Hiking Notes #2: "Tasting Otherness" [by Cassandra Cleghorn]

If you haven't read Day #1, take a glance back -- it will orient you as to my purpose and place. Short version of my blogs this week: writing and hiking. In the next few days, I'm thinking my way into what happens to my mind when I body myself into the trees and stay there for a while. 

Yesterday I said I was a novice. Our mountains in the Berkshires reach only a few thousand feet, hills by the standard of my poet-hiker friends in Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Washington. I'm a day hiker, a piker, no heavy backpack. I return, day after day, to the same map of trails in a ten- or fifteen-mile radius. I stay close to home.

In yesterday's blog, I mentioned the wild azalea that smells as sweet and strong as night-blooming jasmine, and the grosbeak's ornate song, as if I knew what I was talking about. I should come clean. The few things I know about the place I live have come to me by accident, or through spastic Googling. 

I happened to learn about the azalea the day after my hike, over dinner at a wedding. I was seated next to my colleague, Joan Edwards, a botanist who works on fast-moving plants and biomimicry. Her most recent research is on what she calls a "neighborhood" model of pollination, whereby flowers from the same species will have different visitors at different sites. Her cameras record an image every three seconds. 

I excitedly reported that the honeysuckle was in full bloom all along the Taconic crest. It smells like heaven up there, I said. Wonderful! she said. But that's not honeysuckle. It's wild azalea, a native species. I shut up and listened to Joan. So now I know that. 

I only know about the grosbeak's song because I went to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, allaboutbirds.com, and clicked on the link. I only know it's the Rose-breasted grosbeak because David Sibley's Guide to Birds is open on the dining room table. Distinguishing between the Rose-headed and Black-headed can be tricky. Remember that "Rose-breasted can be extensively buffy on underpants." 

Late in Specimen Days Whitman defends his ignorance of the names of the birds whose birdsong he hears:

"Many I cannot name; but I do not very particularly seek information. (You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment of feather’d, wooded, river, or marine Nature generally. I repeat it—don’t want to know too exactly, or the reasons why. My own notes have been written off-hand in the latitude of middle New Jersey. Though they describe what I saw—what appear’d to me—I dare say the expert ornithologist, botanist or entomologist will detect more than one slip in them.)"

This is malarky, of course. Specimen Days is nothing if not a sustained ode to specifying. Whitman knows infinite facts and names, and delights in that knowledge. Here's a bit of marginalia:  "—the tulip-tree is of the magnolia family —is found from Canada to Florida (largely in Michigan & southern Illinois) the highest 140 feet high, 8 ft thick the lumbermen west call it yellow poplar —it does not transplant well, but is easily raised from seeds." Identifying and naming means learning to see and smell and hear and feel in greater depth and detail that species you were formerly satisfied with getting wrong. 

And we love the names themselves. David Young, in "Vermont Summer: Three Snapshots, One Letter": 

"There’s nothing to do till galaxy-rise

but name and gather the wildflowers.

This is called “pearly everlasting.”

And this one is arrow-leaved tear-thumb!

Hawkweed, stitchwort, dogbane, meadow-rue . . .

The dark comes on, the fireflies weave around me,

pearl and phosphor in the windy dark,

and still I am clutching my list,

saying “hop clover, fireweed, cinquefoil,”

as the Milky Way spreads like an anchor overhead."  

I, too, clutch my lists, adding to my collection of trails I can name and claim. 

But I take Whitman's point about willed ignorance. I spend much of my life on mastery -- as musician, teacher, writer. In hiking, I want the daily experience of learning as a child learns:  by sensing, by hearsay, by guesswork. I like being schooled by others, living with the dawning awareness of how little I know. 

I'm thinking here of Lyn Hejinian, from The Language of Inquiry: "Poetry comes to know that things are. But this is not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgement—and that constitutes a sort of unknowing. To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness." 

Recently, I tasted otherness. In late April I was hiking the Frost Trail in North Bennington, Vermont. The easy, 2-mile trail leads from the north shore of Lake Paran to the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury. I was foraging for ramps, the tiny wild leeks that taste like a cross between garlic and spring onions. Trillium grows alongside them, as do jack-in-the-pulpits. (I learned about what to do with ramps from David Young's book, Seasoning: A Poet's Year, a blend of memoir, poetry, nature writing, and recipes.) Fiddleheads were everywhere, too. 

About half way along the trail, I left the woods and entered wetlands. Balance-beam style bridges crossed small streams where I had found watercress the year before. To the side of the trail, I started noticing brilliant green heads of lettuce -- the size and shape of romaine, but brighter. Swamp lettuce! I thought, as if that was a thing. 

To make sure, I Googled "swamp lettuce" on my phone. Scrolling past a few sites, I found one that gave me what I wanted: "Swamp Lettuce with Blue Cheese Dressing."I pulled up a couple of heads, roots and all, threw them in my stringbag and started back. To make sure, I nibbled a bite for ten seconds, spit it out, and waited to see what happened. Nothing bad, a nice flavor, slightly garlicky. 

I texted pictures to my kids and a few friends, and to my husband, who was about to give a reading in Washington DC. Look what I found for lunch!

If I had read beyond the headlines, I would have learned that this was not miner's lettuce, the tender winter purslane that my friends in California find in the wilds. This was water lettuce, the decidedly poisonous, potentially deadly species that overruns waterways throughout North America. The blue cheese lead was actually someone asking a question about whether or not they should eat skunk cabbage. They shouldn't.

Water lettuce contains high levels of calcium oxalate, the salt contained in over 1000 plants, including dumb cane (or Dieffenbachia), and the leaves of rhubarb. Crystals of calcium oxalate are the primary ingredient of kidney stones. Dumb cane.

My husband quickly forwarded me the actual facts. But by then I had washed, chopped, mixed, plated and chomped down on a few big forkfuls. Wow. This stuff is strong, I texted. My mouth is tingling! 

As the roof of my mouth, tongue and lips started to burn and swell, I read that speech may be inhibited, that my throat might close up entirely. Mom, you are not allowed to die of swamp lettuce, texted my son from LA.

White rice, saltines, applesauce, yoghurt -- nothing but time counteracted the sensation. I determined that my case was mild. I had actually only swallowed a couple of mouthfuls. Besides, I had mixed the toxic greens with mesclun and kale. I could speak, though I had no one to talk to. It took five hours for my mouth to return to normal.

I put the electron microscope image of calcium oxalate -- the surface of a kidney stone -- razor-edged tetragonal crystals tumbling, next to a photo of the undulant moonscape of my tongue. I felt every blade slashing the tissue. Here's my sequel to Dana Levin's "Banana Palace," I thought but I didn't have it in me to write the poem. 

 

Comments

[David Young]

Glad you survived that! Thanks for including me in your blog, next to Whitman! I always put a fake name into one of those lists. This time, I think it was "dogbane."
Best, David

[David Young]

Woops, just looked up dogbane. It's real.Maybe 'hawkweed" maybe "stitchwort, both sounds a little phony?

[Cmarie Fuhrman]

I love how honest this is. I think so much of nature writing these days tries to be so imbued with knowledge making it hard for the novice to feels as if they belong, or can engage. Not these entries. They are unafraid, willing to try and to make mistakes. In a world with so much information it is delightful to read of someone learning, trying experientially. And doing so beautifully.