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

by Bill Heavey

  My first reaction to this was to feel intimidated. I’ve never been particularly committed to anything that smacked of the greater good and I have usually been either mystified by or downright suspicious of those who are. Here was a woman of limited means raising two kids who was still committed to her ideals, and—worse—talking about it in a disarmingly open and unironic way. I had worked hard to come by my cynicism and this woman was undermining it before we’d even met. I shopped at thrift stores and yard sales, too, but it was because I was cheap, not because doing so conserved the natural resources consumed or reduced the pollution created in the manufacture of new clothing. I had always more or less gone my own way and figured the planet could do the same. Someone like Michelle might uncover the weak spots in my alienation, requiring that I rethink all kinds of assumptions I had no interest in examining. And what exactly did a biodiesel car burn? Salad dressing? The french fry grease from fast-food outlets? This was unknown territory. Besides, what could she possibly know about plants that Hue didn’t? All of that argued against meeting. And Baltimore was not only fifty miles away, but fifty miles through some of the heaviest traffic in the country. “Rush hour” in the D.C. area was pretty much anytime between 5 a.m. and midnight. Baltimore was a long haul for either business or social reasons. But then I realized that I was getting ahead of myself. E-mails didn’t obligate me to anything. I wrote back, saying I envied her having a foraging grandmother. I confessed to being a child of the suburbs whose prior plant experience had consisted of collecting blueberries at Camp Yonahnoka in North Carolina. We picked them from low bushes that grew atop the local “mountain,” which was only several hundred feet high but a long walk from camp nonetheless. The ladies who worked in the kitchen would make you a pie if you brought them enough berries. I related my discovery of smoked herring and that I’d begun sneaking a few wild edibles into Emma’s food when she wasn’t paying attention.

  In return, Michelle sent me a list of what she was gathering and ­eating—and apparently feeding to her boys. It included dandelion greens, which she and the boys ate “almost daily.” I couldn’t quite wrap my head around someone picking and eating the weed that nearly everybody else in America went to considerable pains to exterminate. I’d tried to sneak some sautéed dandelion greens onto Emma’s plate one night. She wouldn’t touch them. When I urged her to give them a try, she crossed her arms and declared, “No! I hate nature food!”

  Michelle was also eating a lot of garlic mustard—an invasive with a two-year growth cycle. Hue had several times tried to explain the concept of a two-year growth cycle, but I never understood it. Michelle not only understood biannuals, but explained them in a way I could follow. The garlic mustard in flower now, she wrote, was already too bitter for most palates. But beneath each mature one I could find the tender shoots of the second-year growth, the new plant. These little guys were choice now. They, too, would become bitter later in the year. “But once the first frost hits, they become really delicious again and stay green—and edible—all winter, even under the snow. That’s why they were brought over from Europe.”

  Michelle expressed interest in my smoked herring and, saying she made a mean strawberry-rhubarb preserve, indicated a willingness to barter. In my response, I said I was game, but warned that smoked herring was pretty much all I had to offer. Actually, I wrote, suddenly remembering another, I was reasonably proficient at knife-sharpening. I explained that one of my beats for Field & Stream was the acquisition of a particular subset of manly skills, namely the ones that men are widely assumed to possess but that, in most cases, don’t. Among these were carving a turkey, fixing toilets, and sharpening knives. Mastery of this last had, for some reason, seemed a particularly worthy goal. After reading up on it, interviewing various experts, and trying a multitude of stones and gadgets, I’d been forced to admit that I had no natural aptitude whatsoever. Sharpening was simple—you held the blade at a constant angle as you moved it across a stone—but not easy. I had at last become semi-proficient at it, mostly because I was unable to accept the thought of being defeated by something so basic. I’d kept at it long after a less insecure man would have given up. In any case, fish and knife-sharpening were the entire contents of my trade basket.

  There followed nearly a month of sporadic communication—­Michelle was an engaging writer—before we settled on my driving to Baltimore to meet her at Druid Hill Park, a large old tract in northwest Baltimore. She needed to scout the place for an “urban wild edibles” class she wanted to lead there. Her last e-mail included the note she’d made in her planner: “Meet strange man in secluded park. Bring knives.”

  I got lost, of course. MapQuest routed me right through downtown Baltimore and extensive road reconstruction. I was nearly an hour late before I even found Druid Hill Park, which turned out to be the size of Dulles Airport, and then spent another twenty minutes crisscrossing its many roads before Michelle guided me her way via text messages.

  No single man with a pulse is capable of meeting an attractive single woman without immediately sizing her up as a potential mate. Within the first five seconds of laying eyes on Michelle, I had taken in the slender, lithe young woman in maroon corduroy jeans. I had registered the blue eyes, strawberry blond hair, fair skin, and absence of makeup. In her facial features and gaze I recorded a kind of intelligence and self-possession, neither arrogant nor meek. Above all else, I’d registered the specific meaning of the cordial but decisively noncommittal smile she sent my way. By the passing of the sixth second, all this neurochemical activity had created an executive summary in word form, the better to share it with the conscious brain.

  The summary read as follows: Total babe. Thinks you are too old for her.

  I pasted on the best smile I could muster and greeted her as if I, too, had always seen this as nothing more than a cordial business encounter. We moved immediately to small talk. She confessed to having flown out of the house without her strawberry-rhubarb preserves, and she seemed truly embarrassed about this. I sat on my side of the picnic table where she had a basket and backpack and offered her a herring. She said it was really good. “Wow,” she said, chewing slowly now, tasting it more deeply, “I mean, this is really good.” Although the herring was tasty, it was apparently the DIY angle—that I’d caught, filleted, brined, and smoked it myself—that impressed her the most. That, she noted, was “pretty hard core.” I smiled and tried to give the shrug of a guy for whom pretty hard core was the norm.

  Michelle struck me as someone combining traits not usually found growing in the same soil. There was something direct, open, and friendly about her—she was not the least bit coy. She seemed comfortable in her own skin, a state of being I’ve always found intimidating mostly because it’s so unfamiliar to me. I knew she was genuinely this way because I spent so much time and effort affecting the appearance of low-key confidence that I would have recognized the machinery at work. She didn’t have any of it running. And yet you felt that she wasn’t giving away anything about herself. The openness and transparency went only so far and then stopped. It wasn’t a wall. It just stopped. I figured her for a smart woman who took in more information than she let on. That was as far as I could get.

  The next thing I knew we were up, walking and looking for edibles in the tightly mowed park. There wasn’t much—“Dang, I was hoping we’d beaten the park department’s annual spring close shave,” she said—and the few we found happened to be ones I knew. Michelle explained that the Baltimore Zoo was in this park, which dated from 1860. As it expanded into modern captive animal “environments” the zoo had closed off its oldest areas, including its Victorian-era black iron cages. A lot of the fenced-off areas we were passing were decommissioned zoo exhibits, cages, and support buildings. She was curious about what might have grown up inside since then but said she didn’t think there was any way in. The fence was pretty formidable, chain link topped with razor wire.

  “Oh, there�
��s always a way in,” I said. You don’t hang out with Paula Smith without learning a few things about fences. The master trespasser had taught me that any place worth fencing people out of invariably motivated some of those very people to create a way in. People who cut fences prized discretion, preferring sites where they were least likely to be observed, usually a low point, topographically speaking. Sure enough, the second ravine I tried had a torso-sized opening at the lowest point of the fence, the jagged wire-ends bent back with care to spare skin and clothing. “After you,” I said. Then I squeezed through and we began exploring.

  Michelle lamented that invasive nonnative plants—Japanese honey­suckle, kudzu, and some grass whose name I missed—had crowded out nearly everything else. I found some deer trails with signs of fresh use and pointed them out. “Mmm,” she said, noncommittally. She was obviously more into wild edible plants than wild edible animals. We weren’t finding much for her plant walk, but it was an interesting place all the same, ruins of buildings and iron bars from old enclosures slowly being reclaimed by the earth. She’d been right here countless times as a child. The hippo house had stood here; over there had been the elephant yard. We topped a slight rise where I pointed out oval depressions in the grass, saying that they were fresh deer beds. “Really?” she said, a rising inflection that combined requisite polite interest with obvious skepticism. I asked her to wait a moment, bent over one of the beds, and looked until I found a deer hair, which I held out to her. “Deer hair,” I said, handing it over. “This one’s a light color, so it came from its belly.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m officially impressed.” I knew instantly that she didn’t really mean these words. She didn’t give a damn about deer. And yet, I would argue, there is not a man breathing who does not delight at the mere prospect of impressing an attractive woman. I, for example, was ridiculously happy to have the words aimed at me, sincere or not. (Even as I lapped up this praise, I have to admit that another part of me was rolling its eyes, thinking, Good Lord, has there ever been a simpler, more easily manipulated thing than the male ego? It makes the toothpick look complicated by comparison.) We descended that hill and went up another. We’d arrived at the monkey house, a long brick structure that looked mostly unused. The occasional human voice and rumble of an electrically powered zoo vehicle could be heard. The sounds were fairly close but their sources weren’t visible. Michelle seemed excited to be at this place. She confessed that she’d always wanted to break into the monkey house. It occurred to me that this woman had taken me for a pretty vanilla sort of guy, which is, after all, how I looked. She perked up when I noted that all we needed to do was find one unlocked window. The thing was, they were all casement windows, not easily opened from the outside. I found one that was barely cracked open and pulled out my pocketknife to see if I could pry it any farther. I worked on the window for a minute but couldn’t get it to budge.

  It would be months before she would tell me that trying to break into the monkey house had been the moment when she started to think I might be interesting after all. “Ninety-nine people out of a hundred think ‘No Trespassing’ means what it says,” she would eventually tell me. “Not you. That totally got to me.”

  We gave up on the monkey house after a while and retraced our steps. At a picnic table near our vehicles we sat for a few minutes, having iced tea and her home-made granola bars. If something in her had shifted as a result of the monkey house, I wasn’t aware of it. I was still operating under the rules implicit in her initial smile, but I had relaxed a bit. If I was too old, I could still sit and enjoy a conversation with a pretty woman. And if—as seemed to be the case—there was something about her I couldn’t get a handle on, there was no great need to figure it out. After a few more minutes I said I’d better get going if I hoped to beat rush hour traffic. We said the normal things, I smiled, turned, and walked to my car. And that was that. We hadn’t even shaken hands, coming or going. I drove home utterly unaware of how this woman would upend my life.

  Meanwhile, the other woman in my life continued to charm me with the grace she brought even to small, everyday rituals. When Paula Smith called on the phone, for example, she didn’t identify herself, ask how you were doing, or even say hello. You knew it was Paula because she was already well into a one-sided conversation, which, for all you knew, had started half an hour earlier. One hot morning in early June, a few weeks after meeting Michelle, I picked up the phone to hear a tobacco-cured rasp asking, “You like cherry pie?” This question was clearly rhetorical. “Gordon and I had the best sour cherry pie last night,” she continued. “You gotta use sour cherries for a pie, you know. The sweet ones won’t work. But they don’t sell sour cherries in stores anymore. And you wanna know why? ’Cause nobody fucking makes pies anymore, that’s why! But I’ve got the best sour cherry tree in town. I already hit it three times this year, but I think it’s got one more pick left in it if you wanna try.”

  “Just fine, thanks,” I said cheerily, “How are you, Paula?”

  “Okay, I forgot, sorry,” she said. One thing you had to give Paula: when she was in the wrong, she usually didn’t hesitate to apologize. And she usually meant it, too. On the other hand, it didn’t divert her from whatever was on her mind. “So what do you think about the tree?”

  “Go today, you mean?” I said, trying to parse her meaning.

  “Hell yeah, today,” she sputtered, as if I were intentionally antagonizing her. “You think I meant next month? They’re ripe now.”

  Of course I wanted to go. I’d never even had a sour cherry that I knew of. I did know that excursions with Paula had a way of putting you in unlikely places and that it was wise to determine where you were going before she got into the car. Because once she was in, you’d be going wherever she said. This was another of Paula’s strange and inexplicable skills. It was your car. You were driving. And yet, somehow, she always ended up in charge. Actually, she started off in charge. You were merely quicker or slower in recognizing this.

  “So where exactly is this tree?” I asked.

  “Up past Adams Morgan,” she said, still purposely vague. On general principle, a forager resists sharing the locations of favored trees and patches. On the other hand, as I pointed out to her, since I was driving us there I would eventually know the location anyway. She seemed not to have considered this fact closely, and evidently needed a moment to chew on it. I waited, determined that for once she be the one to break the silence.

  “Okay, it’s on one of the major streets,” she said finally, as if under torture.

  “So . . . a major street in major downtown D.C. Why don’t we just ask Obama if we can take a look around his yard? Hey, his wife has a vegetable garden. Gotta be some interesting stuff in there, don’t you think?”

  She was growing irritated with me. “Listen, you in or not?”

  Of course I was in. “Yeah. Twenty minutes,” I said, and hung up. I got my blickey, which is any kind of basket you tie around your waist, leaving both hands free to pick. Mine was an old Tupperware container, about the size of a loaf of bread. I’d punched holes in it and tied it with paracord. I threw it and a bottle of water into the car and set off.

  It should be noted that although Paula would go almost anywhere if she thought the place held shed antlers, old bottles, or edibles, she had a great aversion to being yelled at by landowners or other authorities. (This always struck me as odd, given that her social sensitivity, generally, was right up there that of a subway turnstile.) She timed her visits accordingly. Weekends were unpredictable. Generally, they were bad for residential sites but good for public ones: campuses, state and local agencies, businesses, etc. She once called on a bleak Sunday in January just after a winter weather advisory had been issued. It was sleeting heavily, and radio and TV forecasters were urging people to get off the roads. The excitement in her voice was palpable. “I got a place I been dying to go,” she said. “The—.”
(She here named the facility, which was governmental and which she has, quite sensibly, forbidden me to name.) “C’mon!” she urged. “They just stopped bus service. With weather like this, it might as well be open house day. And the Redskins are playing. This is as good as it gets! The guards’ll never even leave the fuckin’ shack. It’s heated.” She sounded like an astronomer who had just been invited to watch the transit of Venus from a secret observatory in the Azores. I actually felt guilty at not aiding and abetting her in breaking federal law. But there was no way I was driving crosstown over roads best navigated on a Zamboni.

  On cherry day, Paula was waiting for me when I drove up. She stubbed out a cigarette and put the butt back into the pack for later, and we drove into town on the coattails of morning rush hour traffic. “You want to head up 16th Street,” she said. The fact that Paula knew the name of the street was itself surprising. Paula has never had a driver’s license and gets around mainly by bus or commandeering rides from acquaintances. She usually referred to a given area by the bus number she took to get there, and this often made it impossible for us to communicate in the rare event she would tell me where she’d found things. We passed through downtown D.C., then up a hill. Office buildings gradually gave way to a neighborhood of churches and slightly shabby two-story row houses. “Park anywhere you can,” she said abruptly. “It’s in this block.” I parked, but saw nothing that looked like a fruit tree. “Now listen,” she said, as she led me across the street, “Just act like you know what you’re doing. Used to belong to a Hispanic guy, never home, a lawyer or something. But I don’t know if he still lives here.”