It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  I stood up from field-dressing to stretch my back. Michelle and I figured that to get through the year, we’d need to freeze at least three deer, of which this was the second. I was proud of having succeeded on this day’s hunt. I was likewise proud of having killed cleanly. Or so I thought at first. The more I explored it, however, the less pride I found. Instead, something a baseball player had said to a sportswriter after losing a game came to mind: “Losing hurts worse than winning feels good.” Killing cleanly, I realized, didn’t feel like winning. It meant rather that I had escaped the guilt and remorse that come from causing unnecessary pain to an innocent being. Hunting is a primal drama that has a cast of one—you. It has an audience of one—also you. In fact you are everything: judge, jury, prosecutor, bailiff, defendant, and witness in the case of What You Just Did. There’s no way you come out of that mess with completely unsullied hands or unmixed emotions. And yet hunting keeps pulling me back.

  Having cut free the viscera, I lifted one of the deer’s hind legs and the innards slid out in one big mass. I found the heart and cut it free. Eating organ meat of any kind was a threshold I’d only recently crossed. The previous season Brian, one of Michelle’s friends at Food Makers, who was into home charcuterie, had asked for the heart from one of the deer we’d taken. He told Michelle that he’d used the idea of a Philly cheese steak for inspiration, pounding the raw meat flat, grilling it with onions, and serving it under melted provolone on some good bread. He claimed it had been fantastic. We tried the same technique. It was fantastic, surprisingly chewy, lean, and meaty—I’d read somewhere that there was no fat on a deer’s heart—yet satisfyingly rich. The heart had quickly become one of our favorite parts of the deer.

  By the shed in my backyard, we’d hoisted the deer on a gambrel fitted through the hind legs just behind the knee, upside down, and let it hang for a couple of days to age. The weather had been perfect, daytime highs of forty-five to fifty and nights that hovered just above freezing. I decided to wrap the deer in a tarp to avoid offending the neighbors. The sight of a dead animal, I had to remind myself, can be a shock and seem like a deliberate affront to many people. Arctic Village kept pulling at my notions of normal.

  It had been a banner year for edible fungi and Michelle and I had been making the most of it. As we exhausted the familiar places, I bought a road atlas of the District to help find new grounds. One day, we found ourselves prospecting in a gritty and unfamiliar area of Northeast. But the atlas showed skinny green fingers of Rock Creek Park in the ravines between strip malls and storage facilities, so that’s where we went. Behind a place that sold swimming pool chemicals to contractors, we parked and peered down a slope so steep that there was no way of knowing who or what might be down there. We held onto vines where we could and slid on our butts where we couldn’t. I loved that I’d found a woman who enjoyed doing crazy stuff like this. Nobody else I’d ever been with would have gotten out of the car in this part of town, let alone for the purpose of disappearing down a ravine so steep it felt more like spelunking than hiking.

  In any case, if there was a possibility of mushrooms someplace, we were going. As soon as we got to the bottom, we encountered a tremendous downed beech tree. Michelle began eagerly climbing through the jungle gym of its branches. Thirty seconds later she let out a whoop. “Oh my God!” she called. “A lion’s mane!” I was still climbing through the limbs. I found her sniffing a round ivory-colored fungus that looked more like an oversize bleached goatee than a mushroom. “It’s so fresh!” she cried, almost delirious at the find. She came over and kissed me full on the lips. “You did it, Billy! You found this place.”

  “Of course I did,” I said. “I knew there’d be a—what’d you call that thing?” Lion’s mane, she repeated. It was apparently a jackpot mushroom in the mid-Atlantic.

  “Hericium erinaceus,” she said. “In the tooth fungus group. The ‘hairs’ on this—see how nicely they hang down—are actually ‘teeth’ to ’shroomers. But this is one of my all-time favorite mushrooms. Pretty rare and extremely delicious. They taste like lobster.” She had me take a picture of her with it, which she texted to Hue. He was a fairly serious mushroomer himself. They had been corresponding about their recent finds. I sensed some rivalry at work.

  A little later, I heard a three-syllable yell that sounded like something you’d yell when delivering a karate chop. I hustled over and found her holding up a particularly nice hen of the woods, maybe a six-pounder. I asked her if it wasn’t a hen. “Right,” she said.

  “So what was that word you yelled?”

  “Maitake,” she said. “The Japanese name for it. It means ‘dancing mushroom.’ Apparently, if you found one in the old days, you’d be so happy you’d dance.” Michelle was a babe in all circumstances, but never looked so alive and alluring as when she was excited by a prize fungus. I maitake’d my way up to her and kissed her.

  “I knew there’d be mushrooms here,” I told her, feeling joyously goofy. “Babe, I’m telling you. I have the gift. It’s like I’m, I don’t know, bulimic or something.” This was one of our private jokes, from a scene in Zoolander, a terrible movie that Michelle’s older son, for reasons I never quite got, was overly fond of.

  “You’re full of it,” she said, slipping away. “But this is one mad spot for the fungus. Keep looking.” I did. In the meantime, Michelle had received a text back from Hue. He was stuck at the Pentagon, as usual, working late. It wasn’t the mushrooms he was jealous of, he wrote, so much as the fact that we were in the woods and looking. Michelle wrote back that he should skip out and join us. “Can’t today but how about tomorrow?” he replied. “It’s my birthday, so you guys better show me something good.”

  Disclosing his birthday was unusually forthcoming for Hue. His wife, he’d mentioned in one of his earlier texts, was out of town at a conference. That meant he’d be alone. We decided to invite him for dinner and to ask Paula and Gordon, too. I wasn’t sure how my two most influential foraging teachers would hit it off, but I had wanted them to meet for some time. “We should do it up,” I told Michelle. “Make it an occasion. It’s his birthday after all. Plus I owe the guy.”

  “How so?” she asked.

  “Well, he introduced me to this totally hot foraging chick,” I said. “Who initially thought I was too old and too vanilla. But she seems to have come around. And now I was sort of hoping we’d spend, you know, a good bit of the rest of our lives together.”

  I was nearly as shocked at what I’d just said as Michelle obviously was. We’d become a unit so effortlessly that each of us had talked about how this was it for both of us. We’d also marveled at our luck, at how improbable it was, given the geography alone. But we hadn’t mentioned the “m” word. Michelle had been out of her marriage for only nine months when we met. I’d been out of mine for six years but hadn’t gone through with the divorce. There hadn’t been any particular need to until now. The truth was that I’d been thinking about asking her to marry me for some time. But only in the abstract. I had not gotten as far as when and how. But evidently I’d just decided, because I’d done it. I’d spoken the words. Standing about six feet away from her, I realized that I’d just popped the question. And what I remember from that moment is that suddenly I didn’t know what to do with my hands. They had become useless and strange, like a seal’s flippers at the end of my wrists. I looked at the two of us, our muddy boots, the long smears of dirt on our jeans from sliding down the side of the ravine in this no-man’s-land. It wasn’t the ideal setting by most standards. But Michelle had looked especially beautiful in the dim light; her eyes alight with the “flow” of being completely absorbed in the task and pleased with the growing weight of mushrooms in our bags. That, I decided, must have been what reached in and pulled the words out of me.

  “Bill Heavey,” she said. “Are you asking me to marry you in this trash-filled corner of Rock Creek Park?”

  “Yes,�
� I said. “I mean I’m asking you here. But I think the ceremony should be someplace else.” I was joking because I was overcome and didn’t want to start crying. She buried her head in my shoulder and we held each other. I felt warm tears on my neck. Tears, I thought. Tears are a good sign. And I welcomed them because hers preempted my own. Her tears gave me a job to do, which was to tend to them.

  “Yes,” she said, lifting her head. “Of course I’ll marry you.” She was blinking back her tears and smiling in a way I’d never seen before. It was a big smile. One I’d never seen on her. On anyone else I knew, it would have looked fake, a put-on smile. On her it wasn’t. It was the smile that she’d kept hidden until now. But now something in her had dissolved, fallen away. One of my first impressions of Michelle was that she let you in only so far and no further, but did so with such skill that you hardly knew that you’d gotten as deep as you were ever going to get. And even when I saw that in action, saw the curtain dropping, I couldn’t have said how deep I’d been let in or how much more there was to see. But now the curtain was gone. Leaving her, the little girl and adult woman and mom who stood before me now. We’d already said everything. We just stood there for a while. And then I took a deep breath and led her to some mushrooms I’d found earlier, to see if they were edible. They were slippery jacks, she said, a kind of bolete. And very good to eat. We bagged them up.

  The next afternoon, I thawed the backstrap of the doe I’d killed a week earlier. Paula and Gordon were coming at six and always showed up on the dot. Hue, who was leaving work early so that he and I would have time for a brief mushroom walk, showed up, as usual, fifteen minutes early. He was in his office clothes but carrying a bag with his woods duds and boots. Michelle started to recount our finds from the previous day but Hue waved her off. “Enough talk,” he said, heading for the bathroom to change. Then, to me, “You ready?”

  Ten minutes later, Hue and I were walking down a path toward the Potomac. It was a warm day for October, the woods damp from recent rains and very still. Hue was favoring one leg a bit. That could mean only one thing. “How’s jujitsu these days?” I asked breezily. He just smiled and shook his head, conveying either a refusal to discuss it or a kind of resignation. Hue just couldn’t bring himself to tap out when an opponent had the upper hand. It was dumb to sustain an injury you could easily avoid. And yet I couldn’t help admiring the warrior in him, the refusal to surrender. I told him I was having my own problems, an increasing stiffness in my back along with some pain. It seemed as if the floor got farther away each morning as I bent to put on my undershorts. The orthopedist I’d seen had told me to do as little as possible for six weeks and then come see him again.

  “Those guys are full of crap,” Hue said. “You gotta keep moving. Even if it hurts a little. In the long run it’ll hurt worse if you stop.” This was about as long as I’d ever heard Hue go on about something. I had a feeling he was right. I resolved to find another doctor and to keep exercising in the meantime. We walked on. I spotted a large mushroom halfway up the hill above the path and hiked up to find a chicken of the woods. Alas, it was bleached out and falling apart. “Too bad,” Hue said. “Would have been a beaut in its prime.”

  We pressed on, crossing and recrossing the stream on well-placed stones. The dense canopy opened only at the edge of the river, the water running high from the rains. It was mesmerizing to watch that much power—the sheer physics of a river, all that mass and momentum. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text from Michelle. “Glad you boys are getting some bonding time but I need someone back here to get a fire going.”

  “Time to boogie?” Hue asked. It was. We headed up the trail and were about halfway out when Hue let out of grunt of surprise and reached under a downed tree by his feet. The mushroom he pulled out was about the size of a softball, yellow-gray, and looked more like a piece of sea coral or a cauliflower. “Sparassis,” he said, pronouncing the Latin name. “We call it the cauliflower mushroom.” He was smiling, a good sign that it was not only edible but tasty. “They’re parasitic and saprobic, usually grow on hardwoods or conifers.” He saw the look on my face. “Saprobic just means that they live on decaying organisms,” he said. “They’re hard to clean because of all the folds and the way they sort of envelop whatever they’re growing on, but they’re worth the trouble.” He looked happy to be bringing back something he had foraged to the meal. A little farther on, I spotted a splotch of white in the crotch of a beech. Bingo. Another lion’s mane, just two or three ounces, much smaller than Michelle’s. But a lion’s mane nonetheless. And in prime condition, according to Hue. “Good eye,” he said. I was pleased. To see something a guy like Hue misses takes a pretty good eye. I just hoped he hadn’t seen it first and said nothing, in order to test me.

  Michelle had been busy while we were gone. I had left the house in its usual state, which Michelle once characterized as “hostile neglect.” I just figured that anyone I knew well enough to invite for dinner already knew my view that life’s too short to do housework. My pre-party cleaning consisted of sweeping the floor and clearing enough space on the table to eat. Michelle, however, operated differently. Although we had decided not to share the news about getting hitched until our divorces came through, we were a unit. She may have felt it reflected badly on her to just accept the fact of my barbaric sloth, at least in the domestic arts. In any case, she had tidied the hell out of the place. It was like somebody else’s house. We’d decided to punt on the notion of a completely wild dinner and had gone to Trader Joe’s for a flourless chocolate birthday cake, a loaf of bread, and three bottles of wine. She had dry-rubbed the venison with coarse salt, cracked pepper, juniper berries she had foraged, and rosemary from the transplant by the front steps that was turning into an herbal Godzilla, outcompeting even the bull thistles around it. She said she also “threw together a sorbet” to serve with the cake, using serviceberries we’d picked and frozen in June. I asked how one “threw together” a sorbet. “It’s just ice, fruit, a little sugar. You puree it in the food processor and then put it in the freezer.”

  “You mean the blender?” I asked. “I don’t own a food processor.”

  “Of course you do,” she said. And showed it to me. It was a ­KitchenAid, complete with three blades. It had been sitting silently in the deep, two-shelved cabinet above the fridge for years, the Buddha of kitchen appliances, use and nonuse being one and the same to it. I couldn’t even have told you who gave it to me. I sure as hell didn’t buy it.

  On the stove was also a pot of the wild rice I’d brought back from a trip to Wisconsin, where I’d been the guest of Sam Thayer, author of two authoritative books on wild foods. We’d spent a couple of days “knocking” wild rice on lakes where the plants still grew in clean water. And then there was a sautéed mix of the four or five kinds of mushrooms from the day before, including the prized lion’s mane. She greeted the one I’d found with a little cry of joy, quickly cleaning it, slicing it, and adding it to the mix. She had even gathered up the last of the garden tomatoes—they were running pretty small by October—and some basil, and chopped them up with some salt, garlic, and a drizzle of olive oil to make the bruschetta that Paula and Gordon so loved since she’d introduced them to the dish the first time they’d come for dinner to meet her.

  I poured drinks for everyone, and went outside to attack the charcoal. It has always struck me how food that men aren’t allowed within ten feet of in the kitchen suddenly falls under our purview once it’s no longer under a roof. Equally surprising is how we somehow rise to the occasion, cooking it with a skill we were powerless to muster indoors. My dad, who couldn’t make a piece of toast in the kitchen, was a skilled griller of meats in the open air, able to deliver steaks rare, medium-rare, and even the challenging rare-side-of-medium-rare some people occasionally requested. The mechanism of the phenomenon confounds me, but I’ve seen it happen many times. My father was a charcoal griller and passed the gene on to me. Pro
pane is easier and faster, but you might as well be cooking inside—­propane is to charcoal as digital music is to analog. I’m also intimidated by the idea of an open flame near a canister of compressed flammable gas. It’s as if, having set out to make a car bomb and having it 99 percent assembled, you decided to pause and cook dinner over it.

  Gordon came out to watch the fire with me. He was telling me about a walleye hole he has fished for—he stopped to do the math—sixty-five years. It’s about twenty miles upstream, a place where he deems the water clean enough to eat the fish. “Only thing is they don’t show up until we’ve had a few days of cold weather,” he said. “I mean in the twenties. Some years we don’t get that anymore.” He studied his glass. Despite the fact that Gordon and I have known each other for well over a decade, he remains the most diffident of men. I knew he was about ready for another drink but that he would say he was just fine if asked. Instead, I wordlessly passed him the tongs as if I needed his help for a moment and took his glass from him as he reached to help me. “You got me,” he muttered, but there was a smile in his voice.

  Inside, Paula was inhaling the last of the bruschetta. “Man, this shit is good,” she said, her mouth full. Hue looked mildly askance. I shrugged. I’d told him about Paula’s inability to edit her speech. Here were my two chief tutors, as knowledgeable in their own ways about the woods as any two people I knew. But they came at it from different angles.