Picture a school of sperm milling around a monstrous egg, an ovarian Mount Everest, one thousand times the size of each swimmer. Their tiny flagella oscillating like oars on a small dinghy, each sperm filled with thoughts and prayers for a blissful genetic future rather than the evolutionary graveyard.  It’s a biological version of veteran Manhattan shoppers jamming the front doors of Macys on the morning of Black Friday, except here there is only one winner, only one sperm who actually fertilizes the egg, sustaining their future. 

“Soooo, that’s how you were made” Mom said, turning over the last page of  “Where Babies Come From” and flipping the softbound book closed. I was six when I asked the question, and Mom was progressive enough to know that a kid should be told the truth when they asked about human reproduction, but sufficiently repressed to hand the task off to a text that was dry as a two-year old package of Tom’s peanut butter cheese crackers from an abandoned vending machine. I think I did better with my own kids, but please don’t ask me to ask them. Sometimes ignorance is greater sustenance than truth.

Memory is a fragile beast, a jellyfish dangling foot-long tentacles; impossible to grasp without loss. Some legs come away in partial form, some morph into new jellyfish, and others simply dissolve when touched. Even our intact memories actually are paintings coated with several layers of varnish; each one applied via a different relative or friend; each one leaning slightly right or left of center.

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As early as pre-school I had a seemingly innate love of nature; although I’m not quite sure how genes from Ukrainian and Hungarian merchants combined to produce a kid who loved fishes, snakes and frogs. Nonetheless, the fact that my grandparents were willing to abandon their homeland and traverse the Atlantic Ocean to become strangers in a strange new land, surely played a role. My upbringing was far from white bread and mayo, but my divorced and bipolar Mom imparted both gifts and trauma: one of the former being a dislike of mayo. Upon hearing stories about my Mom, neighbors invariably say “Bless her heart”, but my life has been both rich and enlightened even if I’ve never had to choose Dukes over Hellman’s.

In hindsight, perhaps Mom’s greatest gift was her ever present encouragement of my interest in nature—behavior unusual for a “city-gal”, born in 1918. She spent many a weekend sitting in a folding chair, thermos of coffee at hand, reading, while I fished from beaches, jetties, and piers across Southern California. In foggy weather she preferred gray wool slacks and sweaters, but when the Pacific sky was clear and hopeful as cornflower blue, she wore pastel shorts and complimentary short-sleeved blouses and was recharged by the sun.

Mom was especially tolerant of my wild reptilian pets and never hesitated to drive me to the eucalyptus and marjoram-scented chaparral hills of LA for capture expeditions. My favorites were meter-long native serpents such as striped racers and gopher snakes—which, being carnivores, required semi-monthly pet store trips for live rodent prey. Even today, I admire her patience in ignoring the odor of my room’s snake cage corner, where the dead rat stench of snake poop pulled the air down to ground level. Lizards were everywhere and easy to catch in the San Fernando Valley of the Sixties, specifically Western Fence (Blue-Bellies) and alligator lizards. Despite the lyrics of America’s Ventura Highway, alligators lizards were terrestrial rather than aerial.

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Sadly, Mom never lived to see her efforts pay off—she was killed in a car accident when I was eighteen.

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Jumping ahead to my teen years, Mom’s illness worsened, and as an only child, I was sustained emotionally via novels and science fiction. I loved the work of fellow Californian John Steinbeck, especially Cannery Row, a pre-World War Two tale featuring: the marine ecologist owner of a biological supply business; the depression-era unhoused men residing in abandoned sardine cannery pipes in a nearby lot; and the genteel occupants of the neighboring house of carnal knowledge. There’s lots to unpack here, but basically this is a tale of both carousing and seeking wildlife in all its potential forms on the Central California coast. As an LA teen in the 1960s, Cannery Row was the gateway drug for those of us hooked on rocky headlands, low tides, kelp beds and the possibility of natural sustenance.

“Doc”, the book’s protagonist, was based on Edward Ricketts—the real-life owner of Pacific Biological Laboratories, which supplied schools and research labs with marine specimens such as sea hares, anemones and shellfish for demonstrations and research. The lab’s original, weathered-timber building still stands on Cannery Row wharf, just down from the Monterey Aquarium. Cannery Row actually was part of Steinbeck’s childhood home range, and at least one well-known West-Coast marine biologist, Joel Hedgepeth (1911-2006), is rumored to be one of the more savory hobos in the book.

Biological and literary tomes such as field guides to fishes and reptiles, more Steinbeck, and Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories helped sustain my love of nature. Streams, lakes, and especially the ocean, were balms easing the traumas inflicted by a father I had only seen twice in my life and a Mother, who by my teen years, had begun to ping-pong between good and bad mental years.

***

I’m twelve, standing in our backyard in Mission Hills wearing a “so hip” velour shirt and chinos; a 12 pound California Halibut in my right hand. This is the oldest photo I have of a fish that I caught myself, and was taken at a particularly turbulent time in my life—just after Mom’s first attempted overdose. Despite the lack of documentation, my fishing career had begun long before with sunfish and an occasional bass in rivers and lakes around Rochester, New York—my hometown until I was nine. To debone the trope of fishers as liars, the truth is I only reeled the halibut in—it actually was hooked by my “Big Brother” a high school wood-shop teacher whom I’ll call Brad. Being father-less, Mom had arranged for me to have a “Big Brother” from Big Brothers/Sisters of America, an organization that provided surrogate fathers/mothers to nurture children in divorced families.

Brad’s adult son and daughter were sufficiently involved in the Viet Nam antiwar movement to warrant the FBI showing up at his door—but this was the Nixon era, and government harassment of left-wing politicos was widespread, regardless of their criminality. Although Brad was knowledgeable about many things, he was a sealed book when it came to his own personal life and kids. As an adult reflecting on my relationship with Brad, I was pretty sure I was a “mulligan” for him, and although he frequently took me fishing, eventually it became clear he was bored by our twice-monthly ocean fishing trips.  Regardless, it was generous of Brad to serve as my Big Brother, but as Mom fell deeper into the abyss of bi-polarity, she began baring her teeth at him on a regular basis and he decided to end our relationship. I can’t say I blame him now, but as a teen I was hurt by his withdrawal of emotional sustenance. Later, while a PhD student on a research trip to LA County’s Museum of Natural History, I reached out to let him know I was succeeding in life, but there was a misunderstanding over timing—and he remained “the number you have reached is no longer in service…”

***

By my seventeenth birthday in spring of 1971, life at home had become literally insane, as Mom’s condition worsened and we agreed I could move out and share an apartment with Ken, a fellow sophomore at California State University, Northridge. I was used to hard work and independence, having started work at fifteen, first as a bagger at Dale’s supermarket and then as a salad-maker and eventual sous-chef at branches of the now defunct, upscale Bullocks department store.  Nonetheless, after paying for rent, car insurance and gas—little money was left over for food, especially expensive items like red meat, fish, and chicken.

This being the “self-sufficient, back to the land” Seventies, my knowledge of biology and love of reading came to my aid in the form of Euell Gibbons’ “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” and “Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop.” Gibbons’ asparagus book taught me how to identify, find, and prepare edible plants, some of which, like the euphoniously named lamb’s quarter, even grew in vacant lots. Other edible plants were more plentiful in wilder areas like the edged chaparral hills that wove through Los Angeles proper. Dandelions, plantain, dock, bitter lettuce, and mustard, were vitamin-laced, spinach-like greens that were great steamed or just blanched for a minute or two. Dribbled with olive oil and seasoned with salt, black pepper and garlic, they were excellent nourishment via salads or side dishes.

The sole drawback to foraging many edible plants was the requirement that they be eaten when the leaves were small and young—like some humans, older greens could become bitter to the point of cynicism. But others, like cattails were edible throughout the year. Cattails were a veritable supermarket of edible parts—sweet starchy tubers below ground, and green corn on the cob-like, flower spikes. Cattail spikes were great sustenance: steamed, buttered, and salted, then eaten with our fingers.

But greens were not the only forms of plant nutrition—like many youths of the sixties I was forced to listen to a conservative relative or two who claimed that California was full of nuts. They were correct in the technical sense, although the nuts came from trees and not human wombs. In the 1860’s, English Walnut trees had been introduced in Southern California for commercial production, and proliferated in the San Fernando Valley where I lived. A century later, much of northern Los Angeles had been converted from citrus, nut and olive orchards, to suburban housing tracts. Nonetheless, many areas in the northern portion of the Valley, were checker-boarded with undeveloped lots that supported the remaining walnut trees.

Citrusy tasting drinks and teas sustained my liquid cravings, and when the winds blew yellow with tree pollen, I frequently made a rose-colored and pleasant tasting herbal tea from California Ephedra. This prehistoric-looking plant, has twiggy green stems and flowers, but no apparent leaves. Ephedra contains ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, drugs useful for treating allergies and asthma, but because of its potency, it has recently been banned from food supplements by the Food and Drug Administration. Aboriginal peoples across the globe used Ephedra and its relatives medicinally—archeological evidence documents its human use as early as fifty thousand years ago. I never had a bad reaction to Ephedra tea; perhaps luck alone sustained me.

Of course foraging can be a chancy game, and I have to admit feeling a mildly skin-tingling combination of excitement and anxiety every time I picked and ate a new wild plant. Meals with a new green elicited a slight hesitance with the first forkful—then that “jump off the cliff” sensation as first tastes melded into mouthfuls. Ken watched with a look of concern that murmured “who’s going to pay the rent if…”

***

Greens and berries were good, but our real budget sustainers were found in the intertidal. Although Gibbon’s seafood book focused on East Coast edibles, analogs covered the California coast. Delicious California Mussels blanketed acres of the rocky intertidal and a gunnysack could be filled with these orange-fleshed delicacies in an hour. Looking back, I think the daily limit was an astonishing fifty pounds per person. Mussels provided a gourmet meal, steamed in dry white wine like Sauvignon Blanc or Muscadet, spiced with bay leaves, garlic, thyme and a dash of smoky paprika—then dipped in melted lemon-thyme butter—all of this buffered with warm chunks of sour-dough French bread. The California mussel is the larger brother of the cosmopolitan Blue Mussel; the mussel served in restaurants across the US and Europe and just as tasty. We introduced many people to steamed mussels, which sustained both friendships and stomachs.

The Gibbons book introduced me to other edible and good tasting intertidal “creepy-crawlers” such as limpets, chitins, various snails and the jackpot organism, the black abalone. Some, such as the ocean-spanning gooseneck barnacle, seemed almost like creations from Dr. Seuss, displaying a two to three inch stalked neck tipped with a torch-shaped covering of thin white plates, like some sort of tree-clam. Oddly enough, gooseneck barnacles and all other barnacles, actually are crustaceans that live cemented to rocks, despite their strong resemblance to shellfish, like clams and mussels.

Goosenecks prepared in the same manner as mussels were delectable, although prior to consumption, both the plated end and stalk skin must be removed to reach the tasty muscle beneath. In Spain these delicacies are called paracebes, and once at a scientific meeting in Luarca, I paid a restaurant a steep tab for a plateful of palate memories. Other intertidal shellfish such as turban snails and limpets also were easy prey, and prepared steamed with the same broth used for mussels. Frequently, we used a sterilized and bent safety pin to extract the savory snails from their shells, and pop limpets out of their half shells. Esoteric work, but well worth the effort.

***

As an only child from a poor, trauma-laden family, learning how to provide my own food brought a tremendous sense of self-worth— calming nerves, and quenching fears of poverty. My saga didn’t end with foraging however; I went on to earn a PhD, and a professorship at the University of Georgia, where I spent forty-one years researching and teaching about wild species. Even in retirement, our freezer is full of fished or hunted protein and garden veggies, and my daughters, one a veterinarian and the other a neuroscientist, reached adulthood sustained by foraged food.

– Gary Grossman