by Bill Heavey
It was weird. Many people I’d talked to genuinely desired to shorten the distance between themselves and their edibles. But they seldom took it further than voicing that desire. Maybe it was the steep learning curve. One of the cardinal rules in foraging is to eat nothing your first year unless and until it has been confirmed as safe by someone with years of experience. As Michelle told me the very first time we met, when I had asked what percentage of her family’s food she got through foraging and her answer—20 to 30 percent, depending on the season—had obviously disappointed me: “Hey, agriculture arose for a reason.”
But maybe there was something else going on. Sure, foraging was difficult. So was learning to sail or to identify birds or to climb vertical expanses of rock. And plenty of people took up those activities. Was it simply that most people just didn’t want to get their hands dirty? That, while they liked the cachet of wild food, buying it was easier than getting it themselves.
I flashed on a moment in June when Paula had called to say that the wineberries were ready. She was headed out and asked if I’d wanted to come. I was on deadline and couldn’t. But, chained to my computer, I was suddenly desperate for some wineberries, a nonnative raspberry that has become naturalized all over the eastern United States. A bit tarter than regular raspberries, wineberries are fantastic mashed into vanilla ice cream until the whole thing turns a deep pink. Soon I was dying for some. It wasn’t merely the fruit itself, good as that was. I also wanted in on the connection to the annual cycle that the berries were part of. Paula loved wineberries above almost all the other fruits she collected—more than pawpaws or blackberries or apples, peaches, pears, and figs. She counted the days until they were ready, usually in late June. They were almost always done by the Fourth of July. Being there to pick during that brief window of ripeness was a kind of sacrament for her. The more I thought about this, both the thing itself and what it meant, the more I craved wineberries. Finally, I tried something I’d never done. I called her back, caught her just as she was leaving, and offered to pay if she’d bring me some. I was hoping for a quart, but I’d have gladly taken a pint. I hadn’t even pegged a price point. I was willing to pay pretty much whatever she asked. Paula just laughed her gravelly laugh and turned me down. Her refusal implied that my request was as outlandish as a child asking for a pony. “Honey, you couldn’t pay me enough to pick wineberries for you or anybody else,” she said. Then she hung up.
This might not have been completely true. For fifteen or twenty bucks a pound, I bet she might have been willing. But I didn’t make that offer, and not because of the money alone. It was because I felt rebuffed by her larger point, which she didn’t address directly but which I felt nonetheless. I’d been struck by the fact that Paula hadn’t had to think at all before refusing. I took that to mean that wild, seasonal, ephemeral things like wineberries and the everyday world of commerce were never meant to go together. Maybe foraging wasn’t meant to be a profession. It was something that appealed to outliers—the eccentrics, the weirdos, the people who liked difficult paths. To get wineberries, you first of all had to know they existed, and this criterion cut out 95 percent or more of the population right off the bat. Then you had to know where to find them—not an easy task—and when they ripened. And then there was the arduous, tedious picking of the berries themselves. It was hot work. Wineberries grew at the edges of woods, often along highways. They grew in dense thickets and, though not terribly prickly themselves, were frequently entwined with the aggressively thorny multiflora rosebushes. That usually meant you could pick only the outside edges. And even then you wanted long sleeves and pants that could stand up to the thorns. The good wineberries I knew grew along thoroughfares where pedestrians weren’t allowed. Paula had been hassled by a Park Service cop the previous season for trying to pick in one of these abundant but off-limits areas. The guy had warned her once, passing by again forty-five minutes later to make sure she’d obeyed. Paula had simply dropped into the brush and waited until he left to resume picking. That an officer of the law would devote that much time and energy to hassling a woman picking berries speaks to the inherently subversive nature of foraging.
I’d never really thought about how much trouble wineberries were until I tried to get someone else to pick me some. No wonder there was no grassroots wild foods movement gathering steam. It was too much work for most people. I was okay with that. It meant more wineberries for me. If I could ever get the hell out there to pick.
It wasn’t long after I returned from San Francisco that Paula called. “You want some fresh pawpaw?” Sure, I said. “Well,” she said, “They’re in, and I got a bunch. Good year for ’em. Better get over before I eat ’em all myself,” and hung up. Gordon, I knew, didn’t particularly care for them, but Paula was a connoisseur of pawpaws.
It was unusually thoughtful of Paula to alert me to pawpaws’ moment, much less offer to share her haul—it must have been a truly bountiful year. When I asked where she’d gotten them, she said, “Why the fuck should I tell you?” I tried to think of a reason. I couldn’t. Paula then told me about a story the Washington Post had run several years earlier on pawpaws. It had listed places where the fruit might be found, including one that happened to be Paula’s favorite spot. “Boy, did that fuck things up,” she said. “All the yuppies came out to gather the next weekend. And what happened? I get there and half my trees are broken down from these idiots. They’re breaking the tree to get the fruit! I mean, how shortsighted can you get? That’s why I never tell people where I get things. As soon as the public knows they fuck it up. Every time. They have no respect for the natural world. They don’t take what they can eat, they take as much as they can carry, you know?”
In fact, Paula had first showed me flowering pawpaw trees in the woods the day we had found the goose eggs. The slender, spindly trees were common in the fertile floodplains along the Potomac, although I’d never paid them any attention until she pointed them out. Paula said that they needed sufficient rain at just the right time if the trees were to bear fruit. According to her, about half the time that didn’t happen. When they did fruit, however, pawpaws, along with wineberries, were at the top of her list of favorites. At the time of our walk, I’d yet to taste one and I didn’t encounter the fruit until the next year. Shortly after I’d begun foraging in earnest, I was fishing for smallmouth one Saturday near Harpers Ferry, where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers converge. As I walked back toward my car along the C&O Canal towpath, I encountered a man coming the other way. He had two fishing rods in one hand and plastic bucket full of green, kidney-shaped fruit in the other: pawpaws. Catching his eye, I pointed with my chin at the bucket. “Gotta show the young-uns,” he said. “They’ll never even know what’s out here unless somebody does.” He smiled and went his way.
I entered the next thicket of woods and found a stand of pawpaw trees. The leaves are distinctive, large and widening toward the tip (“obovate,” in language of tree ID books). The trees require shade for their first several years, so they start life as an understory tree. I remembered Paula telling me that you harvested pawpaw by shaking the trees—but gently, because they’re easily damaged. It wasn’t until I shook the third one that a succession of dull thuds announced that half a dozen had hit the forest floor. The last one down, medium-sized, bonked me right in the head. I was lucky. Pawpaws are the largest edible fruit native to the United States, occasionally attaining a weight of two pounds. Fortunately, the one that hit me was a half pounder. It’s also fortunate that the things are faily soft when ripe.
I peeled one with my pocketknife and tasted. The flesh was sweet and luscious, fantastic. I tasted bananas, mangoes, and a hint of apple. No wonder its nicknames include “custard apple” and “Michigan banana.” It really baffled me that a fruit like this—tropical-tasting, utterly different from any other native fruit I’d ever eaten—grew here. And that something so delicious was so utterly unknown.
It t
urns out that pawpaws, which range from northern Florida to southern Ontario and as far west as eastern Nebraska, were much better known 100 years ago than they are today. The historical record dates to 1541, when Hernando de Soto noted their use among the Indians of the Mississippi Valley. The journals of Lewis and Clark record how pawpaws helped save the explorers from starvation. Interest in them as a commercial crop started in the early 1900s but then waned, and pawpaws more or less disappeared from our culinary radar. The problem was transportability and shelf life. They bruise easily and can go from underripe to rotten in a few days. Pawpaws were a locavore’s dream and a fruit wholesaler’s nightmare. In short, they had no place in the industrial food economy.
That previous season in Harpers Ferry I had found only a few pawpaws and had eaten each as soon as I found it. With juice dribbling down my chin I pondered my luck in stumbling upon them at precisely the right time. The moment was charged with an odd and surprising power. I’d been foraging long enough to have mistimed almost everything I’d come across, arriving too soon and too late. I’d definitely been late to the party, for example, when it came to making my lawn salad. By the same token, my searches for wineberries, mulberries, figs, and other fruits and nuts often turned up those that were not yet ripe. The berries would be hard and colorless; the nuts, when hulled, green and thin. I’d also had the experience of finding immature fruit, then returning a day or so later to find it past ripe and starting to rot. It had taken me any number of such experiences to truly grasp the merciless speed with which things in nature went from inedibly immature to inedibly old. I’d grown up in a world of supermarket fruit, where all things were uniformly and perpetually ripe. In the wild, the tyranny and contrariness of ripeness were stunning. Maturity took its time arriving, then was gone almost before you could say hello. And there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it except hope to hit it right twelve months later. Shakespeare had nailed it. Ripeness is all.
Now pawpaw season had come back around. Determined to find some on my own, I went prospecting. The woods along the river above Fletcher’s were full of the trees, but, once again, I was unfashionably late to the party. Except this time it was other people, rather than nature, that had beaten me to it. I shook but nothing fell. Then I noticed the bent trees and boot prints in the soft dirt. Paula and I obviously weren’t the only pawpaw lovers in these parts. The prints were too big to have been hers. I ventured farther upriver, where I managed to shake down a few. But only a few.
The pawpaws I got that day were good all by themselves, especially chilled. But the best way to appreciate them, as far as I was concerned, was the same way I liked wineberries—thoroughly mashed into a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Pawpaws and good vanilla ice cream are made for each other. When I tried substituting them in a recipe for banana bread, though, the result was disappointing. The bread wasn’t bad; it just completely lacked flavor. I consulted Paula, who gave me the lowdown. “Cooking destroys the flavor. Completely. Don’t ask me why, but it does. Some people say you can freeze ’em, but it’s never worked for me. The best thing you can do is just eat ’em, you know?” I told her I’d been looking hard but finding only a few. “Yeah, I know. There’s an Oriental guy starts down in Georgetown and goes all the way up the river picking every one he can get. Takes way more than he could ever eat. He’s gotta be selling them in a Chinese market somewhere.” She asked where I had been looking. When I told her, all she said was to try farther up. Coming from someone as secretive as Paula, this was an act of considerable goodwill.
The next day, following her advice, I stumbled upon a paradise of pawpaws. The trees tend to grow in stands, and once inside the woods I saw stand after stand of virgin trees—no bent branches, no footprints. I shook one of the trees, and half a dozen pawpaws hit the ground, a wave of thuds like someone taking short punches to the stomach. I shook another tree. More thuds. I gathered the pawpaws up and could tell by the smell alone that they were ripe. I ate one on the spot, not even peeling it, just breaking it open and sucking the flesh away from the skin and spitting out the seeds. It was delicious. Abundance mania kicked in, just as it had while I was picking ripe sour cherries or catching perch when they were biting. This was it, the blind hog jackpot, the Pawpaw Convergence. I texted Michelle that I’d just stumbled upon the mother lode. “We could fill a wheelbarrow,” I tapped. While I was texting, greed kicked in. In addition to the intensification of consciousness that ripeness and abundance always produced in me, there was, I suddenly realized, also the prospect of easy money. Michelle had already told me she knew chefs who wanted pawpaws, this most local, short-lived, and delicate of fruits. If chefs would pay for what was lying on the ground—more of which required only that I shake the trees—I could make some serious cash. I texted her again, asking where I could unload the most at the best price. She gave me the number of the chef she was friends with at Woodberry Kitchen, widely touted as the best restaurant in Baltimore. I called. The guy said he would take all I could supply. I was so excited that I forgot to either ask his price per pound or suggest one of my own.
There was no time to lose. I left the woods, tore back home, and rummaged through the basement until I found the backpack I’d gotten to take elk hunting years earlier. It was an external frame design, built to carry hunks of disassembled elk long distances. Back in the woods, I collected like the possessed man I’d become. I shook trees until it was too dark to see the fruit on the ground. It was a warm September day and I was sweating heavily. I hadn’t stopped to eat or drink since breakfast. Abundance mania rounded off with greed for money had an amphetamine-like ability to suppress appetite and thirst. I was still stoned as a rabbit when I stumbled out of the woods at dark with the loaded pack on my back and sagging trash bags in either hand. I hadn’t wanted to put too many pawpaws in the pack for fear of crushing the ones on the bottom. As I stumbled up the path, I found a stick, transferred both bags to one hand, and leaned on the stick for support. I didn’t know how many pounds I was carrying; I knew only that I couldn’t have carried any more. At the short incline up to the bridge over the canal, I had to stop after each step to catch my breath. I moved and felt like an exhausted climber summiting Everest without oxygen.
I drove straight from the woods to Baltimore, where I unloaded sixty pounds of pawpaw to the chef at Woodberry Kitchen. I probably had another twenty pounds left in the car, but I’d weeded out the ones that were overripe or had gotten damaged during transport. I’d settled on five dollars a pound as my asking price and was surprised when the chef wrote me out a check for $300 without haggling. He’d tasted one pawpaw and found it as delicious as I had. Then, in the manner of chefs, he had immediately begun imagining what he would do with it. “I’m thinking it might go well with organ meats,” he mused. In my mania—which had diminished only slightly on the two-hour drive to Baltimore—I forgot to warn him against cooking the fruit. I stopped to use the men’s room on my way out and, looking in the mirror, saw why he hadn’t dickered about the price. It wasn’t just that my face was dirty and scratched, with the blood from a cut—I vaguely remembered smacking myself against a prickly branch—dried to a jagged black line across my brow. The striking thing was my eyes. They weren’t mine. There was something desperate and wild in them. They were someone else’s eyes. I wouldn’t have haggled with me, either. (Later, I found out through Michelle that the guy had tried to cook most of them, with the predictable results. I felt guilty. I should have warned him. On the other hand, maybe we’d both been victims of our own greed.)
After I pocketed the check, the greed and mania loosened their hold markedly. They weren’t gone, but I suddenly felt how exhausted I was. I got a double cheeseburger and a chocolate shake at a drive-thru—the forager of nutritious wild foods chowing down on junk—and drove back down I-95 with the windows open to help me stay awake. Once home, I sloughed off my pants, shoes, and shirt; left them where they fell; crawled straight into bed; and collapsed.
&n
bsp; I rested the next day, and this turned out to be a mistake. When I returned to my pawpaw paradise the day after that, it had been stripped clean. Someone very thorough had helped himself to the rest of it. I shook tree after tree, until there was no question. I cursed the rat bastard thief, whoever he was. This was my spot. Those had been my pawpaws. (That neither of these statements was, strictly speaking, true, never crossed my mind. Foraging activates deep proprietary instincts.) I was suddenly sure it was the “Oriental” Paula had railed about. Jesus, I thought, you’re becoming as racist as Paula. This realization had no effect on my ire. Someone had screwed me, pure and simple. There was no way around it and no cure.
Back home, puttering around in my vegetable garden, I calmed down and tried to process what had possessed me. I knew I’d been consumed by greed of a kind and intensity I’d never experienced before. But I couldn’t parse it any further. It was, in Rumsfeldian terms, “a known unknown.” On the whole, for example, I’d always felt I was less interested in money than most people. And, even if it that weren’t true, it wasn’t as though I’d made a killing on the pawpaws, especially when I factored in four hours of driving. On the whole, I was just thankful that the episode was over. I was pretty sure that the experience had cured me of the desire to make a quick buck off wild edibles.
As so frequently happens, I was totally wrong about this. I hadn’t told Michelle much about my pawpaw incident except the numbers, sixty pounds of fruit at five bucks a pound. I figured she had plenty of time to find out how venal her new boyfriend could be. A few days later, she called to report that she’d just sold seventeen pounds of hen of the woods to a chef at Clementine, another top Baltimore restaurant. “It’s been a crazy good year for mushrooms,” she said, asking if I’d seen the recent article about mushrooming in the Post. I had. We’d had unusual frequent rains at exactly the right time, followed by humid days with warmer than usual temperatures. All of which just happened to be ideal for many species. I asked her what the chefs were paying. “Ten bucks a pound,” she said. She sounded happy, as if she’d simply been lucky to find the mushrooms. I didn’t hear any desire—expressed or implied—to go back and see if she could cash in by finding more.