Modern Foraging Update

Here are a couple of the prettier foods availble in the Olympia metropolitan area. Both native, both feeding people for millenia.


This is camas, one of the only words English borrowed from the original Northwesterners. Lewis and Clark saw fields of these so blue they looked like ponds. These are a kind of lily whose bulb is toothsome and nutritious, and local Tribes have been burning prairie and cooking these babies in ground ovens since at least 8,000 years ago. That's according to archaeologists, who we can assume have not yet located the earliest one.

So think about it: there are meadows here that would have been swallowed up by forest thousands of year ago without the original resource managers intervening. Meadows full of root food and four-legged food as well. There were strings of these prairie landscape threaded through the western Washington forests 150 years ago, forests that covered less ground than they do today.


These nice salmon-colored berries are, um, salmonberries. Really. I pick them on the trail home from work at this time of year.

These love the prairie edges as well, and I am sure benefited from the fire regime as well. Now they seem to benefit from disturbance, succeeding logged land and abandoned lawns. They come in in July, ahead of blackberries. Trailing along the ground beneath, often as not you'll find the native blackberry, a bit ahead of the invasive (but tasty) alien Himalayan blackberry.

Urgent Matters of State

Friday afternoon communication in a guvament agency is rare, so the urgent email (followed by urgenter Sunday call at home, no less) told me something big was going down.
Big?
Yeah. Earthshattering.


Or at least earth-moving. On Cattle Point, so they need an archaeologist, stat.

And for rapid-response toilet-vault removal-replacement ops? I'm your man.

Then it's a fierce contest of wills pitting me against heavy machinery. In a trance-like state of super attention, I await the merest glimpse of midden, whiff of once-greasy charcoal, flash of a shiny object, ready to pounce into action.

But not this time. No bullet from the Pig War. Did get this stratigraphy shot, with old toilet pit-fill (Yay! No leakage!) on the left and prairie soil atop glacial stuff on the conveniently sun-lit west profile.

The prairie was burnt for who knows how long by the native people, multiplying the root-foods and feeding the deer who might later return the favor. Then the state burnt it. Now the neighbors object, I think, or at least enough of them do to make it difficult to continue and age-old practice.

But enough of that, Here's a shot of the place looking south. The building was a radio compass navigation aid til the Depression put and end to such frivolities.

I like the rocky point. It looks like a humongous flat-faced guy looking up at the sky, jaw jutting up at the right.

Anybody still reading at this point is now like, "Huh? A giant? This dude's nuts. I'm clickin' the hell outta here!" but I'm one step ahead of you

Backroads: 23 and 141

Last time I was talking about Skate Creek, but what I didn't say was that getting there took a while. From Olympia you can go through Yelm and up the Nisqually to the flanks of Rainier, then turn down Skate Creek Road (aka Road 52) to reach the Cowlitz at Packwood. Or at least you can when it's open, and this year that happened a week or so after I traveled, so it was back-track and waste an hour.

No prob, though, since I got to see more land. I like to vary my routes to avoid monotony, traverse more terrain, and keep the terrorists guessing.

Not long after I had to go to Trout Lake, which normally means hopping on the freeway down south and following the Columbia up to Bingen before hooking back north. But I figured it would be more fun to abandon the interstate (the governor wouldn't want me going into Oregon anyway, even if the up-river trip is faster on that side), so I hightailed it east on route 12.

Not soothed enough on this beefy two-laner, it was south on 131, where the soothing embrace of a conifer canopy closed in. Then Forest Road 23 beckoned, narrowing further and further until pavement petered out into gravel. Washboard and some loose gravel, but not ever bad, no back-tracking. Two other vehicles in an hour of driving. I got out and played solitare in the road for a while, but eventually the stakes got too high for my cheap self, and I moved on.

And even though it was too cloudy to see Mt Adams, I could feel it. A mass to the left, glacial waftings from time to time.

Then after a while there was a bridge, and pavement, and before I could adjust, I was in the rat-race of downtown Trout Lake. Then it was time to work. 9AM and 4 hours driving already behind me.

Uneventful as the drive down had been, after work it seemed like a good idea to take 141 from its Trout Lake headwaters down to the Columbia, maybe get something to eat. Pushing 5PM and 12 hours of driving and struggling to beat the machine drill already behind me.

141 takes you down the White Salmon, a beautiful river. Not a narrow valley, enough room for cows and orchards. In the north, there are lava outcrops, a treat for pahoehoe lovers like myself. Locals probably feel beset by outsiders sometimes, but there are places with far worse infestations of urban vacationers and second homers. Cheap gas in BZ Corners, where transportation signage designers have decided a hamlet should be labeled "Congested Area," as if it were a phlegmy bronchial tube, like Newark.

Right above Husum, there is a very cool optical effect. You see some trees along the road and a mountain behind them. As you continue and the trees get closer, the mountain rapidly shrinks.

And then as you approach White Salmon, the Columbia Valley comes into view, and Mt Hood on the other side. Exquisite. Which may explain why most of the rich people live up there, and the riverside town a stone's throw down (not that rich people literally throw rocks at the proletariat anymore) has a different name (Bingen), a different sewer system, and has cornered the local market on abandoned and industrial real estate.

And that is the end of 141. Taking 14 along the Columbia is a fine trip, but that's another post yet to be born.

Skate Creek

So, since last time, where have I been?

Trout Lake, pulling a John Henry as I tried screening as fast as a Bobcat with a 12" auger (and after falling further and further behind, finally snapping off a leg...screen's leg, not mine). I'd show you pictures, but it was a cloudy day and all I found was that the ash is thick downwind of Mt St Hellions.

Before that was east a ways on highway 12, near Randle and Packwood. Not too far from where the Cowlitz as a river gives way to manifold montain headwaters.



You're looking down Skate Creek here, not all that far from the Packwood megalopolis, but even closer to where one of the mountain chiefs kept house. He's most famous in print as the go-to guy for crazy white men who wanted to climb Rainier.

But you get out on the land, or even just peek at the GIS, you can get the bigger picture. The "Indian's Cabin" shown on an old survey map is by Skate Creek, which feeds the Cowlitz from headwaters near the upper Nisqually River, which flows in a completely different direction, down to the Puget Sound instead of the Columbia. Besides which, there are big meadows up there, so people and ponies can eat.



My humble tent is shown within a few hundred yards of Sluiskin's place, near the big boulder dividing the stream in the top photo. The one where you could stand and net or spear fish. Because yeah, it's nice to have a trail up-valley and all, but food is what's gonna make it worth having a house.

Spent a day and a night there, and even though the Indian's House was obliterated when somebody went ape-shit with a dozer, the place is still great. Just before the hills close in, not too far from the village, lots of strawberries, plenty of room to dry fish, elk trails everywhere, and tasty water.

Modern Foraging: Part 2

Yeah, so first of all, I decided that that passive "Gathering" headline screamed idiocy and passivity. I may be shiftless, but it's not like I (only) take such bounty as falls into the bed of my truck.

Nope. And that's why Part 2 would be further subtitled "Tis the Season," were sub-sub-titles not an egregious breach of blogging etiquette (at least that's the case in the former (future?) Soviet bloc, where most of my readers live).

Seasonality: the cyclical redundance of nature's and cultures' bounties, the daily-monthly-yearly arrival of certain gifts. The biggest misconception I had before living in Hawaii was that there were no seasons, lessened only a bit when I came to know about the drySummer wetWinter seasons. There are mango, avo, guava and all the fruit seasons (the former transcended by a miraculous tree I once met in Lahaina, bearing nearly all year, and easily the coolest thing about Maui); there were the short and long seasons of the pakalolo; tourists from various parts of the globe ripened in Waikiki at different times as well.

The point is (magical trees near Moku-ula aside), it don't do you no good to go foraging for mango in guava season. Know the opportunity of the season, be it a certain berry along Highway 12 or the semi-annual large trash pick-up day in the ritzy neighborhood.

Being prepared means being a season, or a year, ahead. Tis the season right now, for instance, to spot the blooms that will become blue, salal, and huckleberries in a while, to note the heavy flush of petals in the not so obvious spots so that I can harvest in abundance and peace. Last month, I scarcely paid attention to the road in front of me (don't try this until you have driven-cycled-walked your foraging routes enough for your very bones to navigate them) as my eyes swept the periphery for flowers of wild cherries and blackberries. Before long, I'll be paying attention to the fruitings most massive and ignored, evaluating and planning for next year.

And I won't tell you a damn thing about where they are.

Cap City

Why is it that I always end up living in the capital of whatever place I am in? If you know me, you know that my shiftlessness index is too high for it to be intentional. Childhood in the Virginia capital? My parents' doing. College in the nation's capital? Free tuition and easy access to punk bands. 1990s in the Hawaiian capital? Just wanted to escape the DC = Center of the Universe syndrome, putting as much distance as I could without getting a visa (because not only am I shiftless, I lack gumption). And now Washington's capital? Seeking gainful employment.
And so it is that my life has been spent in capital cities. Honolulu and Richmond were both double-capitals: centers of state government now, with pasts as the seats of a kingdom and a breakaway republic, respectively. For that matter, Honolulu and Olympia were both territorial capitals, if you want to keep score.
I suckled at the federal teat briefly and indirectly, but broke myself of the habit before it transformed me into one of those hapless fiends who commutes for hours every day to and from a cubicle neck-deep in meaningless bullshit, resigned to apparatchikness or conniving to float to the top of the cesspool. Two states have now been kind (or blind) enough to employ me, both times as an archaeologist working on state lands and waters. Both have had the lassitude to allow me the latitude to work on behalf of peoples who arrived millenia before state government. Both have been amenable to men able to think beyond the iron cage of bureaucracy. Both have tolerated me, and enabled my mojourning instincts.
A capital's capital extends beyond the employment opportunities. Culture congregates there, performers and provincials, emissaries and emigres, mosaics and mixing pots. Money flows there, funding opportunities and facilities disproportionate to the population. Education accumulates there, schools and scholars more abundant than many larger and richer cities.
Often, capital cities offer resources of megalopolises, without the accompanying accumulation of irritation. I'll take Olympia traffic and prices over Seattle's any day. Seattle-ites may disdain Oly like Manhattans dis Albanyans, or San Franciscans snub Sacramentos, but that's OK. [In a rare case of the Simpsons being way off of my wavelength, Cap City is to Springfield as Portland is to Salem. Hmm.]
Where next? I'll probably just hang tight until Cascadia gets a capital.

Flora 11

And now, how about a couple of plant shots?

Both happened to be frame 11 on their respective digital rolls.

Modern Gathering: Part One

I have this fuzzy recollection of an anthro class in which we learned that !Kung people of the Kalahari maintained a phenomenal memory of where resources were. One example was that a family might know where a water-rich root grew, and keep that knowledge for years until it became necessary. The implication was that we middle class American kids ought not to feel so superior, and should recognize that 'primitive' cultures had knowledge that was every bit as useful and sophisitricated in their domain as was our knowledge of algebra. That mastery of solar navigation and the atlatl was every bit as important as being able to command technological marvels like the electronic typewryter.

Meanwhile, I was answering the questions that would hone the skills of the modern gatherer. When and where did the free-food-heavy happy hours ripen? Where could you pee or get bus change with no cost? Which yards held the untended fruit trees?

Years have passed in which I've gathered food and furniture, trash and treasure, and learned the lessons I needed to avail myself of the free fruits of modern life. Learn the neighborhood and its resources, be they apple trees or rich-to-the-point-of-foolishness households that toss good goods. Identify the Overflow, the perfectly good stuff stripped of value by our society, and free for the taking. Find the "commons," the between spaces and untended grounds that yield wild foods and firewood. Cruise at twilight before Large Trash Pick-up Day (just snagged a fine charcoal grill that way--there were so many that this Beggar could be a Chooser).

We may be facing hard times, and I'm sure there are more competitors out there than there used to be, but gathering has only gotten easier over time, and even the dire downturn of 2008 hurt trustafarians far more than foragers in this country. Freecycle and craigslist allow me to forage virtually before dropping a dime on gas. Municipalities seeking to sort waste and minimize landfill volume mean that most dumps have a place where you can shop for free stuff (like some dressers we've owned, or our shop-vac) or loads of compost and mulch. The steady march of Consumerism has so deadened the minds of Gen X and beyond that they are blind to the resources before them, while mine eyes have seen keener each season the glory of the overflow.

And if you were to consider as occupying some grey ground between gathering and market rate the judicious spending of coin at yard and estate sales, thrift stores, and luckless or witless ebay and craigslist sellers, then the resource catchment for the modern forager is so much the wider. For that matter, turning the gathered good into cash only makes sense. [Esoterica discarded by a former employer continues to re-fill my ebay account now and then, and more than one foraged furniture find (refurbished) has cycled back to the population via virtual and meat-space sales.]

Having the right awareness--the eye for hidden treasure and the shamelessness to pick it up--is crucial, but having the proper tools for the job helps as well. My fleet includes a Jetta (capable of carrying far larger things than you would expect, like good-sized banana trees, or box after box after box of books) and an F150 pick-up (for anything larger). Hand pruners, trowel, and shovel, friends of any archaeologist, also prove useful in liberating plants from soil about to be bulldozed or otherwise insulted.

The gatherer must also be prepared with the right receptacle: paper bags (mushrooms), plastic bags from little zip-locks (seeds) to big tough garbage bags (shrubs and sundry stuff), milk crates (even sundryer stuff), and of course the old reliable 5-gallon bucket. Most of these receptacles, the smart reader will have already noticed, can themselves be gotten at no cost.

Not being much of a parts gatherer myself, wire cutters and wrenches do not form a regular part of my retinue, but there are those who swear by them. I suppose there are those who mark maps or take GPS points, or write detailed notes, and it is possible I'd be more successful if I did so myself. But there is part of me that wants to do this relying just on memory, drawing on my inner !Kung.

Gathering?

The last post featured people who gather food from the land. Years ago, as an athropology student, I learned about the hunter-gatherers, and was told that the peoples of the Pacific Northwest were unusual in having developed Chiefdoms and Stratified Societies based on
Hunting and Gathering alone, that their weirdly rich environment enabled Social Complexity without resorting to Agriculture. Textbooks may not have capitalized all of these terms, but you better believe that the Discipline of Anthropology did.

Reality always outstrips Theory where Complexity is concerned, and so it is with the Gatherers. I knew this from Hawai`i days, when I realized that beyond the Agricultural Fields recognized by explorers and anthropologists were surrounded by concentric ripples of Informal cultivation crucial to long-term Survival...Hedges in every sense of the word. And so it is that the Gatherers of the Northwest, far from being passive beneficiaries of kind Nature, had the system wired.

Harvest roots at the time when seeds are ready to produce the next generation, and aerate the soil in the process. Blind luck, or Cultivation?

Pry out individual roots instead of ripping up acres of sod. Savage lassitude, or Sustainable?

Burn prairies to keep the trees at bay, fertilize the soil, and maintain habitat for tasty ungulates. Primitive pyromania, or Clever?

Producing food without massive inputs, dependence on trans-continental transportation, or global corporations. Witless subsitence, or Wise?

Just asking.

Roots, Rocks, Drums

After a week of training other people to be aware of cultural resources, I was lucky enough to get some education myself this past weekend. Headed over the mountains to attend the first foods celebration of the Chief Joseph band of Nez Perce. Arrived Friday evening to find a roomful of women getting ready to peel roots they had walked to and dug all day, women who welcomed my intrusion as a visit, answered my unpreparedness with a meal, and let me watch and learn while they worked, talked, and laughed. They had prayed, cleansed, and harvested the first roots of the year for a feast that would feed the tribe, and open the way for everyone else to begin harvesting. My contribution: helping set up chairs for the Sunday feast.

Day 2: My host took me to gathering grounds for bitter-root (better here than further south, where these roots get bigger, but lack the fine flavor), wild carrot (usually found higher in the mountains, but this patch was conveniently located lower on an ancient trail), black camas (a lomatium, rather than the lily camas of western Washington), and "little potatoes" (denizens of high ponderosa stands). Tribes are worried about the loss of gathering areas to development, privatization of public lands, cattle, and climate change. So it was a happy discovery to find that one of the good gathering areas is in a square mile of state land where I may have some say in protecting these resources.

My agency has been managing natural resources for just over 50 years, but tribes in the northwest have been doing so for about 200 times longer. By using a stick to pry up the roots just after seed set, and leaving the tops at the source, they aerate the ground and plant the next generation. Thousands of generations of plants and hundreds of generations of people have stayed happy in this way.

On Sunday, long-house services began at about 10AM and went for two hours. Drumming, dancing, and no more than 5 minutes of anything you might construe as preaching. I soaked in the songs without comprehension, feeling the energy and letting my heartbeat ride the drumbeat. After that, mats were laid out and tables set in preparation for the feast. Water, salmon, deer meat, bitter and other roots, choke-cherries and berries--all the native foods laid out in a line, each bowl of it blessed, each one tasted in order. Then an array of everything from hot dogs and apple pie to dried fish.

Drumming and songs continued during the meal, and people had the chance to speak to the gathering. My host introduced me, and I offered thanks for his family's hospitality, and that of the Nez Perce people, and of the earth that produced the food. Speakers offered family news, wisdom, and humor--everyone thanked the women who had prepared the meal. Conversations meandered around the tables, and bowls emptied. The final mouthful was a bit of huckleberries for all, and then zip-lock bags were distributed to all, so every family could leave with food for later (even visiting archaeologists), and each person got an apple as well.

On the long ride home, I stopped at a few more pieces of state land. What had looked like rocks and sagebrush a few days before, a beautiful but seemingly barren landscape, revealed a buffet of roots.

Revelations, Without the Crazy Bloodbath

I must be acclimating well, because a week of cool rain ushering in Spring felt just fine.

Escaped the office on Thursday to explore a parcel in Mason County. No boat, so it took a ridiculous amount of time to drive around and back-track down the peninsulae to the designated spot. It turned out to be yet another place where something stood in the 1930s and was subsequently obliterated, but where I managed to find older stuff: a micro-midden and a hammerstone with some fire-cracked rocks.

That may not sound like much, but considering the fact that almost none of the surface is visible, it ain't bad. I went through the ritual of covering some trail-less ground (in a forest thinned a few years ago, this means through 10-foot seedlings, blackberry tangles, young hazel and alder thickets, and all manner of impdeiments), and learned nothing more than this is excellent huckleberry ground. That in itself is useful, since huckleberries were as delicious centuries ago as they are now. Also, these were the evergreen species, which stay on the bush until well into winter, contributing to the larder later than most any other fruit. And then it was amatter of a mile or so of logging road, scanning the cleared ground for white shell, black dirt, and red fire-rock.

Then Friday, a 2-hour drive to eastern Lewis County, where I went with two of the Cowlitz Tribe cultural resource guys to check out a place identified a century ago as "Indian Cabin." We never found the cabin--maybe it was the foot of snow still on the ground, or maybe due to the last round of CAT tracks--but we found the place.

How do I know? Didn't have the most detailed map, but enough to provide a clue. More to the point, there's something in me that lights up when I walk into prime habitat, and when I walk in with guys who know something about taking advantage of fish runs, so much the better. Some of it has to do with the shape of stream and terrace, the suspiciously dam-like falls, the slightly different vegetation, the abundant elk poop. Then, there's just the feeling, maybe born from unconscious recognition of habitat elements, or maybe the echo of past presence.

Those of you still reading this photo-less post may be put off by the mysticality creeping in at this point, but let me tell you that even an evolutionist, a materialist son of a physicist, can listen to notes not on the standard scale. And when he walks onto the supposed location of the site, and the clouds part and the cold dissipates and everything feels right, he doesn't need to see the artifacts tucked beneath the snow. In Hawai`i I learned to keep an eye out for what are called there the ho`ailona, the signs, and this place had them. Through whatever means, mystical or just subtle material (what you want to believe is still your right in this country), the site revealed itself, as so many sites and artifacts have over the years.

And that's a great way to start the Spring.

St. Patrick's Day Massacre

Yesterday, walking to the bus stop, the varied thrushes sang. Not the ditty of Spring promise, but a dirge, their voices calling out like the mournful creaking gates of abandoned homesteads.

After forming a list weeks ago and repeatedly telling us we'd learn on Monday, the powers-that-be tacked on another day of anguish, wating until the 17th to begin hewing away at the staff. After much deliberation, apparently, it had been decided that the cutting crew would sit in a room downstairs, and we would sit in our cubicles. Your phone would ring, and you would be summoned down to hear what you knew from a simple ring. Like many offices these days, phones hardly ring on our floor, as the business of state whizzes in silent packets through the ether. (That would be email. No editor here to rein me in.)

Anyway, a phone would ring, and everyone in the neighborhood would know. The one for whom the bell tolled would manage an "Alright," and rise for the dead man walking routine. The rest refrained from banging out coffee mugs on the cubicles, but it was pretty much that vibe. The living also refrained from cubicle meerkatting; there's something wrong with popping up for a glimpse of carnage. Instead, we hunkered down, emerging only to commiserate and offer what we could by way of comfort.

And the bells rang out death all around. About a fourth of the people in my section, jobless. And it being a big state office, with a big union contract, the agony has just begun. Those laid off had to fill out forms, some of which set the stage for "bumping," by which they can displace less senior people. "Good morning. Your job is gone, but if you'd like to pass along the misery, we may have a place for you earning far less." So the iterations of displacement will cascade on down.

So yeah, I escaped. What am I complaining about? The System, what else? Not the poor people stuck doing the deed, even. They built the staff, and the cumulative misery of laying off person after person had to lay heavy upon them.

Shitty day, all around. Relief at having a job, gratefulness even. But there was no joy to be had.