Spring, 2005

Spring 2005 Update March 12, 2005

Early spring greetings from southern Appalachia!

Spring is hinting at its arrival as we return home after winter adventures in warmer lands. The rhododendrons are showing their first buds, chickweed and toothwort have begun springing back from their wintery dormancy, and the leaves of the persistent multiflora rose are emerging.

We all had a full and warm winter. After a couple months beside our woodstove at Wildroots, two of us took a trip to Florida, where we camped on an island in Tampa Bay and feasted on foraged whelk (a giant sea snail), and sea catfish (which didn’t taste the least bit muddy!) One of us spent the winter in Arizona where, amongst other things, much time was taken up gathering feral olives, and curing them so they taste savory and oily, rather than mouth-puckeringly disgusting, as they do fresh off the tree.

In February, we packed into the van and headed to Winter Count, a primitive skills gathering in Arizona, which we were able to attend by doing work trade in the kitchen. Our experiences there were very full both skill-wise and socially. We met up with a bunch of feral friends and made many new ones. We attended all sorts of workshops, including wicker pack basket making, antler handle knife hafting, wet scrape hide tanning, rubber tire sandal making, and cattail visor making. It was interesting to see what people are doing with primitive skills in the west, as it seems that more people out there are actually living primitive lifestyles, rather than treating primitive skills as a hobby.

After winter count we went down to a ghost town in southern Arizona that a friend of ours caretakes. There we set up a primitive camp by a lake with some folks that we met at the gathering. We spent our days hiking, tanning hides, and teaching, learning, and playing with each other and the 2 feral children that were part of our tribe there, and our nights singing, feasting, and sweating in a hand-built sauna. We made a birthday coffee cake in a dutch oven filled with an enormity of tasty and nutritious foraged barrel cactus seeds. We ended our ghost town adventure with a night with the tribe in a cave in the breathtakingly beautiful Sycamore
canyon.

Our road trip back to Wildroots was memorable, thanks to the fact that we were not in a rush, (unlike usual). We went backpacking in the gorgeous and mysterious Guadalupe Mountains of west Texas. Anxious to be out of the car we rocketed up the mountains, tasting a serious case of vertigo, as we looked down on the almost 3,000 foot canyon that we climbed above, with save-laden rock spires all around. In Fort Worth, Texas, one of us noticed a few pecans half-buried in the mud in front of the house where we were
staying, which prompted us to look up, and realize that the entire neighborhood was filled with pecan trees. We gathered a large sack-full
before making our way out of dreaded Texas.

Now we are home and looking forward to the cleansing greens and crisp sunny days of spring.