by Bill Heavey
The subversiveness of my actions appealed to me. I’d cut out the middlemen, done an end run on the bureaucracy that decides what is fit to eat. I’d gone to the source.
At the same time, I wasn’t out to take on Monsanto or ADM. I didn’t want to change the world. I was, however, curious about whether the experiences I’d had hunting my own meat had corollaries in other kinds of food. Wild plants, for example. Or plants you grew yourself. A vegetable garden. I knew nothing of either of these. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. I recalled being in the woods along the Potomac River with Paula Smith, a woman I’d met at Fletcher’s Boathouse, a hangout for anglers along the river. We’d been out looking for shed antlers—every year bucks drop their antlers in the winter and grow a new set. We hadn’t found any sheds, but when we had almost returned to the boathouse, Paula told me to hang on a moment. She waded into a bunch of low-growing greenery, produced a glove from the blue duffel bag she carried, put it on, and began tearing off handfuls of the plants and shoving them in a paper sack.
I walked over and picked one myself. Paula shouted at me but already my hand stung as if pricked by hundreds of needles. “You dumbass!” she hollered. “Why do you think they call ’em stinging nettles? Jesus, don’t you know anything?”
I knew that my hand hurt a great deal. She explained that she was picking these for one of the Fletcher brothers who ran the boathouse and who liked to eat some stinging nettles each year as a “spring tonic.” This was among the stranger things I’d ever heard. I asked who would be dumb enough to do intentionally to their tongue what I’d just done by accident to my hand.
“You dope. They don’t sting once you cook ’em!” She went on to say that they were very nutritious and one of the first edible greens to appear in early spring. In the old days, the first fresh vegetables after a long winter were a big deal. “Ray’s old school,” she said, referring to the Fletcher brother in question. “So I bring him some. At least you won’t grab ’em like that next time.”
Paula lived in the house of Gordon Leisch, a retired fisheries biologist who liked to fish and whom I knew from the boathouse. He provided room and board in exchange for Paula’s help renovating the place. As I got to know them, I realized that the two of them ate wild meat and fish almost exclusively. Gordon got two or three deer a year, either on his annual hunting trip to Nebraska with his son or from his brother, who lived farther out in Virginia. He also hunted wild turkey, waterfowl, and the occasional squirrel or rabbit. He and Paula fished the Chesapeake for rockfish, bluefish, spot, and perch in his seventeen-foot boat. I’d gone along with them a few times. They butchered the game and filleted the fish themselves, and stored it all in two big freezers.
Paula was about as eccentric as you could get and still be on the right side of crazy. What worried me occasionally was how well we got on with each other. We’d initially bonded over a shared love of finding dropped deer antlers. Deer antlers are like human fingerprints, no two alike. They’ve always fascinated Homo sapiens, which is why they figure in cave painting so prominently. To me, they’re like distillations of the wild into bone sculptures that you can look for on the ground. I liked finding them. Paula, on the other hand, was obsessed with them. She loved them beyond reckoning.
It wasn’t until another day when Paula and I were shed hunting in a small hunk of urban wasteland that I realized she knew more than just stinging nettles. It was a late spring day in a triangle of woods cut off from the rest of the world by major roads on each side. We nearly got run over just getting in. A tide line of litter thrown from car windows marked its outer edges. Two steps deeper in plunged you into the dimness beneath the canopy of vine-choked trees. This was where people dumped bigger stuff—appliances, reclining chairs, mattresses, old kitchen cabinets, all the disposable trappings of modern life. It also happened to be the public land closest to Georgetown that the police didn’t routinely check, so a fair number of homeless people who panhandled there made camps of tarps and plastic sheeting. We were here because it was also home to a herd of a dozen or so deer.
We saw the deer almost as soon as we entered. Accustomed to humans, they circled rather than fled, maintaining thirty yards and a protective screen of undergrowth between themselves and us. To me, this seemed odd. There were hungry people here and a ready supply of meat. But it was obvious that these deer were not hunted. My reverie was interrupted by Paula. “If you’re a deer here, you eventually get hit by a car,” Paula called back over her shoulder. “Why I usually don’t find any decent fucking antlers in here. But deer’re always here and you gotta look, know what I mean?” I followed Paula through the dense foliage.
Soon we were passing people who studiously avoided eye contact and all seemed to be wearing several coats even though it was anything but cold. Paula detoured around their camps, keeping a respectful distance. She had a nodding acquaintance with a few and was on a first-name basis with others. They evidently knew Paula and viewed her as a fundamentally different order of being from, say, me. I was just another outsider. Paula, on the other hand, was someone who understood the facts of their situation and didn’t hold it against them. I wondered if she thought of me the same way these people thought of her. After all, I was from the world she had left long ago, the one in which people had careers, property, cars, and kids. Paula was a loner, owned almost nothing, and was a creature of the fringe.
Paula pressed on through the vines and bushes. I followed and we came out atop a rock ridge, where she removed her hat to wipe her brow. Her long black hair was cinched, per usual, into a tight ponytail, which she tucked down inside her shirt. “This place fills up this time of year. See, they throw the homeless out of the shelters on March first. It’s like an explosion.”
She kicked at some trash at her feet and shook her head. “Used to have a better class of homeless, you know? I’m not saying they were model citizens or anything, but they didn’t just throw their trash everywhere like they do nowadays.”
We descended toward a wet area. There were deer droppings everywhere, but that in itself didn’t mean anything in terms of shed antlers; it just meant that deer liked to poop here. By her pace and general manner, I sensed that Paula had given up any serious shed hunting. “Show you something,” she said over her shoulder. She tied the chin strap of the battered Tilley hat that was part of her uniform, lowered her head, and bashed her way through the underbrush. (Tilley hats are heavy canvas deals favored by yachty people. Paula would never spend the seventy-four dollars one cost new, but she had a knack for finding them along the river.) The vegetation opened up again and we were heading up a trickle of water that passed silently over sand and rocks. And then Paula was standing in an oval of sunlight, a tiny glade. At her feet was a patch of shin-high greens growing in a pool of clear water. With a kind of theatricality I’d never seen in her before, she bent from the waist, swept her arm down like a dancer, and snatched up a few sprigs of the plants. Then she popped them into her mouth. “Watercress,” she announced. “Only place in D.C. it grows.” She stopped, raised a finger, and amended her previous statement. “Only place it grows that I’ll eat it, I mean.” She snatched another handful. Almost without thinking about it, I followed suit. Aping things Paula did—things I would never consider doing on my own—has become natural to me over the years. “Nice, huh?” she asked. “Sorta nutty, little peppery. I fucking love the stuff.”
The watercress exploded in my mouth. It was peppery and slightly bitter but rounded with a nuttiness that whetted a desire for more. It was crisp, crunchy, and succulent. But the astonishing thing wasn’t exactly a taste, at least in the way I normally thought of tastes. There was something about the plant that I would have dismissed as New Age blather up until that moment. There was a distinct vitality to it. It tasted nothing like any watercress I’d ever eaten before. It tasted alive.
It was only much later that I would accept what the small amount of scientific wor
k on wild edible plants has repeatedly demonstrated, which is that a wild plant is always more nutritious than its domesticated counterpart. Like helicopter parents, we supervise every aspect of a cultivated plant’s life. We feed and water regularly. We weed out competing plants and protect it from pests. We do everything but enroll it in after-school enrichment courses. Then, as if determined to undermine our own efforts, we harvest them before they’re ripe—before their nutritional peak—because they ship better at that stage. Wild plants, of necessity, are scrappier and tougher. They develop deeper, larger root systems. They are more efficient at absorbing nutrients and in turn produce highly concentrated phytonutrients, the very compounds that we eat plants to obtain—vitamins and minerals, plant phenols, and omega-3 fatty acids. Some of these phytonutrients are particularly bitter, the better to protect the plant from predators and pests. The most compelling argument for eating wild plants may have nothing to do with wildness at all. It’s simply that a wild plant you pick today and eat tonight or tomorrow is far more fresh than what’s available in stores. The average “fresh” green bean in a grocery store, for example, was picked sixteen days ago, during whith time it has lost 45 percent of its nutritional value.
As I say, I didn’t realize any of this until much later. What I had had was a brief moment of illumination—It’s alive!—before my mind snapped shut again. It shut because I suddenly realized that what we were doing was crazy. “Jesus Christ, Paula!” I sputtered. “This water’s gotta be filthy. It’s D.C. groundwater, runoff from God knows where. And there’s deer shit and homeless people crapping everywhere.” I was already imagining explaining to the emergency room doctor that my stomach was exploding because I’d decided it was a good idea to eat watercress growing in an inner-city park full of feces.
Paula shrugged but looked unconcerned. She chewed some more, swallowed, and wiped her hands on her jeans. “It does look nasty, okay? The stream over there”—she pointed to a slightly larger rivulet running parallel to this one, only a few feet lower—“is fucking sewage. But this is the seep from the ridge.” She raised her chin to indicate the rock ridge we’d just descended. “That water gets pushed through layers of sand before it comes up here. You know who used sand as a way to filter water? The fucking Greeks! Anyway, I’ve been eating off this patch for years and I’ve never gotten sick. But only right here. Okay, let’s go. We don’t get on the road by two-thirty, we’ll spend all afternoon stuck in rush hour.”
This book began when I set out to see how much of my own food I could get directly, with no middleman. In other words, by hunting, fishing, foraging, and growing a garden. I’m not the most likely guy to write a book about food. I can cook, but only a little and only when there’s no way around it. When I was growing up my mother, an excellent cook, served our family three homemade meals a day. I had neither incentive nor interest in learning my way around the kitchen until I was out of college. And by then my father’s cooking genes had taken over. It was all Dad could do to open a can of soup.
Nor am I a discerning eater. No one, for example, has ever accused me of having a sophisticated palate. When deciding whether something in my refrigerator has become hazardous, I’ll trust anyone else’s nose, including that of my daughter, Emma, over mine. I used to buy the least expensive olive oil on the shelf because I can’t taste the difference and because, like my father before me, I’m cheap. I stopped only when my significant other made me upgrade.
Like pretty much everyone who grew up in the 1960s in the suburbs, I ate what my mother brought home from the supermarket. When she would stop at a roadside stand advertising “local produce,” my sister and I greeted the chance to eat seasonally with irritation. After all, they had the same stuff—and more of it—at Giant, which had the additional benefits of being air-conditioned and free of mosquitoes. And the notion that certain foods were “seasonal” was clearly ridiculous. Giant had any fruit or vegetable you wanted whenever you wanted it. And whenever you shucked Giant’s corn—the only help I remember ever giving my mother in the kitchen—you weren’t going to be surprised by some big fat worm inside.
Looking back, it wasn’t that I felt cut off from the rhythms and cycles of the natural world: I wasn’t even aware that there was a natural world to be cut off from. Sure, I knew nature’s broad strokes—that geese flew south in the winter and back north in spring to have their babies, that farmers planted in the spring and harvested in the summer and fall. But all that stuff, however real, existed apart from me and seemed to be doing just fine without any input from me. And vice versa. I now think of the world I grew up in and the natural world as two parallel universes. And it wasn’t until I began hunting and fishing that I realized that the one which I—like most Americans—was born into is by far the stranger and less likely of the two.
There’s one more thing that should disqualify me from writing this book. I’ve always thought there was something vaguely pathetic about people who were obsessed with food. It was like they didn’t have enough to do.
Nevertheless, my tasty and subversive experiences with deer and watercress led me to wonder how much of my own food I could get, not just locally, but by my own hand. How far, I wondered, could I get trying to close the distance between me and what I ate? It wasn’t a new idea, of course. Countless people have written versions of the same thing. They’d vowed to eat only food grown within a short distance of home or turned a quarter-acre yard into an intensively cultivated garden. I had actually tried to read some of these books. But I always hit a wall. The author would go on for ten pages about how an unexpected encounter with rhubarb changed his life. (Yeah, I did do the same thing with watercress. But give me a break. Mine was pretty short.) This was when I would drop the book and fantasize about tying these people to telephone poles and force-feeding them Cheetos.
And maybe the focus of my book really was different than that of the books I’d read. They dealt with cultivated plant and animals, however painstakingly raised. I was interested in wild ones. They were inner-focused, seeking an enhanced sense of domesticity. I was headed the other way, in search of the most direct connection with nature I could find. (True, I was planning a garden, but I thought of that more as an insurance policy than anything else.) They were cooked. I was raw. Except for the Cheetos, of course.
While I knew a bit about fishing and hunting, it would be hard to find someone who knew less about gardening, let alone foraging. Fortunately, I was okay with this. Ignorance and incompetence are my forte. When I began writing for Field & Stream, it was obvious that the “expert” end of the spectrum was overrepresented. The masthead was loaded with writers who could tie a fly out of tinfoil and dryer lint and then catch the wiliest of trout on it, men who could shoot a running chipmunk at 200 yards. The “doofus” end, though, was wide open. This was where I planted my flag. My core principles were that enthusiasm trumped skill and that hunting and fishing were way too much fun to be dominated by experts. Initially, the editors were surprised that my bumblings elicited a “Hey, I’m just like that, too!” response from the readership. I wasn’t. Failure is a far more universal experience than success.
An attempt to “eat wild” (a term I’d seen in some foodie magazine at a doctor’s office) seemed to connote things radical, adventurous, and not for the faint of heart. These are, not coincidentally, the qualities a good stunt requires. And yet, if you gave the notion any thought—and it was my hope that people wouldn’t—“eating wild” was anything but radical. For most of our history, eating wild was what people did. It was the norm. Except, of course, that it wasn’t called “eating wild.” It went by a simpler, more humble term: “eating.”
I was also drawn to the idea that, as with hunting, I must have come from a long line of people who had a knack for finding wild edible plants. I had to possess some innate ability and I hoped to access it. Although, once again, no one in my immediate family had done anything even remotely agricultural. We were
a twentieth-century suburban family. We never grew anything but grass.
Despite this, I decided to go for it. I reasoned that the foraging instinct couldn’t be very far from the hunting one. Wild plants grew all over the place, after all, and what was vegetable gardening but throwing some seeds in the dirt and hitting them with some Miracle-Gro and water now and then?
In other words, how hard could it be?
Chapter One:
Blood, Guts, and Other Signs of Spring
Fletcher’s Boathouse sits in a tiny cove along the Potomac, two miles north of Georgetown and about fifteen minutes from my house in Arlington. Long before the time John Smith passed through here during his 1608 exploration of the river, the Powhatan Indians had a seasonal fish camp there. The boathouse itself has been there since the 1850s, and was in the hands of the Fletcher family until recently. The government bought out brothers Joe and Ray Fletcher a few years ago. There was never much money in the business and none of the Fletcher children wanted to run it. It doesn’t really matter who owns it. The cove is one of those places where the earth concentrates its power. For centuries it has exerted a magnetic pull on river rats, fishermen, odd ducks, outlaws, and misfits of all descriptions. It is well inside the Beltway, but if you point your car down the steep curve of road that bores into the blackness of the tunnel beneath the C&O Canal—perpetually dripping water and so cramped you can easily touch the rocks on either side out your windows—you emerge in a different world. Marks painted on the boathouse rental counter delineate the crests of past floods. There are no truly permanent structures down on the floodplain. Even the cinder-block office has a provisional air about it. Down here, the river always gets the last word.