by Andrew Moore
“It was terrible,” Donna adds, with a laugh (I suppose humor helps in dealing with forces out of your control). “If you have apples or peaches, and they’re starting to ripen and you know something is coming on, you can run out and pick them when they’re not [ripe], and then just let them ripen themselves in the cooler. You just can’t do that with [pawpaws]. We’ve tried it.”
Donna has a small portable radio set up in the shed. There’s warnings of severe thunderstorm, a double line, rolling through central Maryland. It’s a good thing much of the harvest has been picked, and that the season came early. But there are still many pawpaws on the trees, and hard winds and rains are coming. “Even though you know that storm is coming, you can’t pick the underripe fruit,” Jim says. “You know you’re going to lose—especially the large ones—sometimes a good number of them, and sometimes just a few. It all depends upon the severity of the storm.”
Around midday, two visitors arrive, a woman named McKenzie and her friend Jordan. McKenzie and her husband are new part-time farmers, raising alpacas, twelve sheep, chickens, bees, and growing a host of vegetables. Jordan is a foraging enthusiast. They’re both here to learn more about pawpaws, and to see what a commercial orchard looks like.
Since Jim doesn’t use any fruit that drops, Jordan, McKenzie, and I eagerly gather fruit from below the trees. Both of their shirts are stretched into makeshift baskets and filled to capacity, and even though I’ve spent two days in an orchard, I still think of each individual pawpaw as valuable. It’s a bumper crop of fallen, discarded fruit. McKenzie is considering pawpaws for her farm. She and Jordan plan to save the seeds of this fruit and grow trees, the beginnings, possibly, of another central Maryland pawpaw orchard.
But all of that is the future. Now, we eat. Jordan breaks a particularly large fruit in half, squeezes the pulp out, and eats as much as he can, as neatly as can be expected. We all soon join him, except for Jim. He usually eats one or two a year, and that’s it. He appreciates their flavor, but his interest is mainly about the challenge of growing them and pioneering a market. Donna enjoys a few more than Jim, usually just snacking while she’s out in the field. Otherwise, all the pawpaws are sent away.
Jim and I haul our last load of pawpaws back to the shed where Allison and Donna have built up the last of the cardboard boxes. Allison talks again of the approaching storm warnings, which now include a tornado watch. It’s important that we’ve picked all the ripe fruit, as the winds and rains will surely strip a good amount of fruit from the trees. The sky quickly changes to a black swirling mass of clouds. Heavy winds blow over the ridge, contrasting deep-green pawpaw foliage against a background of pure-black sky. As a precaution Jim and I cart a gas-powered generator to the shed—if the power goes out, the coolers will stay on. We finish just as a hard rain begins to fall and hustle to the house before we’re totally soaked.
We picked 218 pounds of fruit today, most of it Shenandoah. Jim broke a one-day record earlier this year (which had previously been 450 pounds), with a grueling 700 pounds.
Each year, when the fruit has all been picked and the season is finally over, Jim and Donna breathe and relax a bit. But by midwinter, work begins anew. In February, Neal Peterson typically comes to the orchard to collect budwood (also known as scion wood) of his patented varieties, which he then sells to licensed nurseries. After Neal has finished, Jim prunes the orchard. There’s a large deer herd in the area that causes a lot damage to the trees. “Any trees that are busted up because of that, or just don’t look right and I know from the year before were sickly looking, I’ll remove those,” Jim says. Fertilization is done either in late fall or early spring. In mid-April, the orchard flowers. By a month or so after that, while the leaves are still small, any fruit that will develop has formed. “We have a lot of pollinators—flies, beetles, little tiny things that I’m not sure what they are,” Jim says. He hopes one day Stanton will be able to study the unknown bugs working at Deep Run. “But, you know, it’s just one of those things on the back of the list.” In June, the trees are in full leaf, and in a short time the zebra swallowtails have emerged. “To walk those rows when everything is leafed out, and have these little apparitions floating around,” Jim says, “it’s quite spectacular.”
Once the rains have gone, I collapse in the camper and sleep to the sound of a wet orchard: water dripping, cicadas, and crickets.
After leaving Westminster, I drive to the southwest corner of Greene County, Pennsylvania, a mile or so from the West Virginia border. I am meeting Jeanne and Llew Williams, owners of Red Barn Farm. I know I have arrived because I see their big red barn. Guinea hens peck in the road; goats meander on a pastured hillside. Beyond, the dirt road curves and disappears behind a billowy draping of green hills. Llew directs me into the house where I find Jeanne stirring a large pot of applesauce.
I’d learned about Red Barn by calling the Morgantown Farmers Market, where Red Barn is the only vendor offering the fruit. Jeanne and Llew Williams began collecting pawpaws by accident. Several years ago, a sixty-four-year-old woman named Dorothy Eckert wanted to hike the Warrior Trail in a week’s time. The trail is a five-thousand-year-old Indian path that runs along sixty-seven miles of ridgelines (“Clean across Greene County”), and was once used by Native Americans for quick access to flint deposits, among other things. Llew, who is president of the Warrior Trail Association, drove Ms. Eckert to the trailhead and arranged to leave a car for her at the other end. Since he was going to be out, Llew brought his kayak and paddled a stretch of the Monongahela River. He stopped at a creekbed near an abandoned farm whose barn and farmhouse were both falling in. “I was eating lunch, and these things were laying on the ground,” Llew says. “They smelled really good. So I had to try one, and I thought, It’s got to be a pawpaw. I’ve heard of such a thing, but I’ve never actually seen one.” So he peeled one back and ate his first.
Each year, Llew and Jeanne return to the grove, and in good years they gather several buckets of fruit. Llew says this particular grove is an unusual place. “There’s pawpaws up and down that creek, but nothing like this. I’ve never seen a stand of them all in one place like this—and they’re big, and they’re mature. And you would go in there and the ground would just be littered with them. I mean we would pick as much as we thought we could safely carry in a canoe and not even put a dent in the pawpaws.”
Once Jeanne has finished with the applesauce, she and Llew give me a tour of the farm. Jeanne raises upward of eighty goats, along with several hundred broiler chickens and laying hens; across the road they raise vegetables in a mobile high tunnel. We walk to a cold cellar built into the hillside, adorned by the stonework of a local artist. Jeanne kneels to show me handfuls of pawpaws they’ve gathered in the wild. They are small, like misshapen plums, browning with just a few specks of green. This year, the wild pawpaw crop wasn’t great; it was too dry and too hot, and they were likely too late in arriving, but there were enough. The pawpaws are kept here, without electricity, until Jeanne can pulp the fruit to make muffins, butter, and jams, an assortment of goods she sells at the Morgantown market along with her staples of goat meat and organic produce.
Across the road, along a stream, they have planted a few young pawpaw trees, but not any particular cultivar. The weeds have grown high around the young trees, but we locate them and they’re surviving. Eventually they might grow to produce good fruit. Jeanne’s goats will browse nearby, as will the chickens and guinea hens. But Red Barn Farm is not establishing a pawpaw orchard. For Jeanne and Llew, pawpaws have just become a part of life in Greene County, and of the changing seasons. They’re another reminder of why they love living in the country, raising livestock and produce. The hunt has become a ritual late-summer outing; they pack a canoe with sandwiches and water, and spend the day paddling, savoring the waning hours of warmth and light. The act is as much about getting outdoors, spending time together in nature, as it is about collecting pawpaws. Neither
Jeanne nor Llew grew up eating pawpaws, but the fruit and the foraging are now part of a new culture they’re nurturing, and an older culture they’re reviving.
You could argue that pawpaws have earned their day in the orchard, that the fruit has potential as a cultivated crop. But perhaps there’s equal room in American culture for rituals like the one Jeanne and Llew share: going out with a loved one, by boat, by foot, and indulging in nature. Perhaps there’s room to reap the wild bounty as well.
A few days after my visit to Deep Run, Lance Beard drives a small pickup truck from Columbia, Maryland, to the Davises’ orchard. It’s a ritual Beard has repeated for the past six years. He has assembled a makeshift storage unit, two-by-fours nailed into shelving units in the bed of the truck. With Jim and Donna’s help he loads more than six hundred pounds of fresh fruit—pawpaws Jim and I picked together just days before—into the truck bed. Beard then drives through the night, through the hills of western Maryland, West Virginia, and into Appalachian Ohio. His destination: the Thirteenth Annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival. He will have three days to sell more than a quarter ton of pawpaws.
— CHAPTER NINE —
THE OHIO PAWPAW FESTIVAL
Each September Lake Snowden is transformed by a hive of Asimina activity, its low hills and open fields swarmed by all manner of pawpaw lovers: farmers, chefs, back-to-the-landers, millennial permies, ag scientists, and many who have only recently learned of the fruit. They are by turns obsessed, curious, entrepreneurial, proselytic, and nostalgic. And more of them come out each year for this signature pawpaw event, the one-and-only Ohio Pawpaw Festival.
“Right here in southern Ohio we’re blessed with literally millions of pawpaws,” says the festival’s founder, Chris Chmiel. In fact, thanks to Chmiel and this wild plenty, I have begun to think of Athens County, Ohio, as the capital of the American Pawpaw Belt, and Chmiel its mayor. He created the festival in 1999 to get folks to pay attention to this abundance, and it has worked. The festival has grown from a one-day event attended by a handful of Chmiel’s friends to a three-day extravaganza celebrating Ohio’s state native fruit (an official designation as of 2009). It’s now the biggest outdoor party in the county, which is saying a lot considering the reputation of Ohio University. The festival—imagine the love child of a tie-dyed jam fest and a 4-H exhibition at the county fair—now includes live music, expert speakers, and a host of demonstrations and activities, drawing as many as eight thousand visitors. Many come for the food, including pawpaw-stuffed crepes, pawpaw salsa, pawpaw ice cream sandwiches made with oatmeal-spicebush cookies, and pawpaw curries, while others go for the beer: wheats, saisons, and pale ales all brewed locally with Ohio-grown pawpaws. The festival is proof that if you build it—or bake it or brew it—they will come.
I arrive on a Friday afternoon and set up a tent in the camping area atop a gentle hill. The event has had near-perfect weather for more than a decade; sunny September days and cool nights. It appears this weekend will continue that trend. But this is not my first trip to Albany. In fact, my first exposure to pawpaws—the event that hooked me and inspired this book—occurred at this festival, in a patch of woods between the park and a farmer’s pasture. I came out of the forest with a bag of fruit, baptized in pulp. I’m sure hundreds have had similar experiences. I see the familiar look on people’s faces as they come out of the woods or walk away from a sampling table, that of puzzlement and wonder, wheels turning, grasping at the mystery and the possibilities.
I walk the dirt road to the festival entrance. A hand-painted wooden sign reads, WELCOME TO THE PAWPAW CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. Inside, vendor booths and large tented spaces form orderly avenues in a village-like setting. The sleepy morning slowly comes to life with vendors brewing coffee, and potatoes and eggs frying in cast-iron skillets. Under the main tent official swag—T-shirts, hats, pint glasses, and posters—is arranged on tables with designs from current and past festivals—slogans like “Pawpaws to the People”; a cartoon-like illustration of a guitar with a pawpaw body; artwork inspired by Cesar Chavez–era farmworker propaganda, others in the street-art style of Shepard Fairey; and this year, an intricate and timely Mayan-calendar-inspired riff on pawpaws. There are pamphlets explaining what a pawpaw is and how to grow one; information from the Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association; the Ohio Hill Country Heritage Area; and others. Elsewhere, nurseries offer pawpaw trees—both little year-old seedlings and mature, flowering trees of six feet—as well as tropical herbs and other native plants. There’s art, jewelry, handmade leather goods, clothes, pottery and sculpture. Later in the day there will be workshops and discussions on a variety of topics, from yoga and bicycle maintenance to lye soap making and traditional scything.
Toward the lake an atlatl, or spear throwing, contest is under way. Aside from being an enjoyable challenge, the ancient hunting tool is part of the wider acknowledgment of the indigenous groups who originally ate pawpaws (“Ohio’s First Fruit” was the slogan of the 2003 festival). There is a strong sense here that the pawpaw is ancient and belongs to an earlier culture. “There’s something very mysterious and romantic about the idea that this used to be central to the food systems of people who lived here, and it just disappeared one hundred years ago,” a pawpaw vendor said. Organic and natural growing systems are embraced, as are human-powered tools: several Athens-area farmers use the scythe, while a tortilla company grinds corn with a bicycle-powered mill. The East of the River Shawnee Tribe of Ohio is also represented, hosting workshops on flint knapping and survival skills, flute playing, and demonstrating Shawnee storytelling, drumming, dancing, and singing.
Soon, various drums are pounding throughout the grounds, percussion mingling with banjo, guitar, and a growing din of voices. By midday fields are covered in cars and the festival grounds are packed with people (there are pedicabs, a horse-drawn wagon, and shuttle buses between Ohio University and Lake Snowden). Festival attire ranges from T-shirts and overalls to polo shirts and hemp-thread ponchos. It’s a diverse crowd mingling under a shared love for, or simply curiosity about, pawpaws.
A circus of characters materialize between the music stage and beer tent. While a country-folk group performs I look over my shoulder and see a man on stilts with a goat mask and hooved feet, hovering above the crowd like a pagan reveler in carnival season. A pawpaw mascot in an overstuffed pawpaw suit (split in half to reveal his seeds) bounces about, posing for pictures. And for some reason I will never learn, someone with an old-fashioned megaphone periodically calls out a booming, monotonous chant, “Paw, paw, paw, paw, paw, paw, paw, paw . . .” Long after the festival this chant will ring in my head.
Under the main tent, which is dubbed the Pawpaw Tent, a panel of local experts (a grower, a chef, and a professor, among others) taste and comment on submitted fruits, some of which are named cultivars, some wild, and some even nascent breeding efforts. After sampling each entry, the judges will select just one to be named the year’s Best Pawpaw. A second award is given each year for the largest pawpaw, and a third to the winner of the pawpaw cook-off contest, which has seen the likes of pawpaw semifreddo, punjabi pockets with pawpaw chili sauce, and pawpaw mojitos.
Like any good fair, there’s also an eating contest. When the band has finished, contestants—young and old, men and women—sit at a table near the stage, hands tied behind their backs. Chmiel, the event’s MC, piles a bowlful of processed pawpaw pulp, seeds and all, in front of each contestant. Their task is to eat all of the pulp, clean every seed by mouth, and then spit them out. The victor will be declared when all fruit is eaten and all seeds have been spat, shiny and clean. Chmiel asks an audience member to keep time and begins the countdown. “On your mark, get set . . . pawpaw!” The dozen or so contestants dive face-first into the pulp, cheeks smeared in yellow goop (it’s quite messy for one man with a particularly long beard). In just a few minutes a young woman wearing a Ron Paul T-shirt hoists her fists high above her head and is declared this year’s winner.
Peterson Pawpaws have been present at the Ohio festival since its inception, and Lance Beard began hauling pawpaws from Jim’s farm to the festival in 2008 (Neal himself is absent from the festival for the first time this year; Jim and Donna have wanted to return for many years, but September is always “full throttle” at their orchard). As he is most years, Lance is joined by Ken Drabik, and this year also by Nate Orr, one of Neal’s close friends from Harpers Ferry.
I jump in to help with sampling. By one o’clock work at the booth is nonstop. To keep the sample plates filled I’m opening stacked pawpaw boxes and gently squeezing the fruit, checking for ripe ones to slice. With a flick of the knife a chunk falls to the plate, and it’s just as quickly scooped up. I imagine what it was like at the Dupont Circle farmers market on the day following the Washington Post feature. Here at the festival, though, it’s even more intense; the fruit is on the shopping list of nearly everyone in sight. This is one of very few occasions in the world when people line up to buy pawpaws.
These Peterson Pawpaws are not cheap. But knowing the work that Jim Davis puts into each piece, knowing the quality—never mind the decades of breeding and analysis—I’m the first to defend the price tag. They’re sold one or two at a time, but an occasional large purchase of an entire box is made; the line is long and sales are brisk.