We forage fiddleheads yearly, in May, when the ferns are beginning to sprout from the ground, but before they unfurl. I enjoy this annual ritual, in the same way I enjoy cooking stew in the woods with my church community. It is a simple act, but a unique one. It is one that I know not everyone has the privilege to partake in, and so I feel a certain responsibility to enjoy it, and to continue to do it.
Fiddlehead foraging is a contemplative practice. We park the car at the end of the road, and walk in on the path, along the riverbank and the old railway. The day we pick fiddleheads is one of those magical days at the cusp of spring, when we aren't quite used to sunny, warm days and so the weather catalyses in us a kind of glad hysteria. We walk, buckets in hand, along the red dirt way. We cross the marsh and the squishy, wet ground reveals each flaw and crack in our rubber boots. My feet get wet. Then, near the apple tree not quite in bloom, we look down. We crouch. And there around us are fiddleheads: dark green shoots not yet ready to pick, long lighter green plants that have almost reached full maturity, and in between, the ones we like. In groups of three or four are young ferns, big enough to emerge from the ground, but still short enough to not really have leaves yet and still, in many cases, covered in a brown film. It is not hard for us to find an abundance of fiddleheads. We separate, Mary by the river and me among the brush, and here is the contemplation. I hope I can communicate well the beauty of picking fiddleheads. It is like a prayer. I am on my knees, or squatting close to the ground. I hear the swell of the river and the song of birds. I am saved, then, from the noise of every day life: none of the usual humming of a refrigerator or car engine and no impulse to check twitter again.
In this space of contemplation, I think of the lesson of the fiddleheads. They are not cultivated by humans. They simply grow as part of a complex, resilient ecosystem. But at the same time, I get to take them. Though I have had no part in creating them, I have a part in consuming them. There is a way to pick fiddleheads that is akin to clearcutting a forest. You can pick every single fiddlehead in a bunch. If you do this, though, you will come back next year around the same time and you will not find any fiddleheads. The fern will have died. You may get more this year but at the expense of next year's crops. When you pick fiddleheads, you must be careful to leave at least one or two ferns standing out of every patch. As I carefully picked fiddleheads, sometimes tempted to take more, I thought about the world in a larger context. For isn't this the challenge of sustainable living? We have been so greedy for more that we have killed what we have taken. I wonder if the people who proclaim "drill, baby, drill," have ever spent a spring afternoon picking fiddleheads. I wonder of the CEOs of the pulp and paper mills have ever sat on a riverbank with a loved one and a pail of fiddleheads. Money is god but money can't make fiddleheads grow and it costs zero dollars to pick them. This is a different economy, the kind God intended, I think. This is an economy where God provides and we take only what we need and no more. This is the economy of the manna in the desert-- bread falling from the sky. If the people hoarded it, maggots ate the bread. I think that was God's example. This is where greed gets us: only destruction.
I remember when I first learned the basics of capitalism in my undergraduate economics courses. I was intrigued and excited with the premise that that everyone, working in their own self-interest, actually brought about the most economic good. In other words, at the very basis of capitalism is the idea that individual greed produces common good. It was all there in the graphs and the equations. And at the time I completely agreed that this was the best and only system that could succeed in the world. I have always believed in the lostness and depravity of humanity-- I absorbed a lot of Calvinist thinking in my formative years, I suppose. In any case, any economic system that essentially requires the selfishness of people, I thought, would be the only one that would work. And it was true. We are inherently selfish.
But of course, the problem with this general basis of capitalism is that it leaves out one very important dimension-- the fact that our economy is not an independent system. Our economy is based on both our social system and our ecological system. The basic tenets of capitalism forget about the earth. And when I picked fiddleheads, I thought about how dependent we are on the earth. Everything we have has been put here for us. We have bodies and these bodies need nourishment: they need food and water. And we keep on destroying the very things that give us life. But they are not completely destroyed yet, so still we ignore this problem. There is a lot we have killed with our own greed. There are plants and animals that we will never see again. There are places where people need to wear masks because the air is too dirty to breathe; there are places where people need to get truckfuls of water because their own rivers are dry. But for the most part, we are still gorging on the fiddlehead feast of this year, without thinking that next year, when we go back, there will be no fiddleheads.
I now believe that our current economic system cannot be the one we keep in the future. The future needs an economic system that is based not on individual greed, but one that is based on fiddleheads, and manna, and the idea that everything is a gift from God, and we can take only as much as we need, and no more.
Between us, we found eight ticks trying to make their home on us yesterday.
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