—six feet two. His posture is poor, and he says that this is the result of fifty years of bending to forage. His head is a high and narrow one, with a long stretch from chin to forehead but a short distance from ear to ear, as if he had somehow successfully grown up in the space between two city buildings. His hair is brown, turning to gray, and is wavy. Now, after several hours in the open, it was standing almost straight on end. On the way back to the canoe, he collected a bagful of pennyroyal, and, pointing to a small clump of plants, he said, “That’s sage there, but I don’t know what the hell we would do with that, since we’re not going to cook meat.”
On a promising weed near the sage I found a small fruit that resembled a yellow cherry tomato. I asked him if it was edible.
“That’s a horse nettle,” he said. “It’s deadly poisonous.”
Covered with beggar’s-ticks—as Gibbons calls the small seedpods that cling to clothing—we moved on downstream, he in the bow, I in the stern. The sun was still bright and the sky blue. “Well, I certainly am glad that we decided to make this trip on the river,” he said. “We’re not suffering like the early Christians.” He paddled on for a while, looking from bank to bank and up at the mountains. At a little after four, he began to sing. We stopped for the night at five.
At
that first campsite, which was on flat and wooded ground, four great paddle wheels from steamers long gone from the river were leaning aimlessly against tree trunks, and near them was a colony of ground-cherry plants, close to the water’s edge. A small stream that ran into the river there was almost dammed with watercress. We still had daylight, and we cut a pile of cress and collected a peck of unhusked ground-cherries. While Gibbons, in boots he had brought along, was standing in the stream bagging the watercress, he became irritated at the thought of people who fear to take watercress from just any stream. “People say, ‘Is it growing in polluted water?’” he told me. “For gosh sakes, what difference would that make? Your own vegetable garden is polluted when you put manure on it. The important thing is to wash the cress in pure water, or boil it, which we’re going to do. We’ll have this for breakfast.” Ground-cherries, members of the nightshade family, are sometimes called strawberry tomatoes, and they hang from vine-like plants in small tan husks that become lacy with age. The husks are about an inch high, and are shaped and ribbed like Japanese lanterns. Inside each lantern is a berry that is yellow green and resembles a cherry only in that it is smooth and round. It has no pit. It looks like a small tomato, half an inch in diameter. Like many wild foods, ground-cherries are good as hors d’oeuvres, and we ate some as we gathered them. Their flavor is much like the flavor of tomatoes, with a wild, musky undertone. Fifty yards upstream was a swampy lowland where the shoreline was imprecise because it was overgrown with cattails. Gibbons waded in among the cattails, leaned over, and reached down into the freezing water until his arm was submerged to the shoulder. He came up with the leading end of a cattail root, from which a short white sprout was protruding. He broke off the sprout and reached into the water again. The second sprout he found was as short as the first one, and Gibbons was disappointed. “I’ve seen them eight inches long,” he said, and tried again. When he had about ten short white sprouts, he gave up. He calls the cattail the supermarket of the swamps, since it has half a dozen edible parts (not all edible at the same time of year), in a range from the soft green bloom spikes to a rootstock flour that makes excellent drop biscuits. On his way back to the campsite, he paused at a remarkable weed that had a leaf large enough to wrap groceries in. “Burdock,” he said, and he dug it up with the dibble stick. As we dug six or seven more, I discovered that burdock is the plant that produces the spherical bristly burrs I had been picking up inadvertently all my life—the burrs that look like communications satellites and will hang on to almost anything but glass. Just beyond the burdock was a group of plants that looked to me like dandelions, but each one had a dry stalk rising from its center. “Chicory,” Gibbons said. “It’s getting dark. Let’s just take the greens.” So we cut a pile of chicory greens, and Gibbons sorted them. He threw away the outside leaves and kept the young and tender ones.
We had a nest of pots with us, and a Coleman stove, which we used part of the time in supplement to wood fires. It was six o’clock when Gibbons began to prepare dinner that night, and the air temperature was thirty-three degrees. While we talked, we breathed out shafts of vapor, which swirled into the steam that was rising from the pots. As Gibbons bent forward intently over his cooking, light flickered up against his face—the benevolent face of a kind and religious man that seemed to have in it, as well, a look that was gleamingly satanic. He said that he thought that in this kind of encounter with nature—or in any other kind of encounter with nature—human beings make a sorry mistake if they feel that nature is something to be conquered. “The product I gather out here means something different to me than food from a store, but I don’t feel that I have made nature stand and pay tribute. I know that when I disturb the earth to get these plants I will almost always cause more of them to grow. I don’t like to eat Indian cucumbers, because I have to destroy the plants to get them. I don’t want to destroy; I want to play the part I am supposed to play in relation to plants. I come to a persimmon tree and the tree is growing something sweet, so I’ll eat it and scatter the seed. When I do that, I’m carrying out the role I’m supposed to be carrying out. Nature has many, many balances, and we have to find a balance that includes man. If man accepts that he has to be a part of the balance, he must reject the idea of the conquest of nature. Whenever I read that phrase ‘conquest of nature,’ I feel a little depressed. Man is a part of the total ecology. He has a role to play, and he can’t play it if he doesn’t know what it is—or if he thinks that he is conquering something.” While Gibbons speaks, he characteristically averts his eyes from the path of his words, but from time to time, as he reaches a key word, his eyes open wide and focus directly on the listener. He seems to be checking to see that the listener is still there. Light and rapid smiles and frowns follow one another across his face. “The idea that we are engaged in a conquest of nature is a fallacy that is causing all kinds of trouble,” he went on. “We’re covering the earth with concrete, filling swamps, leveling hills. Some of these things have to be done, but we should do these things with knowledge. The conquest of nature has to stop. When Orientals climb a mountain, they believe that the mountain lifts them, not that they have conquered the mountain. Here. You’re going to have to peel your own artichokes. I cooked them in their jackets tonight.”
For dinner, we had boiled Jerusalem artichokes, boiled whole dandelions, ground-cherry salad, a dessert of persimmons, and pennyroyal tea. Jerusalem artichokes are tubers of wild sunflowers. They look like small sweet potatoes, since they are bumpy and elongated and are covered with red jackets. The flesh inside, however, is delicate and white. Boiled, it has the consistency of boiled young turnips or summer squash, and the taste suggests the taste of hearts of artichokes. Gibbons said that Jerusalem artichokes are native American plants. Indians sometimes cultivated them. They were well known to colonists, and the word “Jerusalem,” in this instance, is apparently an English corruption of the Spanish word for sunflower—girasol. Gibbons also said he was sorry that Jerusalem artichokes and a number of other wild foods—such as ground-cherries and wild rice—had been named for more familiar foods. “These things are not substitutes for tame foods,” he went on. “They have flavors of their own, and it is not fair to them to call them by the name of something else. These are not artichokes. They’re sunflower tubers.” With a knife and fork, he laid one open and then scooped up a mound of the white flesh. It was steaming hot. “Boy!” he said. “That goes down very gratefully. Just eating greens, you can get awfully damn hungry. We’ll eat plenty of greens, but we need these, too.” For a while, we ate without speaking, because the artichokes were so good. Gibbons ran his fork into the root of a dandelion and drew the rest of the plant—a long streamer of leaves—away from a heaping mound of dandelions on his plate. With Italian skill, he rotated the fork until the plant was curled around it like spaghetti. I imitated him, and we both began to wolf down dandelions. Gibbons was a little disappointed. “These dandelions are tough,” he said. “Too bad. They get better and better the colder it gets. With this weather, we may get some better ones in the next few days.” The dandelions were also somewhat bitter, but Gibbons seemed to find them just right in this respect. Ordinarily, he would have boiled them in three waters, he explained, but he had used only one pot of water this time, because, as he put it, “we’re using no salt and we got to taste something.” If I had been a little less hungry, I think I would have left the dandelion leaves on my plate. The crowns and the roots, however, were mild and delicious. When we had finished dinner, Gibbons said that his hunger was satisfied but that he did feel a longing for meat or fish. “Right now I wish I had a big plate of sea-urchin roe,” he said. Then he rolled a cigarette and lit it, and that seemed to kill off the thought.
I boiled water in the largest pot, dropped a cake of soap into it, and began to wash up the dinnerware. Gibbons rolled another cigarette. He said that he was trying to cut down on his smoking and that was why he had reverted to a custom of his youth and was rolling his own. He was so good at it
—just a turn of his fingers and a fast lick at the paper—that his rolled cigarettes looked machine-made. I asked him how many Pennsylvania Quakers he knew who could roll a smoke like that.
“I’m not a birthright Quaker,” he said. “I’m a convinced Quaker. I was born in Clarksville, Texas—in Red River County.”
The date of his birth was September 8, 1911. At that time, his father, who was also born in Clarksville, was a blacksmith and a grocer, pursuing both careers in a single store. Gibbons’s father was also a dreamer. His horizons were wicketed with rainbows, and before long he would become an irremediable drifter, taking his family with him as he moved around the Southwest, making one fresh start after another—now a carpenter, now a contractor, now a rancher, a farmer, a sawyer, a builder of culverts, a bit-sharpener in oil fields. Gibbons’s mother was from Dresden, Tennessee, where she had grown up on a hill farm. Her mother taught her to hunt and to trap and to eat wild greens, wild fruits, wild lettuce, and pokeweed salads. When Gibbons’s mother was a little girl, she provisioned her dollhouse not with mud pies but with wild food. In Texas, years later, she passed along her knowledge to her children, three boys and a girl. Euell, the second child, was by far the most interested. “Red River County isn’t like Texas at all,” he told me. “It’s more like Pennsylvania. There were woods there, and river bottoms, and hills. The whole idea that you could go out into the woods and gather good things was tremendously exciting to me. When I was five, I thought up my first wild recipe. I took hickory nuts and hackberries and pounded them up in a cloth and made a wild confection. Wild food was our calendar—a signal of the time of year. In the spring, we had wild asparagus and poke and all the early greens. Lamb’s-quarters came in the late spring and strawberries in the early summer, then mulberries and blackberries. In late summer, we had purslane, wild plums, maypops—that’s a kind of hard-shell passion fruit—and in the fall there were plenty of muscadines, wild pecans, hickory nuts, black walnuts. As it got a little colder, there were persimmons, hackberries, and black haws. Wherever we went, I asked what the Indians ate. We considered all these things delicacies, and we would not have not gathered them, any more than we would have let things in the garden go to waste.”
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