On Break: Lost in a Swamp

I had a short break before some professional development work at school today and I decided to take a walk in the woods. Off trail and just over a tiny creek, I noticed some deciduous trees and,wondering if they might be maples, decided to have a closer look. It was swampy and I had to hop on tufts of grass, but I made it to the trees, and then decided to wiggle my way through some rose bushes to see what was beyond the swampy area. I was hoping to stumble on some morel mushrooms but instead I hiked into a deeper swamp. Too far out to turn back and not wanting to go through the thorny shrubs again, I planned to circle around towards the school but this only led into deeper water. I tried walking on dead logs and more tufts of grass but a log snapped and my foot plunged into the cold water, and I just gave up and waded through the calf-high water and bushwhacked through a thicket, arriving back at the school sopping wet and with no socks (l had wrung them out and placed them in my car window to dry) and just in time to talk with my colleagues about literature.

A Walk in the Woods after Hearing of the Death of an Old Friend

I had walked onto spongy earth. Cattails and other straw-colored reeds had been matted flat onto the ground, maybe by a flood from a nearby creek, which was slightly swollen. It was early and the sun was a deep red. Behind me, the school where I teach was filling with students and in a few minutes the morning bell would ring and I'd begin teaching for the day. But, right now, I stood by the creek, recalling a time many years earlier in the Adirondacks when I sat beside a mountain stream straining to hear something; I wanted a sign that there was something greater than the water flowing quickly over slippery stones and down the mountainside. I was alone, having driven up to the mountain spot from my home on Long Island, where I lived with my mom and three sisters. I became angry and frustrated with the creek and the mountain and the woods when all I heard was silence, everything seemed so pointless, and I walked away suffering my defeat. Now I stood by another creek. The night before I received news that a friend of mine from high school had died. He was a year younger than I, and he had two children the same age as mine. I thought about the nights we spent together with friends in the woods, at house-parties, behind the medical center, smoking and drinking, laughing, telling our stories. I imagined standing beside him and telling him that in 25 years he would be gone, taken from the earth.  I told him that he would have children and they would lose their father. I thought about his response and I felt sad and I yielded to all the things we cannot see. I returned to the swollen creek, looking down into the clear water which was making an oily swirl around a smooth gray branch. I could hear birdsong in the bare oaks and green pines. The air felt cold and no breeze blew. I smelled the wet, decaying earth. I didn't strain for anything beyond this. I turned a few times, looking around at it all, and then returned to school.

In the Woods, Past, Present and Future

March 8

I took a walk this morning in the woods next to the school where I teach, and I imagined I was in the same woods I roamed when I was a boy on Long Island, although I’m now 42 and live in the hills of western Massachusetts. I imagined these were the same pines I smelled, the same sharp air I breathed, and the same birdsong I followed, often barefoot down sandy paths. And, as I walked, I looked ahead to when I'll be an old man passing under the same bare oaks my children will someday pass under when they are old and their children will pass under when they are old, and I am gone. At some point, I noticed a coyote track, a single pawmark in the mud in the middle of the trail. The mud was soft and wet and the print was fresh. I can see the coyote leaping from the dark on one side of the trail, making a brief landing here, and then disappearing into the brush on the other side.

Is sharing always for the best?

The few leaves the bush-bean had left were sagging and pocked with holes. Several limbs were truncated about halfway out, as if the plant had given up. I dug into an orange five-gallon pail and cupped a handful of compost. I had already dropped and dug in 12-pails of compost around the stems of tomatoes and corn. Now, I had a three pails left and I had to be selective.

This plant obviously needed compost. Each batch is a mix of kitchen scraps, wood-ash, lawn-clippings, dried and green leaves and lots of weeds, giving plants the nutrients and bacteria they need to grow and produce.

But this one is weak. Other stronger plants stand a better chance of using the nutrients in the compost to produce a bigger harvest. When you have a limited supply, sharing with the weak seems to be a waste.

Yes, this is what I thought as I kneeled over the that needy plant. And, taken out of the chicken-wire fence of the garden, it’s an ugly thought. But this is what gardening does sometimes: It brings up the worst thoughts in me. Like the time I fantasized about catching the eastern cottontail—yes, he’s the eastern cottontail—in a Have-A-Heart cage and shooting it with a pellet gun. Ironic and ugly, I know.

But he ate my Swiss chard!

And here I now was choosing which plants deserve health. I had already decided that tomatoes came first because they are now producing fruit. Then, the corn, because they need plenty of energy to grow so tall. Beans were third in line because they are about to produce.

And because I only had a small amount of of compost left, the beans would have to share.

But that’s the thing: Should I?

If I share, the weaker plants could bounce back and in the end I’d have a greater yield. On the other hand, the weaker plants could continue to wither, stealing nutrients from the healthier ones, and in the end, I’d have a smaller yield.

Sharing is a gamble.

So, what did I do? I shared. Well, not quite. The truth is a few plants got just a little less.

On Suburban Maryland Roads: Hunting for Berries, Bypassing 'World Famous' Strip Clubs, Suffering Poison Oak (On the Forehead), Finding a Fox Finding Me, Reflecting on the Addiction of the Finder's Joy, and Returning with the Booty

We were visiting my sister, Jennifer, from our home in Holyoke, and once we arrived, I  headed outside to have a look around. My sister and her family (a husband named Dave and a baby daughter named Bridget) live in a suburban neighborhood just outside of Baltimore, on a street shaped like an oxbow, a tiny teardrop of a road branching off of the Patapsco River.

Out back, there's a sump and along its edge a patch of woods where I guessed I might find some berries. Starting here, I quickly noticed one of my favorites, blackberries. It was a bit early in the season, so my son, Paddy, and I had to search up and down the thorned canes to find the darker berries. We did, picking several mouthfuls and then continuing our search.

Through a tiny path at the end of the street we headed, stepping over a steel culvert that directed a stream towards the river, and walking into a development of row houses. Here, we picked our way through bramble after bramble that framed the road, and not far ahead, we spotted low-growing bushes with light-green, oval leaves, and on the end of each branch, blueberries.

We paused, admiring our find. A low-bush blueberry is only a little bigger than a pea, so to get as much flavor as possible, we filled our palms with them before eating a handful. Cars slowed to watch the two grazers, and I got the sense they didn't know about all the wild fruit growing outside their doors. (Or, they were wondering about these two out-of-towners picking all their berries.)

Either way, their watching eyes didn't slow us down. Because once you start picking, it's hard to stop. It's an obsession that isn't just about the sweet reward. Before your tongue even bursts that perfect berry against "your palate fine," some other joy pops in your brain when you see the reward; this happens a moment before you pluck the berry from its vine, and it's this finder's joy that charges your search.  I suspect some ancient evolutionary response wants to keep us scavengers out there in the hot sun hour after sweaty hour hunting for food-- and the addiction works!

In fact, I was so intent on foraging that I not only ignored the nosy neighbors but I even missed the poison oak when its oily leaves brushed my forehead as I rooted through the berry bushes. Yes, I said "my forehead!" And by nightfall, blisters bubbled up, one pimply pocket at a time.

But all this came to pass much later. In the moment, under the sun, on the wood's edge, my son and I were in bliss. Happily we noshed. Eventually, we had to drag ourselves away from the blueberry patch and out towards other finds.

We headed up and out of the townhouses and onto a busy main road.

Across from us was an 84 Lumber and beside that, a storage facility and a do-it-yourself car wash. Stretching down the road was an occasionally-gapped wall of other one-story businesses: a recycling center, asking for brass, copper and aluminum, a restaurant called Beefalo Bob's with a flashing neon sign advertising karaoke night, a strip club with dark-mirrored windows (one shattered) calling itself The World Famous McDoogles, a bail bondsman offering "the lowest" interest rates and a little farther down, beside a tiny drawbridge, a marina peddling steamed Maryland crabs ("too pricey," my sister said) and a tiny one-room wings and sub shop (in a spot where "restaurants go to die"). Behind the stores was a backdrop of woods where two industrial smokestacks puffed out white clouds of steam. High-power lines stretched back to the smokestacks, making a greenway where one evening I spotted a red fox watching me.

Paddy and I walked a little ways and then turned off the main road and headed back towards my sister's, where we stopped at some abandoned buildings. "Check that out," I said. The white-stucco shacks were once summer bungalows. As my sister explained, many of the neighborhood's bungalows were long ago purchased by factory workers from Bethlehem Steel (at a time when the Patapsco River was polluted and river-front property was cheap) and they are now being purchased again, torn down and turned into million-dollar homes, squeezed onto tiny water-front plots on a river more pristine.

These three shacks sat in a line down to the river's edge. Their yards were overgrown with sumac and oak and another tree which had what looked like four-foot-long pole-beans hanging down. Vines wound tightly around the trunks. Green plants of various types--some blossoming yellow and white flowers--covered where grass once grew, and along the edge of the road were the last fruits of the day, mulberries.


I jumped and grabbed a tree branch, pulling the berries down to us and soon our fingertips were stained with the dark purple juice. After picking the lower branches clean, we stood under the tree, looking up at mature berries hanging from the higher branches. "I can climb it," my son said. Although he's only four, I didn't doubt him, and I considered giving him a boost to help him scale up to the enticing upper berries.

But I thought better of it and walked back to my sister's.

Finding Fiddleheads without Breaking the Law

I have a confession to make. So, I was down by the Connecticut River at the spot where I knew ostrich ferns grow. They were in a gully where a culvert poked out of a section of the Manhan Bike Trail and I had gone there last summer when the massive ferns were fully unfurled reaching well above my head.

I hiked down and checked their stems and found they had the telltale groove that made them look something like a celery stalk.

I was excited to have found a spot to harvest the fern's edible fiddleheads next spring, and this is where I found myself this morning: standing in the same gully, poking through the leaf litter with a stick and finding the coiled fiddleheads.

Yet, I also found a sign. It said: Conservation Area: Do Not Disturb Plants. What? This sign was not here last year. It was not attached to a tree, just a big piece of bark, which was propped up on a concrete section of the culvert. I walked over and flipped the sign over so if anyone came around I could plead ignorance: What sign?

I bent down ready to pluck my first fiddlehead, but then my four-year-old son, Paddy, who was surprisingly quiet up until this moment, asked me a question: What did that sign say?

I could lie. Say it was just something the river washed up. It was a For Sale sign. A Tag Sale sign. And then have him return to breaking the law with his father. Our first shared crime.

Yes, the thought darted--very quickly--across my conflicted mind and I am not proud ... But, fiddleheads are so hard to find and I was running out of time; in a day or two they would unfurl and I would have to wait another year and maybe I would never find them again; last year I wrote a story about a forager who had been finding wild edibles in the Valley for some 20 years and he said he had never found the fiddlehead from an ostrich fern-- never!

Moreover, before you judge me, please remember these thoughts were all happening within a span of about 30 second, and in the end, I could not lie and break the law. (If he was not there, who knows?)

"It says we can't pick here," I said.

"I told you so," he said, reminding me that he had told me earlier that we needed to go to a new spot, not one we had already visited.

And that is what we did. We drove up to Route 5 in Northampton and explored the shoreline which the Connecticut River regularly floods and then recedes from; this is the type of wet soil ostrich ferns grow in. We walked around, carefully stepping over driftwood and bottles and Styrofoam coolers. We walked up onto a hill where there was some sort of generator behind a fence and there we spotted a stand of fiddleheads, but they were already unfurled.

We settled for the satisfaction of finding a spot for next year, and we were walking out, snacking on garlic mustard along the way, when I saw a few ferns sticking out of piles of branches pushed up by the river.

"That might be more ostrich ferns," I said.

We walked over and sure enough the whole area had the giant fiddleheads, curled up just below the sticks.

We stayed for about a half hour, picking a few from each bunch and leaving the rest to grow and reseed next year's crop. The stand was three times the size of the former spot (with no guilt attached to it). We brought our harvest home, cleaned, washed and boiled them for about 15 minutes and then pickled the whole bunch, enough for a couple of months.

So today, honesty paid, and ended with a jar of pickled fiddleheads.

This Year's Pole Bean Contraptions