After a swim in the Clearwater River, which smelled just as I remembered—like swampy willow water but fast-moving and clear—we drove up to the ranch. I wanted to see the house my parents had built with their own hands: a rough-hewn cabin covered with cedar shingles and a tar-paper roof. I made Bill stop so I could pick some thimbleberries, berries in the Rubus family that my sister and I used to pick as children. They were velvety and tart.
The circular alfalfa field had gone back to thistles and small trees. The house had disappeared. Burned down. In the clearing where it had stood, the apple trees had gone feral.
After the disappointing visit to the ranch, Bill and I met up with my dad in town. I rarely saw him—only a handful of times the whole time I was growing up—but I could see that he, too had, gone feral. He smelled of woodsmoke and was wearing a wool shirt I had sent him years ago for his birthday. Bald, with a mustache, he walked a little bowlegged, but overall he was fit as a fiddle.
Over hamburgers in a diner in Orofino, he shrugged his shoulders about the house burning down. It and the property had been sold years ago, and he had given up the idea of being a rancher. He had been living in a small cabin without electricity or running water. He hunted for food, went fly-fishing.
When my sister and I were teenagers, our dad would send Christmas gifts of pine cones and photos of birch trees. These were worthless things to us—we craved the name-brand jeans we could never afford. But now, when I think back on that, I realize that those were heartfelt gifts. He was trying to express who he was and what he cared about.
He handed me the book with one caveat: “Euell sold out,” he said, and shook his head. “Goddamned Grape-Nuts.” As Gibbons had gotten more and more famous, he had been hired to be a spokesperson for the cereal company. This broke my poor father’s heart.
Now, as I stood in Jennifer’s garden, I thought my father would be proud of me, foraging for my supper, living off the land as he does. I grazed on some red Russian kale, pulled a couple of green apples off the tree, and discovered a few Cape gooseberries—orange fruits that grow in tomatillo-like husks. They were as sweet as honey.
I checked on Jennifer’s bees, feeling a bit voyeuristic. Her healthy herd was finishing up the day’s work; many of them loitered outside the entrance of the hive and dripped down the side of the box in a cluster. I was filled with longing for my own lost bees. I had tried to order another package, but the beekeeping supply stores were sold out. One man told me they sold out by January. Colony collapse disorder had hit beekeepers hard that year, so there were no surplus supplies for backyard beekeepers like me. Without bees, I had no honey.
I tried to ignore the good smells coming from the kitchen and went back inside to drink a few glasses of wine. A man at the party tried the substance we had made and declared it “a witty little wine.”
By midnight, we had forced the last cork into the seventy-fifth bottle. Bill picked me up, and we stuffed my share—twenty-five bottles of not very good Sangiovese wine—into our station wagon. That it wasn’t good didn’t matter. The possibilities were endless. I could use it for cooking. I could make balsamic vinegar. Sangria. Mulled wine. As we drove home along MLK the festivities of the Fourth on our street unfolded: children holding Roman candles, a car that shot out a twenty-foot flame, police and fire engines roaring up and down the streets. I imagined that this is what our street would look like if there was a riot. It was wonderful. I was drunk.
CHAPTER TWENTY
By day five, my headaches—and body aches—from caffeine withdrawal had subsided. I actually felt terrific. Light, energetic, with a thrumming, exuberant feeling from eating so many greens and salads and farm-fresh eggs. I rode my bike around, trying to remember the taste of the food I used to eat. I had pizza and Chinese food amnesia.
In the mornings, I would wake up and go to my feeding area—the garden. The new ducks and geese greeted me with great quacking shouts. They gorged down a few scoops of chicken food and nibbled at the bok choy from Chinatown I upended into their area. The geese ate first, always, and made a big show, craning their necks up and down—looking at me, then back to feeding.
“What are they?” someone called out from behind the fence. “Swans?”
“No, they’re ducks and geese,” I said. I peered between the slats of the fence to see a large woman with two children. A few of the ducks, following the sound of her voice to the end of the fence, stood and begged for food.
“Well, bless you and have a wonderful day,” the big lady said. The children trailed after her.
I plucked an apple and a few plums, and made plans for lunch. The pumpkins were still small but numerous. I yanked the smallest from the vine; I’d shred it and make pumpkin hash browns. A red-chested hummingbird came down, letting out short bursts of air, then flew back into the ether. It was mating season for the little hummer; maybe he mistook me for a potential competitor.
I squeezed the green stalk of a corn plant. Still just ear and silk, no substance. The Brandywine tomatoes were causing me much heartache. They were enormous but stubbornly green, and even after a hot day, they never threatened to blush.
I crouched near the zucchini plants and examined them. Beneath the giant turgid leaves, the fruits were still too small to eat. There was an abundance of the yellow-orange flowers, though. I had heard you could eat them, so I gathered a colanderful, with the intention of frying them.
I gave the flowers a quick rinse in the sink and shredded the pumpkin with the grater. When I dabbed the flowers dry with a tea towel, I heard a curious noise. A muffled buzz. I checked my cell phone: no. It was coming from the flower. I peeled back the crepelike lips of the zucchini blossom, and out veered one very upset fuzzy black bee. It adjusted to the new light and hastened toward the open back door. My heart beating very fast, I picked up another flower and pried open the blossom. Another furry prisoner buzzed out. Four captives were released before I could eat lunch.
I dredged each of the flowers in egg, dipped them in cornmeal, then fried them. I sprinkled the former bee prison with lemon juice and stuck it in my mouth.
After eating “lunch,” I made plans to go to Willow’s garden to harvest lettuce for some former Black Panthers. A few months before my experiment in self-sufficiency began, I had encountered the organization, which I thought was long dead. “Join the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party!” a kid with dreadlocks shouted outside North Gate Hall on UC Berkeley’s campus, where I was taking some classes. He stood behind a table with another man, behind a stack of newspapers with the words THE COMMEMORATOR and an image of a black panther busting out.
What did I know about the Black Panthers? Black power, guns, men in leather jackets, Huey Newton sitting in that big wicker chair. My mom and dad were active in the civil rights movement and had lived in Berkeley and Oakland when the Panthers first started in West Oakland in 1966. I was curious and wandered over.
The two pamphleteers were in the middle of explaining to a young black student that the Black Panthers were necessary for social justice in America. That education was the most important thing for all the kids who lived in the inner city. I nodded my head in agreement.
“Can I help?” I asked the kid and the middle-aged man standing next to him. Remembering the scene from the Malcolm X movie where the blond lady’s help is rejected, I figured they would say no thanks, whitey.
“Yes, we’re integrated now,” the man said, and handed me the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program.
“Well, I don’t have time or money, how about vegetables?” I asked.
The man, whose name was Melvin, beamed. “We could really use some salad for our literacy program.”
Melvin took down my name and promised to call. I read the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program in my car. The list covered employment demands, an end to police brutality, and education and health-care concerns for “our black and oppressed communities.” The final program point read: “We want land, bread, housing, education,
clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.” It was followed by the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, the document that embodied the ideas of the American Revolution.
When I called Willow and asked her about supplying salad for a literacy program—I wasn’t sure I could grow the volume of lettuce necessary alone—she told me that her nonprofit garden project had been inspired by the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers, in which they distributed food and eyeglasses to the needy. “Hell,” she said, “we’ll plant a Lil’ Bobby Hutton memorial plot of lettuce!”
Every week since that meeting, I had been harvesting lettuce from both my garden and City Slicker Farm to share with the Black Panthers’ literacy program. For the month of July, though, I couldn’t share my bounty. So, after my lunch of fried flowers, I swung open the gate to one of Willow’s community farms and yanked five sturdy-looking heads of lettuce out of the ground. I snipped off the roots, leaving them there on the ground to rot back into the earth, and tucked the leaves into my bag. I chose the red frilly Lolla Rosa, the bright green Deer Tongue, and Speckles, a green lettuce with red spots.
After washing and bagging the greens at my house, I got on my bike and rode through GhostTown to deliver the lettuce to the office of The Commemorator, the newspaper of the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party. It was the errand of an optimist. I knew that providing a salad once a week to kids at their drop-in literacy program wouldn’t change anything. But I did it anyway because—if I’m honest with myself—it made me feel better. It gave me hope.
I pedaled up Martin Luther King Jr. Way on my ten-speed, a bag of salad greens gently rocking on the handlebars. I spotted Johnny, the Watermelon Man, who sells watermelon in the summer and greens in the winter at his produce stand. I have never noticed much buying going on; mostly he and some other old-timers just hang out under the awning of the little shop. As I pressed on I noticed a man sleeping in an overturned refrigerator box, arms flung out like a baby. I counted five men and one woman with shopping carts filled with aluminum cans headed to the recycling center.
Acts from people’s lives are played out on the streets and sidewalks like Shakespearean drama. On this July day, whole families sat on the sidewalk, chairs placed just so, to take in or be part of the day’s events. Just the night before, I had happened on a woman yelling at the father of her son for money he owed her. While she ranted (from the seat of a Hummer), his friends recorded the performance on their cell phones. “You’re acting like some kinda Michael Jackson,” she hurled, and the Hummer screeched away. The man and his friends cried out at this dis, slapped street signs, and groaned.
A person on a bike gets to be part of this sidewalk theater. I got a sweet “Hello, good morning” from a man walking with a cane across the crosswalk.
After thirty flat blocks, the landscape changed. I crossed the border into Berkeley. There’s a NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE sign and the giant, gleaming words THERE and HERE, a lumbering piece of public sculpture that has always rubbed me the wrong way.
“There is no there there,” Gertrude Stein once famously said. Though she was referring to her Oakland childhood home, which was destroyed in a fire, seventy years later Berkeley, in the form of public art, continued the misunderstanding that she was dissing all of Oakland.
The gold-embossed sign above the door read THE COMMEMORATOR. The quarterly paper has a circulation of ten thousand and specializes in stories for the black community. It was started in 1990, a year after founding Black Panther Huey Newton was killed. The remaining members of the party felt the Panthers’ socialist legacy might be lost.
I rang the doorbell, and Melvin Johnson, tall and handsome yet bogged down by the formidable task of running a newspaper, let me in. The office smelled of incense, and on the wall there were hand-painted drawings of various Black Panther all-stars. There were Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Mumia Abu-Jamal and an oil pastel of a Black Panther youth group, all painted directly onto the wall.
“Hey, salad lady,” called the other Melvin, Melvin Dickson, a stocky, muscular man with kind eyes. Dickson was an original Black Panther, in charge of all things culinary for the Bay Area Panthers from 1972 to 1982. After I put the lettuce in the fridge, we often sat in the office and chatted about events and history. I found myself frequently asking him for advice.
“I see kids eating all this junk food in our neighborhood,” I said the first day I dropped off the lettuce. “That’s why I’m bringing this salad.”
“Kids are hyper on that junk food,” Dickson said. “They can’t learn in that state of mind. One thing we imparted was a nutritious diet. That’s why we fed them three meals.” The Black Panthers weren’t just about guns and self-defense; they started a free breakfast program for hungry children. Later, in some of their schools, they served breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the students, so their parents could go to work. I thought about how different my neighborhood would be if those self-sufficiency programs had survived.
When I wished aloud that more programs like the ones the Black Panthers started existed today, Melvin sighed. “There just aren’t any programs anymore. You’ve got to challenge them, educate them, get them to try new things.”
I knew Melvin was right, but now that I was surviving on lettuce and pumpkins for several days, I do believe I would have killed someone for a bag of red-hot Cheetos.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
On day ten of the experiment, I stood on the boggy roof of an abandoned carport eating plums. The house was abandoned, too. The tree, planted at the back of the house by some kindly farmer of yesteryear, groaned with fruit.
In order to be truly self-sufficient for the month of July, I found that I had to become a hunter-gatherer of sorts. There was no shame in this—I couldn’t grow everything, after all. Even Wendell Berry, farmer extraordinaire, agreed. In the essay “The Whole Horse,” he wrote, “A subsistence economy necessarily is highly diversified, and it characteristically has involved hunting and gathering as well as farming and gardening.” It was true that eating the same things out of the garden—lettuce, beets, squash blossoms—day after day had gotten a little monotonous. I needed to supplement with some foraged food. According to Roman law, it is perfectly legal to harvest fruit that hangs over into a public area.
I spotted the plums while I was riding my bike. I had never noticed them before, but the 100-yard diet had so heightened my senses, I started to see food everywhere. Every shrub, tree, and weed I encountered quivered with potential usefulness. In every abandoned lot, I saw a potential garden. I could also smell a hot dog a mile away.
These plums were a variety called elephant hearts. They had green skin and bright red flesh, in the shape of a heart. They didn’t taste particularly good. In fact, if I hadn’t been doing this experiment in self-sufficiency, I never would have gone out of my way to find the tree, shimmy up a wooden fence, make the catlike leap to the garage, and creep across the rotting beams for a few plums. And now that I had gone through that, I found them to be vaguely dry, maybe too sour. But I was hungry, so I scarfed them down on the rooftop.
As I munched, I silently thanked the long-gone home owner who had planted this tree. Whoever had done so probably had to make a tough decision: a beautiful ornamental or a fruit-bearing tree.
“Garden style is a continuing expression of the changing idea of the universe,” environmentalist Paul Shepard observes in Thinking Animals, pointing out that Italy’s Renaissance gardens were orderly and complex, like aristocratic society. If this is true, and I think it is, what does our city landscaping say about us? The barren ornamental pears, the trimmed hedges, the ubiquitous lawn—the pedigreed landscape. I find this environment to be wasteful. “The observer of city gardens cannot fail to notice that not one of the plants that are grown in most urban residential areas, or that appear on planting plans, have the slightest nutritional value,” landscape architect Michael Hough writes in City Form and Natural Process.
“However, opportunities for using edible plants are just as great as [for] using those that are purely ornamental. Tree planting along city streets could include fruit-bearing species.”
Here, someone had ignored convention and planted this fruiting plum tree. Maybe he had been hungry. Maybe the tree reminded him of home. Maybe he had imagined plum dumplings or plum jam. Whatever his motives, he watered the tree, didn’t cut it down, let it flourish and fruit for all these years. Based on its size, it must have been forty years old. Whoever planted it could never have predicted my existence—a crazy, starved, foraging locavore. The past was feeding me today, and I was grateful.
After I finished eating, I loaded two plastic bags with fruit, let them fall to the soft earth, and climbed down after them. I balanced the bags on my bike’s handlebars and headed home. I had a hunch. It involved canning.
On my way, I paused a few blocks from the 2-8 to watch a dice game. Two boys were playing—one fat, one thin. They yelled and rolled. The fat one threw down a dollar.
“Excuse me,” I said. “How does this work?”
Without pause, as if he had been waiting for someone to finally inquire, the thin kid explained that the first roll determines the bet. If it’s a seven, for instance, then the person who bets is betting that another seven will be rolled.
I watched for a while, and the fat kid lost all four of his ones.
“Can I have ’em back?” he said to the thin kid.
“OK.” The skinny kid passed him the floppy bills. I wasn’t the only one just playing. This kid was pretending to bet; I was playing at self-sufficiency.
I continued cycling, keeping the BART tracks and highways 980 and 24 on my left.
I passed the lumbering Magnolia grandifloras growing along some of MLK. The trees have leathery leaves and giant white blossoms, and if it’s not rush hour, you can smell their tangy-sweet lemon scent.
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