Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  Charleston lacks a commercial pawpaw grower, with the nearest orchards currently in production at least three hours away in Kentucky and Ohio. But that might be okay for the Kanawha Valley—if local tastes are already acquainted with it, perhaps backyard selections, and growers, will do just fine. However it goes, whether the grower niche is waiting to be filled or not, there is already a pawpaw hero in Charleston: writer Colleen Anderson. “One of the pawpaw’s charms is the company it keeps,” she once wrote. “Like the fruit, they tend to be slightly off the round.”6

  Anderson, you’ll remember, is close friends with Neal Peterson and learned of the fruit from him. Neal convinced Anderson to join the PawPaw Foundation, and for some years she served on its board. Once, she and Neal drove a carload of fruit from Maryland to Chicago’s Midwest Food and Wine Show, and in the late 1990s Anderson began reading a series of pawpaw tales on West Virginia Public Radio. When another Charleston writer and playwright, Arla Ralston—a defiant pawpaw detractor—grew tired of these reports, she demanded equal airtime for non-pawpaw praises, and a friendly battle ensued. Anderson argued that pawpaw was an aphrodisiac, linking the fruit to Bill Clinton, while Ralston formed a Pawpaw Prevention League in objection to the “third-rate fruit.” Finally, as Zack Harold of the Charleston Daily Mail reported, Anderson and Ralston agreed to allow the success or failure of Ellen’s pawpaw ice cream to settle the debate, and, “Sixteen years later, the pawpaw has emerged victorious.”7

  After Pikeville we continue down the highway, deeper into the rugged mountains, heading straight for a mass of rain clouds. Broad-leafed umbrella magnolias line the roads, luxuriating in humid, subtropical forests. As we exit the highway and descend into the first of many hollers, the storm comes fast and hard. Winds shake the trees violently; brown and yellow leaves litter the slick asphalt. The leaf-fall is a reminder of the coming change of seasons, a transition marked not just by foliage but also by the ripening of pawpaws. The full transition is still a month or two away, though, and when the rain comes to a stop, the heat, humidity, and sunlight return.

  The Lucky Penny General Store heralds our arrival in Phyllis. Inside, stacked on shelves above the hardwood floor, are sodas and snacks, tobacco, and fresh produce (onions, potatoes, peppers). There’s also a full menu of cooked-to-order food from which we order sandwiches. Noting the produce, I ask the man behind the counter—Bryan—if he ever sells pawpaws. “No, but I know where there are some,” he says. I tell him I’m doing general research on the fruit. “Well, let me go get you some,” he says, and in a matter of seconds he goes out into the rain (which had started again), gets in his truck, and is off to fetch some pawpaws. When he returns, he pulls several pawpaws from a paper bag. A tree at Bryan’s parents’ place—just around the corner—is now producing. I wasn’t expecting the pawpaws to be so large, so I’m impressed to see such round, plump fruit. We eat them and they’re good. “I’m sure I’m going to be eating pawpaw pie or something,” Bryan says. “My mom’s going to make something out of them.” Pawpaws aren’t the only wild foods on the dinner table; in spring, his parents especially enjoy poke salad and morels, or “dry land fish,” as they’re locally known.

  A young man of thirty, Bryan has lived his whole life in eastern Kentucky, though many of his peers have moved out of the region for work. He admits that there aren’t many opportunities for those who stay, and that he occasionally offers store credit to those who need it. “It’s hard, but we make it,” he says. “Everybody just makes it.” In lean times, previous generations supplemented their diets with wild foods. They’re eaten less commonly today, but poke, pawpaws, and morels, and the people who love them, are part of what appeals to Bryan about the region. “I enjoy being here,” he says, “There’s something about the culture around here—we try to help people.” He doesn’t charge us for the sandwiches or the pawpaws, confident we’ll pay it forward.

  The folks I speak with in Pikeville, Phyllis, Charleston, and elsewhere are familiar with and often fond of pawpaws. Although pawpaws are native to twenty-six eastern states—more than half the country—pawpaw culture appears stronger in Appalachia than anywhere else.

  Long before European Americans settled in the mountains, American Indians cultivated many crops—including well-known items like corn, beans, squash, and tobacco—and combined those foodstuffs with items procured through hunting, gathering, and fishing. While this could describe any number of American Indian groups and subsequent pioneers, in a region where arable land was less abundant, the wild harvest may have held even greater importance. As historian H. Tyler Blethen writes, “European and African newcomers often took over the very fields that Indians had farmed and adapted Indian methods of slash-and-burn and of planting beans and squash among irregular rows of corn . . . in the backcountry [they] learned from the Indians how to dress, track, and decoy game and live off the land while hunting.”8 Living off the land meant that the morels and the ramps, the pawpaws and persimmons, the hickory nuts and the chestnuts were of greater importance in these mountains.

  In rural Appalachia, the wilderness lingered where elsewhere it was cut down, plowed, or paved. “As late as the mid-nineteenth century [farmers] continued to leave four-fifths to three-quarters of their land unimproved, primarily in forest,” Blethen writes.9 Among other things, more woods meant more pawpaws—in the fall, when hogs were run through the woods, a farming family had a bounty of fruits and nuts to gather. This wild bounty was often so great that during this same period forest crops like ginseng and snakeroot, in addition to the various fruits and nuts, were brought to market for cash.

  But with the onset of the Civil War, Appalachia entered a devastating period of economic decline. During this period rural Appalachians increasingly turned to the woods for supplemental foods. And later, by the 1920s, when many farm families elsewhere in the States were creating modern, homogenized, industrial-sized farms, Appalachia’s families were not. “Appalachia comprises only 3 percent of the land area of the United States, but the 1930 census found one third of America’s ‘self-sufficing’ farms tucked away there,” writes historian Paul Salstrom. “The Census defined self-sufficing farms as ‘where the value of the [home] farm products used by the family was 50 percent or more of the total value of all products of the farm.’ In Appalachia in 1930, about a million farm dwellers lived that way, far more than any other region of the United States.”10 Self-sufficing not only meant raising a vegetable garden, but might also have included growing enough cotton for clothing, raising and butchering hogs, canning and drying foods, bartering, and curing sweet tooths with wild fruits. “Many of Appalachia’s self-sufficing farm families brought in cash incomes of less than $100 a year (equivalent to about $1,000 today),” but many families were so “successfully self-sufficing that the Depression barely affected them.”11 In fact, for those who were accustomed to this way of life—as anyone who enjoys cured pork, chestnuts, pawpaws, and ramps can attest—they probably ate quite well. And so the old-timers we meet, who grew up in the Depression, remember eating pawpaws out of necessity, sure, but it was also a normal and joyful thing to do. And it’s a tradition they passed on to their children and grandchildren.

  Paw Paw, Kentucky, is not easy to find. It’s not even easy to define where Paw Paw is. We drive over two mountains, along several creeks, and make at least one wrong turn. “The road is just crooky, curvy, gnarly, either way you go,” we were told. But the closer (we think) we get, the more pawpaws we see. A little lost, we ask a man about finding Paw Paw, who says it’s just a little place, a few homes, over the mountain. We follow the road to the next community. Inside a country store—a plain cinder-block building—we ask the woman behind the counter if this, finally, is Paw Paw, Kentucky. “This whole area is Paw Paw,” she replies. “Paw Paw, Virginia, and Paw Paw, Kentucky.” Paw Paw . . . Virginia? Apparently, it works like this: We’re actually now in Paw Paw, Virginia, but if we go back a few feet, we’ll be in Paw Paw, Kentucky. An
d if we keep going, we’re back in Virginia, and then we’re back in Kentucky—or at least I think that’s how it works. Two states, one Paw Paw.

  Lisa, the store owner, heats a sandwich for Bobby May, who’s been out hiking with his grandson Buddy. Bobby hasn’t ever eaten a pawpaw but was just the other day saying there ought to be some planted prominently in town. Thanks to Bryan from the Lucky Penny, I have some fruit (and seed) to share. “I remember my dad always said you don’t eat them until the frost hits them,” he says. I think they’re good to go now, but will let Bobby make up his own mind.

  “I tell you one thing that had to do with pawpaw trees, too, now,” Bobby says. “In the late ’20s, W. Ritter Lumber—man, they cleared this country, and they got rid of a lot of trees. They cut the scrub, and stuff like pawpaws, they probably decimated.” It’s true. Nearly every tree we see on this trip is second-, third-growth forest—an eighty-year-old specimen would be an outlying elder. In fact, although modern environmental ravages seem more devastating than ever, it’s true that around the turn of the century many sections of the country—Appalachia included—were grossly denuded, clear-cut to the point that great vistas became smoking, stump-filled wastelands. But the trees—various combinations of natives and exotics—came back. Whether there were once more or fewer pawpaws growing here, I don’t know, but apparently at some point there were enough in this corner of Appalachia to inspire multiple town names. “There’s another Paw Paw on the other side of Buchanan County,” Bobby says. Later, I have trouble finding it on any maps, but like the Paw Paw, Kentucky/Virginia, I’m sure it’s there.

  Before we go, Bobby tells us to look out for moonshine around Panther. Once, he even witnessed a politician giving out gallons of it from the back of a pickup. I’m not sure if he’s telling us this because he thinks we’d like to hear it, or if this is truly his most vivid memory of Panther. Either way, I’m intrigued.

  I’m not the first person to cross the country in search of Paw Paw towns. Raymond Jones was born in Kansas in 1920, to a father who adored pawpaws. At forty-two, Jones moved to California, “where pawpaws were nearly as scarce as hen’s teeth,” and he longed for them like few others before or since. In 1991 he launched The Pawpaw Tracker, an organization and newsletter whose goal was to collect the correspondence and knowledge of the nation’s far-flung pawpaw lovers. Jones grew his own trees in Santa Clara, but still had a longing. So when he learned of Neal Peterson’s efforts in Maryland, Jones (at the age of seventy-two) drove cross-country to the Maryland orchard. And as if the trip weren’t long enough, he took detours to Paw Paw, Illinois, Michigan, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and into the hollers of eastern Kentucky where he found himself, as we just have, at the state-line village of Paw Paw. “Where, oh where is Paw Paw?” Jones wrote. He even photographed a woman, Ms. Media Ested, seventy-six, standing by her dooryard pawpaw tree. Ms. Ested said she had “had lived there all her life and had always called it Paw Paw.”12

  As we go back through Paw Paw, Kentucky (and then Virginia, and then Kentucky again—I think), we come to the former Paw Paw Groceries building, which is now a gym. Our new friend Bobby used to own the grocery, in fact. If the sign ever changes to reflect the new business inside, it will be one less reminder of where you are. Maybe Bobby will sprout the seeds I’ve given him, plant a tree, and someone in town will ask the building’s owner to keep the sign.

  After a short drive we arrive at the Panther Wildlife Management Area, where we’ll camp for the night. It’s been a long day of talking pawpaws, and I wish we had come across a bottle of moonshine; instead, we settle for a six-pack. And while I never expected to stumble across a bootleg still, I’m aware that West Virginia does have a storied past with moonshine. Historically, the most popular moonshine was a white corn liquor, but it wasn’t the only fermented drink made by Mountaineers. In 1962, Roy Lee Harmon reminisced in the Raleigh Register of one particular spirit: “Now paw paw brandy was a drink without a peer. You could take a few snifters of it and feel like you were floating on a pink cloud eating ice cream and viewing some beautiful scenery . . . Kids used to be paid to gather them for brandy making . . . You got very little paw paw brandy. It was rare stuff and caused some rare reactions. I knew a fellow who got a snoot full of the stuff one winter night and didn’t show up until next day. He claimed he slept in a snowdrift and dreamed of little angels all night. He swore he kept nice and warm.”13

  Almost a century earlier pawpaw beer had a reputation for packing a punch in eastern Kentucky. “The paw-paw is ripe and the mountain man is in his glory brewing paw-paw beer,” the Courier-Journal reported in 1896. “It is a combination that leaves terror in its wake . . . A fellow from over in Powell county was in town yesterday with a barrel of the stuff, but most of the boys fought shy of it, remembering their experience of last year.”14

  Before cooking dinner, we take a short hike up a hillside. The forest floor is damp, dotted with ferns and an understory of rhododendron and pawpaws. Midway up the hill I begin to see Fraser magnolia, its leaf differentiated from the other American species by a pair of lobes at its base. I’ve only read about these trees—which are also known as mountain magnolia—before seeing them now on this hike. Trees in the Magnolia family are among the most ancient, with several species dating back more than ninety-five million years, but Annonaceae is not too far behind. In fact, the Magnolia and Asimina genera likely weathered ice ages together in the Florida panhandle.

  Today there are many unique plant species found in parts of Florida’s panhandle that are otherwise rare in the Deep South. Many of these trees and flowers—from the bigleaf magnolia and pawpaw, to trout lilies and trilliums—are more common in the Appalachians, a thousand miles away. “During the Ice-Ages, as glaciers pushed northern vegetation southward, these plants remained in the sheltered ravines when the glaciers retreated,” writes the Northwest Florida Environmental Conservancy. This is likely how a proto-pawpaw, or Asimina triloba itself, came to Florida. From here, the species evolved into its unique Floridian forms and spread southward. Meanwhile, as the glacial coverings receded, A. triloba went north, back home to Pikeville, to Panther.15

  Like Ray Jones, I have also visited other Paw Paw towns. The banks of the Potomac are home to Paw Paw, West Virginia. The region was once home to a thriving apple industry, and among the town’s principal employers was a tannery. The roads and riverbanks that wind to and from the town are lined with unending pawpaw groves, and throughout the town—population approximately five hundred—trees are cultivated, including a pair in front of the post office.

  Walking in town, I met a man named Schooner, seated by the sidewalk with a crate of pears. A former apple picker, Schooner set a record for most apples picked in a day, and remembers when the town was bustling. Schooner and his family—wife, daughter, and grandchildren—are all fond of their town’s namesake fruit. “Down in Magnolia—probably six, seven miles if you take the road,” his daughter told me, “down there they have a lot of pawpaw apple trees, it’s just a whole field, and it’s called the pawpaw patch.”

  Pawpaw apples? Perhaps because the region was such a large producer of apples, and Paw Paw itself a large packing and distribution center, they added the clarifying name of apple. And this was what the entire family called the fruit: pawpaw apples.

  At another home in Paw Paw, a few men and women were gathered on a porch. I approached them and asked about pawpaws. “I love them,” one of the men said. “I didn’t know about them till maybe twenty years ago, somebody took me down along the Potomac and showed me what they looked like. There’s hundreds of them right along the railroad, and even a walking trail where everybody goes down and gets them. There’s a road goes down to the river—that’s all pawpaws—you’re walking under a couple hundred of them.”

  Just outside Paw Paw, West Virginia, is the Paw Paw Tunnel, a former railroad tunnel on the C&O Canal. The tunnel is now part of a bicycle trail from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
to Washington, DC. The woods on either side abound with pawpaw trees, and large sections of the 335-mile bicycle trail run under a pawpaw canopy.

  In the morning, we take a light breakfast at the Friendly Mart, near Panther. A few older men stroll in, pour themselves coffee, and sit at a table. I ask the eldest man, Mr. Bailey, about pawpaws. “Sometimes, just passing by, I might pick one up,” he says. “They’re dying out, though. Unless you transplant them and take care of them, they’re going to be gone.”

  Many people I’ve met during my travels have told me that pawpaws are dying out. Denver and Bill said as much back in Pikeville. I heard similar reports in southern Ohio. Maybe it seems that way because the people in these hollers are eating them less and less; thus, the assumption is that they’re dying out. Or maybe there’s some truth to it. At the Lucky Penny, I was told there used to be a patch along the creek across from the store. But when I’d gone to look, the bank was thick with Japanese knotweed. Invasive exotics compete with and often replace pawpaws in the understory. With mountaintop removal, pawpaws are often buried in the rubble and blast of fallen peaks. When strip jobs are “reclaimed,” they’re not often on the list of replacement/restoration trees. When roads are widened, and roadsides sprayed with herbicides, pawpaws lose out.