Considering scenarios that have never, and are highly unlikely to ever, affect me personally is one of my hobbies. I’ve read the memoir Life and Death in Shanghai three times, in case I’m ever imprisoned as an intellectual. I know what you’re thinking: fat chance of that. Still, in case it happens it soothes me to know about the coping strategies Nien Cheng applied, should the situation arise.
Subcategory One: food scarcity. If you’ve read the story, The Good Blanket, you know that the bottom drawer of my two-drawer horizontal file cabinet at MNC contained twelve cans of tuna and a blanket. And I knew where the can opener was kept: in the top drawer of Cathy’s desk. All of this preparation was in case of siege.
If you haven’t read The Good Blanket, don’t worry: This story will make just as much sense.
When I explained the blanket and tuna in my bottom drawer to a summer intern—because I’d opened it to retrieve my bright orange sneakers and questionably clean socks for a walk—-he said, What’s a siege? Otherwise a smart, fun person, he clearly was uneducated in strategies of medieval warfare, the ones that were highly unlikely to occur during the workweek in Silicon Valley. I heard myself sounding just a tiny bit wacko as I explained the meaning of siege and watched his polite, carefully blank facial expression.
Sidebar: Actual disaster preparedness, the kind that is recommended by experts to deal with more likely scenarios like earthquakes or wildfires, I’ve mostly avoided. To the consternation of my husband. End of sidebar.
Last November, when I was hiking in Water Dog Park, the open space area near our house, my attention was drawn again to the buckeyes that I’d see, here and there, on the ground. Gleaming golf ball-sized brown spheres, beautiful and smooth as polished mahogany. High on the hand-appeal scale. Enticing. I thought to myself, Can I eat these?
I already knew the native people in this part of California ate acorns. Learned it in one of those self-guided educational walks, part of a Miwok display in Yosemite Valley. You have to remove their little hats (the acorns' not the Miwoks') and go through an involved process to remove the tannins, the bitter compounds that will make your acorn flour pancakes less delicious, whether or not you have any maple syrup or jam left in your fridge. If I’m not mistaken, the leaching process involves lye.
Note to self: Get some lye, just in case. I already have a Williams-Sonoma mortar and pestle, so I can grind the processed acorns. I think Beau will take a turn if my arms get tired or my hands get blisters from all that grinding. Or if the power is still on, I can use my Vitamix. An interesting scenario: the electricity still works, but there is no food other that what you can find outside, within walking distance.
Acorns are small but plentiful. They grace our backyard each autumn, literally in our own backyard!, because giant oak trees from the church behind us hang over our fence. Buckeyes are much bigger, but less plentiful. I’ve taken note of where the buckeye trees are located. There’s even one on our double cul-de-sac, our loop-d'loop of a street that has two small islands of native plants filling out the insides of the loops. One of these islands features a buckeye tree. They’re native to our area.
There are a dozen houses on our loop-d'loop. I’m going to have to get out there early to get the fallen buckeyes, should the need arise. There aren't many from that one tree.
Last November I saw about eight buckeyes on the ground under the tree, and even the trees in Water Dog don’t seem to produce many buckeyes per tree. Perhaps buckeye trees are content with their relatively scarce population, compared to to the more competitively-minded oaks. Or, more alarmingly, the neighbors are already onto buckeyes as a food source, and they’re getting there before me.
I did check, and you can eat buckeyes, for sure. You’ll have to pull out some of your lye, the lye you’ve already bought for your acorns. But it’s worth it: your local loved ones will appreciate the novelty that buckeye pancakes bring, after they’ve resigned themselves to eating acorn pancakes every day.
If you get too hungry to leach them, or you forget because you’re getting old, you’re in trouble: The native people also used untreated buckeye powder to kill fish. They’d throw the powder into a pond, and the fish would float to the surface. I don’t know what to think about the first man (because you know it was a man) who ate a fish to prove that the poison doesn’t affect the flesh of the fish.
For the record, it doesn't. Also for the record, I don't think Water Dog Pond has enough macroscopic fish to sustain me for even an afternoon, if we run out of acorns and buckeyes.
One of these days I’m going to properly research what local greens can be foraged, too. Don’t want to get scurvy, eating just acorns and buckeyes. I’ve seen tempting leafy plants that look like lettuce, and it’s okay if the leaves are a little tough and you have to cook them for a while, like collard greens. There are ferns that beckon me, too. Yesterday I pulled some clovery weeds, absent-mindedly, as I walked up our front steps. My hands smelled great! Acorns in the back yard, and delicious peppery clover in the front! What an Eden this neighborhood is!
Wild fennel is plentiful near the Bay. Lee and I always remark on how yummy it smells as we ride our bikes by. I saw a woman picking wild fennel fronds last weekend. Didn’t know you could eat the fronds, hooray! I was planning to dig up the root and use the fronds for compost.
Speaking of the Bay, I regularly harvest bay (laurel) leaves from Water Dog Park. Those are just for flavoring, and I use them even now, when food is not even a little bit scarce. However, if we’re having to eat acorns and buckeyes every day, a little flavoring may come in handy.
Water Dog has wild mushrooms, too, but I’m afraid of mushrooms that don’t come from the store. My son, Max, and his girlfriend, Ems, harvest chanterelles in the forest in Maine, but Ems is a trustworthy, lifelong forager. A month ago I took a photo of large golden mushrooms that I found in Water Dog, and sent the two of them this studiously nonchalant text:
Max replied, Not even close. He continued, I’m not going to entertain the notion that you actually tasted them. He'd texted me right away, because he was worried Ems might think I was serious.
When I ride my bike along the Seal Slough to the Bay, I see hundreds of coots, those chicken-shaped water birds, black with starkly contrasting bright white beaks. You can’t tell they’re chicken-shaped when they’re swimming, only when you see them on land. In the water they look like ducks. To me, anyway. When it’s past lunchtime and I’ve been riding a while, I do speculate whether coots taste like chicken. Have you seen the Looney Tunes productions where the little chicken hawk looks hungrily at Red, and the chicken hawk’s thought bubble shows the rooster, Red, prepped and roasted, on a platter? I’m like the chicken hawk, with the coots in my thought bubble.
Now, I have no idea how to catch a coot, and I can’t imagine being hungry enough to kill one. Think I’ll leave that dirty work to Percy, my twelve year-old, eighteen-pound, dimly-sighted, agoraphobic cockapoo. I’ve seen that look of desperate hunger in his eyes when I’m eating chicken. Surely he'd get one for us to share. I’m a bit worried that, after figuring out the seemingly insurmountable catch-and-kill process, the coot will taste more like slough than chicken. Can’t find any literature on this subject. Intellectual curiosity is dead.
If we don’t have enough protein, however, our hair will start to fall out, our complexions will get pasty, and our fingernails will soften. We might need the latter if our tools are gone along with the food. In this scenario, all tools are gone but the mortar and pestle and a skillet for the pancakes, and the stove is working.
Maybe Beau can trap squirrels. He’s Canadian.
Do you know that Joy of Cooking has a recipe for preparing squirrel? In the discussion they not only tell you how to skin it, but also whether gray, brown or black squirrels are the most delicious. I’m not going to spoil their book sales by giving you the answer.
The first edition was published in 1931, another of those Depression era works, like the Raggedy Ann and Andy books I discussed in another story, the one about my friend Hooney. I also had a comic book from my mom, published just after the Depression, called The Life and Times of the Shmoo (Al Capp). Schmoos were animals that looked a bit like Casper the Friendly Ghost. If you looked at them hungrily, they would happily keel over, and you could slice 'em up and eat 'em. They didn’t even have bones. Unless you’ve read this scholarly work, you probably won’t have heard of the Shmoo. I suppose they’re extinct because they were so delicious and easy to catch.
And of course, I'll be able to get salt, that most precious of flavorings, from the Bay. Easy-peasy. I’ll boil the water first, in the scenario in which the gas is still working and still allowed by the building code. If not, I think I’ll just leave a shallow tub of salt water in the back yard, wait for the water to evaporate, and then risk whatever impurities might color the salt. Probably we will be okay, at least for a short time, until FEMA sends the St. Bernards to rescue us, bringing Wendy’s hamburgers in the little barrels strapped to their collars.
Sure hope FEMA remembers that some of us are gluten-free.
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