It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  It was Euell Gibbons himself who threw down the cattail gauntlet in 1962, when he called it “the supermarket of the swamps.” Peterson’s deems it “one of the best and certainly the most versatile of our native edible plants.” On the website of the not-to-be-outdone Backwoods Home Magazine, it’s called “the Super-Walmart of the Swamp.” Sam Thayer offers a more balanced perspective, calling Gibbons’s assessment a “slight exaggeration” even as he notes the plant’s remarkable versatility. The plant yields four vegetables over the course of a year: the immature flower spikes, the buds, the leaf “hearts,” and the shoots of the rhizomes. The rhizome itself is starch-laden and can be turned into a good flour, and the golden pollen, which is high in protein, can be eaten raw or dried and used as a flour as well. (“Rhizome,” by the way, is a word much in use by foragers. I finally figured out that it’s basically a way of saying “sideways-growing root,” although technically it’s a “horizontal stem, often growing underground.”)

  Archaeological evidence in Europe of ground cattail material dates back 30,000 years. Cattail rhizomes contain ten times the starch of an equal weight of potatoes. The seed heads, the brown “tail” of the cattail, are full of a downy material. Birds line their nests with this down. Aboriginal people lined their moccasins and beds with it and also used it as a combination diaper/baby wipe. As recently as World War I, the U.S. Navy filled life vests with cattail down. The sticky stuff at the base of the green leaves is reportedly useful as an antiseptic and coagulant. The dry stalks, being uniformly straight, are good for arrow shafts and fire-starting friction drills. I’m sure a cattail-powered car is under development at this very moment.

  With Hue’s help, I discovered firsthand that it’s more fun to rhapsodize about cattails than actually eat them. We agreed to meet one Saturday so he could teach me how to make cattail flour. To shorten the time he’d spend driving, I suggested we meet at my mother’s house, in Bethesda. Hue showed up with a trash bag full of cattail rhizomes. We proceeded to wash them and strip off the outer layers. This left the inner cores, white and pencil-thick. They were full of both starch and tough fiber. We sat together on milk crates over a bucket of water on the back porch, holding the cores under water and “worrying” them between our fingers to extract the starch. The cattail slime rose to the surface. The starch sank. When you felt you’d done justice to a given piece, you tossed the fibrous remains aside and moved on to the next. We did this for about a week. Actually, it was probably more like ninety minutes. All I know is that by the time we were through my hands looked like prunes and my back was so stiff I doubted my ability to ever stand fully upright again. We poured off the water and beheld the fruits of our labor, a putty-colored orb of cattail sludge about the size of a golf ball. My heart did not leap at the sight.

  At this point, if we’d really been after cattail flour, we would have dried the sludge until it turned to powder. Being of middle age, I wasn’t sure I had that kind of time. Hue’s solution was to combine the cattail sludge ball with an equal amount of regular flour. This didn’t dry it, of course—the sludgeball merely doubled in size. Next he told me to fold in an egg, a little sugar, and some salt. I did. Then, under his eye, I poured this mixture out into three “pancakes” in an oiled skillet over medium-high heat. The batter seemed completely unaffected by heat, suggesting an untapped source of flame-retardant textile. The stuff had a gummy viscosity that it retained in the pan even as I came very close to burning the pancakes. I flipped them. When the still-mucilaginous little pancakes smelled as if they were about to burn again, Hue declared them done.

  We plated and served the pancakes. Hue took a bite of his and said, “Hmm,” in a fairly contented tone. Bear in mind, however, that this was a man who maintains that all rodents, generally speaking, are pretty good eating in a survival situation. I took a small bite. It tasted like a cross between a regular pancake and an unknown vegetable. My sister, Olivia, who knows a great deal about cooking, tried a tiny bite of mine. She cocked her head and assumed an expression of diligent interest. “I’m tasting some corn and”—she paused, rolling it around in her mouth—“a bit of cucumber.” As there were three of us and three pancakes, I told her she was welcome to one. “No thanks,” she said brightly, and marched off to the den to make herself a Manhattan.

  In the days that followed, I decided to try making cattail flour on my own. Don’t get the wrong idea. It wasn’t that I liked the stuff. But I did have a desire to show my teacher that I was, despite appearances, serious about this foraging stuff. Jogging one afternoon along the bike path about a mile from home I spotted a stand of healthy-looking cattails. I resolved to return and harvest some rhizomes. (I had taken to working the term into everyday conversations as often as possible to display my deep connection to the natural world.)

  My chance came during Emma’s dance class at a nearby Unitarian church. It was a midweek afternoon class. I was the sole dad in attendance and, as a single dad of but one year’s standing, keenly felt my outcast status among the moms. I had shown up in running clothes with a fanny pack in which I had my digging antler and some plastic bags. I figured the hour-long class would give me plenty of time to jog the mile or so up to the cattails, harvest some, and return in time to pick up Emma.

  It was a warm March day. I took off on my jog and, not wanting to be seen pulling up plants by passersby on the bike path, I moved to the back side of the pond and knelt at the water’s edge. The place was absolutely choked with cattails. I began to dig and was immediately struck by how deeply attached the cattails were to their environment. I could barely budge anything with my antler, which is a surprisingly strong material. The leverage I exerted on it would have bent a metal trowel in no time. My antler had a smooth, pointed tip, but the handle was rough with the coarse “pearling” that occurs at the bases of deer antlers. Following a root down into the mud as deep as possible, I applied full pressure. No movement. I pulled the stick up and found that I’d cut my hand on the little bumps in the antler.

  When your foraging teacher has been awarded the Bronze Star, you don’t let a scratch stop you. Besides, Hue had said that cattail slime had antiseptic properties. Between running and digging, I had begun perspiring heavily. Actually, I was soaking wet with sweat, which was dripping off me like a one-man spring rain. My eyes stung from the perspiration finding its way there. I reflexively rubbed the back of my muddy hand across my brow, realizing only afterward what I’d done. Great, I thought, that should endear you to the moms. Having knelt the whole time at the water’s edge, I was also covered in mud up to my knees. I kept digging.

  These cattail rhizomes were different from the ones Hue had given me—darker in color and harder to break. But I was damned well going to come away with something to show for having muddied and bloodied myself. With a final shove and twist of the antler I succeeded in breaking off a few roots. This effort cut my hand a second time, and deeper. Shoving the roots into a bag, and the bag into my fanny pack, I suddenly realized I’d lost track of the time. I needed to boogie if I was going to get back before the end of dance class. Like many men my age, I take a baby aspirin daily as a blood thinner. It seemed to be effective, because the minor cuts on my hands were now bleeding steadily. I splashed warm pond water over myself in what I knew was a futile attempt to clean up and then took off up the path at a brisk jog.

  A few paces along I realized things must be even worse than I’d thought. A mother and toddler coming the other way on the bike path spied me and, even at a distance of fifty yards, the woman’s eyes widened with fear. She moved the child behind her to shield it and gave me a glare of maternal challenge as I ran past, giving them as wide a berth as was possible on the narrow trail. I really needed to speak to my doctor about the baby aspirin, because now the blood was running down the inside of my forearm. The bike path passed under a road and I noted moss growing on the damp concrete of the underpass. I’d read somewhere of aboriginals using certain mo
sses as styptic agents, so I grabbed a handful on the off chance that this was such a plant. It wasn’t.

  Ten minutes later, I jogged into the parking lot of the church. From the relaxed way the mothers and girls in their leotards were scattered about, I knew instantly that the class had been over for some time. I spotted Emma, anxious and alone at the far end of the group. “Em!” I called, waving at her with what I realized a second too late was a hand full of blood-soaked moss. “Here I am!” I jogged over, avoiding eye contact with the moms. If I looked at them, I knew, I’d try to explain the perfectly good reasons I had for being covered in mud and blood. I also knew, from years of experience, that explaining my actions nearly always made them sound creepier and less defensible than if I’d kept my damn mouth shut. The relief that had initially lit up Emma’s face was quickly replaced by alarm. “Daddy, what happened?” she said, sounding more like my parent than my child. “Where were you? Are you okay?” It turned out that the class ran forty-five minutes long, not an hour, which meant that Emma had been sitting there by herself for fifteen minutes, an eternity to a child.

  I panicked. I’d had sufficient time on the run back to accept that there was nothing I could do about my appearance. But I’d been sure the class was an hour long. Next thing I knew, I was rapidly doing exactly what I’d vowed not to do. I was explaining. I spoke as if to Emma alone, knowing that every woman there was listening. I recounted digging for cattails, how my antler digging stick had cut my hand, how I’d bled because of the baby aspirin Daddy took for his heart. I told of my muddy hands and the stinging sweat in my eyes, which I’d wiped without thinking that . . .

  I had the strange experience of hearing my own voice as I spoke, as if I were wearing headphones. I knew I was gushing a torrent of language that was making what had happened sound increasingly implausible, but I couldn’t stop. I did have the sense to quit squeezing the moss, from which blood droplets were dripping onto the gravel of the Unitarian church parking lot. By this time, a mom with whom I had a nodding acquaintance had come over and wordlessly extended a wad of tissue. I thanked her, wiped my brow (careful not to look and see exactly how much blood and mud had been on display) and then wrapped it around my injured hand. I knew I needed to go before I explained how certain Australian aboriginals used moss—not all mosses of course, but certain kinds, of which I’d hoped that this was one but alas it was not—as a styptic agent. “Daddy?” Emma interrupted in a whisper. “Can we just please go?”

  Yes, I said, brightly. Yes, of course we can go. We got into the car and we went. In the car, Emma again asked if I was okay. Yes, I told her.

  “Are you okay, Monk?” I asked tenderly.

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess. But I think you scared some of those people.”

  A few days later I showed the rhizomes, unexamined since being shoved into the refrigerator, to Hue. “These aren’t cattail,” he said. What? Of course they were cattail. They were growing in water. They looked like cattails. They had cattail-like rhizomes. What the hell else could they possibly be? “I can’t tell you what they are,” Hue replied calmly. “I just know what they aren’t.”

  After the burned-but-raw cattail pancakes and the blood, mud, moss, and child-neglect incident at dance class, I was feeling deeply discouraged. I had realized that while Hue had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of wild edibles, much of it was geared toward survival situations. Long after the grid went down and Safeways across the country had been picked clean, Hue would be fine, eating barbecued rodents and grubs. He’d told me grubs accounted for more than half of the diet of certain Australian Aborigines even well after contact with Europeans. Grubs were, in fact, one of his favorites.

  I, on the other hand, had zero interest in eating grubs, no matter how nutritious and delicious Hue proclaimed them to be. I had not gone into this for survival training—I had thought that when eating wildly, I’d also be eating well. In terms of foraged food, however, this was certainly not where things were headed. I’d been ignoring the accumulating evidence that my stunt was not working out as intended. I might—might—be able to just barely survive consuming only wild edibles that I got myself. But after the cattail incident I had to admit that subsisting solely on food that I’d gotten with my own two hands was likely to be a very unpleasant experience, and even if I could succeed in pulling off the stunt I honestly didn’t want to anymore. Not that I wanted to quit entirely. It was simply a matter of altering the rules of engagement.

  Paula was all about getting free food from the woods that she liked to eat. I now had new respect for this approach. Even if her plant knowledge was less encyclopedic than Hue’s, even if she didn’t know her henbit from her deadnettle, I knew that anything I found with Paula would be not only edible but almost certainly appetizing as well. From now on, I resolved, if I was going to put this much work into getting something to eat, it had damned well better be something that actually tasted good. When Paula called me to go foraging with her again, I was in.

  One bright spring day, the air so clear it almost felt carbonated, Paula and I met at Fletcher’s and headed upriver into the woods along the Potomac. She pointed out the wisteria vines dangling from the sycamores like telephone wire. “You can make fritters from the flowers, but you can make fritters outta anything, you know what I mean? The seeds—it puts out these sorta knobby pods—are poisonous. I don’t mess with them.” We pushed on to a small stand of shin-high greenery, where Paula paused to rummage in her duffel. I asked if she knew the plants.

  “Jesus, Heavey! They’re stinging nettles. I already showed ’em to you once. Can’t you remember anything?”

  Evidently I couldn’t. That was the problem with shopping outdoors. One little green plant looked pretty much like another and none of them were labeled. Paula pulled out a glove and silently harvested a plastic bag’s worth, shaking her head as if marveling at my inability to retain information. “My favorite green,” she murmured at one point. She’d chosen well. Some months later, when I went to hear Michael Pollan speak, he said that stinging nettles, along with purslane and lamb’s quarters, were the three most nutritious plants in the world.

  We came to a place where the woods got thicker and we either had to push through or go around. She must have wanted to show me something, because she tightened the chin strap of her Tilley hat and bashed onward. I balled up my fists at face level, like a boxer fending off punches, and followed. Suddenly we were at the water’s edge, where an eddy slowly twirled in its bowl between two boulders poking their noses above the water. “I just like to check this place,” she said. “Certain eddies, you know what you’re gonna find there,” she went on. “One’ll be good for lost bobbers and lures, one’ll be good for lumber, another one maybe gets coolers and canoe paddles. This one, though, you never know what’s gonna wash up here.” She told me that in nearly two decades along the river she had twice found, reported, and led the park police to “floaters.” One of which she had found twirling in the current right here. “Nothing stinks like a human body, honey.” She pulled her cigarette pack from its Baggie and lit one, then laughed at something. “You shoulda seen the cops when I led them here! They were tying orange tape every five feet like they were in the fuckin’ wilderness instead of two hundred yards from Canal Road!”

  She didn’t tell me what she hoped to find in this spot, but she must not have found it, because after a while she said, in a tone that suggested a change of plan, “Let’s see if we can find some goose eggs.” I was momentarily bewildered, trying to square the two Paulas. Custodial Paula picked up park litter and reported deer poachers to the cops. Feral Paula wanted to steal and eat the unborn children of Canada geese, which, moral issues aside, is frowned upon by the authorities. Geese, as migratory birds, fall under federal, rather than state, jurisdiction. As we walked, she gave me an over-the-shoulder tutorial. Geese weren’t God’s smartest critters when it came to picking nesting sites. They tended t
o lay their eggs almost at water level, which meant the eggs often got wet, which meant they got cold, which meant they wouldn’t hatch. “Sometimes they do hatch, which isn’t necessarily good, because the babies end up like Jerry’s Kids, if you know what I mean. The foxes get them pretty quick.” There were too many Canada geese here, she said, many more than the area could support. This, as far as I knew, was true. There were geese everywhere along the towpath of the canal, crapping all over the place. And they competed for food with ducks, whose numbers had been in decline for years. Paula never took duck eggs. Taking the odd goose egg, though, was to her completely ethical.

  Suddenly she froze and held up a finger. “Hear that?” I didn’t. I heard the never-ending procession of jets that use the river as their approach path to Reagan National Airport and the nearby rush of traffic. “There it is again,” she said. And then I caught a faint birdcall, a liquid, rising, three-note call, tickety-tickety-tickety. “There he is.” A tiny brown bird perched on a twig thirty feet away and about twenty feet up in a tree. “Wren, probably a Carolina,” said Paula. “They don’t migrate, and they don’t do well in hard winters. Just not enough of a body to pack any reserves away.” They made up for this, she said, by reproducing in large numbers when they got the chance. “You gotta give ’em credit, though. Lotta guts for such a little bird, you know what I mean?” I was struck again. She seemed to be toggling back and forth rapidly between the two Paulas. This was a rare glimpse of her tender side. (I would learn later that the pan lying in the driveway under Gordon’s trailered boat wasn’t to collect spilled oil. It was water Paula set out for the birds. When I asked about it, she became a little testy. “Well, there’s no goddam water around here anymore,” she said defensively. “All the streams they once had are in pipes under the street. What’re they supposed to do?” I tried to tell her it was fine by me, but I think she was just miffed at having her sentimental side seen so openly.)