Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  When it stood directly in front of me, it opened its mouth, and I saw its thick teeth and the naked pink of its tongue. A terror as great as any I have ever known settled over me like a suffocating blanket, and I closed my eyes, surrendering myself to those jaws. But next I felt not the rip and tear of teeth, but the wet scratch of a tongue and the warm wind of bear’s breath on my face.

  A moment later it left me, and lumbered over to lick and breathe on Eva, enveloping her face, too, in its wide jaws. Then it disappeared into the woods, and I sat by the stump, thinking, So that’s how babies are made.

  The encyclopedia doesn’t say a lot about pregnancy and childbirth, though there are long articles on conception, fetal development, and the types of drugs obstetricians use during labor. There is a section called Abnormal Changes During Pregnancy and another on Accidents During Labor, but I can’t bring myself to read those yet.

  It does say, A woman’s strength and general physical health are several of the many factors affecting labor length and outcome. And also, Walking is considered the exercise of choice for the parturient woman.

  Even armed with the machete and the rifle, we felt as though we were going to our doom, when we left the clearing and entered the forest for our first walk. Despite the midday heat, we wore boots and long pants and we felt a tight sense of foreboding as we followed the dirt road away from the house.

  The forest looked lush and safe, but we jumped at the sound of each other’s footsteps. Even the breeze made us wince. We had rounded the first curve in the overgrown road when something started in the underbrush and went bounding and crashing up the hill. A little sheepishly we agreed we had gone far enough for the first day and we headed home.

  But we went out again the next day and ventured a bit farther down the road. The day after that we inspected the orchard and the following day we walked to the bridge. On the way home I realized with a shock I had left the gun in the garden.

  After a hard winter and an uncertain spring, both hens are laying again and we are rich in eggs, most of which we scramble with parsley, rosemary, and basil from the garden or hard-boil to eat with sprinkles of our hoarded garlic salt.

  The garden is doing pretty well now, too, although not a single melon or broccoli seed ever germinated, the corn seems to have stopped growing, and the last row of lettuce I planted produced only a few ragged plants. But we’re already eating chard and spinach and peas, and tonight we had a salad of beet green thinnings.

  I never realized what a lovely flower garden a vegetable patch is. The squashes sport wide golden blossoms, tomato flowers are scattered like white stars among the green vines, and the bean plants are decorated with lavender buds.

  Down in the orchard, the fruit trees are loaded with small, hard fruit, and the green knobs of nuts fill the walnut tree.

  Eva’s flat stomach has begun to show a tidy bulge, though there are still moments when I can’t believe she is really pregnant, when I’m certain her fickle period will still arrive. She has regained some of her old grace and moves like herself again, though she does not dance.

  Nothing seems to bother her these days. She forgets to lock the door at night. She doesn’t give a thought to the emptying pantry. She hardly notices the ragged holes in the chard leaves, the stunted pepper plants, the scruffy cucumbers, or the puny corn. She doesn’t worry as I do about F1 crosses or sterile seeds. She has never thought to count the canning lids or wonder what will happen if the spring runs dry.

  But I worry for both of us. I worry about pests and diseases and accidents. I worry about fire and marauders. I worry about the hens and the orchard, about the broken shingles on the roof, and the sagging utility room. At night I lie awake, staring into the blackness, and wonder how we will ever get a baby out of Eva, how on earth we will manage once it’s here.

  I still read the encyclopedia sometimes, not for the Achievement Tests or Harvard seminars but in the same way I once read novels—for the stories it contains. I read only at night now, in those few minutes after the day’s work is done and before the light fades from the room. I have abandoned the alphabet, and I skip and skim, sprawling on my mattress with the volume propped up beside me and reading whatever catches my fancy until my weary body drags me into sleep and the final sentences mingle with my dreams.

  Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). The coast redwood is the world’s tallest tree and one of the most long-lived. In favorable parts of their range, coast redwoods can live more than two thousand years. Although only one seed in a million becomes a mature redwood, only wind and storm and man pose any threat to a full-grown tree.

  Even when redwoods are toppled or otherwise injured, they have a remarkable adaptation for survival. Wartlike growths of dormant buds called burls are stimulated to produce sprouts which grow from a fallen or damaged tree. It is common to see young trees formed from burls encircling an injured parent tree.

  We hadn’t intended to go there when we set out on our walk this afternoon. At first we just headed down the road, and then, right before we reached the bridge, we decided to turn off onto a game trail we discovered a few days ago. It led us through a thicket and across a flat space where the forest canopy was high above us and there was little undergrowth. After a while the trees began to grow smaller and denser again, and we found we were hiking uphill. Following the narrow trail in single file, we climbed steadily, each of us absorbed in the clean sound of our breathing, the honest burn of the muscles in our thighs.

  When I realized we were walking through the same part of the forest we had torn through to reach our dying father, my first thought was to turn back. But that impulse passed and suddenly I felt an urgent need to see his grave. I wanted to face it, to know for certain what had happened. I wanted to see if my nightmares were true.

  I wanted that so intensely I felt reluctant to mention it, in case Eva would decide to turn back. I was following her, and just as I was beginning to feel guilty for tricking her into going where she might not want to go, I saw her pace slow. A second later, she squared her shoulders and kept walking, and when we passed a patch of wild-flowers, she stooped to pick a few.

  By the time Eva led us into the glade, my hands, too, were filled with flowers, and I was panting and hot and ready for a rest. Even so, I entered that place hesitantly, ready to wince and run.

  There was the grave, a closed and quiet mound. Despite a winter’s worth of rain and oak leaves and fir needles, it seemed barer than the ground around it. But it was not opened. We faced only warming dirt and not the torn earth or strewn flesh of my nightmares.

  I have to admit I felt a sense of accomplishment looking at my father’s grave. Somehow we had known what to do. We had dug deep and filled it well, so that now it was healing cleanly like a well-tended wound.

  We laid our flowers on the mound, and then sat beside it in a deep silence as though we were sitting beside an old friend with whom words were no longer needed. I pressed my palms against the soil that covered my father’s decomposing cells and thought of rot and worms, remembered all the nightmares I had woken to in the darkness of our house, those images that left me stiff and wet with dread and guilt.

  I imagined my father’s face bloating, collapsing beneath its load of dirt. I imagined the writhing maggots, the thick liquids, the putrefaction. And yet, that held no horror. So what? I thought. We shit when we’re alive, rot when we’re dead. That’s nature. That’s our nature.

  In that gentle wash of early summer sun, I dozed, dreamed again, felt in the sun on my head the weight and warmth of my father’s hand. I remembered how when I was a little girl he used to come into my room at bedtime, how he would sit on my bed for a joke and a moment of talk before he bent to kiss me, to say, “Sweet dreams, Pumpkin,” and leave me warm and safe in the benevolent night.

  It came to me then that I could take comfort in knowing my father and my mother were dead, that death’s mystery had already embraced them. Whatever happened when a person died had happened to them. They ha
d gone on ahead, had broken the trail, and because of that, death seemed a little cozier, a little safer, a little less terrifying. Because my parents were already there—in death—I saw I could afford to enjoy the sunlight for as long as I possibly could. Sitting beside my father’s grave, I was glad—and proud—to be alive.

  Then Eva, who had been rummaging in the weeds on the other side of the grave, said, “Look at this.”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t these strawberries?” she asked, holding out a few berries the color and size of drops of blood.

  “I guess so,” I answered.

  “They look ripe,” she said, lifting them to her mouth.

  “Eva!” I gasped before she could taste them.

  “What?”

  “You can’t eat them.”

  “Why not?”

  “They might be poisonous.”

  “Strawberries?”

  “They might not be strawberries.”

  “What else could they be?”

  “I don’t know. But you can’t take a chance,” I said, pointing at her belly.

  She looked down at herself, shrugged, and held the berries out to me. “Okay. You try them.”

  Wild plants can kill you, I heard my mother say as Eva poured the berries into my palm. But they looked so innocuous, so sweet and innocent, and before I could think, I tossed them into my mouth. The seeds felt like tiny grains of sand between my teeth and the tang of strawberry burst on my tongue.

  “What do they taste like?” asked Eva.

  “Strawberries,” I answered, “only stronger. Strawberries to the tenth power.”

  I bent to look for more. “If they’re going to kill me,” I said, “I want to make sure they do a good job.”

  “Hey!” cried Eva. “Don’t hog them all.”

  We left our father’s grave and nibbled our way home, foraging from one patch to the next, grazing mindlessly as cows, greedily as kids, following the faint, meandering trail of strawberries that seemed to spread from that quiet glade through the whole forest.

  Tonight it came to me, as we sipped our bedtime cups of white tea—surely there is more than just an afternoon’s treat of berries in the woods. Surely the forest is filled with things to eat. The Indians who lived here survived without orchards or gardens, ate nothing but what these woods had to offer.

  But I have no idea where to begin. I have studied botany. I know about plant morphology and physiology. I know how plants grow and how they reproduce. I can recognize a plant cell under the microscope, can list the chemical reactions that cause photosynthesis. But I don’t know the names of the flowers we left on our father’s grave. I don’t know the names of the weeds we pull from the garden or even what kind of leaves we use for toilet paper.

  I can recognize poison oak. I can tell a fir tree from a redwood. But all the other names—Latin or Indian or common—are lost to me. I can’t even begin to guess which plants are edible or how else they might be used. That bush, I say, that flower or those weeds. And how can bushes or flowers or weeds feed us, clothe us, cure us?

  How can I have spent my whole life here and know so little?

  “There has to be a way we can learn about wild plants,” I said to Eva this morning, after having said it to myself all night.

  She looked up from her plate of eggs to ask, “How did other people do it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did anyone ever learn which plants were good to eat?”

  “I suppose someone had to try them.”

  “So?”

  “We can’t do that—it might kill us.”

  “What does your encyclopedia say?” she asked, rising from the table.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’d better stake those beans.”

  She was at the front door when she turned to say, “I thought Mom bought a book about wild plants—so she could try dyeing with them.”

  Entering our mother’s workroom was like entering the airless darkness of a tomb. With the window boarded over, there wasn’t even light enough for me to read the titles of the books crammed into the bookshelves that covered two of the walls, so armload by armload I carried them into the front room, and then armload by armload I returned them to their shelves—books about educational theories and weaving techniques, car repair manuals, murder mysteries, histories, biographies, novels.

  Finally I went out to the workshop for the claw hammer and the crowbar.

  “What’re those for?” Eva called from the garden as I passed. “I need some light,” I answered.

  The nails squealed and protested, the hammer slipped and gouged the window frame, and I sliced my hand on the corrugated tin, but finally daylight resumed its residence in my mother’s workroom.

  I found Native Plants of Northern California wedged on a top shelf between Madame Bovary and a book about the Spanish Civil War. Although my mother had written her name inside the front cover, its spine was unbroken and its pages pristine, as though she never had a chance to read it before the cancer stole even her love of color. I opened it eagerly, drawn not by a quest for color but by the lure of food.

  It was a disappointment. I think unconsciously I had been expecting a friend, a guide, a grandmother—some wise woman who loved us and who knew how much we had suffered, who would rise from the pages of that book and lead me into the woods, kneeling by the stream to show me herbs, poking her stick into the bank to dig up roots, patiently teaching me where to find, when to harvest, and how to prepare the forest’s bounty.

  Of course there was no such woman, only entry after entry of Latin names and botanical descriptions and vague black and white sketches or out-of-focus photographs. Native Plants of Northern California is as dense and confusing as the forest it is supposed to describe. All day while Eva gardened, I pushed grimly through its pages, trying to connect the weeds in the woods with the grainy photographs and spindly drawings, trying to rekindle meaning in words I had once memorized—petiole, umbel, raceme.

  I am more confused than ever. Tonight I think I’d give my soul for an hour on the Internet. I feel as if I’m trying to learn a new language without the help of tapes and books, a language for which there are no longer any native speakers, and for the first time in my life, I wonder if I can pass the test.

  There is a little plant that grows beside the workshop that I think is sheep sorrel. The encyclopedia doesn’t even mention sheep sorrel but Native Plants has a description that seems to fit, though there’s no illustration. The dictionary says sheep sorrel has pleasantly acid-tasting auricled leaves. “Auricled” means ear-shaped, and I suppose those lobed leaves might be considered ear-shaped, though they look more like arrowheads than ears to me.

  I can find no other description that fits any better, and surely, I reason over and over again, if the dictionary says sheep sorrel is pleasantly acid-tasting, it can’t be poisonous—though the dictionary’s definition for deadly nightshade says nothing about poison.

  What an act of faith and luck it is to pluck and taste a little green leaf. With Eva standing beside me and our mother’s warnings buzzing in my brain, I felt as though I were re-creating the history of humankind as I bent, picked a leaf, brushed a delicate coating of dust from its surface, and took a nibble, so tentatively I think I expected it to burn my lips. But it had a cool, delicate, clean taste. It tasted sour and green, like chlorophyll, pickles, the evening air. It was a little tough, almost like lettuce that’s bolted—but fresher, more alive.

  “What’s it like?” asked Eva, watching me.

  “It’s good,” I said, “a little sour.”

  We went inside to our dinner of beet greens, peas, and boiled eggs. I woke once in the night with a little cramp and lay awake a long time, wondering if I was going to die and wanting desperately to live.

  There’s not much that’s at its prime in the forest in midsummer. The spring greens have turned so tough and bitter we can’t eat them, and the autumn fruits and nuts and
seeds aren’t yet ripe. But so far, I’ve tried watercress, purslane, plantain, shepherd’s purse, soap plant root, redwood sorrel, lamb’s quarters, amaranth, wild mustard greens, and a late patch of miner’s lettuce.

  Slowly I’m beginning to untangle the forest, to attach names to the plants that fill it. The leaves we use as toilet paper are mullein. The plant with the daisylike flowers that grows by the workshop is pineapple weed—a cousin of chamomile. The weed in the garden with the triangular leaves is lamb’s quarters. All these years, the bushes that line the roadside have been hazelnut bushes. And the flowers we laid on our father’s grave were blue-eyed grass—the root of which is supposed to reduce fever and ease an upset stomach.

  Native Plants says the maples in these woods will produce sugar sap, that coltsfoot leaves can give us salt, that the Indians who once lived here used Spanish moss for diapers, California poppies as a painkiller, and molded acorn meal as an antibiotic. There are plants to stop fevers, plants to relieve colds, plants to soothe rashes and menstrual cramps. There are plants to strengthen Eva’s contractions and ease her pain in labor, plants to make her baby strong, plants to help her milk come in.

  There are teas. For months now we have drunk hot water when we could have been drinking wild mint, wild rose, blackberry, bay, mountain grape, black mustard, pennyroyal, manzanita, fennel seed, sheep sorrel, nettle, fir needle, madrone bark, yerba buena, black sage, pineapple weed, violet, wild raspberry.

  And there are acorns. Native Plants says, Worldwide and throughout history, acorns have served as a staple part of the diet of many peoples, including the Japanese, Chinese, early Mediterraneans, and North Americans.