There’s a storm on the range this year. The cow camp we are in right now was where the crew found their tents underwater 2 years ago after a cloudburst dumped buckets. But this year is one of the lowest precipitation years on record, so it isn’t rain. The storm is not hail, even though last week an icy hailstorm rained down on the crew, but it was only the second pelting storm this summer. This year’s storm is of a different kind.
Last year, the storm was voles, or field mice. I couldn’t help but step on them as I walked across our hayfields. Some meadows weren’t even worth cutting because of the rodent’s voracious appetite for grasses and forbs. We grazed some fields intentionally with heavy mother cows hoping to cave in their burrows. The raptors had a heyday. Bald and Golden eagles descended on the ranch for the vole feast.
Nature runs in episodes, and some of them appear to be storms. They aren’t all bad. Sometimes they benefit humans directly.
Melanie and her 2-man horseback crew were coming back from the remote meadow we call Skull Flats by the light of the moon a week ago. It was around 12:30 AM, and they were returning to camp after serving as trail guides for another crew to get 100 head of heifers we cut out from the main herd to begin the 35-mile journey back to the ranch.
The path out of the tangled forests, broken ridges and canyons isn’t for someone who doesn’t know the country. She was up for it, because she’s been on such ancient trails horseback since she was 5. She knows them as well as I do. So she got them to the open grass and sage country, and left the three other cowboys on their own with the 100 head to find their next spike camp (they found it, as it turned out; they sent me a satellite com message at around 2:30 AM after settling the cattle down, turning horses out to graze and rolling out their bedrolls).
In the half-moonlight on the way back to Iron Camp, Melanie unexpectedly (to the other two riders) dismounted, and started gathering wild raspberries. The picking was especially good in this one fold of the mountain traversed by the Big Hat Trail, and only she knew about this one patch.
Even though it was going on 1 AM, she had to stop. And so would I have.
The other riders took the welcome time out of the saddle (they had been going since the previous morning) and feasted on fruit which was like no other. Certainly, they were all bone tired, but the wild flavor and sweet quenched part of that fatigue. They were eating pure beauty.
This year, as you probably figured out, the storm is in wild fruit. I’ve never seen anything like it. On last week’s scouting mission, I ate wild raspberries, thimbleberries (incredible but not many of them yet), four kinds of currants and gooseberries, bush cranberries and elderberries (Caryl made a batch of “cold-care” elderberry-honey throat syrup out of a bag I stuffed full for her).
Yesterday, it was wild apricots, chokecherries and squaw currants.
Normally, I eat pretty squarely in the carnivore category, getting about 95% of my sustenance from our beef, eggs and dairy. At 63, I feel great when I do this, but have found when I graze wild fruit, plants and roots on the Hat Creek Range, I still feel good. It’s not like I can pile them on like I used to with a bag of grapes in the grocery store (that would make me ill).
And when I eat my mostly “keto” diet, even a chokecherry tastes sweet. They make most people pucker. But I couldn’t resist the unprecedented clusters of cherries this year; they hung like grapes. It was unbelievable.
We have a row of wild currants in a remote stretch of Little Hat Creek. Only riders on horseback who happen by on the faded game trail know about it. The beaver dams sometimes put the trail underwater, but the currants are up above on the gravely mountainside—close enough to touch water with their roots, but high enough to never drown under a beaver-initiated deluge.
Although the same species, each bush tastes remarkably different. I eat them with my eyes closed, savoring the nuance. One tastes like mandarin oranges. Another is tangerine. Another is wild strawberry. I’ve learned what the ancient peoples most certainly had to have figured out: first, I roll a cluster of the fruit gently between my palms. Then I get them all in one hand and slowly let them tumble down to my lower hand, cupped for the catch while blowing gently with my mouth through the orange column of berry bliss. The chaff of stems and dried flower petals and sepals gets carried away, and all that is left is a handful of wild fruit.
The result is an unbelievable depth of flavor. Certainly not as sugary sweet as any storebought fruit, but with my reset on just what sweet is, to me, they are divine.
The apricots are a case in point. They are the only fruit I mentioned on these lists that was planted by some human over the past 150 years. They are the only non-native. Horseback or wagon travelers would plant them, usually inadvertently by spitting out seeds. And lo and behold, an apricot tree would grow. They like the cracks and crannies in the desert where they can squeeze out some water from an underground spring or nearby seep.
I leaned over on my dirtbike as I was passing one such tree yesterday. Clyde, my border collie balanced on the gas tank wondered why my clutch hand went free as he saw my hand dart into the fruit laden bounty of the stiff branches of the tree-bush. I clutched apricots for the long, hot and dusty trail to cow camp, with over 30 miles yet to go.
I savored them as I rode the dirt track in the 90 degree heat. Nothing like them.
A friend dropped some California orchard grown apricots at our home last week. They were twice the size of our naturalized wild ones. And twice as juicy and sweet. But they were absolutely bankrupt of flavor.
It’s a testament to wild food instead of cultivated, curated and crossbred food that usually only checks two attributes: Bigger and Faster. And often, Sweeter is bred in as well.
As a result, our commodity industrial food found in supermarkets is categorically bankrupt of nutrition. And then, so are we. Our bodies are rudely tricked by the sugar-sweetness. And we think we like it, but sweet is the only thing checked on our body’s shopping list. And we end up overweight, walk in malaise and exhibit broken immune systems. My friend Mark Schatzker wrote a whole book about this called The Dorito Effect.
Several years ago I read a well-researched account describing when the colonists aboard the Mayflower first met the natives. The colonists were freezing in the December cold typical of New England on that windswept sandy spit that we now call Cape Cod. They were bundled against the relentless wet cold and wondering how they would survive the frigidity of New England. It was a valid question; many of them did not survive that first winter.
Then on one of the first encounters with natives, two men stepped out of the snowy forest. They became known as Samoset and Tisquantum, who befriended the “Pilgrims” and gave them a little bit of hope through their presentation of local food lore. The two men were giants compared to the Europeans, and despite the cold were barefoot in the snow and wearing only a sort of deerskin loin cloth. In today’s terminology, the men were “cut” (with very little fat and well-endowed with abundant and very pronounced musculature).
The fact was that this had to be extremely intimidating to the settlers, especially since most of the Mayflower occupants had been well versed in the lore that all such “savages” were potential enemies. Aside from that stereotype, I have to think that some of the colonists must have been left wondering why the natives appeared so robust and healthy.
And here’s where I step in with my theory as to why. It even has to do with my experience eating wild food from Hat Creek, not the least of which is the wild protein from the cattle we graze there. These wild foods like the berries and currants in this story are always surprisingly flavor dense, in contrast to their commodity raised counterparts. I believe our cows find the same extraordinary goodness in the pristine environments they graze in.
Could it be that the flavor intensity also equals nutrient density?
Our beef numbers suggest that to be true. Spectrographic analysis by Dr. Stephan Van Vliet of Utah State University shows that our beef has over 600 unique plant originating compounds in it that are absent in corn fed beef of the same breed and age. Our cattle choose from nearly one thousand species of native plants. Feedlot cattle eat corn and “roughage.”
Back up on the Hat Creek Ranges, all of the current residents up there in the high country are going to benefit from the berry storm. The birds are first: their wings allow them cream of the crop—the sweetest and most nutritious fruit is often in the upper foliage, where abundant sunlight allows ready access to energy to fill fruity flesh. The nests of eggs will be more successful next year because of the berry boom.
The bears feed on the low end. Their omnivorous desires will angle toward the berries for the easy calories to lay on winter fat for hibernation, and will enable them to have cubs while they sleep in their dens and have abundant bear-milk for them to nurse on during the late winter months.
Some of the chokecherries I picked yesterday were on trees that had the telltale multiple broken branches and trunks from heavy cherry full-bellied bears that broke them off while trying to climb for the highest fruit.
It’s a cascade of berry benefits that even benefits fish. Think of it this way: mammals and birds flock to the creeks where the fruit is. They draw insects who suck their blood and eat their feces. Those bugs in turn land on the surface of the creek; the fish eat them.
It’s really the way we should think about food and how it should be raised. If we as a food culture can embrace and support growers who produce wild-type food, that food will end up being grown. Even in a city, you should be able to purchase and eat a wild huckleberry, morel fungi or wild, grass-fed beef.
And as a culture, we’ll be better for it. And the planet will be too. Even humans can benefit from a year where there is a berry storm.
Happy Trails. May you find yourself in such a deluge.
Glenn
Leave a Reply