Wild hickory nuts

This story is a chapter of a memoir focused on the insights I gained from interactions with certain notable people. All these stories are true. I admit, however, my memory may not be flawless. 

Euell Gibbons - Wild Hickory Nuts

From the front porch of Aunt Phoebe’s Perch we could just make out the silver threads of the Gasconade River a hundred feet or so below. The late afternoon sunlight was tinted tan by the canopy of remaining oak leaves. It was warm for November. We tilted our chairs back to prop our feet on the railing of the old Ozark log cabin. Joli, our black and white border collie, paced back and forth eager for a walk down to the river.

The year was 2008. My sixtieth birthday fell on a weekend. Merry and I decided to celebrate by taking our first exploratory trip into the Ozarks of Missouri. We headed out of St. Louis down I-44 (that’s pronounced “farty far” in Missouri) headed for Rolla (“Rah-la”) about a hundred miles to the southwest. As soon as we escaped the endless suburbs we began to climb gradually onto the Salem Plateau of the central Missouri Ozarks.

The plateau is a limestone uplift cut through by many shallow rivers and streams. The topography is known as “karst,” meaning that the limestone has severely eroded over the millennia resulting in numerous caves, remarkable fresh water springs and streams of clear water. Along some streams a layer of harder rock such as flint forms an impermeable cap over the water-soluble limestone resulting in spectacular high bluffs.

At Rolla we turned north and wound for about thirty miles more over and around some very steep hills. On the secondary roads small stream crossings were sometimes accomplished by means of low water bridges: nothing much more than paving in the creek bed. Our destination was Rock Eddy Bluff Farm near Dixon, Missouri. Eventually the blacktop ended. We turned up a long dirt driveway and passed a small horse pasture. An older ATV was parked at the end of the drive with a bumper sticker that read, “Another Redneck for Obama.” This must be the place.

Our hosts, Tom and Kathy Cory, gave us directions to the log cabin where we were to stay. We chose this place because it seemed as close as possible to an authentic Ozark country experience. The log cabin was ancient but had been renovated to include a sleeping loft, luxury outhouse, gravity feed sink, gas stove and solar powered LED lights

After catching our breath on the porch, we put the leash on Joli and headed down the path to the river. The air was clean with the lightest scent of leaf mold. The path was so deeply covered in oak and hickory leaves that often we couldn’t see our feet. A little way along I discovered a spot where there were a lot of freshly fallen wild hickory nuts. Merry gathered some to take home. This put me in mind of how I came to first meet Euell Gibbons many years earlier.

Back in the fall of 1967 I was a sophomore history major at Bucknell University. A fellow from Philadelphia named Eric was my roommate for that semester. Eric was a very serious biology student who was proud of his Quaker heritage. He had an easy smile, shaggy hair and wore handmade sandals with socks, all the time, everywhere, in all weather. He liked to regale me with stories about the wonders of the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

Eric’s Quaker faith was the foundation of his sincere pacifism. My own nascent anti-war beliefs did not have religious underpinnings but grew out of my political opposition to the Vietnam War. We often talked about our differing perspectives on pacifism. He invited me to accompany him to the local Friends Meeting where he assured me I would meet others who would be happy to talk to me about their pacifist beliefs. At the time I was so uncertain of my own beliefs that this prospect did not appeal to me, so I politely declined. My interest level reversed, however, when Eric casually mentioned that about once a month after the Quaker Meeting Euell Gibbons led a hike to gather wild foods followed by a “wild dinner.”

I knew about Euell Gibbons from my Boy Scout days. I had read and re-read his wonderful Stalking the Wild Asparagus. I was intrigued by his claim that it was possible to live solely on food gathered from the wild. I loved his extensive knowledge of plants, his folksy style and his deep affection for the outdoors. I did not know he lived in Central Pennsylvania. I had always wanted to try eating some of the wild plants he recommended but had never dared. This was my chance.

A few weeks later I accompanied Eric to my first Quaker meeting. It was not exactly what I expected. After a few minutes of sitting quietly one person after the other stood to talk about their favorite Bible verse or their interpretation of their faith as it applied to events either in their personal life or the life of the nation. I had a naive idea that Quakers mostly meditated during meetings and only occasionally spoke when the spirit moved them. These Quakers were downright talky.

When I didn’t think anyone was watching I scanned the room but didn't see anyone that remotely resembled a weathered outdoorsman. After the service a very tall, gaunt man with unruly gray hair stood and invited anyone who wanted to go along for a walk to meet him outside.

It was a cool sunny late fall day. We walked for quite a distance along a railroad track outside of town. Euell seemed to know the name of every plant. Every few feet he would stop, pick up a plant, explain what it was and how it could be eaten. At his direction we gathered the edible plants he intended to use to prepare dinner and put them in buckets. At the end of the walk we drove out to Euell's farm where we all pitched in to make a big salad, a savory soup and some roasted root vegetables.

On the walk we collected a large clump of yellow and orange fungus that was growing on a tree stump. Euell called it “chicken of the woods.” We cut it in strips. Some went in the soup and some in the salad. I asked Euell how it was possible to identify which mushrooms were edible and which poisonous. He laughed and said that it was not possible to know which of the many thousands of mushrooms were poisonous. The trick, he explained, was to know how to positively identify just a few edible mushrooms and only ever eat those. Experimentation with mushroom edibility was not something he wanted to risk.

I went on several of these walks during that year. I got to know Euell and his wife, Freda, fairly well. Euell loved to tell stories as we walked. Frieda filled us in on various details of their life while we were chopping, cooking and eating. I learned quickly that Euell was a heavy cigarette smoker and that pizza was actually his favorite food. Euell was not a vegetarian or wild food purist. When he prepared wild food he typically used plenty of butter or even bacon fat. He also employed of a wide variety of spices to improve a sometimes questionable taste.

Until his “Stalking” books became a success Euell led an eclectic and pretty hard life. He was born in Texas in 1911. His mother, Laura Bowers Gibbons, was quite knowledgeable about wild edible plants and passed her knowledge on to the young Euell. He dedicated Asparagus to her. In 1922 his family moved to rural New Mexico. Times were hard. Foraging for plants and berries became a real necessity. Euell left home at the age of fifteen and drifted from job to job for a few years. By the early 1930s he was homeless. His knowledge of foraging helped keep him alive.

He joined the Army in 1934 and served two years. Once out of the Army he joined the Communist Party and wrote propaganda pamphlets for them. He told me that during the depression he truly believed Communist ideology provided the best practical hope for the poor and the working classes. After Russia invaded Poland in 1939, however, he renounced Communism and spent most of World War II in Hawaii working at a Navy shipyard.

In the immediate postwar years Euell lived for a time on Maui. He expanded his knowledge of foraging to include items that could be found by beach combing. He went back to school, earned his high school diploma then attended the University of Hawaii from 1947 – 50 majoring in anthropology. He earned some spending money by composing crossword puzzles in Hawaiian.

In 1948, he married Freda Fryer, a teacher, and both decided to join the Quaker Meeting. They taught school on Maui until they relocated to the mainland in 1953. Euell always wanted to be a writer. In 1955, while employed at Pendle Hill Quaker Study Center near Philadelphia, he started to write a novel about a man who lived primarily by foraging wild foods. He worked on it for years.

Through friends he eventually managed to show the manuscript of the novel to a respected New York City publisher. The publisher was impressed but didn’t think Euell’s novel would sell. Instead, the publisher recommended he use all the material he had collected about wild foods to write a non-fiction book. The resulting book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, was published in 1962. It found an immediate audience and sold well enough that Euell and Freda could retire to a little farm in Central PA. He wrote seven more books on foraging. Most sold well but none was as successful as Asparagus.

One of the most appealing aspects of Asparagus is its easy conversational style. Each chapter has a catchy title and very complete information on finding, identifying and preparing that particular food. The narrative is cleverly designed to fire the reader’s imagination and taste buds. Euell tended to exaggerate how tasty and good for you certain plants are, but that is part of the charm. I still have my copy.

Euell was never apologetic about having once been a card-carrying Communist. Growing up during the height of the cold war, I was taught that all Communists were evil beings who just wanted to exterminate America with the atom bomb. Euell came from a time of economic desperation where a substantial number of Americans deeply believed that our country needed to adopt some form of democratic socialism to help the poor and working class. He told me he believed our democracy was weakened every time the rich got away with exploiting the poor. He believed in fighting back on the side of the oppressed. I admired his conviction. He was a genuine dust bowl lefty in the Woody Guthrie vein.

He and his wife were both steadfast supporters of the peace movement and occasionally attended local vigils and marches opposing the Vietnam War. I especially remember Euell holding forth one Sunday about how the Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] had a real opportunity to remake outmoded and ineffective liberal politics into a truly progressive force that would transform our corrupt political system.

Hearing his “old left” perspective was very important to me. At the time I was only marginally involved in the anti-war movement. I knew nothing about the history of left-wing politics in America. I was suspicious of the SDS because of the views expressed by the mainstream media. After hearing Euell talk, I decided to go to a SDS meeting and see for myself what they were about. Euell provided me with a bridge between the anti-war movement of the 60s and the progressive politics of America’s past. He was a living refutation of the propaganda I had been fed all my young life. I didn’t just think he was on the right track, I knew it. His endorsement of the agenda of the so-called “new left” was a key part of my decision to seriously devote myself to social justice causes.

A few years after I graduated I was pleasantly surprised to see that Euell had been invited to write a couple of articles for the National Geographic and that he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and on Sonny and Cher. I was a bit surprised to find him pitching Grape Nuts cereal in a TV commercial in 1974 during which he uttered the phrase I never forgot. When describing the taste of Grape Nuts he said in his Will Rogers voice, “reminds me of wild hickory nuts.”

My friends and I laughed. Some moaned that Euell had “sold out.”  Personally I knew he had lived a hard and principled life. I was happy he had achieved some small measure of fame and economic success. A few years later John McPhee wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times to remind everyone that Euell was more than a Grape Nuts pitchman, “He was a man who knew the wild in a way that no one else in this time has even marginally approached.”

More than fifty years after Stalking the Wild Asparagus was published many of the wild plants he loved, virtually unknown as food at the time, have made their way to the mainstream. Some of Euell’s favorites included lamb’s quarters, rose hips, dandelion shoots, pokeweed, stinging nettle, purslane and cattails. Most of these “wild” foods are now commonly available, even sought after by the best chefs. At a recent meal in a fine restaurant in New York City, for example, I was served the special of the day featuring fresh, locally sourced, stinging nettles. I am certain that Euell’s effort to popularize wild foods contributed greatly to this major shift in the food culture.

Although most people do not now remember Euell’s lifelong dedication to social justice, sitting with him in his kitchen was an education that I never forgot.

Euell died in 1975 from an aneurysm secondary to his Marfan’s syndrome.  Although it's been a long time since I participated in my first wild dinner, I hear his voice and feel his influence every time I take a walk in the woods. I can’t hear the phrase “reminds me of wild hickory nuts” without smiling.

References:

To my mind John McPhee wrote the definitive article about Euell Gibbons recounting a four-day trip he took with Euell in early 1968 on the Susquehanna River, “A Forager,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1968.

Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euell_Gibbons                                   

Grape Nuts commercial filmed in the Ozarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTcLOqTsNds

Rock Eddy Bluff Farm can be found at: http://www.rockeddy.com