Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  A stiff, cold wind began to blow north up the river, and a heavily layered sky closed out the sun for the rest of the day. We wanted to end the river part of our trip six or eight miles downstream, near Clarks Ferry, where the Appalachian Trail crosses the river, and we had planned to arrive there that afternoon. “Well, if we’re fixing to get there before dark, we had better get going,” Gibbons said, and he got lightly to his feet and walked to the edge of the water. He looked back at me. “Let’s go,” he said. I had been stretched out on the ground for almost an hour—as he had—and I got up slowly. I felt stiff and chilled. Gibbons was waiting in the bow, and I got into the stern and shoved off. All afternoon, we pushed the canoe into the cold headwind, and conversation was impossible. When we had covered about a mile, however, Gibbons began to sing:

  “When the north winds blow

  And we’re going to have snow

  And the rain and the hail come bouncin’,

  Then I’ll wrap myself in a buffalo robe,

  Away out on the mountain.”

  The dusk was deep when we took the canoe out of the river, at a windswept and deserted picnic ground that had stone fireplaces. As we had planned, I hitchhiked back to pick up Gibbons’s Volkswagen, then returned to the campsite. On the way, I stopped in a general store and bought a box of salt, for that evening’s meal, and cooking oil, for the following night. The counter was covered with cinnamon buns and chocolate cupcakes, but, oddly, they did not appeal to me at all. What I really wanted was eight ounces of undiluted whiskey; but whiskey was not on our menu, either. Feeling cold and miserable, I went back to the campsite. Gibbons was digging up dandelions in the dark, and he was whistling.

  Dinner revived me. Gibbons had found some catnip, and he made catnip tea. He said that catnip is a mild sedative, and I drank all I could hold. We built a high bonfire that whipped in the wind. The dandelions, boiled in three waters, were much better than they had been the night before, and the oyster mushrooms might have been taken from a banquet for the Olympian gods. Each mushroom was at least six inches across and, in the center, nearly an inch thick. As they steamed, the vapor from the pot did seem to carry the essences of oyster stew. Their taste, however, was fantastically like the taste of broiled steak.

  The simple ingredients of that dinner—dandelions and mushrooms, no dessert—were splendid in themselves, but they were made transcendent by the presence of salt. This was the first of the kitchen staples that we would introduce, one at a time, during the rest of the trip, and, perhaps a little expansively, we had the feeling that we had repeated the experience of some inspired Cro-Magnon who first thought to crush the white substance and sprinkle it on his food. After dinner, Gibbons rolled a cigarette and said, “What I could sure eat right now is a praline.” We planned to introduce sugar at breakfast the next morning (in the car Gibbons had a large block of maple sugar he had made from a neighbor’s trees in Troxelville), and his remark about the praline set a pattern that he repeated many times, concentrating his fantasies on kinds of food that were on the horizon of our diet. “Roadside stands sell terrible pralines,” he went on. “They use corn syrup. I make pralines out of maple syrup, hickory nuts, and cream.”

  Unfortunately, Gibbons did not make pralines for breakfast. As unappealing as pralines might have been at that time of day, nothing edible could have been worse than what we had. The meal began with peppermint tea, which was very good in itself and was excellent with chunks of maple sugar in it. The substance of that breakfast, however, was a great mound of hot persimmons, which had been stewed in maple sugar and were now glued together with concentrated maple syrup. We stuffed them eagerly into our mouths, because they looked good, but we found that all the astringency of slightly unripe persimmons seems to be brought out powerfully when they are stewed. They puckered not only our mouths but also our throats. Gibbons observed, without apparent alarm, that he thought that his esophagus was going to close. Nonetheless, he kept shoveling in the styptic persimmons, and I followed his lead. There was enough carbohydrate fuel in the stewed fruit to keep us going all day, and we needed it. Each mouthful tasted fine on entry but quickly turned into something like a glut of blotting paper, requiring a half dozen forced swallows to squeeze it down. Gibbons had told me that in all his experience of cooking wild food for others no one had ever gotten sick. In order to preserve his record, I excused myself and went for a walk, taking deep breaths, until I was sure that the persimmons were going to stay with me.

  We spent the morning foraging near the river, for Gibbons had become nervous about the Appalachian Trail. “Nut trees bear very little in dense forest,” he said. “A dense forest is a famine area. Along a river, sun may get in, but I have walked for miles in dense forest without finding one damned thing I could eat. It is possible to eat the inner bark of trees, but there’s almost nothing else.” A short walk into a valley west of the river calmed him completely. This was dry, brown, beautifully autumnal pheasant country, with corn stubble in the open and the clustered stalks of the summer’s weeds fringing ditches, streams, and fields. In such fringes, Gibbons is truly happy, for more concentrated foraging can be done in them than in any other kind of area north of the tropics or far from the sea, and for sheer concentrated provender the only comparable areas in the United States are the food-laden zones between high and low tide. About a quarter of a mile from the Susquehanna, a small rivulet ran along one side of a cornfield and then under a blacktop road. The curving plow of the farmer had spared a fifth of an acre in the angle where the stream met the road, and there we found wild mustard, lamb’s-quarters, chickweed, wild spearmint, catnip, winter cress, dandelions, and groundnuts. Gibbons ignored the first three, because they were past their prime. We almost ignored the dandelions, too, since we had had so many, but Gibbons dug up a few with the dibble stick to see how they were, and announced with excitement that they were the largest dandelions he had ever found. The roots of these single-headed beauties were more than an inch thick. “This is the best dandelion field I’ve ever got into,” he said as he pried one after another out of the earth. “I’ve seen cultivated dandelions that weren’t as big as this!” It was a clear, sunny morning, so we sat down right there and dressed the dandelions, deciding to have crowns for lunch and roots for dinner. The crown is the place where the leaves are joined, at the base of the plant. When the leaves are cut away, the remaining stubble resembles a coronet. We put these into one bag, and we pared the roots, which were about three inches long, and put them into another. The groundnuts in that remarkable place were also the largest he had ever found. They grow below the surface, and are discoverable at that time of year only by thin filament vines that wind upward around the stems of other plants. These groundnuts are in no way similar to peanuts, which are called groundnuts in many parts of the world. Groundnuts of the sort we found are spherical and are sometimes called Indian potatoes. They are connected underground by stringlike roots. Gibbons excavated carefully, and he brought up one, then another, then another, each separated from the next in line by a foot or so of root. His eyes were bulging. Each groundnut was about the size of a golf ball. “Captain John Smith said he found groundnuts as large as eggs,” Gibbons told me. “But these are the biggest I’ve ever seen. You’re in on the kill—

  “Where the whitest lilies blow,

  Where the freshest berries grow,

  Where the groundnut trails its vine,

  Where the wood grape’s clusters shine.”

  Walking back to the river, we passed a persimmon tree that was four stories high. The persimmons hanging from its branches were so large that they looked almost like oranges. In fact, some were two inches in diameter. We walked right on past them without a second glance.

  “There is interesting wood in a persimmon tree,” Gibbons said. “It is in the same family as ebony.”

  Before repacking our gear and going up onto the Appalachian Trail, we had a light but hot lunch beside the river—boiled dandelion crowns, catnip tea, an
d walnuts. The crowns were every bit the delicacy that Gibbons had claimed they would be—easily the equal of asparagus tips or young broccoli spears. With vegetables, Gibbons has the touch of the Chinese. Each crown offered an initial crunchy resistance and then seemed to dissolve in a mild but distinguished sea of the flavor essence of dandelion. We took many long draughts of catnip, and we felt good. Sunlight was sparkling on the river. The temperature was in the middle forties. Gibbons began to talk about a tribe of Indians in the Andes. He said that when these Indians travel they take no provisions at all, and they go for three or four days on coca leaves that they chew as they move. He paused for a moment, shaved some maple sugar into his catnip, stirred it, and said, “They live on nothing but the cocaine—and their own energy. It’s rough. They get thin. They’re using up their own bodies when they’re doing it.” He drank some more catnip. “Of course, we’re getting plenty of energy from this sugar,” he went on. “When I tapped the trees, I made spiles out of elderberry stems and sumac stems. I cooked the sap right there in the woods, in two old bake pans. I’ve made sugar from the sap of red maples, silver maples, Norway maples—hell, yes—and from walnut trees, butternut trees, sycamores, black birches. This? This is sugar-maple sugar. This is living. In the Sudan, there are certain Nilotic tribesmen whose diet is insufficient and consists almost wholly of cornmeal. They start the day by eating their ration of cornmeal as fast as they can, so it will digest more slowly and prolong the feeling of being full. Let’s get going.”

  The Appalachian Trail rose and fell in long, untiring grades through the mountains, among hardwood forests that were not at all dense and where sunlight, on that first afternoon, sprayed down through the trees. The ground all around us was yellow and red with dry leaves, and the clear sky was a bright pale blue. Along the edges of the trail for hundreds of yards at a stretch were colonies of ground pine and wintergreen. We stopped to collect wintergreen, and soon after we moved on Gibbons began to sing a song about making love to a turtledove. I said to him, “This is the best famine area I’ve ever been in.” He then began to talk about fried chicken, fried pork chops, fried potatoes—for we were going to break out the bottle of cooking oil that night and fry things for the first time. We stopped at a log lean-to that had a stone fireplace in its rear wall and, against the side walls, permanent bunks whose wooden frames were covered with heavy sheets of steel mesh. Behind the lean-to was a brook.

  We collected wood and started our fire. The temperature fell rapidly after the sun went down. The night was going to be clear and cold, and we kept the fire high. By seven, when Gibbons had the two frying pans out and was beginning to sauté dandelion roots in one and sliced groundnuts in the other, the temperature at the open end of the lean-to was below freezing and the temperature at the closed end was almost a hundred degrees. The distance between these extremes was eight feet. Gibbons seemed at home there, cooking, with his face baking and his back freezing, and the dinner he served was outstanding—wild-spearmint tea, piles of crisp dandelion-root tidbits, and great quantities of groundnuts so skillfully done that they seemed to be a refinement of home-fried potatoes. Having fried food was an appealing novelty. We were hungry, and we ate as rapidly as Nilotic tribesmen, without conversing. Gibbons looked up once and said, “The Smithsonian has a very good man on starchy roots.” Then he went on eating.

  Afterward, Gibbons made another pot of spearmint tea, and he built up the fire so that it glowed all around him as he sat on a corner of his bunk and told me that he had been a tramp and a Communist—first the one, then the other—in the 1930s, in California and the Pacific Northwest. “California was a poor place for wild food. I gathered some purslane, lamb’s-quarters, and black walnuts. And out near Needles I once got some prickly pear. There was not much wild stuff in California that I recognized. I foraged cultivated foods from fields and shops.” His first view of the state was over the side of a coal car, which he left at San Bernardino in March 1933, hopping another freight to Los Angeles. Calling himself by the name of a friend in New Mexico, he signed in at Uncle Tom’s Transient Center. “I had a road name. Lots of bums had road names. At Uncle Tom’s, you got a number, and that was that from then on. But there was no work in Los Angeles. There were too many bums there. After so many days, you had to leave. I went to the railroad yards and found a train of reefers—refrigerator cars—that had been made up to go north empty. There were hatches on the tops of the cars. I raised a dozen of those hatches and men were crammed in under every one of them. I finally had to sit on the top of the train. When we left L.A., men were all over the top. There were probably a thousand guys on that one freight.”

  In Ventura, Gibbons stayed at the Sally (Salvation Army), and in Lompoc he begged toffins (semi-stale baked goods) from a friendly baker. He found a preacher in Lompoc who had the same size feet he had, and he built a chicken coop for the preacher in return for a pair of shoes. The preacher was so astonished at Gibbons’s willingness to work hard and at his skill as a carpenter that he gave him the shoes and $2.50. “Everything was green in Lompoc. It was April. The sun was shining. Lompoc was my heaven, and I didn’t need any other one. There were no more jobs, and I had to move on.” He caught a freight to Surf, where he joined up with a Mexican and a Spaniard, shared his toffins with them, and spent five cents of his $2.50 on a measure of coffee, which he brewed in a No. 10 can. He slept in a bindle (bedroll) and carried it on his back during the day. “I was a bindle stiff, like the others. I had a blanket with me, and a pack made out of an old tin bread box.” He rode a freight to Santa Clara and arrived on Good Friday, a day of luck. A butcher gave him a pound of hamburger, and at a packing plant he was given a bag full of prunes—“huge prunes that sold for five cents apiece in Southern Pacific Railroad dining cars.” He found artichokes in Santa Clara fields, and while he was walking along a road near the artichoke fields a car driven by a woman stopped beyond him and a small boy got out, ran back, and gave him a fifty-cent piece, telling him that it was an Easter present.

  Gibbons paused to say that he apparently developed in that era what some people who know him well have called his “hobo instinct.” Few American hoboes of the 1930s knew much about wild food, he said, but he acknowledged nonetheless that there are hobo overtones in his approach to his specialty—his excited way of seeing wild plants as wild coins, and his affection for roadside foraging. He said, “There is nothing I would rather do than eat my way through a roadside ditch.”

  At times, in California, Gibbons lived in ding camps. “‘Ding’ is the hobo word for bum. When you go bumming, you go dinging.” In the ding camp at San Jose, he took a course in Spanish, and he worked in the camp variety show as a blackface minstrel, a juggler of vegetables, and a trick roper. The San Jose troupe traveled to other camps—in Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco—and also played in theatres, where Gibbons got three dollars (tops) for an appearance. “The thing that broke that up was marijuana smoking. About half the guys in the troupe were hay burners. Five cents a stick.”

  “Were you a hay burner?” I asked.

  “No, I never was a hay burner.”

  Gibbons pushed the logs in the fireplace closer together. “I went to a few Communist meetings with men from the transient camps. We would hear lectures on the labor situation and put money in the collection plate. But my left-wing activities really began after I got a job as a laborer for Continental Can in San Jose. I met a girl there who was a Party functionary—she was subsidized by the Party. I fell in love with her. I had a little one-room shack I had been living in, and she moved in, and we painted it white. There were fig trees beside it, and we gathered walnuts, prunes, oranges, figs, and lived on those. I sold newspapers to make dimes, and I wrote leaflets for the Party. We worked to organize Continental Can, and we finally got them out on strike. After the plant settled the strike, we were fired. They wanted the agitators out, and we were agitators. To tell you the truth, my Communism at that time was all mixed up with my love affair. I was not a memb
er of the Party. She was a militant Communist. I was in love with her, but she was not in love with me. I was just convenient—I wrote leaflets. I finally got tired of living with Karl Marx, and in the summer of 1934 I caught a freight. I ended up in a ding camp in San Luis Obispo, where they had hot showers.”

  The camp in San Luis Obispo was on a vast private estate. Gibbons and the other transients built roads and bridges for the owner and were paid by the federal government—five dollars a month, plus tobacco, work clothes, and meals. Gibbons swam in the Pacific, dug clams, caught fish, and began to develop a lifelong metaphysical fondness for islands and the sea. He and other Communist sympathizers—an Englishman called London Fog, an Icelander called Whitey, an American named Sam—drifted together and discussed world revolution. One day, when they were fed sandwiches that consisted of two pieces of bread that had been dampened with gravy, they walked off the job, shouting, “We want better food!” When Whitey tried to get the whole camp to strike, he, Gibbons, Sam, and London Fog were jailed. They managed to get off a telegram to the San Francisco office of the International Labor Defense, which, in Gibbons’s words, was “a non-Commie organization that was to the left of the American Civil Liberties Union and defended many Commies.” An ILD lawyer came to help them. They were given suspended sentences, with the provision that they leave San Luis Obispo County. Gibbons went to Seattle and joined the army.

  When his hitch was done, he worked in Seattle and Puyallup (near Tacoma) as a carpenter, a surveyor, and a boatbuilder. He formally joined the Party and became a district organizer, or “messenger boy from higher up to the local level.” There were about fifty members in his district. He worked with front organizations like the American League Against War and Fascism, and he picketed Japanese ships that were hauling scrap iron out of Seattle. “We picketed the ships because we thought scrap iron would go into munitions and come back at us.” He married a girl named Ann Swanson, and they had two sons. (One of them is now an electrician in Albuquerque, and the other is an airman in Vietnam.) Gibbons and his wife caught crayfish in Washington lakes and sold most of the catch. They also gathered and sold dewberries, and, just for themselves, they collected salmonberries, blackberries, raspberries, salal berries, serviceberries, sea urchins, crabs, clams, mussels, moon shells, lamb’s-quarters, purslane, wild mustard, and camass (“very much a local wild food, a sweetish and smooth-flavored bulb”). During those years, he gave more time to his political activity than to his work, and more time to wild food than to politics. When the Russians attacked Finland in 1939, he resigned from the Party. “I couldn’t jump through hoops. It was the peacekeeping part of Communism that had interested me. I wasn’t working for any foreign power. I was working to improve things right here. When the Russians attacked Finland, it was as if the Quakers, now, suddenly decided to support the war in Vietnam.” With the coming of the Second World War, he went to Pearl Harbor, as a civilian but without his family, to build small boats for the Navy.