Secret Ingredients (28 page)

After breakfast, we heard shotgun blasts up and down the river, some quite close, and I said, “What are they shooting at?”

Gibbons said, “Duck, I think.”

I began to think of roast duck stuffed with oranges. Gibbons must have started to think about roast duck at that moment, too. “There’s a difference between being hungry for foods that you’re used to eating and being just plain hungry,” he said, and he added, “I’ve been both.” Then he went off foraging while I cleaned up and packed the gear. When he came back, he was carrying a bag full of winter cress and three bags full of oyster mushrooms. The winter cress looked like magnified watercress, but its taste, Gibbons said, would be altogether different. The oyster mushrooms were gray and floppy and made me think of the gills of sharks. Gibbons told me that he had found them growing on a dead birch and a dead willow, and he said, “When they steam, they smell like oysters.”

“How do you tell the difference between an edible mushroom and a poisonous mushroom?” I asked him.

“You can’t,” he said. “A family in New Jersey died two weeks ago from eating
Amanita verna
—you know, the death angel. A reporter at the Philadelphia
Inquirer
called me up and said, ‘How do you tell the difference between mushrooms and toadstools?’ You don’t. There are too many of them. Some are neither edible nor poisonous. You learn to recognize the edible species. It is exactly like recognizing someone’s face; once you know a person, you know that person from all other people. If you came home at night and a woman you had never seen was standing there in your house, you wouldn’t think it was your wife. God help you, anyway, if you would. Oyster mushrooms, meadow mushrooms, chanterelles, shaggymanes, puffballs—you get to know each one, and you never forget them. I don’t just go out, find a mushroom, eat it, and see if it’s going to kill me. I know what I’m looking for.”

A boy hunter walked into the campsite. He was about twelve years old, and he was wearing a red cotton parka. A shotgun slanted down from the bend in his right arm. He had short-cropped blond hair. His left hand was bright with blood.

“Hello. What did you kill?” I said to him.

“Rabbit. You get anything?”

“Yes,” said Gibbons.

“What did you get?”

“Winter cress.”

“Don’t you hunt?” the boy said.

“Sometimes,” Gibbons told him. “Have you seen any ducks this morning?”

“No, but I shot five coot down there, on the water.”

“What did you do with them?”

“What did I
do
with them? I’m not going to wade out after coot. I’m not going to get wet for coot—not when it’s this cold.”

The boy moved on up the riverbank. Gibbons and I looked at each other for a moment, and each saw all reserves about hunted game crumbling away. We threw all our stuff into the canoe and shoved off. A coot is a ducklike bird—not a delicacy, but edible.

We searched the river for the five dead birds. Perhaps to give his appetite every possible consideration, Gibbons began to refer to the coots as ducks, and he began to shape a menu in his mind that included not only ducks but also freshwater clams. “Watch the bottom,” he said. “I want ducks and clams. If we had ducks and clams, we could have clam-and-mushroom stuffing for the duck.” So we began to scan the bed of the river as well as the surface. The water was clear and it flowed along over ribs of stratified rock that were partly covered with leaves and algae but not with clams. On the surface all around us were gliding coots but no dead ones. We slanted back and forth in angled patterns down the western side of the river. It seemed impossible, on such a still morning, that we could not see the birds.

“That little kid was lying,” I said. “He didn’t shoot any coots.”

“There’s a clam!” Gibbons shouted.

“Where?”

“Right there, Goddamn it. Stop the canoe!”

We backwatered hard, and then I pried the canoe broadside to the current and jammed my paddle against the river bottom on the downstream side. While I hung on, Gibbons plunged his arm into the water, soaking part of the sleeve of his jacket. When he drew out his arm, he had a muddy half shell in his hand.

We drifted on, still searching, and we began to feel the chill of the morning. Above us was a mackerel sky, and no warmth was coming through it. The current gradually took us close to the bank, and after we had gone along beside it for a while, alternately drifting and paddling, we came to another hunter, in a semi-blind—an adult this time, all red and brown and crouched and ready.

“Get anything?” Gibbons said to him.

“One pintail duck,” said the hunter. “They’re scarce today.”

“You’re telling me,” said Gibbons.

We paddled steadily for a long stretch, all but giving up the search, and we began to feel warm. Around noon, the sun broke through. “You couldn’t say we were suffering like the early Christians,” Gibbons said. “We’ve got a pretty good sun there now.”

“What else could we ask for?” I said.

“A duck.”

We shot through a little rip and stopped paddling at the end of it to drift and eat persimmons. While I ate mine, I leaned back on the gunwales, so that the sun could hit me full in the face, and I closed my eyes and spat the seeds into the air. “What were you before you were a Quaker?” I asked him.

“I was raised up a Southern Baptist—no dancing, no card playing, picayunish piety—and that produced all kinds of problems, many of which I still have with me. That part of Texas where I first lived was some micro-culture. Puritanism in theory. Tobacco Road in practice.”

The canoe moved quietly around a small island. Two white-tailed deer, from cover in the middle of the island, jumped and ran. When they entered the shallow water of the river, spray flew up from their feet. It happened that there was a deep channel between the island they had left and a much larger island in the center of the river. The deer slowed down, then lost touch with the bottom and began to swim. Instinctively, Gibbons and I took our paddles and made boiling eddies in a race to catch the deer. This was bizarre. What on earth did we intend to do if we caught up with them? Were we going to jump out of the canoe and drown them or knife them in the river? There was no logic, and there had been no second or even first thoughts. But we were both paddling as if our lives depended on it. Apparently, just the sight of all that meat was enough to make us move. For a time, we gained on the deer. Then their feet found the bottom again and they moved a little faster as the water shallowed. Soon they were skimming along over a few inches of water, spray flying. They ran up onto the big island and sprinted along its central ridge. When they had moved several hundred yards down the ridge, they disappeared from sight.

“Lunch?” Gibbons said, and we beached the canoe on the big island. We could find no stones there, so we went into the river and picked up two flat ones. For an hour, we cracked walnuts and hickory nuts, exchanging the hammer, and when we were not pounding or picking at the nuts we ate watercress and persimmons. Like people in all parts of the country, we were eating essentially the same lunch we had had the day before, and it was not much of a thrill. We were tired, so we stretched out and propped ourselves on our elbows while we worked. The ground was cold. Over lunch, Gibbons told me this story:

In 1922, his father took the family to the Estancia Valley, in New Mexico, to establish a homestead. The state of New Mexico was ten years old, and was having unpromising beginnings, for a four-year drought of appalling severity had discouraged homesteaders in the state, and many of them were giving up and moving away. Euell’s father was a man of such unnerving optimism that he saw the drought as an opportunity. Surely rains were near, and meanwhile departing people were all but giving away their homes and goods. He traded the family car to a defeated homesteader for a cow, a calf, a colt, two mares, a mule colt, twelve hens, farm tools, a set of harness, a woodstove, and an axe. The family moved into a half dugout, which had a dirt floor and, above ground level, was made of logs. Water was carried from a spring several hundred yards away. Euell’s father found work with a new company that had been established in the valley salt flats to make salt. This, he said, would be his permanent career. Gibbons remembers that his father described as permanent every job he started. The salt of the valley had not been tested, and cattle died wherever the salt was sold. The company collapsed. The drought continued, and since there was no other work for Euell’s father, the mule colt was sold and the money was used to buy food. Soon his father left the valley, on foot, to search for a job, and the mother and four children in the half dugout had no idea where he was going, how long he would be gone, or whether he would come back. The remaining animals began to starve. Euell’s mother got sick, apparently from malnutrition. A mare died, and Euell’s dog ate the carcass. Wood, out there in the semi-desert, was difficult to find, and Euell, who was twelve years old, began to take posts from an old pole corral a half mile away. The cow, in her hunger, ate yucca and died. Euell skinned the cow and sold the hide in Cedarvale, the nearest town. The chickens ate the flesh of the cow, and the family, who had been living on lard, pinto beans, flour, and syrup, began to eat the chickens, one by one. When Euell killed the last hen, he found an egg inside it, and for many weeks after that the egg sat on a shelf because no one would be the one to eat it. It was eventually thrown away. Meanwhile, pinto beans had become the family’s diet morning, noon, and night. At the sight of pinto beans, they sometimes vomited. About a mile and a half away, there was a house that stood empty. Its owners were to be gone indefinitely, and Euell went there to see if they had left any food. He found the front door swinging in the wind on one hinge. Sandstorms had blown drifts of sand into the house and had knocked a stovepipe chimney from the roof as well. There was no food inside. A few yards from the house was a dugout shelter, and it was locked. Euell thought for a while, then broke in. Inside, he found two hundred pounds of pinto beans.

Outside, his dog began to bark. Euell went out and saw that the dog was concentrating on the stovepipe chimney that had blown off the house. He picked up one end of the chimney and squinted into it. A pair of rabbits was in there, and after he had killed them he began to wonder—for the first time in this strange, dry, and unpromising landscape—about wild food. Soon after the last of the family’s livestock had died, there had been some rainfall in the Estancia Valley, and, as will happen in desert country, things were suddenly green. On his way home with the rabbits, he found Russian thistles growing along a fence row, and he also found wild garlic, lamb’s-quarters, and wild potatoes. All these ingredients were used that evening in rabbit stew. The next day, Euell put a pack on his back and went to the edge of the valley, where he found puffball mushrooms growing under cedar trees, piñon nuts, and fruits of the yellow prickly pear. He made long daily hikes in search of provisions. He found buffalo berries on the margins of sand hills. He found a way to fish the ground for rabbits—pushing barbed wire into rabbit holes and rotating the wire so that the barbs would work their way into the rabbits’ fur. His father returned, with money, about a month later. Until then, the family lived on the wild food Euell foraged.

Now, on the island in the Susquehanna, Gibbons stopped talking for a few minutes and cracked a number of walnuts. He hunted around for his nutpick, found it, and ate the nuts. “Wild food has meant different things to me at different times,” he said. “Right then it was a means of salvation, a way to keep from dying.”

I asked him if his family had been able to stay in the Estancia Valley. “Oh, no,” he said. “It was a whale of an unstable situation when I was growing up. But my father finally did homestead a place in northwestern New Mexico, about a hundred miles from Albuquerque, near a town called Cuba. We had four hundred and six acres. It was a very, very small spread, but you had the use of a lot of free range. When I was fifteen, I left home. I didn’t run away, I just left. I always sent money home. I worked the wheat harvest in Texas. I worked in a dairy. I worked in boll-pulling fields. I knew carpentry from my father, and I helped build a church. I spent seven weeks trapping on the Red River. With some others, I panned gold. We could get a little bit of color along the Tonque. In Logan, New Mexico, I worked for the LE Ranch, and later for the Bell Ranch. And after that I worked for Blumenshine’s, near Albuquerque. These were all straight riding jobs—yayuh, a cowboy. Just a general cow nurse—riding fences, working cattle. I spent nearly every day all day in the saddle, but I never was a good rider. I’ve always said the reason I learned to ride was all that cactus out there—you had no place to fall if you were thrown. I was never badly hurt, though. A cowboy also does an awful lot of digging postholes, stringing fences, fixing windmills. I earned extra money bronc-stomping, and I got pretty good with a rope. I can still do it. Every once in a while, I lasso a whole bunch of children at once, just to give them some fun. I learned a lot about nature from the Navajos. They were semi-agricultural. They were lean in the spring, and when they killed a horse they ate everything. When I was twenty-one, I caught a freight for California.”

As Gibbons finished telling me these things, I found that I was looking at the red bandanna around his neck. His long, spare, unpostured frame seemed suddenly just right for the resigned slouch of a cowboy in the saddle, although that was the last thing I would have imagined before then. And I thought I could see now why he had apparently been so timorous about starting out in the first place. He had had his share of discomforts years ago, and the idea of artificially creating them, or even running the risk of creating them, must have seemed bleak to him. I, for my part, had been sure that Gibbons would take care of the food and that luck would take care of the November weather, so I had been full of energy when we started out, and had thought that I was going to have to rally Gibbons to get him through the trip. What was happening, though, was that I was losing energy now and Gibbons was visibly getting stronger as he settled into the routine, accepted the conditions we had set up, and relaxed in the momentum of fifty years’ experience.