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.
