It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It: Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter-Gatherer
256
It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It: Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter-Gatherer
256eBook
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Overview
For Bill Heavey, being a sportsman is more than a hobby—it’s a way of life. So despite living inside the DC Beltway, raising a daughter who has an aversion to “nature food,” and having zero experience with foraging or gardening, Bill attempts the ultimate sportsman’s dream: living off the land.
Unsurprisingly, Bill’s foray into catching, finding, and growing his dinner doesn’t go exactly as planned. From battles with tomato-eating squirrels to a grizzly attempt at gutting perch to multiple failures at harvesting an appetizing salad, Bill stumbles through his quest for wild food with blood loss, humiliation, and hard lessons. Still, with the help of his locavore girlfriend and an eccentric neighbor who runs an under-the-table bait business, he manages to eat the way our ancestors did—and uncovers the true meaning of being full.
“Bold, courageous, hilarious, honest, and touching” (Duff Goldman), Bill Heavey’s first full-length book is a must-read look at how we consume, consider, and source our most basic of needs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802193483 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 493,293 |
| File size: | 970 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Blood, Guts, and Other Signs of Spring
Fletcher's Boathouse sits in a tiny cove along the Potomac, two miles north of Georgetown and about fifteen minutes from my house in Arlington. Long before the time John Smith passed through here during his 1608 exploration of the river, the Powhatan Indians had a seasonal fish camp there. The boathouse itself has been there since the 1850s, and was in the hands of the Fletcher family until recently. The government bought out brothers Joe and Ray Fletcher a few years ago. There was never much money in the business and none of the Fletcher children wanted to run it. It doesn't really matter who owns it. The cove is one of those places where the earth concentrates its power. For centuries it has exerted a magnetic pull on river rats, fishermen, odd ducks, outlaws, and misfits of all descriptions. It is well inside the Beltway, but if you point your car down the steep curve of road that bores into the blackness of the tunnel beneath the C&O Canal — perpetually dripping water and so cramped you can easily touch the rocks on either side out your windows — you emerge in a different world. Marks painted on the boathouse rental counter delineate the crests of past floods. There are no truly permanent structures down on the floodplain. Even the cinder-block office has a provisional air about it. Down here, the river always gets the last word.
White perch season is a big deal in these parts because you really don't want to eat any fish that spends its entire life in the Potomac, unless you're curious about undergoing a sex change or are experiencing a decreased will to live. It's not that "the nation's river" lacks fish. There are plenty of fish here: largemouth and smallmouth bass, catfish, walleye, sunfish, and crappie, to name but a few. The real problem is that forty years after the Clean Water Act, the D.C. section of the Potomac is so loaded with pollutants — everything from raw sewage, PCBs, and agricultural runoff to heavy metals, lethal bacteria, and birth control hormones — that you could probably improve the water quality by peeing in it. For years, a sign put up by the District Department of the Environment on the boathouse dock's light pole warned of the river's health hazards. Owing to high levels of bacteria, it forbade swimming. It warned that fish from these waters contained PCBs and other chemical contaminants, and banned the eating of carp, catfish, and eels outright; it recommended that "healty adults" limit their intake of largemouth bass to no more than half a pound per month, and limit sunfish or "other fish" to no more than half a pound per week. It didn't give details of what would befall those exceeding the limit, but sudden swelling of the hands and feet, dissolution of internal organs, and enlarged nipples all seemed likely. At the bottom of the sign there was a phone number listed for further information. Call and you got a recording saying it was no longer in service. If you live in the D.C. metropolitan area, you know that this is pretty much par for the course for municipal agencies in the District. The only exception is the city's parking enforcement operation. That functions flawlessly.
White perch, however, are one of the few species that are in, but not of, the river. For the past 10,000 years or so a few kinds of fish that spend nearly all their lives in salt water prove that they either have never read Thomas Wolfe or have decided that he's full of it. Prompted by a springtime urge to reproduce, these fish — including perch, herring, and shad — leave the salt water in which they spend the majority of their lives and go home again, to the Potomac River waters of their birth. No one knows for sure what triggers their migration, why the fish insist on returning to the very same pools and riffles in which they were hatched, or how they manage this trick. Whatever it is — a certain slant of the light, a scent in the water measurable in parts per billion, a magic water temperature — they all make the journey more or less at the same time, usually in late March and early April. And they are highly motivated little fellas. They fight river currents, expose themselves to commercial and recreational anglers, and generally get beat all to hell to get where they want to go. If you happen to be an angler in the D.C. area after safely edible fish, the spring run has got your name written on it.
There was a time when the Potomac's spring migrations of fish were of such size and duration as to seem incomprehensible to us now. There was a time when the river was said to run alternately silver with shad and black with herring. I asked Gordon, who grew up fishing the river and is in his seventies, if this ever really happened. Normally a soft-spoken man, he said, "Hell, yes, it happened! I saw it every year growing up. Water black with herring, silver with shad. What we've done to this river is criminal. There's no ther word for it." These days both fish have been depleted to the point that it's no longer legal for recreational anglers to catch them. Commercial fishermen, who take many times more fish and are the ones directly responsible for destroying the fishery, are, naturally, still allowed to catch them. They have better lobbyists. That leaves perch, which Paula and Gordon also pursue. There are two kinds. Yellow perch are great eating, but, for reasons known only to themselves, seldom migrate farther than certain deep holes near Occoquan, twenty-five miles short of D.C. Luckily white perch come all the way up, and are the sweetest-tasting fish in the river. Their run, which once lasted for months, has dwindled to where an angler counts himself lucky to get into them a few days each season. Some years, the perch hardly show up at all. The dismal state of the fishery is belied by the appearance of the Potomac, which — at least visually — remains a wild and scenic river. There are parts of it where you see no buildings or wires and you can feel how it must have been a century ago. It's only when you develop an interest in what lives below the surface that you realize how much has been lost and how little is being done to restore it. It's a subject best not to plumb too deeply if you are prone to cynicism.
Because the perch run was my shot at catching, reasonably close to home, fish that I could eat safely, I'd been pounding the river's perch holes for weeks. Nothing. I made an offer of each unsuccessful outing to the fish gods, proof of my humility and worthiness. I went out in company and alone. (I preferred company, since I figured pretty much anyone taking me out knew the river better than I did.) I'd gone on rising water and falling, warming temperatures and cooling. I'd yet to bring home enough perch for a single dinner.
A river looks like a pretty uniform thing until you try to fish it. Beneath, especially near the boathouse, the river's topography is as varied as the mountains of Afghanistan. Fishermen will tell you that 80 percent of the fish are found in 20 percent of the water. Around Fletcher's, the split is more like 90/10. Moving your line as little as two feet can spell the difference between catching and not catching fish. Learning where the holes are and when they're most productive can take a lifetime. If I had to live off perch I'd starve before I amassed anything close to that kind of knowledge.
Although she hadn't spent her entire life on the Potomac as had some of the other boathouse denizens, Paula Smith was adept at both sussing out productive holes on her own and somehow convincing — or possibly coercing — longtime Fletcher's regulars into telling her about others. She had been showing me holes and telling me their names: Boiling Rock, the White Sign, Walkers Point, Hens and Chickens, and Dixie Landing. This last one got its name decades ago from a boathouse employee who liked to row downstream to Georgetown, tie up, and go to Dixie Liquors, a store at the D.C. end of Key Bridge. Usually too drunk to make it all the way back upriver, he would beach the boat and sleep it off at the same place each time. I guess Dixie Landing sounded more picturesque than Drunk Beach.
By all accounts, Paula just showed up at Fletcher's one day, one more bit of flotsam deposited by the spring floods. She was unemployed, and looked as if she might have spent a few days sleeping outside. She dressed like a man: blue jeans rolled up at the cuff, an oversize heavy shirt with her hair tucked down the back, a battered Tilley hat on her head. She was more than a little unconventional and there were some who thought she was flat-out crazy. But she impressed the regulars with her knowledge of fish and deer and her general woods sense. She hung out, seeming to live on cigarettes, coffee, and air. After a while she began lobbying for a job working the dock, the lowest rung at the boathouse. Joe Fletcher didn't want to hire her. He pointed out that she was too small to manhandle boats and anchors. Besides, the last thing they needed was a nutcase on the payroll. But Paula is a powerful presence under normal circumstances, and especially so when she wants something. Eventually Ray Fletcher, the softer-hearted of the two brothers, gave her a chance. In short order Paula showed herself to be the most conscientious, hardest-working employee the boathouse had ever had, running the dock like a general and scrubbing the inside of the rental boats free of every speck of fish blood, bait, and sand. Paula's haphazard appearance belies her exacting standards of cleanliness and her ability to focus for long stretches on meticulous tasks. According to Danny Ward, the only non-Fletcher to make a career of working at the boathouse, "She was the only employee we've ever had that I had to tell to work less hard."
I was desperate to get on some perch but so far that spring Mother Nature had been like the doorman of some trendy club, granting entry to the guy beside me and the one behind, but not to me. Paula had been passing on boathouse scuttlebutt, tantalizing reports of anglers who had gotten into good runs of fish at one spot or another, only to return the next day and totally blank. Rowing back to the boathouse after another perchless day — a wonderful workout for those seldom-used back muscles, especially when you are bucking a stiff northwest breeze and an outgoing tide — I had imagined how it would feel to get into a good school of perch, to have even a few hours of the kind of fishing Gordon says was routine when he was a boy growing up along the Potomac seventy years ago.
That night Paula called, saying the next day was looking like the best shot so far. "If they're ever gonna come thick, it oughta be tomorrow, honey," she said. "River's falling, and they like that. Water temperature's pushing fifty degrees, and they like that, too. I'm not saying we'll get into 'em, because they're fish, you know what I mean? But the fuckers've gotta be somewhere around by now." She said that Gordon couldn't make it, because of a doctor's appointment, but that he'd meet us down at the boathouse later.
The next morning we met at Fletcher's, where we ran into Dickie Tehaan as he was loading his rods into a rowboat. Dickie is a minor legend among boathouse regulars, both for his fishing skill and for the bucktail jigs he ties by the score. These are known around the boathouse as "Dickie jigs," and are as generic a term among river rats as "Kleenex" is among the general population. A fair number of the best perch anglers use nothing else, claiming Dickie jigs outfish even live bloodworms. Dickie won't sell them, but he gives them away to people he likes. When he suggested that the three of us go in his boat, he didn't need to ask twice. "If Dickie's not catching 'em, they ain't in the river," Paula said, as Dickie pulled toward a hole on the Virginia shoreline. Sharing a boat with Dickie filled me with confidence. Fishing at its highest levels is no different from other "sports." What separates Tiger Woods or Roger Federer from the rest of the crowd is more about mind-set than muscle. What sets Dickie apart from other anglers is more than the ability to detect the slightest bump of a fish mouthing a jig and the reflexes to set the hook instantly. It's something intangible. It's fishing juju. It's sorcery.
Somehow he finds where the fish want to be on a given day. Somehow, the barbed bucktail that he selects — which may be heavier or lighter, bigger or smaller, and in colors from white and yellow to orange and purple — is the one the fish are hungry for. Experience is essential, of course, and Dickie has that in spades. He grew up in a house five minutes' walk from the boathouse and with the river as his chief playmate. He once passed up a promotion at nearby Sibley Hospital, where he works in the parking and maintenance division, for fear it would cut into his fishing. But experience alone fails to account for it. There are other guys with similar river pedigrees. The thing about Dickie is that he has the river in his blood. He feels things others don't. Although he's a little older than I am, there's an innocence about him that is childlike and suggests that he may be attuned to frequencies most of us shut out as we grew up. He doesn't belong in a place like D.C. He's not a striver. He is without pretense. Whatever he is, Paula's right about one thing. If Dickie's not catching 'em, they ain't in the river.
We reached the hole Dickie wanted, dropped the rock anchor in about thirty feet of water, and made sure it held. Then we started fishing. We each had a two-ounce lead weight at the end of our lines and two Dickie jigs tied just above. Once the weight hit bottom, you reeled the slack out of your line; pumped your rod slightly, to lift the sinker up a few inches; and then let it fall. This motion animated the jigs, which darted around like disoriented minnows, an easy meal. The deer hair the lures are made of is hollow, and what looks lifeless in your hand billows and pulses in the water. Fish most often strike as the lure is falling, so the trick is to keep the line tight enough on the fall to detect a strike but not so tight that you impede the jig's action. And then, like the old joke about the obsessive-compulsive who endlessly follows the shampoo tube's "lather, rinse, repeat" instructions, you jig the lure again and again and again. You jig until Dickie decides to move or you get a strike or Jesus comes back.
Today, however, was payday. Within three pumps of the rod, I felt the electric pulse of a fish, set the hook, and reeled up a good-sized white perch. "Yeah, baby!" crowed Paula. "That'll work! Throw him in the basket!" I unhooked the fish and slid it into the basket tied over the side. The basket was made of wire, with a spring-loaded lid that only opened inward, so you could put fish in but they couldn't get out. Dickie had a perch on before I got my rig back in the water, and Paula was right behind him with a double, a fish on each jig. We exchanged wide-eyed looks, fully aware that this was exactly what we'd been praying for and also scared that we'd queer our luck if we spoke of it. (The baseball pitcher who wears the same socks every game as long as he's winning has nothing on the fisherman when it comes to superstition.) A giddy feeling, a kind of perch madness, washed over us. We were jacked on fish. Our senses sharpened, time slowed, and the world shrank to the wand in your hand and the sensations it telegraphed. Moments after our jigs touched bottom, something bumped them almost every time. We kept happily reeling fish up, swinging them aboard, and sliding them into the basket. At a certain point I realized that I was thirsty and — during the five seconds it took my jig to fall through the thirty feet of water to the bottom — I would resolve to stop after the next fish long enough to open my water bottle and take a swig. But every time I forgot until the jig was once again falling, at which point I again resolved to drink after the next fish.
We were careful not to advertise our success. The last thing we wanted was company. When a guy in what had once been white coveralls motored past in a skiff, we dropped our rod tips and studied the scenery as if it were of far greater interest than the fishing.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "It's Only Slow Food Until You Try To Eat It"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Bill Heavey.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: How Hard Could it Be?,
Chapter One: Blood, Guts, and Other Signs of Spring,
Chapter Two: A "Savory Little Fellow" Rediscovered,
Chapter Three: The Homicidal Gardener,
Chapter Four: Of Cattail Disasters and the Blue Goose Incident,
Chapter Five: Enter the Girl, Sour Cherry Pie, and Five Bites of My Own Lawn,
Chapter Six: Among the Cajuns,
Chapter Seven: Of Closet Carnivores and the Gospel of Small Fish,
Chapter Eight: "You Don't Want to Grab Anything Has Red Eyes",
Chapter Nine: People of the Caribou,
Epilogue: Don't Ever Let That Man Near a Stove,
Acknowledgments,
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