How to Make Your Lifetime a Continuous Vacation

Our career–our life’s work– should be something that we thoroughly enjoy, not just something we do to pay the bills and put food on the table. And that is what this story is about--how one man went about choosing work that he still wonders why people are willing to pay him well to do. Or, in other words, how he has made a almost continuous vacation out of his career.

We live today in interesting and scary times–times in which the majority of Americans have virtually disconnected themselves from the land around them and all of the valuable gifts it contains.

Today, when money runs out and people are hungry, they go to food pantries. If THEY are out, they have no idea where to turn. It is the rare person or family who will scavenge in the trash bins behind grocery stores, and even rarer those who know which of the plants they are walking over every day are edible, and will stoop down, grab the leaves, and graze on them.

For most of the people in the world, this is not a problem. They know where to find food. Roughly 90% of the world’s population still gets part or all of its meals by foraging, hunting or fishing for them. In early spring, Italian women scavenge the hillsides for the young, tender spring greens– the dandelions and their relatives that are such delicacies for them. So do the French, the Germans, the Lebanese, the Greeks, and people in at least some 64 other countries. In England, backyard gardeners devote one whole raised bed to what they call their "wild garden," where they purposely cultivate what we would call weeds to supplement their supply of the same plants they find growing uncultivated among their tomatoes and onions; they want to make sure they have enough of the specific ingredients they need for particular recipes. Betzy Sullivan, Eastern European reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, when asked what the Beemer crowd did when evacuated from their expensive condos in Sarayevo during the Bosnian war, said “they went to the country, arranged with a landowner to build a shelter, and reverted to living off the wild plants growing there that they learned to eat as children and still knew well enough to go back to.”

It is only in America that we turn our backs on the wealth of tasty and nutritious foods that we literally walk over each day– the foods that are growing beneath our feet.

But this wasn’t always so. During the Great Depression and World War II that followed it, as well as in all times preceding it, it was common practice, at least for rural folks, to enjoy those plants which have since become known as “weeds” for many breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Mrs. Ann Kadlececk of Phillips, Wisconsin said that “It was the custom to rely on the land to provide the healthiest foods a homemaker could prepare for her family. There were lambsquarters early in spring and mushrooms by the pails full. Women knew how to cook and it had little to do with finances. The eggs and lambsquarters are something we still wait for each spring.”

It was that way with my family also. Back in 1948, my father died and left us with no money. My mother had no skills to support a family, but a friend told us that we could “live on lambsquarters” until she developed some.. Today, had she said that, she would have been laughed out of the kitchen. But then it was not unusual advice, because most Americans grew gardens and were familiar with what the soil had to offer. We knew that we were surrounded by mysterious wonders waiting to be discovered and harnessed for our use, and just needed someone knowledgeable to unlock the secrets. For us, that someone was Agnes Mare, a neighbor and friend from down the street.

For the next six months, while my mother learned a couple of trades that would earn her enough money to support us, my six-year-old brother and nine-year-old self would spend the early mornings before school gathering the young tops of lambsquarters and bringing them into the kitchen where mother would make the most amazing spinach dishes from them. For, after all, that is all that lambsquarters is– a wild spinach.

Lambsquarters was so good, in fact, that it got me to wondering what other plants growing underfoot were equally tasty and nutritious, and that wonder spring-boarded me into what has become my life’s work.

But it didn’t happen overnight.

Mother learned a skill, became a door-to-door saleswoman for Avon Products, then a sales person at Sears, and finally a clerk for the City of Pasadena, California, where she stayed until retirement and provided a good living for our family. I got older, and my interest in wild plants --replaced by an interest in girls, sports, and cars– faded into the depths of my memories to maybe be reawakened sometime later.

That “later” came sooner than I would have thought, however.

In 1956, the summer of my 16th year, I went to work in a sawmill in Northern California. I was big and strong for my age, and more than a little bit independent. My uncle had this friend who owned a series of sawmills nestled in amongst the California redwoods, and, in the course of a conversation with my mother, suggested that a summer in the woods would do me good. I thought so too.

So it was arranged. After I had finished my junior year in high school in 1956, a friend and I loaded my red ‘51 Ford pickup truck with camping gear and headed north along the Pacific Coast on US 101, which at the time was mostly a two-lane highway. The route took us past vast fields of vegetables growing in the blazing sun and the Monterrey Bay area depicted in so many of John Steinbeck’s novels, on up through San Francisco and over the Golden Gate Bridge. We continued north into the California wine region, where grapevines were growing everywhere, and finally reached the Redwood region of Willits and Weed, Scotia and Rio Dell.

We never knew California was such an extensive state– reaching over 1500 miles from bottom to top. We had started in Los Angeles, only a hundred miles or so from the Mexican border. Our destination was near the top, just south of Eureka, around a hundred miles south of the Oregon border. The challenge two adventurous but inexperienced 15-year-old kids had taken on was to traverse almost 1300 miles of mostly two-lane road and arrive in one piece, ready to go to work, in less than a week. We camped nights under the stars, and made breakfast in the morning on our little Coleman stove. We would drive from early morning till late afternoon, find a campground, and settle in for the evening, getting used to the equipment which would populate our bedroom and kitchen for the next two months.

After four days, we crossed into Humboldt County, and were greeted by a strange and wonderful, but totally different, land than we had been used to. Interspersed between the redwood stands were lush, fertile, green pastures filled with Holstein, Jersey and Guernsey cows, cone incinerators that burned the waste from the sawmills with wisps of smoke breaking the clear blue of the sky, and quaint little towns, each with its own four-lane bowling alley, gas station, general store, and shiny silver diner made from old rail cars. It was a totally new world for us, and we liked what we saw.

We arrived in Fortuna, the main market town for the dairy farmers and loggers alike, in late morning on the fourth day. We picked up some food and other supplies, got directions, and headed east on the narrow, winding country road leading to Carlotta, where we would be working for the next two months. On the way, we passed through Hydesville, another quaint farming village. After Hydesville, the road wound into the hills and, an hour later, we were in Carlotta, which, as far as we could tell, was nothing more than two sawmills, a general store and a post office. Not even a diner or gas station! Now all we had to do was figure out where we were going to live.

At the Post Office, we learned that there were plenty of campgrounds up the road–including Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park. The most intriguing, however, was a place managed by Strong’s Station, an old stagecoach stop along the road between Fortuna to Red Bluff (a town on the other side of the mountain). This was a private redwood grove, owned by Hammond Lumber Company, through which the Van Dusen River, from which we could get our water and in which we could take our baths, ran. It was beautiful and very quiet, and we assumed that we would be able to live comfortably and peacefully there for the next two months.

We soon learned that “comfortably and peacefully ” weren’t quite the right words, but we had no way of knowing what adventures were coming our way when we plunked down our $12 a week camping fee on that first day. We unlocked the gate to the redwood grove, went in, locked the gate behind us, drove down the dirt track through the giant trees, and found the perfect place to set up camp on a bluff overlooking the river.

What a summer it turned out to be! The adventures started the first night and included, but were not limited to, the following:

● That first night it rained–hard– and, not having ditched the tent,we got flooded out. Our sleeping bags were soaked, our clothes were soaked, and, since the rain wasn’t about to stop, we had no way to dry things out. So we slept in wet sleeping bags and wore wet clothes for the next two days.

● Bathing wasn’t as easy as we were led to believe. The water was ice cold, and the only good way to get into water deep enough to bathe in was by diving off a 16 foot cliff into four feet of water. My buddy Bill, fortunately, was a competitive swimmer and diver, and taught me how to make shallow dives. So, every afternoon when we got home, we’d strip down and dive in, soap in hand, to wash off the day’s grime. It was exhilarating at first, but after about a week, we got used to it, and soon began taking our unusual method of entering our ice-cold bathtub for granted.

● Fascinating people attached themselves to us. One was Dutch, for whom we provided lodging, or at least a place to pitch camp for about three weeks. Dutch, last name unknown, was the millwright (or sawmill mechanic-troubleshooter) in the mill where we worked. He was only there for part of the two months, but the reason for that will come later in the story. The thing about Dutch is that he was a turtle. Everything he owned– all his clothes, bedding, cooking gear, food supplies, toiletries, anything he needed– was contained in his ‘50 Chevy panel sedan with “Bluebird Cleaners” written on the side. He traveled everywhere in it, and when he was done traveling for the day, he slept in it. From the first night on he was our cook, conjuring up the most remarkable meals in his Dutch oven, which he buried in a pit each morning, covered with hot rocks and dirt, and dug out when we got home each evening. After dinner, it was story after story of life in the logging camps and sawmills and the quirky personalities that he had known in his days. Oh, how I wish I could remember even one of those stories, but I don’t. I did learn, however, valuable lessons about living a successful nomadic life which has stood me in good stead ever since as I travel this grand country in my motor home conducting workshops on edible wild plants. Intrigued by Dutch’s example, I, too, have become a turtle, at least part-time.

● The story wouldn’t be complete without at least mentioning the two teenage girls who came camping in our woods one weekend, and became our girlfriends for the summer. Wonderful memories, and lessons in sharing for Bill and I, as we had to schedule the pickup truck so each would have enough time to go to Fortuna for private time with our respective girl. The hills around Fortuna were never more beautiful than on those nights, sitting in that pickup truck looking out over the dairy farms in the valley with a delightful, soft, and cuddly companion by my side. (I'm surely glad that trucks can't talk and embarrass us with the tales they'd have to tell.) From this standpoint, (and most others for that matter) for me, summer ended all too soon.

● They, however, weren’t the only girls who impacted on our lives during that summer in our peaceful and pristine redwood forest. There was also that weekend when a twenties-something (could have been thirties-something, I suppose, but she looked good to us) singer, who was booked to perform at Strong’s Station, and her two “handlers” parked their travel trailer across from our tent in the woods. The pheromones she was giving off were overwhelming, and during their stay there, we romanced her as much as we dared, always aware of potential retribution which might be meted out on us by her two goons should we happen to explore too deeply into our options. We more-or-less minded our manners, and parted company peaceably when her contract was completed.

● Pulling green chain (removing fresh, rough-cut lumber from a rapidly moving conveyor belt and stacking it in proper piles) next to a wiry 66 year-old man who was still working as hard and making the same wage as I was, helped me realize that, when I was 66 years old, I didn’t want to still be doing the same thing. I decided right then and there to make something more of my talents, so that I wouldn’t be stuck in a dead-end job with no retirement or medical benefits when I arrived at my dotage. I wanted my golden years to be a bit more golden than that.

● What surprised me the most, however, was how small and wiry, but incredibly strong, the average logger and sawmill worker was. I went into the woods at 6'3" and 240 lbs of solid muscle, and got harder and stronger the longer I stayed there, so that by the time we left for home and started back to school, I was probably the strongest and best-built student at Rosemead High school. By contrast, NONE of the men I worked with were over 5’ 8" or 5' 9", and practically all were thin and wiry. However, there wasn’t one of them whom I could beat at arm wrestling even by the end of summer. There also was none of them whom I would have wanted to be angry with me and then meet in a dark alley at night.

● Life in the woods was hard for these guys, and, while they were fascinating characters, they were more than a little rough around the edges. There were lots of drunken nights at local bars, wives leaving husbands and vice versa for what they perceived as “greener pastures”, and the periodic fight. We made friends with one of our co-workers named Claude Batty, who lived in a shanty with his wife and a couple of kids. One day, we went home with him at lunch and found that his wife had run off with a guy she had met at the bar, leaving him and the children to fend for themselves. He was heart-broken, and we, being young and inexperienced in such things, had no way of consoling him.

● One characteristic of many of these men, especially the day-workers–-management was more responsible–- was that they would seek work after they had run out of money, work hard until they had earned enough to go on another drunken binge, quit, and then come back to work again at the same mill or another one when they had again run out of money, and this cycle kept repeating itself. It didn’t matter if they were married or not. Years later I discovered that this was true also of blue-collar workers in the woods and blueberry packing plants of Maine. They were interesting, rough, but playful guys who were full of stories to tell– a fascinating crowd from whom to learn about that particular perspective on life. What you learned mostly, however, was how NOT to live your life if you wanted to be really happy. I’ve learned, over the years, that those often are the best and most useful lessons, and stick the longest in your head.

● Driving the 20 miles or so in to work and back home each day started out as a very scary adventure. Rt 36 was a narrow former stagecoach route that crossed the mountain between Fortuna and Red Bluff. Over the years, it had been paved, but not widened very much. Logging trucks, both empty and full, considered this road their very own, and, even when the fog was thick, would come barreling around the tight corners at death-defyng speeds. Time was everything, and their continued employment depended on them getting logs to the mill and returning for a new load as fast as possible. Fortunately, they were masters of the road, and no matter how fast or dangerous it seemed, they rarely drifted over the center line into our lane. Within a couple of weeks, we came to know the road as well as they did, and long before the end of summer, we were matching them in speed and agility in our little red ‘51 Ford pickup.

There were lots of other memories of those two months in the woods. The little general store at about the halfway point with its old-fashioned crank telephone, and crackers with a layer of raisins smushed in the middle that were so good that I practically lived on them are a couple. But probably the most significant action I took that summer, in looking back, was making friends with the Ashcraft boys, Donnie and Dickie. They worked with us in the mill but lived with their parents, Ruby and Dick, in town. Ruby was the town Postmistress, and Dick was the foreman at the Carlotta Mill, across the street from the Southern Humbolt Mill where we worked. Both mills were owned by Orban Lumber Company, which was captained by my uncle's friend.

The Ashcrafts adopted us and involved us in whatever they were doing as a family as if we were their own sons. This included going berry picking almost every afternoon after work while the berries were in season. These huckleberries, salmonberries and other treats, the names of which I don’t remember any longer, became the ingredients for some of the most luscious pies and jams I have ever tasted.

The other item of defining significance was stripping the ripe cherries from the wild black cherry tree in the field next to our camp, from which we could only get the cherries by psyching out the bull in the field next to the tree.

It was the berries and the cherries that reawakened my curiosity about “what else in the wild would make good food,” and set me off in the direction which has become my career. From then on, I was looking for wild harvests whereever I went, whether they were cumquats, persimmons or wild greens, and for stories from the people who valued them as food and medicine.

It was during the summer of 1956 that I began asking and observing and learning everything I could about how people used wild plants to enhance their lives. While I started college a couple of years later (I put in some military service time between high school and college) as an animal husbandry major, within a year I had switched to biology, and by my junior year to botany. The last happened when I, being lazy, realized that zoologists had to run after animals. Plants stayed put.

I have now spent my last 52 years learning how various cultures use backyard weeds and other wild plants for food and medicine, and have written eight books and countless magazine articles about it, as well as conducting workshops and seminars and giving keynote speeches at conferences in the US and Europe. This pursuit has taken me into fields, farmhouses and dairy barns all over Europe, Canada, and the United States, including Hawaii and Alaska, both learning and teaching what I have learned to others.

When I entered college, I noticed that all my friends were majoring in what they felt would give them enough money to take two weeks off each year to do what they wanted to do. I said. “No way. I want two 6 month paid vacations a year.” So I decided what I would do on vacation and majored in it. And, except for about eight years in my 40's, that is exactly what I have been doing.

And that is how what I became fascinated by when I was nine years old has become what I have done on my 52 year "paid vacation."

Peter A. Gail, Ph.D.
Director
Goosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living.