Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  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 f
ind 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.

  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 fa
ilure 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.