Sestina for Foragers

1.
Among the things we ate from the forest and ditches, fields and brambles (and rivers beyond) were salmonberries, red hucks, lambs’ weed, blackberries—three-plus varieties: Himalayan, Evergreen, wild trailing (rubus: bramble/bear), salmon, stolen jam from restaurant baskets, stolen half & half from restaurant baskets, stolen ketchup packets from fast food bins, pumpkins and zucchini wildly overgrowing in the gardens, taking over like Europeans, like those who came on boats and planes and went on clinging and vining and winding their way across the land. 

We never called it foraging. Those of us who eat, by necessity, what’s wild and/or found—collage eating—just call it food. Foraging: a word that rich people use?, or people who’ve chosen to “live off Mother Earth,” to embark on a journey the way that people “enjoy thrifting”—when you shop used clothing stores for the novelty, because it’s cool. When your life requires you to shop thrift, there’s nothing cool about it. It’s just clothes. 

I didn’t know the word foraging until I was in graduate school, when one day, a friend said, “Do you want to go foraging for mushrooms this weekend?” 

I thought, “Finding food in the woods? Like, after all that, do I want to go back to the most basic of needs?” I did believe in the privilege of simplicity; I wasn’t anti-work, it’s just that it was emotionally complicated. I could now go to the store. I could now pay. Also: I didn’t know my edible mushrooms; I knew only my psychedelic. 

I passed. 

Later, leading a public writing workshop on plants, noting offhandedly that, “Oh, and you can eat it—it’s high in vitamin C—” about nettle or mint or rosehips, I don’t remember—a participant crooned excitedly, “Oooooh, have you read that book by ____ ____? About foraging? You can find so much that’s edible in the wild! We all should be thinking about what we can eat right outside our doorsteps!” and I almost barfed in my mouth. She was completely right: we should eat what grows for free. And she was right: you can find so much—a constellation of produce is everywhere. But I didn’t like her implication “we should all be thinking”––implying that none of us were yet thinking about it, that we’d all been raised on Hot Pockets and Pop Tarts, or even that we saw fresh produce as something we could pay a lot of money for at the Farmers’ Market. The truth was, fresh produce had perhaps always been under our noses, if we had the privilege–and it is a privilege—of living where the dirt isn’t covered in concrete. This wasn’t a mystery; it didn’t need to be exotic. 

2.
A train of thought is mysterious and many-speared, like a star, or a sestina. 

In the field of poetry, a sestina is all about repurposing, in an incantatory pattern, a repeated set of six end-words, in six sestets and one tercet/envoi, the last containing three lines but all six words, some folded into the middle of the stanza. If you map the pattern, it has a web of six sides. 

Francis Mayes: “When the sestina was first used in the early twelfth century, the numerology of the sixes probably had a mystical meaning that is lost to us now. What is still fascinating, on inspection of the form, is that each end word is positioned next to every other end word twice in that poem. If we make a hexagon of end words (called ABCDEF) and connect each end word as it touches all the other end words in every stanza, we see that the poem is indeed graphically complete.”

Does the sestina work to show you how eating what’s in season extends throughout a life, how it departs and returns, like the mythos of memories? 

Where I live now, in the Inland Northwest, the huckleberries are blue and grow wild on the mountain among the bear grass and the tamarack. The air smells of pollen and lichen and alpine glow. We take our children picking in mid-July and early August, teaching them how to be foragers, to eat what’s in front of them, and back home, to make it sweet with flour and sugar and cream. They dream up an unrhymed chant about how the plant grows only in its own soil. It’s true: if you try to domesticate it, it dies (like you, they say, like you). A mystery, and a rule. Like foraging. Something we do when we are a little wild inside, not because we want to be, but because it’s who we are. 

3.
My friend, writing a Book of Difficult Fruit, asks me to go with her into the woods on the Olympic Peninsula (north of my childhood watersheds, but climate-wise, fairly congruent). She says,“Let’s go berry hunting,” and I agree. Walking in the woods—what some call hiking—is one of my favorite things.

“I hate hiking,” she tells me, laughing. “But I want to know the plants that produce the fruit.” She’s honoring every fruit about which she writes, thoughtfully approaching each ethnographically as lenses into and alongside cultures as she interviews folks, tromps through the woods (though she doesn’t enjoy it), builds—or watches others build—fires with folks who live in rural areas. She pours through history, lore, etc. for each chapter and recipe she writes. She’s being a star researcher. 

I admire and respect her approach. So, when she asks me, after our hike through the woods—during which I note for her the differences between the wild, trailing blackberries and the two invasive varieties—if she can interview me about my childhood relationship to thimbleberries, I say yes. I’m sometimes shy about it. Unless you’re in the woods with me, I don’t always talk about my childhood spent eating what I could find in the forest, grazing all day until it was time to go home for dinner. 

My friend and I sit in a restaurant to review her progress, and so that she can ask me about thimbleberries, and the irony of the restaurant booth isn’t lost on me (my whole adulthood feels, in some ways, like dramatic irony). She’s wearing an orange-rust-colored hat she knitted herself. She has domestic skills. I used to have those skills—embroidery, sewing, scratch-made noodles—but now, I spend all my time reading other people’s writing, not writing my own things. I don’t even consistently remember to feed birds. 

My friend’s questions are her form of foraging for what’s edible. I tell her we’re all doing this—scavenging and foraging after the floods. But we don’t call it that; we just call it being alive. Working. Still, I take some cue from her; I begin asking more questions, scavenging my past for details, for patterns to repeat. 

4.
It's worth saying here that the book by _____ _____ is probably excellent. I didn’t read it. Ever since Ehrenreich’s appropriative foray into “blue collar work” in Nickel & Dimed, I’ve balked at the books that make it big in genres in which I’m probably most marketable: those that focus on the education of people who grow up “living off the land” (practicing some of the earliest and most basic methods of gathering), people who “transcend poverty” (eventually make enough money to not have to rely on free lunches or other necessary and humane social services that a nation with enough resources should reasonably provide), people who were “homeless” (lived in vans, garages, etc.) as children and now live in “regular houses” (have government-recognized addresses). 

I resist these things the same way I resist making Inland huckleberries into a marketable commodity, or even a mythic picnic; they’re a fruit we eat simply because it’s in season, and because we like being in the woods. We leave enough for the bears because we like bears; they are in our community. The stars are what we see at night from our yard or far on the lake, from a paddle board, not something to chart out in the romanticized wilderness. I know we’re lucky to be so close to what’s wild, but I also know I come from a people who, long ago, ran from what wasn’t, trying to feel safe and whole—like Uncle Fred, or my dad, who began foraging for a new life as soon as he set foot on this continent, coming across from faraway lands where wild meant this new world. 

5.
In Uncle Fred’s version of reality (which I receive when visiting my uncle in his wild scrap house, years later, with my spouse and child), my father was sitting in a bar with some tweakers—brothers of that woman he was with before your mother—and Fred came in dressed to the nines in his pinstriped suit, the one he wore to sell used cars in Portland to people who came to the Pacific Northwest for the good life, the way the family had come from Germany when their mother died, but they ended up in the Northwest, where fortunes were rare as blue sky days. Scratch that. Fortune is the waking bird, the field of notes that float in my uncle’s windows where he sleeps and waits for those to call who need a tow. He’s foraging his life from the road and stars, piecing it together with rust and salal. His truck is here with its axel orange as a salmonberry. He’s seventy, still patching his own roof. His roof is a series of patches, like his body, his beard gray as that of my father, who Fred purportedly saved. 

I never know who to believe in these stories. Fred tells stories to my husband and I while our daughter—age two—sleeps in the car, windows down so if she were awake, she could reach out and touch the elderberry forest beyond Fred’s chickens and hear the rooster’s low grumble as he beckons his hens to a good cache of grubs. My father came with him, Fred tells us, because he was looking for a leg up, and a way to escape the woman. 

6.
The berries on Highway 26, where Fred lives now in his patched-up constellation of house, grow fat and wild. They’re not huckleberries, they’re blackberries, and they glisten on their vines like dark stars working at undoing a heart. I fold my hands into the thorns and leaves for fruit, and they come out purple-red. My father is synonymous with a thorned bush: all prickle and stain, too. He tops my list of those who dig in the forest and swamps: the turkey vulture, the bottom fish, and larger, the nutria—those swamp-rats that live where the water is lit by reeds and dragonflies. I want these things back now—the fecund rot, the simple arc of season. 

7. (Envoi) 
Now it’s August and the summer of a global pandemic, and all I want is to go back to the most basic of needs. We work our car up the winding road to Mt. Spokane, the children—ten and seven—singing and wondering if we can have cobbler for dinner. Or we wander the wild mountains of Montana, eating tart Oregon grapes. For aging is what, but returning to the star-shaped sestinas of our internal mythos? I don’t believe it; I do believe it. I am afraid of the future. I watch it move like a cloud-shadow across the meadow of wildflowers. My heart-field thrumming with these bright beams. Fire season just beginning. 

ξ

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011); her prose appears in such places as Brevity, Gettysburg Review, Bellingham Review, and Booth Journal. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. Maya considers it a great honor to work with students in two programs, both as Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University, and as Affiliate Poetry Faculty for Western Colorado University's low-res MFA; she is also grateful to serve as Poetry Editor for Scablands Books, a boutique press in the Inland Northwest, specializing in strange, smart, innovative writing. “Sestina for Foragers” is from Maya’s memoir manuscript, Raised by Ferns, which is currently seeking a press. Find Maya on Twitter @MayaJZeller. If she’s slow to respond, it’s because she’s in the forest with her two children.