Occupy, Looking Back a Year Later

On the anniversary of the Occupy movement, a look back at how it appeared in three cities up the East Coast in the fall of 2011.

Ginseng-hunting Season

This month’s Adirondack Life magazine includes an article celebrating the ginseng tradition of the northeastern mountains. That’s right: the plant perhaps best known in America as a Chinese herb or a southern wild medicinal plant has, for millions of years, grown wild up all the way into Canada. The article features Bob Beyfuss, expert ginsenger and champion of “simulated-wild” ginseng, an approach that gives the plant space to grow in the forest without use of chemicals or the intensive methods of ginseng farming. He is also a presence in my book Ginseng, the Divine Root, which Algonquin Books has released as an e-book. Today’s post is adapted from the book.

Bob Beyfuss says the tattoo on his arm was a midlife crisis: a full-color, life-size illustration of a huge five-prong ginseng plant, from leaves to root. Ginseng diggers everywhere talk about prongs – the bracts that branch off from the main stem and give a rough idea of the plant’s age. One-prongs are a year old, two-prongs are two years, and a four-prong generally signals a plant four years old or older. After four years, a plant rarely adds prongs, so to tell the age you have to dig up the root and count the scars that gather on its neck, one every year. Beyfuss had a botanical illustrator paint the image from one of his own plants, a nine-year-old. Then a tattoo artist needed most of a day to transfer the illustration to Beyfuss’ arm. There it is: a flush of leaves on his shoulder in rich greens, the red berries full, and the brown, branchy root only slightly smaller than it should have been.
    Beyfuss has been involved with ginseng for nearly 30 years, starting at a low point in his life. In 1984 his marriage had just ended and he was going back to school for a master’s degree, and he felt old among the other graduate students. He was commuting two hours each way from his day job in Greene County. With the added strain of studying, he was a wreck.
    He started taking ginseng, chewing a bit of root daily, and found that despite getting less sleep, he could keep going through a full schedule of work, study, and almost-daily racquetball games. Ginseng seemed to cut his stress load, improve his energy, and, he thought, help him to lose weight.
    Beyfuss hoped that with simulated-wild ginseng, he could help revive a New York tradition in which families supplemented their income with native species from local forests in ways more ecologically sound than conventional dairy farms, which invest a great deal of energy, resources and antibiotics to grow animals that are not well-suited to these hill slopes.
    One September day we were in the Catskills where he likes to hunt the plant. Suddenly, standing amid stinging nettle and blackberry prickers, he knelt down. There it was. “Four prong,” he said.
    This was the first ginseng of the season. It was indeed a four-prong, with several clusters of leaves off the central stem – a good-sized buck in ginseng terms – but it did not stand out from the shrubs and the jack-in-the-pulpits nearby. Yet we were in a ginseng patch.
    “The more you look, the more you see,” Beyfuss said. Almost immediately, he pointed out another, just a bare stem. Although deer had nibbled off the leaves (deer and wild turkey love ginseng), Beyfuss could identify the plant by its central stem and the remaining bracts.
    He has hunted American ginseng throughout its range, which at one point stretched to the eastern edge of Nebraska and down into Florida. As you go south through the plant’s native range, down the Alleghenies through the Appalachians to Georgia, the indicator plants that signal its presence change. Blue cohosh gives way to black cohosh. Galax springs up.
    Pressed to explain ginseng’s allure, words fail him. He can’t articulate the feeling he gets from hunting shang, except to say that it “reinforces the primeval connection between humans and plants.”
    Later we crossed the road and re-entered the everyday world, stopping in a driveway to retrieve a fertilizer spreader for his friend. You could tell, as Beyfuss settled into the car, that the rest of the day would be routine after the magic of the first hunt of the season.

Food and Our Stories

The Algonquin blog this month offers a mouth-watering take on food stories, and a deal on 7 of them for e-readers. Have a look and reflect on how our gatherings over meals and our memories of food influence our sense of ourselves.

    Some of us live closer to gathering our food and herbs than others. My friend Bob Beyfuss posted an exhilarating response to the start of ginseng harvest season in upstate New York this month. It shows how for him, experiencing ginseng habitat each fall helps reinforce all the natural history and medicinal knowledge that he's learned. So taste and how it connects to memory goes past Proust's bite of the madeline, into the forest or the community garden. However you slice it, enjoy.

Constitution vs. Guerriere: A Doctor’s Log, War of 1812

Two hundred years ago this month, a first major sea engagement of the War of 1812 took place in the Atlantic about 600 miles east of Boston.
    August 19 dawned cloudy with freshening breezes, and for the crew of the USS Constitution, another day isolated on the sea. At 2 pm, though, a sail was spotted to the south. An hour later, as Constitution closed in, the other vessel’s outline became a frigate. Captain Isaac Hull cleared the decks for action. The surgeon, Dr. Amos Evans, carefully arranged his sinister-looking instruments in the cockpit.
    The cannon fire started suddenly. Amid the din and fog, the British ship’s mizzenmast soon toppled, slowing her down considerably. Constitution surged across her bow and let loose first one raking broadside, then turned for another. The ships collided, the British frigate’s bowsprit tangling in Constitution’s rigging.
    Constitution’s first lieutenant, Charles Morris, and her marine lieutenant, William Bush, were shot down—“Mr. Morris first jumped on the Taffrail with an intention of boarding her and was instantly wounded in the parieties of the abdomen,” Evans wrote in his journal. Bush rushed in after and immediately took a musket shot to the face.

Constitution v. Guerriere became a favorite theme.

    The battle ended quickly as the captain of the HMS Guerriere surrendered. But Dr. Evans’ work was just getting underway. He was soon joined by his British counterpart and side by side they worked in Constitution’s cramped cockpit, kneeling over writhing and groaning men, cauterizing wounds, setting bones, and amputating limbs. One gunner recalled a man who had his leg amputated say simply, “You are a hard set of butchers.”
    The surgeons worked through the night. Even as they attended to the wounded, in the morning they looked up to see the Guerriere as it gave its last gasp. The American crew got all the prisoners of war off and set the enemy ship ablaze. She soon blew up spectacularly.
    Then it was a matter of getting everyone to shore. Nine days later, a lookout sighted Boston lighthouse. By August 31 they had anchored there. Recorded Evans:

As we passed Long Wharf were saluted with huzzas by a great concourse of people from that place and the different Merchant vessels. Commander Decatur… came on board… and the vessel was crowded all day with citizens – boats surrounded us, huzzaing, &c.

How to reconcile the long, tedious days at sea with the sudden violence of battle, and the crowds and celebration on shore? More from routine than necessity, Evans still began each journal entry ashore with the weather:

September 5. – Wind from N & E—cold rain. Were honoured with a superb dinner at Faneuil Hall by the citizens of Boston to-day. Much order and decorum were preserved on the occasion. Several excellent Patriotic toasts drunk… In the Gallery, fronting the President’s chair, was a model of the Constitution Frigate with her masts fished and the Colours as they flew during the action… A band of musick played in the Gallery, and every toast was honored by several guns from the street.

September 27 – Walked around town with Lt. Contee & saw many pretty girls, coming from & going to church. Cool & cloudy in the evening…

By October 2, a Boston theatre had adapted the surprise victory for the stage in a short piece called “Guerriere & Constitution.” It ran after the main show, The Foundling of the Forest. Evans bought his ticket and afterward pronounced the new work “a very foolish, ridiculous thing.”
    There was an election that fall, too. Marylander Evans received “very disturbing news” reports from home of the outcome for Congress: “What a farce! And what miserable dunces the people are to be so easily gulled! … I am sick of this rascally world.”
    Still Evans returned to his duties on the Constitution. Back at sea he conducted experiments to determine the ocean’s currents, and savored simple pleasures. On November 19 he wrote, “Eat the albacore caught yesterday. I found it an excellent fish.”

Digging Up History and Making It Fresh

Earlier this month our first Neighborhood Profiles workshop wrapped up a blast of discoveries, lives and upturned hideaways, from Washington’s old Brookland monastery and tavern west to Route 66 and on to the Kentucky-Tennessee border. I was lucky to have a group with wide-ranging curiosity and skills for exploration, and help from George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media for trying out new tools for local historians and storytellers. It was indeed a blast.
    Our venue itself was dripping with history: the Old Naval Hospital, recently converted into the Hill Center. Less than a year into its new life, it already draws a range of local groups its halls, which date back to the Civil War. It had high ceilings and odd transoms that peer down into the rooms from grand stairwells. The room across the hall from ours was the Walt Whitman room.
    Thanks to The Writer’s Center and the Hill Center for their support in creating the workshop. Hope to see you there the next time we offer it. For more about the workshop see my post on the Writer's Center blog.

The Secret Life of a Powder Monkey and Other 1812 Transformations

The ships of another age arrive in Chicago and the Great Lakes this week. As they mark the 200th anniversary of the 1812 war, my thanks to the folks at NY Bound Books for showcasing the story of Samuel Leech, the boy caught in a brutal battle on the far side of the Atlantic who found himself reliving it in NY harbor many years later, and others who remade themselves. http://www.newyorkboundbooks.com/2012/08/10/bicentennial-of-a-forgotten-war/

77 Down the Road: An Anniversary

Today marks the anniversary of the start of the Federal Writers’ Project (under the WPA) by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. Several recent items string together to signal the effort’s surprisingly long influence across the years. First, a recent post by NY Bound Books does a wonderful job noting the WPA writers’ influence on how New York life and history get portrayed still.
    Then Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and other books, invokes the WPA writers in her new Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which aims “to force this country’s crisis of poverty and economic insecurity to the center of the national conversation.” Check out her recent thought-provoking interview with Amy Dean.
    Shifting to the individual writers and their lives after the WPA, Richard Wright scholar Jerry Ward, blogging from China about “Richard Wright and 21st-century Questions,” notes how we’re still learning the range of what Wright learned and wrote in his twenties while he was a WPA writer in Chicago and New York.
    Even this week’s New Yorker brings a glimpse of the creative legacy of these writers. In David Remnick’s profile of Bruce Springsteen, the rock star, speaking about writers that have affected him, notes two WPA alumni in the space of two lines: John Cheever, whose WPA editing job helped him survive the Depression, and Saul Bellow, who gained his first job as a writer with the WPA when he was just out of college. “I was a big John Cheever fan, and so when I got into Chekhov I could see where Cheever was coming from,” Springsteen tells Remnick. “And I was a big Philip Roth fan, so I got into Saul Bellow, ‘Augie March.’ These are all new connections for me.”
    Happy to report that you can now watch Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story in full on the Smithsonian Channel online. The filmmaking team is very pleased that this doc, supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as six state humanities councils, is now freely available to the public. See America this summer.