Vine maple color; Sitka Mountain-ash berries

Photo of vine maples by Yaquina, Flickr Creative Commons license.
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Sunday’s hike was golden in many ways. Its drive was overly long, and a foot was sprained on root-y trails. But it involved an isolated alpine lake, fall color bursting from rocky slopes, and the round, un-glossy delights of farm-stand apples brought from the town of Sultan.

The hike was to Hope Lake, in the Cascades near Stevens Pass. In less than two miles each way, we climbed over 1400 feet in elevation.  This meant it was fairly steep, and traversed narrow stretches of eroding trail above steep hillsides.

The colors were startling, though. On hillsides above us, vine maples raced across the landscape in yellow and red.

Photo of vine maples against forest by David Patte, USFW, Flickr Creative Commons license.
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Expecting the dense, dark woods of the typical Northwest hike, I’d forgotten that we might be dazzled by the light and color changes of autumn. Some ferns and airy huckleberry bushes had also turned vividly yellow and orange.

As we hiked the narrow incline, we passed out-of-season bushes bare of thimbleberries and salmonberries, and I noted them for later. That said, those two are nearly everywhere in the region. But the raspberry-like thimbleberries are especially nice. I also like them because they remind me of the flat, wide buttons on 1950s coats.

Along the ground, bunchberry plants bore their red berries atop the four leaves. I ate one – only my second ever – and noted that this time, the grainy taste went down easier. This one tasted deeper and more sun-warmed, and I thought to myself that they'd be fine added to other berries to make jam.

Photo of bunchberries in dew by Pellaea, Flickr Creative Commons license.
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In Samuel Thayer’s book Nature’s Garden, one of my favorite foraging guides, he talks fondly of bunchberry. The berries grow in cool, northern forests, including Thayer's native Great Lakes region.

We reached Hope Lake, which is really a pond. It appears shallow, and is backed by tall evergreens  -- probably hemlocks and Douglas-firs. Hope seemed more peaceful than the other lakes I’d seen in the Cascades’ Alpine Lakes Wilderness. This was the first time that the lakeshore was silent; no one was there, nor calling out as they ate their lunches.

Lakes in the backcountry of Yellowstone are quiet like this, too. This pond in the Cascades was like Grebe Lake or others circled by huckleberry bushes that I saw when I was a new hiker, a kid from a hot climate working at the park during college summers.  At the time, my heart raced when I saw fields of berries at a remote lake. Where were the bears? Were they watching?

Photo of Sitka mountain-ash turning color, by heystax, Flickr Creative Commons license.
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At Hope Lake, two weeks had passed since I'd been to one of the Alpine Lakes. Before, we'd seen only green and somber woods, but now, red and yellow huckleberry bushes and Sitka mountain-ash crowded the lakeshore, their colors splashed across the water surface.

Even late in the season, when most of the huckleberries had been picked clean of their fairy bushes, the mountain-ash was laden with bunches of red berries.

Sitka mountain-ash berries can make wine, I hear -- alhough I haven't tried it yet. It was great to see such plenty, to know that for every departed salmonberry, thimbleberry, or huckleberry, something new came with fall: something bright and wonderful.

   

 Photo of Sitka mountain-ash by Tim Green, Flickr Creative Commons.
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Rediscovering a friend on a bus; gooseberries

  

 

Photo of red currants by Liz West (Muffet), Flickr Creative Commons license.
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Yesterday on a bus to Seattle’s Eastside suburbs, there was something familiar about the older woman sitting next to me, and the copy of the New Yorker that she was poring over.

Surreptiously, I checked out her eye-glasses. Had I seen them before? Had her hair been that exact shade?
 

I wasn’t sure, you see, whether she was the lady whose seat I'd shared a month and a half before, on the return trip from an Eastside park where I’d gathered a bag of golden plums so ripe that some fell off their pits en route. 

On that bus ride, my new buddy and I had talked avidly about politics, Harper’s magazine articles after 9/11, her war-protest activities downtown, and gathering edible plants. We had even exchanged email addresses, but I couldn’t recall whether I’d contacted her. It had slipped between the cracks of looking for possible roommates, considering whether to relocate to a sunnier city, and finishing out the field notebook I'd been using that week.
 

Yesterday, I decided I would lose out if I kept silent. When she had turned away from her New Yorker pages to look at me, her face changed and she smiled. “Well,” she said in her slight English accent, “Can we believe this?” We had indeed met on that previous bus trip, going the opposite direction.
 

It was great to see her again. This is what I like about talking with people about plants and gathering: Standing alongside a trail in any quiet park, I’ve met inquiring people who can either tell me more about the plants I see, or about the land where we stand, or who have questions for me. In every case, I have felt the sparkle of exchanging vital, life-giving information with another person -- and learning a bit about them.

 

Was I gathering plums again? my friend asked on the bus, then smiled to acknowledge that she had remembered: Right, plums were no longer around, weeks later.

 

Not this time, I said: Going hiking. As I flipped through a field guide I’d brought, Trees & Shrubs of Washington, by C.P. Lyons (Lone Pine Publishing, 1999), my friend said that she’d like to see gooseberries around, that she missed the days when they were considered standard pie material, especially in England.
 

I'd also like to see gooseberry pie early and often. Gooseberries and currants are about and they're being used, I said – although it’s true that they’re not the commonplace pastry material they once were. These days they aren’t standard; they’re pleasingly retro.

 

Still, I’d seen both berry types sold at mid-summer in the standard grocery store near my house. The farm name on the boxes, when Googled, turned out to be in Washington’s Yakima Valley.  It's an area known for its berry farms. The farms, it turns out, are supported by a network of irrigation systems that carry water from mountain snow-melt.

  

At a farmers’ market I’d talked with another farmer from the Yakima Valley, who said that his family grew blueberries in the soil, which was rich from age-old volcanic activity in the area. “The blueberries love it,” he assured me, shaking his head. I imagine that the gooseberries and currants do, too.
 

On the bus, my friend and I looked at photos of gooseberry and currant bushes in Trees & Shrubs of Washington. “That’s it!” she said happily.

In the same park where I’d picked the golden plums, I’d gathered a few currants and gooseberries that grew nearly pushed out by over-eager blueberies, I told her. I grew up in a warm climate, one with its warmer types of berries, like dewberries -- so I had been excited about picking blueberries, and especially marveled at the currants and gooseberries. 
 

It was a fine bus ride to have before a hike: Rediscovering gooseberries. My friend said, "Have a good hike," as I headed off. We decided we'd meet again.
 

Photo of black currants in a bowl (these are like the ones I found in the Eastside park, though mine were smaller) by Glen Fleishman, Flickr Creative Commons license.

Rose hips and herb nerds with brown paper bags

Photo of rose hips by Audreyjm529, Flickr Creative Commons License.
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Today I've been collecting sun-softened, ripe rose hips into a brown paper bag that I begged off a counter-person at Rainbow Naturals, an apothecary that mixes its own herbs on Capitol Hill in Seattle. When I asked her for somewhere to transfer my bristly handful of rose hips, each the beating color of internal organs, she rustled out the bag and said in an undertone, "We're all herb nerds here, so I understand."

It was good. I wonder what Rainbow Naturals does with their rose hips, and I'll have to ask.

Meanwhile, I have a brown lunch bag lined with their rosy rounded forms, each with its autumnal, prickly leaf-stem. Lovely, what a dying rose leaves behind. If this is recycling, then I like it.

I'd always seen the bright orange hips, seemingly in such abundance on bare fall shrubs. But I never knew that they were things that ripened, that grew soft and tore at the edge when unhinged from the stem, so that each tear resembles a gash in a tomato.

So far, I'm just peeping at them proprietarily every so often. Tonight I'll settle on whether to make jelly, puree, chutney -- or even rose hip and vegetable curry.

What do you think?

Hawthorns and clippings of small presses from 2009

Photo of hawthorns (European) by Maura McDonnell, Flickr Creative Commons License
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Lately, hawthorns have been my quarry, though I've only gathered a 2-pound margarine container full of them and left them in the refrigerator, so far. What can I say? I was expecting to have to move this week! I was knee-high in boxes and making decisions about papers and treasured clippings about small presses in New Jersey from 2009.

Why is it that every review of our small items makes me think that a) I should become a hard-core Buddhist and relinquish all material items, going from door to door with a proffered hat and never again thinking about Comcast and (b) that every piece of paper, each wing-nut from a project and each pearlized button is irreplaceable and that I must keep it for all time to remind me of the fall of 2010?

Did I say that I did not move? Not yet, at least. I gave notice, then thought about whether I'm ready to go flying off to another time zone to live on a couch until I am able to find a peaceful share with a like-minded person who (hopefully) does not come in at 2:30 a.m. and cook aromatic soups of chicken and spices, at the very least. Because one of my former roommates in New Jersey did just that, and the scent was tempting enough to get a person out of bed and rubbing her eyes.

It is just the beginning of October, hawthorn and rose-hip season. Our weather here in Seattle is still bright and sunny, and sometimes I swear that we all are living in a waking dream in which we think that it is June. Honestly, I get confused, although on the nippier days (which I love), I notice that the evenings come earlier now as our planet tilts.

The reason for thinking of moving was partly weather. I'm a person who loves sunlight, or at least loves it in its indirect forms: dappled, glowing into a room at the window, emerging through tree branches, on a light and breezy summer day, and in its amber-bright autumnal glory.

Often, in late summer, I can hardly stand to think that the sharp concentrations of color that we see here in Seattle in August and early September might change. That said, I am happiest when I live near (by which I mean, keep aware of) the plants and air changes of season.

That is, knowing which plants are now in season -- hawthorns, rose-hips, the last of the huckleberries at high elevations -- it makes me notice the days better, to walk with a quickness of step.

So, how shall I prepare those hawthorns? I'm thinking of making a kind of apple sauce, having boiled and mashed and strained them, then adding cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice.

Late summer and fall, free from a tree. Good start!

Cold air and snow brace us

Photo of lobster mushroom, by gabriel amadeus on Flickr Creative Commons license
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Lately my mind has been consumed with foraging. I think of mushrooms and their fluted caps, rose hips swaggering on branches, bull-whip kelp in brash sections on the beach.

I know little about my topic, though. I look at many blogs, and I went chanterelle-hunting for the first time a few weeks ago. My knowledge is nascent, but I'm building on it.

The weather here in the lowlands of the Pacific Northwest is turning unpleasant for me, wet and full of leaf rot. The past few days have been dusk-dark at mid-day. They aren't just shorter since last week’s time change, but full of looming catastrophe in the hanging darkness and just-deferred downpour.

Walking in Seattle in the dim noonday, taking care not to slip on damp leaves piled along the sloping sidewalks, I think of Snoqualmie Pass and the Cascades. As of this morning, they have received fresh snow and an order to don tire chains.

The air at the Pass, I know, is brisk and cleansing to the lungs. Looming mountains lift the eyes into clear air or air hazed by snowfall. One feels the elevation of the barometric pressure, and steps with energy on snowshoes.

Sometimes the air and the snow are the cold water in which we can swim.

I look forward to diving into this land, to finding the rose hips and making a syrup to pour over cake -– to eating that cake and making other starches from chestnuts. 

To gathering. It is endless, the possibilities.