I was in Alaska teaching a class of 3rd graders about plants. I was waiting for my group to assemble prior to a hike. One little Tlingit tyke was sitting down with some twisted stalks piled in his lap. “Hey George, want some cucumber plant? Tastes just like cucumber.”

I was instantly rebuffed by the term “cucumber plant”, which seemed an irresponsible name for a poisonous plant.

I sat down beside him. He was busy peeling the stems with a penknife. Carefully pulling out the peeled inner stem, he offered me a bite. Trying to remain calm, I dreaded the worst. “Um, no, I am not sure you should be eating those plants – they might be poisonous.”

One of the other kids took my piece. “We love cucumber plant. We eat it all the time”.

Right.

Rudy added, “Yup.” And then he looked at me with a look of what can only be described as pity – pity for my ignorance. And then he added, “George, haven’t you ever seen watermelon-berry before?”

Another kid added, “It’s called watermelon-berry because the berries look like watermelons.”

Great. Another common name that belongs in the garbage can. What in God’s name is wrong with the name twisted-stalk?

There seemed to be sort of a showdown brewing between me and Rudy, so I asked the other kids, “Can one of you go find Rudy’s mother?”

Fortunately she appeared quickly, although Rudy had eaten another inch and another piece was passed to a cute girl sitting in a circle around Rudy. I told Rudy’s mother that Rudy was eating wild plants without permission.

She sat down next to Rudy and took the plant, leaving the knife in Rudy’s hand. Briefly admiring the plant, she said the following. “Do you want to know what this plant is? This is what we call cucumber-plant – because it tastes like cucumber. It is a very popular native food. Everyone nibbles it in the spring. It’s also called watermelon-berry because the berries look like watermelons. Here, have a piece.”

A one-inch-long shoot was floating before my lips gently balanced on the tips of her fingers. I looked around me and all the little smiling faces were nodding, probably in the joy of knowing that the locals were much smarter than the visiting botanist. I looked at the plant. I looked at the kids. I managed to cover my dread with a feigned look of curious anticipation. I took a wee, tiny taste.

There was only one thing I could say under the circumstances. “Wow!!!! Tastes just like cucumber.”

Required disclaimer: The stems of the Alaskan plants are soft-hairy, not glabrous like our Washington twisted stalks, and even though the different varieties have been subsumed in Flora of North America, it is just possible that there are varietal differences after all (ours used to be called var. chalazatus) that might explain why it is poisonous in one area and relished in another. Or, as with any number of plants, it might be negligibly toxic in the parts eaten, and given and the normally small amounts consumed. In coastal Alaska, it is one of the first spring greens, and some minor irritation might be forgiven when other greens are still scarce. In any case, the roots contain compounds that cause catharsis and the berries and seeds likely contain similar compounds.

The first Latin name I knew for a plant was Quercus, the oak. Quercus came into my head during a round trip across the country from Baltimore to the west coast and back, just in time to start graduate school. Edith rode with me on that trip in a Chevy Camper Special. On the way back we traveled through Canada.

It was the end of summer, and the road was hot and long. Did I say the road was hot and long? I meant it was Hot! and Unbearable. Our lips were chapped, our mouths were dry, our eyes were stinging, and we always seemed to be going against the wind. The scenery was mostly semi-trailers rushing past us within inches of our lives. The truck rocked and lurched on the bumpy ribbon that goes for a highway, and being American we were accosted by strange customs like driving on the shoulder, and figuring our gas mileage with a dwindling supply of Canadian dollars and Imperial gallons.

Halfway across the continent we came to the north shore of Lake Superior, where we found a campground and conked out. As we slept, the sky opened up with the crack of thunder and a deluge. The roar of water on the roof was truly the most wonderful sound I had ever heard. We were back in the humid east. The covers were soft, our skin was soft, and the world was soft.

I dreamed I was alone on the strand of a vast ocean, where there were no people or animals or anything but sand and sea and sky. In the dream, the sky was blue and a voice was calling to me. I felt as if the world was cleansed of all its sorrows, we were forgiven, and there was laughter in the air.

We awoke refreshed, rejuvenated. Edith was beaming. Our vacation was nearly over. We had penetrated to the edge of rocky clarity where the west meets the western sea and now we had returned safely to the mists and fogs of the east.

We had a deadline to resume classes in a few days, so we kept up an even speed. The pleasant Ontario countryside flew past us, a sea of deciduous forests rolling past our window. And as we drove along we thought about our lives together and how they might soon change. I was about to begin classes at the School of Pharmacy at UM Baltimore. Edith was embracing the arts, language and dance at UM Baltimore County.

For me, graduate school was the dream of a lifetime. I was enrolled in the Division of Pharmacognosy and Medicinal Chemistry. These are studies of the biochemistry of enzymes, drugs, medicines and poisons. I ended up in this discipline somewhat vicariously. I had originally started out as a geology major at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, followed by sampling all the other sciences over the course of ten years at six colleges. Now I would be taking classes in mass spectrometry, neurochemistry and genetic engineering.

But there was one class that really caught my attention. It was different from the other classes in that it didn’t involve working in a laboratory with goggles and pipettes full of nasty chemicals. It was a course in plant taxonomy, taught by the renowned Dr. Elmer Worthley. In that class, I would learn the Latin names of plants. At the time, I didn’t realize that I would be in that class for the better part of the next three years before leaving the school, more so as a botanist than a chemist.

I had prepared for this class by collecting plant specimens along the route. These were duly pressed in the pages of a notebook, where I suspected that they would be of interest to my new botany classmates. I didn’t know any Latin names at that time–not a one. Driving through the Ontario countryside I had an inkling that I should try to learn a name or two to prepare myself. But I had better catch up fast.

We decided to take a detour to Hudson’s Bay. … Um, I decided to take a detour. Being a college student not accustomed to practical matters, it seemed reasonable looking at the maps. There was a long tongue of the bay jutting practically all the way to the Great Lakes. Practically. I commandeered the wheel and veered northward.

The cars quickly thinned out and the scenery got boggy. Unfortunately there were not many places to observe plants. The road shoulders were thin and treacherous looking, not much more than loose mounds of gravel angling steeply into mosquitoey quagmires. Once or twice we parked in the middle of the road and peered over the edge. We drove on into dwindling daylight and gathering mists, hoping for a place to park.

Finding no dry ground, we continued connecting the dots on the map toward our destination. But the dots were depressing and forlorn. Around midnight we stopped at a gas station only to find it filled with dirty men and mud-splattered trucks and two whorish looking women carrying on loudly while their engines revved. We got out as fast as we could and skipped the restrooms.

Around midnight we were still deep in the boreal forest. There were few signs of civilization other than intermittent patches of strange debris in the middle of the road. We grazed within an inch of the largest of these, which turned out to be the remainder of a semi truck that had lost its roof and contents until it finally wrecked part way in a bog. The men were bloody and torn, and asked us to send help from the next government office, which we finally reached after several hours of travel.

At daybreak we reached a motel with sandy campsites and spent the morning there. The boreal forest had given way to open misty meadows interspersed with clumps of Christmas trees and mushrooms. The ground was still moist from recent snow flurries. But there was a voice in our heads telling us to turn back before it was too late. Or it may have been Edith’s voice.

We had pancakes and then headed south that morning. Classes would begin in a couple days. We were getting out of there. This turned out to be a good move, as we were destined to run into more fog, fog so dense that we could barely see a foot in front of our camper and had to open the door to see the line down the middle of the road, hoping nobody in the oncoming lane was doing the same thing.

By that afternoon, we were again passing through the hardwood forests close to the International border, intent on getting home.

Suddenly I spied a sign advertising a scenic nature trail and we swerved into the parking lot. This being the land of the maple leaf, I imagined that there might be signs along the trail giving the Latin names of the trees. Upon this unexpected opportunity, I explained to Edith how important it was that I assimilate some plant names before class started. But in the interests of getting back on time, we fairly raced along the nature trail, hoping to accomplish this assimilation as quickly as possible.

I can only vaguely recall that the trail was in a charming setting decked with handsome outcrops of granite. These tumbled willy-nilly into an endless canopy of hardwoods that stretched away to the southern sky.

Indeed, the trail was one of those affairs where they have the little placards with cute stories about the Indians or the ecology. And as if it had come to me in a dream, there on the placards were the names of the plants along the trail, given in both the common parlance as well as in scientific Latin.

Ignoring the scenery, I pulled up at each sign along the trail, and repeated the Latin names of each plant several times over, hoping this would imbue me with instant taxonomy. But as we pulled out, only one new Latin word remained fixed in my consciousness: Quercus … Oak … Quercus … Oak.

A few days later I was in my first class with Dr. Worthley. There were a half dozen other students in the class. Each had brought in botanical items to show and tell and these the professor identified in turn. When someone lifted an oak leaf, he asked the class what it was and I fairly shouted it out: Quercus!

Without stopping, he calmly responded, “Correct, Quercus rubra, the red oak.” And then it was my turn to open up the pages in my book of plants.

Ancient and furrowed, sturdy and strong, navels set fast, deep in the ground

High in the mountains,
Close to the sky,
Are clearings on ledges,
With whispery traces …

The Wee folk were merry.
Singing and dancing,
Traced on the ground,
‘Round a post set with flowers …

The signs of a gathering,
And spinning in circles,
Whirling and twirling,
And raising the spirits.

Or was it the wind,
Restless for change,
Shaking the blossoms,
Buzzing the bees?

Or was it the flowers,
Who woke from their dream,
Ghostly and shimmering,
Under the stars?

And jumped and cavorted,
‘Round and around,
Pearls in the moonlight.
Ere first light of dawn,

Ancient and furrowed,
Sturdy and strong,
Navels set fast,
Deep in the ground,

The buckwheat,
Was dancing.
Around,
And around.

A lakeside idyll

When I was just a tadpole I was giv’ to understand,
That in order for a gentleman to give a girl his hand,
He’d have to be up on his books, his rhymin’ and his diction,
As it’s well known, what lacks in fact, is made up best in fiction.

So in order to insure that I would not in marriage err,
My Daddy early on explained in what I must take care:
Not muscles, clothes or riches, son, will get you off the hook,
If you ever dare imply that your wife’s not the world’s best cook.

And furthermore your life will be a damned sight better off,
If you compliment her choice of clothes, and drapes and tablecloth.
In short, your neck will go a long way towards avoiding getting wrung,
If you polish up your verbitage and exercise your tongue.

Well, I gussied up my speech and got a special kind of twang,
So that upon my words the gals would liter-ally hang,
And I seriously began to charm the lady I liked best,
And got her all in awe and let the preacher do the rest..

And when I got her home I sat her down inside the kitchen,
Just to let her know that I was boss and she must listen.
She smiled and started talkin’ ’bout her life ‘n’ this ‘n’ that,
And she whiled away the afternoon with pleasantries and chat.

And then she launched into a rather lengthy diatribe,
On relatives and friends whose private lives she must describe,
And this went on about a week or two I guess,
And the subject changed to mothers and to premenstrual stress.

“But…,” was all that I could manage in the middle of her ode,
And that reminded her of all the lovers she had knowed.
And on she went undaunted, while I poured myself a dose,
And that’s the way it’s been for nigh on fifty year’n I ‘spose.

I resolved that I’d get even ere my final days had passed,
And when I upon my deathbed lay, I saw my chance at last,
She asked me, what about the will, and I finally replied,
“I left it to the deaf school”. And then I up and died.

Are you a chemophobe with an irrational fear of chemicals? Or are you a chemophile who craves the flavor of pesticides and preservatives in food?

Despite misinformation campaigns waged by chemophobic do-goody-goods, chemophiles know that pesticides have yummy smells and flavors that can enhance your dining experience. So why not embrace them instead of shunning them?

“Oh, No!” you say?  You may not know it, but many of our prized groceries owe their subtle tastes to the food scientist who skillfully blends the pesticide ingredients to create a balanced flavor in your food supply.

In order to maintain a wholesome diet, you may need to amend an all-organic foods diet with additional nutrients that can only be provided by pesticides. Luckily, the ready availability of pesticides in food makes them the ideal dinner combination to spice up organic food diets. Check your food labels. If the label says 100% organic, you may not be getting all the pesticide vitamins you need for a healthy, happy lifestyle.

We all become accustomed to certain flavors and aromas over time. Food tastes and smells lie at the core of our personalities because they are remembered in the hypothalamus, which regulates emotions and behaviors such as hunger and thirst.

Common table salt is probably the best example of a preservative that contributes to the taste and smell of foods. But salt doesn’t just taste good; it is essential for survival. We should dispel the notion that all chemicals are bad. Take the taste of corned beef hash – it would be bland indeed if it weren’t made with saltpeter, a chemical.

Think about it. Everything on earth is made of chemicals. Our future depends on having an abundant supply of safe chemicals in our food supply.

So next time you hear some flabby environmentalist poo-pooing the chemicals in our food supply, tell them that they should get a life and learn to appreciate salt and learn the value of chemicals and pesticides for enhancing food flavors.

You may not realize that moms prefer chemical additives in their orange juice. During processing, chemical flavor packets are added to the orange juice. Scientific studies confirm that this juice is preferred by moms over untreated OJ.

To understand the inherent preference for certain smells, we have only to look at look at children. Kids don’t have the hatred of chemicals that their parents hammered into them.

I can well remember standing behind our old jalopy, telling my mom that I thought the exhaust smelled good as she yanked me away by the collar. In those days, the only gasoline additive was tasteless, odorless lead, and this allowed the aromatic hydrocarbons to fully express their rich aroma. Also in those days, we hadn’t yet hit the bottom of the oil barrel where all the high-sulfur oil now comes from. Have you noticed that cars today smell like rotten eggs? Yes, those were truly the good old days.

When I lived on Okinawa we could also go to the PX and buy tall green cans of DDT made for the army. To us kids, these cans were fun toys to spray around the house, until my mom took them away from us. The ingredients were basically just raw DDT with a little freon propellant. Now I wouldn’t recommend DDT as a food but it just shows that our smell preferences are hammered into us by our moms – we are not born with this unnatural hatred of pesticides, that is the cause of so much misunderstanding in our world today.

And I fondly remember the fun of running through the piquant fog as the DDT trucks went by twice a day at Ishikawa Beach in Okinawa. The aroma was complex and it was probably enhanced by the mild stimulant effect of all the volatile petrochemicals used to make up the carriers and surfactants. And even though DDT has been banned, the fond memories still come rushing back every time the county spray trucks drive by.

Nowadays I get my kicks from those little flavor packets they put into meats. You know, the antioxidants BHA and BHT. They lend a musky flavor to fish and meats that is quite distinctive. After using them for a while, meat just isn’t as good without them.

In addition, the beauty of using pesticides as flavoring ingredients is that they are already in your food, and for this we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to genetic engineering.

If you care about the flavor of your food, then maybe you should think more about how pesticides and preservatives contribute to the flavor and aroma of foods.

So don’t say “Oh, No!” to pesticides any more. Say “Oh, Boy!” to the taste of pesticide. Just imagine a future where pesticides are no longer restricted by our oversized bureaucracy of government regulators.

Try these great new pesticide food combos

• Tomatoes Tordon! – Tomato dishes from Italian pasta to Mexican salsa can benefit from this herbicidal condiment. You’ll be crying “More! More!”
• Phenoxylate Fudge - A new crop of phenoxylate herbicides has being genetically engineered into chocolate with an incredible taste sensation based on scientific flavor principles. And phenoxylates can also help prevent diarrhea.
  
• Chicken tamales smothered in Atrazine sauce – Atrazine, the wonder pesticide, is now available in rainbow colors. Your guests will be wondering, was it the sauce or was it the chicken?
• Woundup Nutmeg Nougats – These chewy morsels contain the sweetener ambidextrose that was sought after by the ancient Mayas. In addition to being a mild stimulant, ambidextrose is genetically engineered into the flour molecules so that they taste 10,000 times better than natural sugar, and in addition ambidextrose contains important cleansing ingredients that brighten and whiten your teeth!
• Rolled Latex Dormant Spray Meat Rub – Liven up food textures. Learn how the right bad things can help perk up your dinners.
• Death Burgers – one taste could be your last!  These make great dinners and lunches for the terminally ill, since they contain pure 2,4 -D in every bite!!!

These and other great pesticide recipes can be yours when you subscribe to Xenophile, the organization of the Pesticide Flavoring Industry.

You’d better hurry, too. Soon it will be too late.  Time is running out for those in the industry and these chemicals may not be around for future generations to savor.

- This article was written by a chemist. We want to help you control your food supply.

The year was 1969 and I was sixteen. Outside of a prosaic life of school and idle summers at the lake, the world was experiencing Woodstock, love-ins, peace marches, and music the likes of which had never been heard before. But I watched 1969 go sailing by without me on the boat. And I cursed my time for being born too late.

For me, you are either on the bus or under the bus.

I was the tail end of the generation that grew up realizing that our country was being run by idiots and we were all desperate to do something about it. We didn’t want to have 2.3 kids and a station wagon in the driveway. Surely that wasn’t our future.

We grew up pampered in our homes, shamed because we let them kill Kennedy, knowing that we had the means to fix these problems, starting with making loud noises, and escalating as necessary.

But the stuff on the pop stations was sanitized for our parents, so we looked outside the box where they wouldn’t go.

FM Radio was just coming into its own. There were stations out there pushing every button making people crazy. And I wanted to be part of this craziness. The hip stations had DJs with British accents and they played really good music, but the crazy stations had music about revolution.

Sometimes people were sucked into this vortex and never came back. You could dial into any level of the ongoing revolution. Like being on the Titanic, we knew the country was headed the wrong way but we just watched the icebergs float by because the music wouldn’t stop and it was so good.

I was one of the lucky ones. My high school bus driver let us listen to the radio. She had one of those 50s names like Shirelle that you couldn’t tell whether it was old fashioned or hip. I was the first one on and the last one off the 45 minute ride to school. This ride took us past old farms and honeysuckle fences of rural Maryland in the time before they all became cul-de-sacked. I could get my homework done on the bus while enjoying radio music. Shirelle played mainstream AM during the crowded part of the ride, but when the bus got empty out in the hinterlands, she would let us listen to the racy FM stuff. In 1969 I sampled the revolution from a safe seat on the bus.

Sometimes when Shirelle was in a bad mood, she would just play country and ignore us. We understood. All of us grew close in a privately understood way. And we would get off the bus thoroughly brainwashed to the core without a thought about what appeared to be a plain old bus ride.

My view of the world was profoundly influenced by those bus rides to school. Only now have I begun to see myself apart from that world, now changed forever. True, I was lucky to have a clear view of the cold, harsh reality that was to come and that has served me well. But my vision was tinted by the safety and security of the big yellow box that carried me through chaotic times. Even when the box changed appearances to look like a house, or a family, or whether it was a new job or a new car–I have always felt as if I were riding in the safety of a big box with viewing windows and piped in sound. Safe on the bus, where revolution is a recreational pastime, it’s just a turn of the dial to get there and back.

Tony's snowy view of winter sun on the distant mountains.

This was written by Tony Smith while he was living next door to me in a one-room picker’s cabin in the Eastern Washington Cascades near Winthrop. It describes how 5-year old Tony first came to realize that winter can be long and hard. Yacolt is in SE Washington, and Bonneville is southeast of there. Silver Glance is a remote wilderness area a long way further east and south, in Utah. Tony passed away in about 2010. He was a fire lookout and philosopher. Perhaps reminding him of the Long Sky Cold, here is a picture of the view outside Tony’s window.

Over Silver Glance and the Long Sky Cold

by Tony Smith

Grampa said they’d better kill that hog
And take the heifer to Yacolt.
My grandmother said, “hum”, but she was looking south -
waiting for the light from Bonneville.

I’d been a help they said, maybe so,
I’d gathered all the eggs without breaking any -
Watched the mornings leave quite early in July -
Fished with string; and sneaking past the Johnson’s bull,
Patrolled the border of the woods with bow and arrow.

The hazel grove had long been overgrown with grapes
And the luncheons served to Cat and me hidden there
Were chattering affairs suffused with dappled pastel light.
The guests were always equal to the crumbs and rinds,
For then the vines and brush were busy towns; but now,
As October’s copper haze obscured my view of summer,
The ventures of spring were winding down. Cat blinked
When tired berries fell on the grass – out past the silo
The brown fields sighed under the hayricks, and coming
Upon yet another bend, the walking river stopped.

Grandpa said he’d get me a BB gun for Christmas
If Margaret didn’t care; then he squinted at Silver Glance,
Muttering that he’d left an axe down there.
I asked if it was stuck in the side of the mountain -
He grinned and spit a gob of snoose at a gang of ants -
“I don’t know, maybe so” he shrugged, then looking up as
Some ravens talked, shrugged again and walked into the barn.
I examined my bow and arrow – so this is when doubts arise -
In the nervous month, when mysterious congregations of birds,
Wheeling specks high above the farm gathered to discuss -
Soon decide, and moving off like black stars of singular intent,
Disappear eastward and silent over Silver Glance.

Three times the sun had dwindled in October
And I supposed the other two; five times sure then, that
Beyond the burnished sky and foreshortened foothill ridges
An implacable emerald dimension was streaming off
Some dazzling sheet of ice; and that after Halloween
The blinding crystal air would allow but brief forays
Into an arctic of unearthly space and long sky cold.
The old house would provide the shelter of confinement -
But it would be in a different land than summer -
For the flickering lamps would not dispel the ancient caves
Beckoning from the corners of its rooms; and short indeed,
Would be the warmth kindled in dark mornings
Between black primal nights passing like slow drum beats.

The hog would be ham, the heifer cozy in Yacolt.
Perhaps Sears had sold some small boys ordnance.
But despite such farmstead feats, uncertain fears would linger still
And my grandmother, edging back the curtain and looking south,
Would say, “hum”; and be waiting for the light from Bonneville.

[Memories of 1938 (I think)
Written in August, 1993]

Wandering footsteps,
At night,
Follow the music.

Close by,
At night,
The edge lies silent.

On the edge.

I went on past many cirques,
Their walls of snow and spacious murals,
Shining down on azure lakes.
Sparkles dancing off their sides.
The blue sky amused with clouds of cotton.

I went on past jutting spires and melting tongues of ice.
Where the world lay below me distant and weary.
I sat by the shore of a tiny lake and dropped in a hook,
And pulled out one funny fish from the bottomless deep,
Would you believe – its flesh was the color of blood.

Bottomless.