Forget grass fed cows and organic shiso. Spurn the local free-range
ducks and non-GMO beets. Get out in the field with long gloves and haul in the
nettles, pick up the purslane, chomp on burdock roots. Gnaw on salads grisly and
deeply bitter with dandelion greens, tiny sour sorrel, and the evil garlic
mustard. Smoke your road-kill squirrel on the Weber in nests of fallen oak
leaves. And take a chance on that pretty mushroom popping up on a log after a
dewy night. Foraging is the new farming! And it's easy. You just go out and
pick stuff off the ground.
And chances are that if you own some woods and an old apple
orchard, you also have at least one forager creeping on to it when you aren't around
or early in the morning when sane people are asleep. These are deceptive humans,
often attractive, all smiley and natural when they emerge from the woods, innocently
coming upon you walking up Your Own Path and asking, "Oh, are those your
woods? I didn't know that." They are typically clean, earnest, full of
good will. Often Democrats. Possibly even contributors to Bernie Sanders' campaign.
Foragers have the purest of intentions. They even have a code! But don't be
tricked! They are cunning Gollum-like creatures, sneaking onto your land to
seek out Their Preciouses – mushrooms, berries, black walnuts, rooty treats --
which are actually, by law, Your Preciouses.
One fateful day a couple of years ago, when we were still
weekending, Dave, our friend and landlord, brought over some oyster mushrooms, which,
he explained, were given to him by Brenda (not her real name for reasons that will emerge), a forager who lived near by and
taught students at the local college how to steal food from others. Dave owns the barn we live
in, the old migrant quarters next to it – now a woodshop and garage for his
tractors -- and the land and house across the road. We had bought the other
half of the property, which surrounds his barn, selling an adjoining parcel to
him where he keeps his bees. Dave said that he had told Brenda she could forage
on this property, but she had wandered beyond his up into our woods and found a
stash of oyster mushrooms. She had given him "some" of hers and he
gave us half of his, which in retrospect seemed to be have been about five
pounds.
"God, how much did she get?"
"I don't know. It was a lot."
"That's so cool. I wonder if she'll teach me how to
find them," I said naively.
A few weeks later, I was in our back yard and saw a woman
talking to Dave outside the old migrant quarters. I went over to say hello and
was introduced to Brenda.
"Oh. Hi. I've been hoping to meet you. I understand you
found some oyster mushrooms [like a truck load] on our property."
"Oh, was that yours? I thought it was Dave's."
"No, our land starts a few hundred feet west of the
barn. Anyway, I'd love to learn more about this. Where did you find the
mushrooms?"
Long, seemingly thoughtful, pause. "Oh, I don't
remember…"
Alarm bells . She's a mushroom expert! Mushrooms
show up in the same spot every year. She has the oyster mushroom
location stored on her GPS! I squinted back. "Well, let me know when you want to forage on our property again."
Brenda flashed me an open-faced cheesy lying smile, "Sure."
The path on our property that leads west of Dave's barn is lined
each year with thick black raspberry bushes, which I pick for syrups and jam or
I just freeze fresh in bags. Two weeks after I met Brenda, the berries ripened.
I spotted them on Sunday, already shiny and black, right before we had to head
back to the city. Back upstate the following weekend, steel bowl in hand, I
trotted eagerly up the path and stopped at the first berry bush. It had been
stripped, and the grass around the briar patch was tamped down. I walked up to
the next one. Same horrifying denuded nubs. On and on up the path. No berries,
just evidence of someone or something tromping around the ravished bushes. "The
forager!" I growled.
In my knee-jerk socialist days, I would quote Proudhon:
"Property is theft." Now that I owned property, however, what ran
through my berry-greedy brain as I walked from fruit ruin to ruin was a
comradely affinity with the old English squires, righteous in their anger at
poachers, fortunate in their ability to nab these thieves, rabbits dangling
from their belts, and to string them up without any consequences. Viva la
ancien regime!
Once I learned from Dave that Brenda and a friend had been
there earlier that week swimming in his pond, I needed no other proof. I sat
down and wrote her what I believed was a reasonable and irate letter. She was
renting a house near us and I drove by and stuffed it into her mailbox. Michael
says I called her a "thief". I don't remember that, although in hindsight,
I think that that I was one rant away from cutting and pasting the words from
tabloid headlines. I might have gone a little overboard.
I added my phone number to the letter, and a couple days
later I heard Brenda on my voice mail insisting on her innocence and
suggesting that a bear might have eaten the berries. "Ha!" I said out
loud and subsequently to all my friends and a few strangers, "A bear does
not gently pluck single berries off a bush and carefully tread around it."
I returned Brenda's call but only got her voice mail. I left
a message, but she never returned it. She did call Dave, however, and argued
her case to him because he's far cuter than I am, saying that she would never have picked my raspberries and always
obeyed the forager code. "We only take a handful of anything we
pick," she piously told him (forgetting, I guess, the 15-pound oyster mushroom
haul she had pulled out of my woods).
To my relief, Brenda moved out of our neighborhood in the fall, and I figured
that was the end of her. I relaxed my vigil. The following raspberry season was
both bear- and forager-free, and I bagged about three gallons of them.
Then, last spring, I found a morel. I had long suspected
that these yummy mushrooms lurk beneath the old apple trees that spider among
the thorny webs of multiflora rose and nasty honeysuckle, which coat most of
our acres. Morels might be the safest wild mushrooms to forage. With their
blonde spongy bee hive hairdos, they seem to have few toxic twins, and even
those apparently don't kill you.
So last year, I Googled around and discovered a great site called morelhunters.com. I learned that they hit our area around mid-May. It was then too late in the month, but I decided to check anyway under the dying trees of the old orchard. There, I discovered a wide well worn path skirting through masses of brush from apple tree to apple tree. Too wide and well trodden even for morel-loving bear. Foragers! Grrr.
I followed the path, poking about, until, under a battered old trunk, I found one soggy and forlorn morel. I brought it home in triumph, set it on a plate, and a slug crawled out of it. The mushroom lay there for a couple weeks, getting creepier every day until I finally tossed it out. But it was an inspiring event, and I was intent on getting started early this year.
So last year, I Googled around and discovered a great site called morelhunters.com. I learned that they hit our area around mid-May. It was then too late in the month, but I decided to check anyway under the dying trees of the old orchard. There, I discovered a wide well worn path skirting through masses of brush from apple tree to apple tree. Too wide and well trodden even for morel-loving bear. Foragers! Grrr.
I followed the path, poking about, until, under a battered old trunk, I found one soggy and forlorn morel. I brought it home in triumph, set it on a plate, and a slug crawled out of it. The mushroom lay there for a couple weeks, getting creepier every day until I finally tossed it out. But it was an inspiring event, and I was intent on getting started early this year.
Morels emerge when the soil temperature reaches 50 degrees, but
this winter was so cold and the spring so dry that I failed to spot any when
I started checking the trees in early May. I did, however, spot Brenda. That same week, sitting on the swing and reading my Kindle in the back yard, I saw a car
drive up and a woman and her dog get out, walking up the path toward the top of
our hill where our apple orchard lies. She didn't look over and didn’t see me.
I headed over to the base of the path, silently (and I hope with a Squire-like
menace) watching her peer about in the grass, her cute muttish hound pouncing
around beside her. He started to trot toward me. She looked up and
slowly followed him down until she was within stringing-up distance.
"Hi," she said, "I'm Brenda," and held
out her hand.
"I know. I'm Carol." I shook her hand as if she
wasn't in any danger, "I met you a couple years ago. We had an
altercation."
Not missing a beat, she responded, "Oh, you know, I
never took those raspberries."
"Well…"
She glanced back up toward the hill, "I've been looking
for nettles." Right. "Dave said I could check for them on his
property."
"Well, actually, you were on our property."
"Oh, really? I didn't know that. I thought it was
Dave's property." She added carelessly, "I didn't see anyone
around."
"Our car is in the garage. We're up here full time
now."
"Oh, well, I thought it was Dave's property." She
repeated.
"No." I waved at a flagged stake a short distance
up the path behind us. "That marks the end of Dave's land and the
beginning of ours." She had been wandering about 50 feet beyond the stake.
I was too gracious to mention that we had pointed this out two years before.
"Oh, that's good to know…" Pause, then awkwardly.
"So, I was looking for nettles. I'm really a mushroom expert, but I'm
trying to learn about other things." Nettles are trash plants, growing on
every available patch of earth throughout the Northeast. So what a coincidence that
an expert fungi poacher would seek the ubiquitous nettle in mid-May right by
the thief-worn path where I had found my slug-infested morel.
And why wasn't she wearing gloves? Nettles sting.
But it was a beautiful day, she was earnest and friendly,
and her dog was adorable. "Look. If you want to forage on our land, just call
me. I'd really like to follow you around and learn about nettles..and other
things."
"Sure." Same open-faced deceptive smile, but I had
grown bored with revenge.
We exchanged phone numbers, just like new BFFs would do, and
she gaily got back into her car with her bouncy cute dog and took off. I guess
she hadn't been all that excited about the nettles. And she missed the wild
strawberries. I hope she calls.
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