Acorns have been prized as a food source both for their abundance and for their nutritional value. In the western United States, for example, several of the varieties of oak favored by the indigenous Indian tribes could yield from 500 to 1000 pounds of acorns per tree per year. Although the bearing season for oaks is only a few weeks, it has been estimated that an industrious individual, working eight hours a day, would be able to collect over four tons of nuts. Such a harvest could feed a family of five for more than a year, yielding over 5000 kilocalories and 50 grams of protein per day per person.
I’ve lived in an oak forest my whole life, and it never once occurred to me that I might eat an acorn.
Before, I was Nell and the forest was trees and flowers and bushes. Now, the forest is toy on, manzanita, wax myrtle, big leafed maple, California buckeye, bay, gooseberry, flowering currant, rhododendron,wild ginger, wood rose, red thistle, and I am just a human, another creature in its midst.
Gradually the forest I walk through is becoming mine, not because I own it, but because I’m coming to know it. I see it differently now. I’m beginning to see its variety—in the shape of leaves, the organization of petals, the million shades of green. I’m starting to understand its logic and sense its mystery. Everywhere I walk, I try to notice what’s around me—a clump of mint, a cluster of fennel, a thicket of manzanita, or a field of amaranth to gather from now or return to later, when the need is there or the season is right.
Why did we ever buy flowers—great, gross, hulking things in plastic containers from the Buy-n-Save parking lot—that we watered, fertilized, fenced, and sprayed, and that still finished the summer ragged from slugs and snails and grasshoppers? Why didn’t we let the flowers grow where they would, healthy and strong and in their own time?
I wish my mother were alive so I could tell her that we didn’t need those Buy-n-Save petunias, didn’t need even her ring of tulips. Clarkia. Columbine. Red Clintonia. Blue-Eyed Grass. Woolly Paint Brush. Red Thistle. Owl’s Clover. Calypso Orchid. Golden Fairy Lantern. Globe Lily. California Poppy. Miner’s Dogwood. Buttercup. Windflower. Solomon’s Seal. Lupine. Vetch. Mountain Iris. Ceanothus. Fireweed. Shooting Star.
We were surrounded by flowers all the time.
We’re eating like queens from the seeds our father saved, from the garden we hoed and mulched and planted and weeded and watered. Summer squash and zucchini, cherry tomatoes, carrots, beets—each picking is a feast, a gift, a windfall.
But already hybridization is going awry. We’ve got some plants that produce round Zucchinis and others that yield weird green gourds. None of the cabbage, eggplant, or radish seeds germinated, and some of the tomato plants that I thought would do the best because their foliage grew so vigorously have set no flowers.
And there are other worries. The corn is still puny-looking, and it may be my imagination, but I think both the creek and the spring are beginning to slow. In the meanwhile, the cupboard empties. Only a cup or two of wormy flour is left in the pantry, and only a quarter of a sack of pinto beans. The rice is gone. The Fastco cans are gone. There are three more jars of our father’s beets, two more jars of plums. At night my mind throbs with questions: What if the beans fail? What if the corn won’t grow? What if the rest of the tomato flowers don’t set? What if the spring runs dry or if pests get into the garden? What will we do when we’ve used the last canning lid?
And the biggest and most enduring worry of all—what will we do with a baby?
The other day I was in the woods behind the house, harvesting yerba buena to add to the pantry’s growing assortment of herbs. I felt calm and dreamy, crawling across the sun-dappled forest floor, snipping sprigs and tucking them into the old Easter basket I’ve started to use for gathering.
I pinched a shiny leaf, rolled it between my fingers, held it to my nose, and closing my eyes, I inhaled the brassy smell of mint. I remembered that Native Plants said the California Indians used yerba buena as a sedative. For a long moment I was happy breathing its scent, but just as my lungs had finally filled and I knew I would soon have to interrupt my pleasure to exhale, another thought jabbed at me with such urgency that I forgot about the crushed leaf in my hands.
Tonight, work-weary and half-drowsing, a cup of yerba buena tea steaming on the floor beside me, I opened the encyclopedia, reread what I had read last winter, back when it mattered only as information to memorize for the Achievement Tests: The Indians who came to inhabit the region of Northern California now known as Sonoma, Lake, and Southern Mendocino counties are referred to as Porno, although they did not comprise a single tribe. For at least ten thousand years before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Porno enjoyed a rigorous but relatively peaceful life.
Because they seemed to practice a sort of primitive birth control, and because of the temperate climate, and the abundance of game, fish, and native plants in that region, their population was well maintained in relation to their resources. Famines were never reported. Even in years when the acorn crop was light, there were always other food sources to fall back on….
Today California’s native population is of only vestigial importance. Between 1769 and 1845, the Indian population of the state decreased from an estimated 310,000 to 150,000. By 1900, there were fewer than 20,000 Indians living in California.
Suddenly I remembered another book, an anthropologist’s collection of stories, songs, and interviews from indigenous Californians that I had skimmed once years ago, when Eva and I were trying to figure out how to build a teepee. Back then I abandoned it as soon as I discovered that none of the tribes it mentioned lived in teepees, but I found it again tonight in Mother’s workroom, carried it out to the living room and sat with it in front of the stove, reading the words of the people who inhabited our forest before us.
I read coming-of-age songs, love songs, feasting and funeral songs. I read about Coyote and the acorns, and the girl who married Rattlesnake. I read the reminiscences of basketweavers, rainmakers, hunters and dreamers, and eventually I read about the massacre at Needle Rock:
The following is from an interview with Sally Bell, one of the last of the Sinkyone. She was over ninety years old when she gave this account in 1928 or 1929.
“My grandfather and all of my family—my mother, my father, and me—were around the house and not hurting anyone. Soon, about ten o’clock in the morning, some white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and my father. I saw them do it. I was a big girl at the time. Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it into the bush where I ran and hid. Mylittle sister was a baby, just crawling around. I didn’t know what to do. I was so scared that I guess I just hid there a long time with my little sister’s heart in my hands. I felt so bad and I was so scared that I just couldn’t do anything else. Then I ran into the woods and hid there for a long time. I lived there for a long time with a few other people who had got away. We lived on berries and roots and we didn’t dare build a fire because the white men might come back after us. So we ate anything we could get. We didn’t have clothes after a while and we had to sleep under logs and in hollow trees because we didn’t have anything to cover ourselves with, and it was cold then—in the spring.”
Finally I begin to understand what the encyclopedia means when it says by 1900, there were fewer than 20,000 Indians living in California.
The Porno divided the year into thirteen moons and named most of them for the kind of food available when they were full—the moon when you can get clover, the moon when the fish begin to run, the moon when the acorns come.
I am no longer certain what month this is, but last night the moon was full, and we canned our first batch of tomatoes today. At dawn Eva built a fire in the stove while I went out to pick tomatoes in the chilly garden. When I came inside, the stove-warmed room felt wonderful, and when I poured boiling water over the first bowl of tomatoes and picked one up to slip its skin, I welcomed the heat on my cold hands.
But soon the room was blistering hot, and my
fingers were throbbing from scalding water and tomato acids. I remembered my father saying, “It takes more boiling water to can a tomato than it does to have a baby.” In my palm, the flesh of each skinned fruit felt like a heart, and I thought of Sally Bell and shuddered.
We worked until noon, until the last ripe tomato had been processed and the house itself felt like a quart jar that had just been lifted from the boiling water bath. Finally we left the jars to cool and the fire to die down, and we escaped to the orchard to harvest plums. When we reentered the house at dusk, there were nineteen quarts of tomatoes waiting on the table, only one of which hadn’t sealed.
Tomorrow we will can plums, and the next day we’ll start on the peaches. We’ve only got eighty-three lids left, so all too soon this sweltering work will be over, and everything we can’t cram under a lid will be left to rot in the summer sun.
I wish we could eat it all now and hibernate all winter.
We had spent the afternoon on the ridge above the house, picking the waxy manzanita berries I’ve just learned how to steep for juice. We were on our way home, walking silently through the hot forest, enjoying the thud of the berry bags against our backs and the occasional wisps of air that came to tease us like a phantom breeze.
I was thinking only of what obsesses me now—the way our pantry is filling. I was estimating the number of quarts the bean crop would yield, calculating meals, and planning what to can next, when suddenly Eva plopped her bag down and veered off through the woods.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, following the water-sound of the little stream that parallels our path at that point. “I want to cool off.”
“Wait for me,” I said, setting my bag beside hers.
The summer heat had reduced that tributary to little more than a trickle, but the water felt like cold silk against my naked feet. I stood on the mud and gravel of the streambed and felt the press of the current against my ankles, felt its coolness rise up my dusty shins. I forgot about counting canning lids.
But then I caught sight of something that made the whole world grow taut and still.
“What is it?” Eva asked when she heard my gasp.
Wordlessly, I pointed to a track in the quiet mud.
It was broad and blunt, shorter than my own foot but wide as my outstretched hand—a thick-heeled footprint crowned by five toe-marks. My first thought was, He’s come back, and I froze, standing in that stream like a stunned rabbit, waiting for the afternoon to be rent by a final blow and scream.
Then I saw the claw marks in the mud beyond each toe and felt a sweep of relief that no human being had left that track. A second later I was wheeling and listening, scanning the forest for the new danger it contained.
The forest was unchanged. It was as quiet and impenetrable as it had been a minute ago. Only we were different.
“Bear?” Eva whispered.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“I thought they were all gone,” she said, clasping her abdomen as though by protecting it she could keep us safe. “I thought the bears left when the settlers came.”
“I guess they’re back,” I answered, straightening up and hurrying on.
Which is worse? I wondered as we raced towards home with our jostling bags of berries—a bear or a man?
Black bear (Ursus americanus), the most prevalent bear in North America and one of the largest mammals. Once the black bear enjoyed an extensive habitat of wooded land, though in recent times both its range and numbers are much diminished.
Like man, all bears are plantigrade, walking on the entire foot and commonly leaving a track showing the large palm and sole pads, and, in some cases, the claws. Unlike its fiercer North American relative, the grizzly or brown bear, a black bear will rarely attack humans, generally preferring retreat to confrontation.
The black bear is omnivorous; besides animal prey, it eats insects and a variety of vegetable matter. Given the opportunity, it will also raid garbage dumps and campsites. In northern regions the black bear spends the winter sleeping in a den, but unlike such animals as the ground squirrel or chipmunk, it is not a true hibernator.
Last night we smelled smoke.
It had been a hot day, hot with the sort of oppressive late summer heat that takes your breath away. We’d managed to spend both morning and afternoon in the garden, pulling the bolted lettuce plants and collecting their seeds, weeding the potatoes and pumpkins and watering the panting plants.
We had eaten our garden supper out on the deck—sliced tomatoes with basil, steamed green beans, and summer squash—and were lingering outside with our glasses of manzanita juice, watching the light fade from the western sky, and trying to catch a sweep of breeze before darkness chased us back into the hot, locked house.
We’d decided to can another batch of tomatoes in the morning, and I was fretting about our dwindling supply of canning lids, wondering what sort of risk we would run if we tried to reuse them, while Eva fanned herself with a languid hand.
The breeze we had been longing for finally came—a puff of air so frail it didn’t even stir our hair. I found myself remembering autumn, the chill mornings, the golden light, the piles of burning leaves. I was thinking about the whimsy of memory when the breeze returned. At first I thought the fickle evening air was somehow pulling the scent of smoke down from the chimney, but when it came again, it didn’t have the old creosote tang of a cold chimney.
Suddenly I was on my feet, sniffing the air and pacing the deck in the coming darkness.
“What is it?” asked Eva.
“I think I smell smoke,” I said.
In an instant she, too, was up and sniffing. There were long minutes when I was sure we were imagining it, when I felt impatient or bored and was ready to go to bed. But then one or the other of us would say, “There!” and the air itself seemed to stiffen with our fear.
“Do you think he’s come back?” asked Eva. “Is that his camp-fire?”
The evening was so still, the breeze so inconsistent, that it was impossible to pinpoint any direction, impossible to guess how far that smoke might have traveled to reach us.
“I don’t know,” I answered, and went to get the gun, though it suddenly struck me that a forest fire was the worst menace there was. A man might possibly be reasoned with—or shot. A bear we could try to elude. But a late summer forest fire would destroy everything we must have if we are to have any chance of survival. It would ruin our house and our water tank, would scorch our garden and all our stores of food. A late summer forest fire would leave us at the mercy of the woods.
“What should we do?” I whispered to Eva after we both said, “There!” almost triumphantly because we had again caught that faint, sinister smell.
“There’s nothing we can do,” she said, “but wait and see what happens.”
“What if it is a forest fire?”
“We’ll leave.”
“Where can we go?” I asked.
“To the stream,” she answered and I thought of the two of us trying to flatten ourselves into that eight inches of cold, black water, while above us and around us on all sides the forest blazed and roared and toppled.
It was an awful time. We were afraid to stay outside after dark, and yet we were afraid to go indoors, where we couldn’t keep track of the breeze. We sat on the deck on either side of the open front door, twitching like startled deer at the night sounds, gulping at the breeze when it wafted by, waiting for the crescent moon to clear the treetops, waiting for the blaze to sweep down around us.
I said, “Maybe we should try to save some things.”
“How?” Eva asked from her post at the opposite doorjamb.
“We could carry some stuff down to the creek.”
“What would we take?” she asked, and I fell silent. We couldn’t take what people used to take when there was a fire. We couldn’t take the photograph albums and family letters, my computer or the VCR, the artwork or heirloom silver. We would have to take the things we needed. Bu
t we need it all. If we are to survive, we need everything—every jar and nail, every piece of clothing, every scrap of paper and scraping of food, all our father’s junk. And most of all, we need the things we couldn’t possibly carry to the stream. We need the woodstove, the workshop, the water tank and garden, the orchard and truck. We need the house. If those things burn, we might as well burn with them, for we will surely die.
So we stayed where we were, sitting on our deck in the pleasant summer night, listening to the crickets, watching the moon and stars, imagining walls of fire, imagining trees screaming, flames soaring, imagining that horrible light.
At dawn we were still there, huddled under the blankets I’d dragged outside when the warmth had finally seeped from the air. Our clearing was still green, the garden was growing, the house stood. But the rasp of smoke was unmistakable even in the crisp morning air, and as the light grew stronger, we could see the northern sky was tinged with brown.
“At least it’s not a campfire,” Eva observed.
It was a strange day, ominously normal except for our exhaustion and the fine white twists of ash scattered across the deck like fairy bones. Despite the heavy cast of the light, the sun still shone. When we went out to pick the ripe tomatoes, the garden was full of its own grandeur, and the tomatoes yielded themselves easily into our hands, heavy and rank-smelling and with the night’s chill still in their flesh.
But when Eva knelt to start a fire in the stove so we could heat the water to can them, I felt a shiver of worry.
“Maybe we shouldn’t can today,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“For one thing, we won’t be able to tell if the fire’s getting closer if we’re smelling this smoke, too.”