Harvesting Wild Asparagus

Published in The Christian Science Monitor

            Asparagus is expensive now. The asparagus in stores reminds me of the spring Steve and I shared a place near Oregon's eastern border, in the Treasure Valley. We harvested all the free asparagus we could eat.

            We found the house on a farm for very low rent. The house sat under huge old cottonwood trees, with ground near the house for a large garden. The owner of the farm let us use his green tractor to turn the soil for our garden.

            I forgot about steering a tractor by using the individual rear wheel brakes to turn until I was inches from tearing out the fence, but I remembered in time how to turn and that I could, if necessary, put the clutch in and stop. We planted and raised an excellent garden.

            Steve and I both were learning all we could about existence. We experimented industriously to see if we could live without jobs. Steve knew how to solder and weld, and he made jewelry.

             We thought we might make enough money selling handcrafted goods to pay for our basic existences. We found a place where manufacturers dumped Philippine mahogany, and we harvested a load to carry home in Steve's van.

            I made small boxes from the wood, and a mirror frame that Steve cut a five-sided mirror for. Everything we made was beautiful to behold.

            Very little of it sold, despite the best efforts of the craft co-op shop personnel in the nearby small college town. Very little of anyone's craft efforts sold, but everyone in the co-op learned a lot, some of it disillusioning. Part of what we all learned was that we must replace the illusions that don't work with visions that do work.

            Art is an exception if by "work" we mean provide some economic income. Art merits our involvement even if we don't make money from it, though it is more acceptable, in the consumer culture, to pursue art vigorously if it looks like we will eventually make money from it.

            When I realized most of the finest boxes and mirror frames I made weren't going to sell, I started carving the wood for no practical purpose, just to represent parts of visions living in my mind. I tried to round out my visions by playing my guitar and singing and by writing poems and short fiction.

            The cottonwood trees around the house offered new green leaves to the warming sky. Seeds we planted in the garden sprouted and began to grow, and along some of the big irrigation ditches that served the farms around us, asparagus began to push green, very edible stalks from the ground.

            No one in the area cultivated asparagus anymore, but the plants had seeded themselves where weeds grew and cultivators wouldn't reach, along ditch banks, for example. No one cared if we harvested these delectable weeds, so we did. Finding asparagus among the rapidly growing spring weeds became a daily adventure.

            We ate asparagus raw, steamed, fried, and baked, usually with rice. We harvested lambsquarters, miners' lettuce, several varieties of dock, dandelions, and other wild plants.

            The garden began to produce, and we shifted some of our harvest to what we had cultivated ourselves, culminating toward the end of summer with our harvest of several varieties of melons, slower growing than most other garden produce, but well worth waiting for.

            I showed Steve you can vacuum a floor with a canister type vacuum cleaner while you sit comfortably in a chair, moving the chair only as the size of the rug dictates.

            We had so many projects going, we filled half the large living room with tables. We thought we might eventually fill all the floor space with tables and have to move our living up one table height and start over.

            After melon harvest, we took Steve's van to California. We experimented. 40 miles an hour the first 100 miles gave us very high mileage. 45 miles an hour the next 100 gave us slightly fewer miles per gallon of gasoline. We increased our speed by increments of 5 mph until we arrived in the Sacramento Valley at 60 per.

            In California, late summer baked the land. We swam in Butte Creek a lot. I met Laura almost as soon as we got there, and she went with the growing group of people and also swam.

            I knew almost from the first that we would eventually marry, but it took me a while to convince her. I was in a hurry about living, learning, and building various forms of art, but I wasn't in a rush to talk Laura into marriage.

            Like any form of art, courting her took time, and a slow and careful approach showed well in the finished form.