The Real Paleo Diet

Keep walking, paleo dudes; it's bound to warm up someday.

Because I procrastinate, other people have beat me to the punch, but rest assured that this archaeologist has had it in for The Paleo Diet (TPD) since first learning that it was not a joke. The book, the fad, and the spin-offs have as much to do with the actual diet of Paleolithic peoples as Indiana Jones has to do with the Nazi-free tedium of actual archaeology.

The ideal is that if we ate like our early human (or pre-human for that matter) ancestors, we'd avoid being diabetic lardasses. TPD's inventor, Loren Cordain, has a PhD in health, and I suppose I could snipe at his utter lack of awareness of what Paleolithic people actually ate (and more importantly, I hope you will see, what they did to procure those calories), or lower myself to the credentials attack so favored by archaeological and other academics.

But instead, let's just take a look at where The Paleo Diet fails to be the paleo diet. Let's see what it really took to feed ourselves in the pre-agricultural world.

First off, nearly all of the fruits and veggies that you can gorge on in The Paleo Diet, well, they didn't exist in the Paleolithic. As a phase of human development, despite its many accomplishements, the Paleolithic is adamantly non-agricultural, so much so that archaeologists inserted the Mesolithic as a buffer, just to make sure that any latent or proto-agricultural pursuits (selecting, seeding, and weeding of wild food patches, for example) were excluded from the early times. You want to go Paleo? Then forget the "fruits and veggies" allowed by Dr. Cordain, because nearly all of them are from species domesticated over generations by post-Paleo peoples. Eggs? Not unless you grab 'em from under a wild bird or reptile (or monotreme, I guess, if you live down under). Macadamia nut oil? You've gotta be kidding.

Hooray! A wild berry; just don't eat it all at once.

Modern Americans tend to think of unfamiliar and ethnic-sounding foods as more primitive/pristine, but many of them still fall far short of being Paleo. Acting like your quinoa concoction is "wild" is an insult to the Inca (and before them, Wari and Tiahuanacu) farmers who domesticated it, and to the hippies who continue to grow it up north. Go gather goosefoot yourself, if you want something less sullied by the selective hand of man.

But the list of what you can eat and be Paleo is only part of the argument for TPD's bullshititude. A roster of  What Thou Shall Not Eat to remain truly Paleo makes the strictures of Leviticus look easy. No crops, no domesticated animals, and sure as hell no mammal-milk from the wild creatures (defined as: everyone but mom).

Paradoxically, the Paleo person may also have had more choices than the Kosher observant, if only because we have no clue about religious strictures in the way distant past. You are hungry, and you spy some crayfish or lizards,...you eat them. If you die soon after, your smarter relatives avoid those species. If your life consists of wandering the earth in search of food to simply remain standing, your religion may have more to do with Thanks than with Rules.

Speaking of wandering, get used to it. A key component of Paleolithic nutrition is walking. Needless to say, no catching a bus to the store or even driving to your favorite foraging spot. Sadly, being in modern America, it must be pointed out that there would be no horses, dinosaurs, or other mounts to relieve your feet. Trekking across the land, searching for food, hauling it back home, and doing all the prep with tools you have to make  yourself,...takes a lot of energy. Be careful not to burn more calories than you can hunt or gather (but Rejoice! for all this walking keeps you trim and slim). Oh, and be ready to pull up stakes and move camp a few times a year, because hunting depletes game, and plants grow where they want, not where you would consider it convenient, oh ye pre-agricultural Paleo person.

And speaking of housing, your only heat is a fire, the fuel for which must also be gathered, which may involve a lot more walking, returning with heavy loads. Then you stoke the fire in your cave or saplings-and-bark or whalebones-and-sod dwelling. Hope your Paleo food is healthy, because you will be in close quarters with other humans and their ailments, not to mention the constant smoke from the fire.

So, are we clear? The real Paleolithic diet is probably pretty damned healthy, assuming you don't eat a toxic plant or mollusc, and that your hovel-mates are healthy, and that you are killed suddenly in a hunting accident before lung disease kicks in. But anything touched by the hand of man, not just processed, but domesticated, is a sham. Anything bought rather than hunted or pulled off the landscape? Nope. A life of constant walking, clothing yourself in what you can tan or weave, eating what you can find,...that life is probably going to give you a healthy body until a mastodon rips you a new one, or years of breathing sand and smoke chokes you, or whatever.

Or, you can feast on spelt and walnut oil, broccolini and mangoes. There are plenty of healthy ways to subsist. Just don't call it Paleo until you've doing it with your own stone and bone tools, and eating only the wildest of foods in your humblest of abodes.

Agriculture and Bias

Orchards count as agriculture

In the past day or three, I've been reminded of how weird our understanding of agriculture is in modern America. Another blog that I regularly read, written by an educated, smart woman, linked to an article about the novel theory that the introduction of agriculture actually led to instability and population collapse in Europe. Then today, working with some other archaeologists and archaeologists-in-training, we talked about how generations of our forebears (and their cultural anthropology kin) have sworn that in the Northwest there was no indigenous agriculture or horticulture, just hunting and gathering.

Like most children of Western civilization, I was taught that the rise and refinement of agriculture allowed production of surplus, which was what allowed humanity (some of it, at least) to step off the dreary treadmill of subsistence, so that some people could become businessmen, priests, bureaucrats, artists, and all of the other divisions of labor that make up a civilization. Even among the cynical who viewed some of these jobs as blights upon humanity, there were few that argued the basic tenet that by making the transition from gathering and hunting wild foods (yes, in that order, if you are to be honest about where the calories came from) to farming domesticated crops represented an advance, creating some respite from the struggle for survival.

Only, if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view (so long, Bible Belt readers), agriculture does not provide stability. It is inherently unstable. From a diverse spectrum of wild plants, adapted to local conditions over millenia and more, people came to depend on a select and quite small group of species, using temporaryu success to grow larger human populations. Over time, this became more pronounced. Hundreds of wild starches gave way to dozens of grains and roots, and ultimately to a handful of cereals and russet potatoes, often grown outside their optimal range through generous application of non-renewable chemicals. Nomads moved to villages, which became cities and morphed into megalopolises. We stand now as the coyote did in the old road runner cartoons, over a canyon on a board nailed to a board nailed to a board, cantilevered so far out on a gamble that we are doomed to fall, unable to skitter back to solid ground. Evolution punishes monocroppers and urbanites who forgot how to find or grow their own food.

In our hubris, we have assumed that human selection can successfully replace natural selection, when in fact all domestication amounts to co-evolution. From corn's point of view, it has caused humans to adapt their behavior toward its own ends. We winnow down the gene pool to emphasize the parts that maximize kernel production, eliminating competition from weeds and even regional maize variants, maximizing acreage, extracting fossil fuel to fertilize and distribute the crop. Zea mays has domesticated and trained Homo sapiens to its benefit, not ours.

What amounts to genocide of other grains and the once diverse array of locally adapted cultivars of corn has resulted in such a narrow, patented gene pool that we are now at greatly increased risk of collapse in a major element of our food supply (and the same goes for soybeans, rice, wheat, and any other major food crop) should evolution create super-bugs, fungi, weeds, or diseases that could rip through the millions of acres planted in the same damned genome. Or maybe  the dirty work will be done by climate change, or the growing scarcity and cost of the chemical additives and artificial genetic alterations that are already deeply entrenched responses to the biological and climactic threats we already face.

Our smug modern bias that by replacing a "primitive" society (in which nearly every family produced its own diverse and locally adapted bread, vegetables, and protein) with a few corporately owned farms churning out the national output of food and food-like subtances is misplaced. Even before evolution engineers collapses in production, the elmination of diversity and removal of people from the healthful effects of working the land has created epidemics of heart disease, diabetes, and the other diseases of civilization that decrease individual fitness and create increasing drains on social resources. More angioplasty, less art.

Camas fields do not count as agriculture

But let's step back from that brink, back to the early days of agriculture. The domesticated crops all began as wild plants. As a young anthro, I was taught that this happened in a few select places: Mesopotamian cereals, Mesoamerican grains, Andean tubers, and a few others. While this select club would be expanded from time to time, membership rested on transformation of primitive forms to highly productive domesticates. People who ate "wild" foods were not agriculturalists, or even horticulturalists. They were foragers.

A prime example of that class were the indigenous tribes of the Northwest, who stood out among hunter-gatherers in having a higher level of social stratification and cultural elaboration than anthtropologists expected of tribal, non-agricultural peoples. Being an exception only proved the rule, however, since it was pointed out that a peculiar natural abundance of food, from salmon runs to camas meadows, was what allowed them to advance beyond, for example, their Great Basin counterparts.

But the more we look, and the more we listen to the Native cultures, the more we see that the Northwest tribes (and although I am ignorant of the details, I would have to suspect the tribes in other parts of the country) were not passive collectors of a random bounty. People burned meadows to return nutrients to the soil to such a degree that once-poor glacial outwash became black loam, while at the same time arresting succesional processes that would have liked to establish forest where berries and root foods grew. Harvesting techniques aerated the soil, gave next year's crop room to grow, rotated the burden of harvest, and propagated new generations of food. There was weeding and transplanting. Just because Tribal knowledge acknowledges first and foremost the role of Coyote for the origin of many foods does not mean that the actions of mortals played no role in the perpetuation of those foods. My suspicion is that the "wild" characterization of foods like camas and cous has as much to do with our lack of investigation as with absolute reality--the same people who weeded out the death camas, who harvested roots and berries over millennia, am I to believe that they never rooted out smaller, sicklier plants in favor of tastier or more productive ones? Are we supposed to think that because a food plant is found within it's "natural" range, it was not the result of transplanting or establishment of patches convenient to trails and settlements? I find that hard to swallow.

But our bias is that if a plant is native to its range (typically defined thousands of years after people began eating it, hmm...), it is wild. If it is not ridiculously oversized, the food part dwarfing the other elements, it must not be domesticated. If it is merely tended, rather than planted in rows or milpas, it is not agriculture. Our bias is that hard farming work, rather than knowledge of how best to feed off of natural systems with minor inputs, is superior.

We see what we want to see (I'll admit that I want to see humans who adapted to a place over millennia as pretty wise to its ways), and so Euro-Americans who conquered continents generally want to see that as progress. Casting agriculture as a noble effort, even as a single God's will that Man exercise dominion over the earth and its lesser creatures (Indians included), serves that goal. Defining what everyone else did as inferior helps make the stealing and subsequent transformation of the land more justifiable to most Americans, eases the guilt of wiping out thousands of little societies attuned to nature to make way for a large one attuned to itself. Bad as that particular bias may be, the one that may come back to haunt us more deeply is that other bias, the one in which we presume that civilization is always getting better, that we are exceptional, and our agriculture is smart and sustaining, rather than unstable, a dangerous taunt toward evolution.

Desecration is in the Eye of the Beholder

Do this to my grave and I will haunt the Hell into you.

Some people decide what's gonna happen to their bodies when life departs, willing the afterdeath: cremation, burial, embalming, burning viking ship, and so on, hoping the dearly un-departed will live up to the legal document, maybe even the dying wish. I'll cop to having considered all of the above except embalment, and can add a few more to the list, like: worm-food, fertilizer, being planted at the base of a tree, and something like the Zoroastrian end. 

Some people live in fear that somehow their corpse will be defiled, their burial site will be desecrated, their remembrance dirtied. As an archaeologist I've witnessed cases and heard reliable tell of epidemics of graves razed, bones bulldozed, and I'd rather it not happen to my bones, but I don't lose sleep over it, or even comprehend it as more than an abstraction.

But the other day I witnessed the routine maintenance of a US President's grave, a founding father, beloved by Virginians. A guy pulled up, trimmed weeds with one gas-powered machine before blowing trimmings with another. I don't speak for any dead presidents, singular or en bloc, but the racket and fumes felt like desecration to me. Said president remains synonymous with ambitious and creative husbandry, the idealized American nation of farmers, and so it's hard to imagine the guy being OK with a noisome din and gassy humors of the modern maintenance regime.

I don't blame people like the guy in the photo, and if you recognize him, don't be mean. He's just doing his job, and there's a lot to do for only a few staff, not the dozens of slaves and overseers that did everything in the President's day. Blame goes to that culture which cannot get things done without real slavery, or a mix of wage slavery and polluting technology. Maybe someday we'll be forced to do things by hand again, kill the leaf blowers and employ corps of landscapers at fair wages to weed, rake, and in all manners tend the grounds and graves, but I'm not holding my breath (until I die). Until I can keep gas-scaping from tending my grave, I think I'd rather be cremated and put where the weedeaters and leafblowers cannot reach, where the noise blows in on the wind and not out on the exhaust.

The dead were not issued ear protection.

 
 . 

Garden 10: Food for All, or It All Ain't Food

One of the Blueberry Guard

It only occurred to me as I vainly grasped for a clever post title that my rationalization for procrastinating myself out of any serious attempt at pest control in decades of gardening could pass as a Garden Philosophy. Maybe more, if I can pump up a fully righteous head of steam.


Meanwhile, back in the garden, a diversitude of creatures ambulate, root, hyphaeate and otherwise occupy what is in theory a controlled landscape. My monotheistic ancestors, farmers dependent on the God of Abraham (and the Holy Ghost of Agronomy), plucked bugs and pulled weeds til the cows came home, until one of those cows in it's brahmic wisdom brought forth unto these farmers a bounty of chemicals. Most tillers of soil lost out to the conglomerates who replaced stewardship with production, and had to leave the land to those who could wrench the greatest efficiencies out of topsoil tranmogrified from living organism to platform for nutrients, herbicides, and pesticides. The Holy Ghost ascended to the heavenly throne, and nations came to depend on the chemiracle to feed themselves, their armies, and their trade surpluses. (Then came genetic engineering, the chimeracle, but that's another episode...)


But those bugs and slugs flitting and crawling, the weeds stealing soil and crowding crops, the molds and fungi and microbial malevolents...they may be threatening the beans, the carrots, the squash, the tomatoes, egads--the hops! Maybe. But then again, some provide haven and ambush sites for pest-devouring preyers, diversity and distraction enough to derail disasters. The complexity of a soil only sorta weeded (not hoed and turned, much less the more harrowing experience of mechanifarming), strung through with a felt of roots, hyphae, tunnels and wee webs of creatures too multitudinous to comprehend, lacks a uniform veneer of predictability, but is a better long-term bet.


Chemfarmers gain a momentary advantage. The weevils and weeds die, the crop comes in (barring misapplication, bad weather, and the plethora of troubles that will always ace farmers). But not all the pestiferous fauna and flora die, and the survivors immediately set to breeding immunity into the population. The survivors represent a diversity-poor selection at first, theirs is a high-stakes gamble that overcoming a single chemical will result in success. But if they win, they win big, and a field becomes a field of weeds, with a single species dominating to an astonishing degree. 


Which is almost as lousy a place for the animals and fungi as was the industrial moncropland.


Meanwhile, back on the tendril of thought that started this post, my garden has no resident chemical residue. I've been known to directly expel and even violently attack a plant predator, but I don't poison anything. Which means that anything there can be food, even if not for me. If the ladybug can gobble the aphid with no worry, good. If herbivores have a plethoric buffet, so much the better for any one food plant to survive. If the fungi select out the weakest, then evolution points me in the right direction (or more precisely, away from a wrong one). I do not get miracle yields, but I get my share.

HI NW

Maybe you knew about it all along, but it was not until I was fully grown that I learned about the Hawai'i - Northwest connection. Cook and then Vancouver sailed (and ailed and aled) between these places in the late 18th Century, and there are those who feel that certain petroglyphs in Bella Coola may demonstrate that the Hawaiians had already done so before. The Hawaiian islands provided sandalwood and firewood, provisions and crew (weary and horny Anglos jumped ship in Lahaina, and adventurous Hawaiians took their places) during the fur and silk trade. Maybe because they both loved kings, the Hawaiians and British took to each other, among the expressions of which was a minor migration of Hawaiians to the Columbia and points north, in country that was then more Brittanic (or Gallic, maybe Russki).


I moved to Hawai'i before I knew any of this, and so I was a little surprised to find that a favorite dish there, and pretty much the only local kine grind with land-based non-starchy vegetables in it was something called lomi salmon. Tomato (hard to grow in the islands since diseases and fungi caught up, but historic sources indicate it did alright soon after introduction), onion, and salt salmon. It looks like this (but tastes even better):

"Lomi" derives from lomilomi, the Hawaiian art of massage. You need to turn the ingredients together with your hands to get the  tomato juice on the salmon, to bleed onion spice into the tomato, and to spread the salmon salt throughout. 


I made this last week with the trimmings from a king salmon I'd inexpertly filleted. Salted and drained and resalted and redrained and salted again the bits o salmon. Rinsed and dried and added a diced Yakima tomato and homegrown progeny of Walla Walla onion. 


None of the girls would share it with me, because they figured the salmon was raw. True, it was never cooked, but the salt basically dehydrates it, so it does not seem so raw. Not exactly jerky tough, but the salmon ends up being a salty, slightly chewy nugget in the soft tomato matrix. The onions add crunch, sweet allium crunch. I had no ogo, but may try to get some next time. 


This dish marries the Northwest and Hawai'i Nei, transcending a swath of the world's largest ocean. To eat it is to consume history, to break open the barrel of salt fish in a Honolulu house, to hybridize cuisines in a Kanaka Village kitchen on the Columbia. To have it here and now, with a sun-ripened tomato, a sweet onion from my yard, and a salmon that swam the morning before it was salted, is delicious beyond description.

I Sat in Front of the King

A couple of days after my encounter with a queen in Wenatchee, eating lunch in Twisp, I sat in front of the king, an older gentleman who, every 4 minutes would make a pronouncement:

"I'm gonna pick up 3-4 more horses." No reason given.
"I ought to buy a few hundred head of cattle. Seems like the fish and wildlife Department won't even talk to ya about leases till you have a herd."
"The job those boys did on the fence,...I might ask 'em out to do the whole property."

Basically, listing things he would acquire in that odd monarchic tendency toward bucolic nostalgia. Like Marie Antoinette playing  milkmaid in Petit Hameau, a rustic Swiss-ish village she had built at Versailles. Do they ever really blend in? Heck no, but the rich spend a lot of money locally in their quest to feel like farmers, which is the modern capitalist version of the Prince and the Pauper, and acceptable to the peasantry.

Sometimes it works out well. The locals, or at least a family or two who do the king's dirty work, may get the run of the place during the 90% of the time when isn't around. Suppliers of feed and fencing, gear and luxury goods, have a new customer who not only pays on time, but can be counted on to spend extra if the seller so much as hints that some other guy is doing similar things. The king must win at the game of competitive consumption. 

But then, the king ain't from here, and he don't exactly understand some of the balances he is upsetting, the social and environmental  laws he's breaking. He overpays the young guy (who everybody knows is an idiot) while the dad (who everybody knows can fix anything and needs the work to stay off the bottle) remains silent and grows bitter. He fences off open range, brings in questionable stock, and when he grows bored (or scared) of nature goes on a building spree that bulldozes the old Indian village, paves the single best field in the valley, and pollutes the night sky with floodlights.

With any luck, the king gains a new fascination and moves on before he does too much damage. Without it, he falls so deeply in love with the place that it becomes his court away from court, and other nobles follow, inflating land prices and making it impossible to farm or ranch any more, ruining that which drew him there in the first place.  The occasional king is smart enough to notice and regret this irony, but most don't even recognize what happened.

Auwe!

Once I had a garden in Honolulu. I built stone terraces around an old mango tree, grew ancient crops, played with my baby girl. For the better part of a decade, I went there every other day or so. Took it on as a pile of rubble, left it as a little oasis of rich organic soil in the middle of a city.

I just looked at it in the google aerial view, and felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach. The mango and the terraces are gone. The big retaining wall that had kept this little place hidden was replaced recently, I guess, and they bulldozed the garden. Maybe it's buried under stone and concrete, but the life is gone.

Auwe. Lamentations. 

A Failure

Once upon a dream, I started a business. I'd had one before, and it had worked. This one ended unhappily, but not forever after. I'd forgotten about it until Spring gardening season rolled around again.

The idea came to me during the Virginia years, a time frought and fucked as any I've survived. I'd go do a field project in Hawai`i for a few months, then come back and write it up. This made better financial sense than the full-time job I was offered locally; weird world. The work I did was exciting and rewarding, and I was allowed to control how it went for the most part. But it also meant missing out on my family, and each trip made it clearer that we'd never be able to afford a decent life if we moved back to the islands.

So I considered going into contract archaeology on my own in the Old Dominion, quickly dismissing the idea as a doomed foray into a hyper-competitive market already full up, not to mention having start-up costs way beyond my means. Then one Spring another idea lit.

Maybe in restrospect, I'd begun grasping at straws, but at the time it felt like I'd discovered a way to weave threads of my experience and interest into a tapestry. Old things, dirt, plants, history, gardening, ethnobotany, sustainable land use... I would invent and occupy the niche of landscape designer/household archaeolgist/... Living in the first American watershed settled by Anglos, I'd charge their descendants to visit their places, learn what had come before, restore it if they wanted, or design a landscape that would testify to their presence long after their kids and kids' kids had become wastrels.

To be sure, landscape architects with expertise in historic gardens exist, but they operate only in the thinner reaches of the statusphere, where the blood runs blue for lack of oxygen and exogamy. There are archaeologists who know something of historic gardens, but they are occupied with their jobs at presidential and plutocratic estates, and spurn the dirty world of digging for hire. The Heritage crowd can be woefully ignorant of the millenia of plant knowledge that preceded Jamestown settlers, and native plant enthusiasts would sooner dine on Cicuta maculata than plant an English-ish cottage garden. Any number of people could grasp a thread tighter than I, but only I would have the tapestry.

There was no time or money to get a Landscape Architect degree (no prob, I didn't want big commercial jobs anyway), so I set to stacking up what creds I could. I was admitted to the UVA/Monticello Historic Landscape Institute, I took a class on the HIstory of Landscape Architecture, I became certified by the state-wide organization as a Landscape Designer (did an end-run on that one, avoiding the usual class-load by re-packaging my anthropological, planning, and cartographic skills into a portfolio that passed muster).

One reason I'd chosed this garden path was that it could be done without employees, without investment capital. I had my body (still relatively strong) and a shed full of archaeology and landscaping tools. My wife got a gig that she generously transformed into a pick-up truck.

And I was ready.

But Virginia wasn't.

I ran through connections quickly. A couple referred to me by my sister, and better yet her boss and his River Road Mansion. My college room-mate with his new spread, who bought a design and paid me to implement it over a year or two of seasonal visits.

But otherwise, not much. Even the work handed to me amounted to very little money in my pocket. I kept taking Hawai`i work to keep from starving my family, which interfered with being able to focus on the landscape design business. I managed to have one good job that I got on my own, designing and making a Japanese style garden in Church Hill, complete with rustic timber frame tea house.

I did learn a lot in my efforts to get work, meeting prospective clients and walking their properties. For instance, even the most ignorant and inexperienced people think that they can plan a lasting landscape (why did you call me?), because one time they grew a great bed of those, uh, you know, the yellow ones. Of if willing to concede that I had some expertise, obstinately insisting on a landscape that would at once be sublime, maintenance free, instantly mature, drought-proof, deer-proof, and death-proof. Oh, and extremely cheap.

So many faces of cheap. Like the people who call for a consultation, a price estimate, and are obviously just milking you for ideas and knowledge with no intention of ever hiring you. Or the ones who will hire you for a basic conceptual design and then ask if you can just real-quick-like whip up a detailed plan and materials list and specifications for nothing. Or who string you along before dumping you to have your ideas done by one of those "landscape designers" whose qualifications amount to having a diesel truck and a trailer full of lawnmowers and leaf-blowers and illegal aliens. Or the old money in their brick and stone mansions that are taken aback that you won't work for what the colored people did back when they were colored. Or the new money in their opulent McMansions, mortgated to the hilt and wanting the patina of age and class instantly with sale plants from Home Depot that have been withering their driveway for a week.

I was getting to despise people. Even more than I had before.

It didn't help that the big dream--that I could do landscapes that would grow into something that would persist, that might feed generations yet unborn with beauty and fruit, with a tableaus of older worlds--was revealed as an impossibility. Because a yard is so personal, people cannot help tweaking it. They plop down some ugly-ass ornament, or if not ugly, definitely not part of the tapestry I'd woven in my mind. And to say so is to insult the customer, which means business is done. Then they get thrilled at some find at a plant sale, and place an invasive bully in the bed. Or they love some certain plant that is wrong for the place where they just know it would be perfect. Tell them it cannot take the heat, cold, wet, dry, or even that it will get too big and damage their house, and at least half the time, even though they may nod their head, their eyes reveal that they think you are an idiot or just too difficult.

At one point I groveled to my mom. Dad's will left everything to her, and she was sitting on a pile of money larger than she needed while her kids ate beans and rice and never ran the heat. If I could have enough to cover living for a year without having to keep running off to Hawai`i, enough to get my name out there where it would do some good, then I was willing to keep trying. But, no dice. I was disappointed, but not mad. It was her money, and she was already helping us financially. I was asking too much to say, "Support me for a year in case this crazy plan works out."

Maybe someone else will make a go of it. There are plenty of Virginians in the strata between the Monts (Vernon, -icello, -pelier) and the middling types that would be willing to pay enough to learn about the secret history buried in their soil (part of the plan was to do some archaeolopgy that would enrich the history of the owner's place, and maybe provide something cool for the mantlepiece), to have a garden matching the period of the house, or maybe to have a landscape that would feed the body and soul for a long time. If I'd been able to stick with it for years, it may have become a going concern. I still believe that a decade or two into it, I could have become The Name that people would pay real money to attach, that I may have been able to become part of the competitive consumption and display of the statusphere.

But then, it's best that hunger won out, that I looked elsewhere, and found a job doing something very different, very far away. Working for richers made me itchy and cranky. My friend was the only one uninterested in chiseling away at what I made (truth be told, the whole landscape thing with him may have been his way of spreading the wealth). Had I become a fulcrum in the one-upsmanship game, it may have broken something in me. More likely, I'd never make it up that far, some moderately rich bonehead would set me off, I'd refuse to do stupid things, and would limp along, maybe making ends meet, but becoming more and more misanthropic. My kids like beans and rice well enough, but is it fair to ask them to live with a broken dream and it's disgruntled dreamer?

Nah. Better the route taken a few years ago. Not a dream. Not a preconceived notion of what will work, trying to force the warp of my interest onto a weft of commercial success, notting nothing true. Epiphany may not be the right word to describe what has happened since I decided to admit failure as a landscape designer, but it is interesting how doors suddenly opened. Letting go of the dream let me try something else, ride the flow to a new place.

Where a life I never dreamed of is turning out to be better than most of the scenarios I would consciously imagine. I get to learn whole new plant communities, different ways of gardening in a strange climate, a rich ethnobotany, unique archaeology. Having the landscape design business, being my own boss, allegedly, turned out to be the least independence I'd had for a very long time. Paradoxically, working for a state government, keeping things right with laws and regs, has left me free.

River James

I started this blog a couple of years ago starting upstream against the James, and there is always part of me that will live there, or at least in the Tuckahoe swamp feeding its flow. The headwaters, frigid eddies and snow-rafts heading downstream under dim-winter grey, were the last I’ve seen of that river where I once canoed, swam, waded, and kept a wary eye out for snakes.

Lately, though, as I followed a blog (http://300songs.com/2010/09/28/55-james-river-cracker-and-camper-van-beethoven-richmond-virginia/) by the songwriter and adoptive Richmonder David Lowery, the river has flooded back into my consciousness. That blog started as a way to explain his 300 songs, give them some context spin and stories, but it has spawned some interesting essays on cultural geography, on the natural and man-made material underpinnings of music and lifeways. “James River” is one of those songs.

James as in Jamestown, as in centuries of arterial flow (rum and sickle cells upstream, moonshine and tobacco downstream), as in a city’s flusher, as in a swath of wild through so-called civilization. Lowery recognizes in its neglected banks and muddy water the “elegant decay” of a defeated Southern capital. For all the talk of rednecks and junkies and that, you can tell he loves the place. Sometimes, at least.

Richmond is where it is because of the Falls; it lies on the toe of the Piedmont foot, or if you want to look at it another way, the promontory above Tidewater’s swampy expanse. Just like Alexandria (DC being a modern invention by Virginia standards) and Fredericksburg. All these Falls cities had their ports, and it’s tempting to thing that’s the end of it, cities just automatically spring up at the point where merchant ships had to stop and unload.

That probably explains why the settlement lasted, but not why it appeared. The English set up near the falls because that’s where Wahunsenacawh held court. The Spaniards who didn’t stay too long called him Carlos, I think, and the new batch of Europeans took to calling him Powhatan. His homeland was to the north on a smaller river, but once he’d fought, married, and politicked his way to the apex of a large confederation, he headed to the James. What he called it, I have no idea, but the first English just called it Powhatan’s River before they came up with the original idea of naming it for their bible-revising king.

Wahunsenacawh wasn’t there because he had deep draft merchant ships, although the logic of stopping at the falls holds true for canoes. Maybe he didn’t want to be too far from the Chickahominy just downstream, a tribe who stood out in the region for their democratic system of government and widely feared warriors—double threat to a guy like W. Probably he wanted to control the flow of trade between coast and interior. Definitely he did not want to live way downriver at some hellhole like Jamestown Island, with its bad water and malarial swamps.

Oh, and the precondition to all that commerce and politics: a river spawning huge runs of fish. I won’t quote the 16^thcentury shamster bit about walking across the river on their backs. That’s frickin’ ridiculous, and it saddens me to see so-called historians repeat false claims intended to trick people into putting money or themselves into the Virginia venture. But there were unimaginably more fish than now, and of course a bunch of them would run into the falls, creating a major harvest locus.

Anadromous fish excel in excess capacity, and so large annual harvests are possible without killing them off. The humans coming to get the fish would have swelled the population during certain months, and would have had some impact on water quality, especially if a downpour came after they’d done a big burn eroded gullies and caused a pulse of ash and mud. So was the river in its pristine pre-human state when English colonists set foot on the river their progeny would one day dump kepone into? No, but it was likely in an evolutionary, ecological balance.

The river in those days could be a boundary, but nowhere near as much as when Europeans came along. The great chief’s influence didn’t go north of the Potomac, and of course there have always been beefs between left and right bankers on any river, but all it takes is a look at the names of Tribes to know that they saw rivers as centers more than as edges: Chickahominy, Mattaponi, Pamunkey,…

Now, rivers divide counties, states, nations. The James separates Henrico (no Spanish pronunciation in this honorific for Henry, you either say hen-RYE-co, or if you are old and local enough, Hen-RUKkah) and Chesterfield. The line it wrought on maps and in minds of Euro-Americans was frought with various worries and prejudices. Although the City of Richmond annexed part of the south long ago, the power and money generally stick to the north. Long before there were railroads and wrong sides of tracks, ‘South Side’ was a slur.

Maybe this stemmed from racism, the south bank of the James near Richmond being one of the few places where free blacks could live. Or maybe it’s geography, south of the river being the ever-broader coastal plain, lots of creeks and swamps (culminating in the great Dismal Swamp) but not enough rivers to connect with the wide world. In time, Southside sprouted manufacturing and chemical plants, refineries, and neighborhoods for the workers. The owners of these concerns settled in a way that reflected US history: labor and resources extracted from the south fed opulence in the north, which kept expanding westward. Just as Southside brings forth visions of smoke and white trash, a Richmonder understands that West End means wealth (and pretensnobbery).

I grew up in that westward expansion. I knew that as a recently fatherless girl, during the Depression, my grandmother had helped run a boarding house in Richmond, but the truth is that neither of my parents grew up there; they arrived in the late-1960s and decided that the West End had better schools, so I ended up growing up in suburbia. I remember no other place before.

Yet, still in reach of the river. We’d hear the trains on the James, played there from time to time. My dad’s work was not far from one of the bridges. On rare but indelible days, winds from the southeast would waft the warm sweet spice of curing tobacco from Shockoe Slip right up to my nose.

A nose that knew the stink of swamp and the danks of copses. Across the street from our house, there was another row if identical houses, and then Tuckahoe, the James trib separating Henrico from Goochland Counties. The placename refers to an aquatic plant whose tubers formed a crucial foundation in whatever Food Pyramid was promulgated by Wahusenacawh’s Department of Health. One of those taro-like plants that occurs in every tributary of the James, in sloughs and swamps everywhere through that country. And before a succession of tobacco, corn, coal mining, and real estate development took over, I imagine some patches were cultivated, others were half-wild reserves, and a few went feral. Our swamplands were once breadbaskets.

But all those things did happen, and the woods I walked were thick with greenbriar and honeysuckle vines, mostly under thick hardwood canopy. Step in the wrong place, and the mud would suck off your shoe, poison ivy would baste you with time-delayed blistery misery, cottonmouth or copperhead would strike, or worse. A few times it froze hard enough to venture off the trails and onto the ice, but always with the fear of falling through. When it finally did happen, someone got a boot-full of water and muck, but nothing worse, and we grew out of some fear.

One time me and my friend were walking through these woods when we came upon something worse: 4 boys coming the other way. At their head was a guy who was fairly big and thought of himself as a strong guy, being just bright enough to know he’d never be the smart guy. We’d met at a log crossing The Ditch, a mucky gash dumping the neighborhood storm drains into Tuckahoe swamp. I stepped on and so did he, and in the middle he grabbed my walking stick and tried to twist it from my grip or me from the log. Neither succeeded, and I don’t even remember who got to cross first. Just the rush of adrenalin, a stalemate, and then cracking up when he solemnly uttered, “You’re strong. I admire that.” Like in some old melodrama about days of chivalry or some such crap delivered in a fake English accent.

Meanwhile, I was thinking, “You’re a fatass.”

Turns out the guy’s family were Southsiders.

And so this entry ends with no summary, no pith. Just me taking a break.

Fringe Flora

For a while I did archaeology on Kaua’i, which is at least as fun as you would imagine, despite a psychopathic thug who kept threatening me and one long, rainy, snot-filled stint when I did permanent damage to my wrist wrestling through packed clay. The reward for that was spending days in the presence of Makana (watching the wind place misty lei around the mountain again and again), that and some secret things you cannot hear.

I did more excavation there and then than I had since my initiation in a certain O’ahu valley. A fair volume of dirt moved, for sure, but more importantly a high rate of hitting things. Not cool artifacts and valuable museum pieces, but deep stratification, a cache or two, clear-cut features. And lots of charcoal.

Which is what helped me come up with the idea of a “settlement fringe flora.”

Generations of farmers, cooks, and eaters lay down blankets of soil. Cultivation and fallow, cooking and cleaning, occupation and abandonment: all these things lay down a record. All these things make rubbish and soil, holes and backfill, deposits and discontinuities that archaeologists come along later and read. Charcoal that gets buried in the process, the carbon sequestration incidental to human life, embodies a history of the environment (at least the woody part of it). Locked in charcoal is the cell structure of a plant, and patient experts could be hired for a dollar a minute to decode this. The information gained is especially useful when you use it to choose samples for radiocarbon dating, and start looking at things over time.

By buying a few hours of this service, I was able to find the obvious: that the 20th Century had wreaked havoc. Also an earlier chapter: arrival of Polynesian farmers caused discernible but less drastic changes like disappearance of some endemics and introduction of some useful plants. Both of these are examples of selection, intentional or not, cultural or natural, evolution’s famous cutting edge.

But what was really interesting to me was that in taro fields and villages alike, certain species managed to stick around through centuries of human presence. Akoko, Kukui, Lama, Ulei,...these four tended to show up whenever there was a fire. The first and last of these make perfect sense in terms of their own adaptation--they can colonize disturbed areas, they are abundant and not too long-lived, they flood the landscape, especially when humans are around and not planting exotic weeds.

Kukui? Not native, but also not necessarily the type of aggro plant that invades and takes over. No, it’s one of those plants that accommodates people so well that they help it along. The plant one, and it will provide oil, wood, dyes, glue, compost, medicine, even a reminder of a god. The hardshelled nuts will roll downhill or hide in soil for years, ready to sprout and make more.

Lama? This is the surprise. Diospyros sandwicensis, Hawaiian ebony (paradoxically pale wood and all). Not the fastest grower or reproducer, possessed of spiritual significance, and not what you would necessarily expect to be burnt willy nilly. Yet it shows up in many a fire pit. Partly, this is just a physical peculiarity, the hardwood probably preserves better than many species. But I have recovered it in areas where it would have been wiped out in a generation of uncontrolled harvest, where the only way for it to have been used over the long run would be for people to maintain its presence (conservation or cultivation? I dunno).

These four species, I think, are part of a fringe flora. Plants that occur around human settlements. All had uses in the organic technology of Hawaiians, all provided fuel to warm and cook, all escaped extirpation. All maintained some place in an environment settled and farmed, all occupied a Polynesian landscape in evolutionary stasis.

Coppice Success(ion)

I think I read somewhere about there being European hazelnut coppices known to be 800 years old. Beyond Old French, I'm not sure where the etymology leads, but the practice of cutting back trees that could be counted on to re-sprout is at least as old as tales of the Hydra. (How many of the Hercules stories have to do with the heroism of farm labor? The stable-cleaning labor is not even metaphorical.)

Whether to reinvigorate an old berry bush or to generate a new supply of withe or wattle, cutting back the sprout-prone tree is an act of the wise, though the proliferation happens just as dependably for ignorant modern hackers. Of the few people who even know what a coppice is, only the lunatic fringe maintain one.

Never as exciting as a new field, but crucial for the self-sufficient farm, or even the urban homesteader, a coppice is one of those mundanities whose importance and interest flourish with a little attention.

I inherited a yard with over half a dozen clumps of native beaked hazelnut. A couple have been removed (and in this, I m optimistic--at least one will require repeated abuse for years before giving up). The others represent several life stages of hazel regrowth. Skinny little yearling whips remain flexible: weavable, knottable, plaitable. Another year or so and they make decent stakes. Then kindling and pea-poles, and later on the big tipi poles I use for beans and hops. Using various combinations, I can make hoops to support dahlias and peonies, woven fences or punji sticks to keep the dog out of seeded beds, and on and on, any function needing a straight pole, forked stick, flexible withe,...

The life cycle of a coppice, at least in my garden, is one of attrition. Rising up in resentment against a clear-cut, dozens of sports sprout the following spring, each vigorous and boldly set on reaching the sky. For a year to two, thinning to remove the erratics or to provide some flexible pieces removes enough to let the survivors become thicker than my fingers. Looking at each shoot, I then prune for the eventual shape of the clump: removing cross-branches, thinking about ease of future harvest, removing unwanted shade, and maintaining paths. The results will provide me with sturdy stakes and poles that will eventually return to the soil (for I am horder of my quarter acre's biomass).

As the trees age, the decision is whether to rotate within the clump, or between them. I can selectively take out the older trunks to keep a succession of new, nutful, and reachable ones rising. This will give me a steady supply of various-sized cuttings. Or I can let the whole thing grow to a ripe old age--until I am tired of feeding the squirrels who are the only ones that can get a the nuts, that is--and cut it all to the ground so that a proliferation of small shoots rises the next year. This will give me wood for cooking, and if done at the right time, a good harvest, followed by years of abundant cuttings.

Either way, the succession plays out over the years. Either way, the stubborn hazelnut roots send up their persistent pleas for sun. Either way, that non-descript bush off at the edge, making do in shade too thick for crops, is an important organ in the organism of this yard.