WW: Glass rolling pin net float

(All the way from Japan and the mid-20th Century; newly arrived on my beach.)

The Great Pacific Sock Patch

According to figures released by the Index of International Statistics, the Great Pacific Sock Patch may be one of the greatest environmental threats of our time. In this region off Australia's east coast, millions of odd socks churn, from every nation in the Pacific Rim. Some are sweat socks. Some are dress socks. Black, white, and argyle; toe socks and boot socks and nylons. And around December, a documented uptick in Christmas stockings. But they all have three things in common: they're footwear; they're unmated; and they threaten one of the world's most sensitive habitats.

The basic mechanics of the Sock Patch phenomenon have been known for centuries, but with global warming accelerating the rotation of the Pacific gyres, it has become a matter of international concern. Single socks have a well-documented tendency to drift; that's why you're likely to find fewer of them after laundering than before. Over the years there have been many attempts to explain this frustrating peculiarity. Children in my grandparents' day were told stories of the Sock Thug, a pirate who stumped into homes while the noise from the washing machine masked his footstep and snatched out single socks to sell to other pirates. Families in the 1940s were cautioned against keeping cats, after an article in Ladies' Saturday Evening Journal posited a high correlation between having a cat in the house and coming up short on stockings. And then there was the exorcism fad of the 1970s, when priests were called into homes to cast out the "dryer demons" that randomly ate socks. Because, you know: evil.

But in the mid-1990s, scientists working with superconductors finally cracked the case. Turns out all socks are either positively or negatively charged. The negative side of the pair tends to remain passive, but the positive one leans, imperceptibly, toward ground. That's why they often end up on the ground, and then, drawn by the superior conductivity of water, in lakes and streams. At last they reach the Pacific Ocean, where they swirl in the currents, slowly wending their way south, drawn apparently by the static cling generated by Australia's low average relative humidity. Sadly, before they can actually wash up on the Fatal Shore, they become snagged on the giant barbed wire fence that is the Great Barrier Reef. So insidious is this phenomenon that parts of the world's largest living structure are now all but buried in odd stockings, smothering the coral and hastening its destruction by storms, owing to greater resistance.

Solutions have so far proven elusive. Attempts to interest private industry in harvesting the garments have foundered on the expense of sorting, coupled with the lower saleability of unmatched socks. Like so many other human-generated threats, the best response may be a fundamental change of lifestyle. The California Maritime Coalition suggests pinning socks together before washing them, a time-honoured strategy that not only keeps stray stockings out of the world's water, but also produces substantial savings for large families. Others advocate a total ban on wearing socks at all, while still others are calling for legislation to require that all socks henceforward be made of hemp.

Because, you know: hemp.

A Suggestion of Madness: Euell Gibbons

New Mexico, 1926. The Dust Bowl has held the state in its grip for over a year now, and where there is no water, there is no work. The head of the Gibbons household is riding the rails, looking for employment. Weeks pass; no word. Back in New Mexico, his family are down to one egg. No-one will touch it.

So fifteen-year-old Euell throws a gunny sack over his shoulder and heads for the hills. Forty years later, he would muse, "Wild food has meant different things to me at different times. Right then it was... a way to keep from dying."

Euell Gibbons packed a lot of living into his sixty-four years. By turns a carpenter, cowboy, trapper, prospector, hobo, labour organiser, vaudevillian, soldier, boatbuilder, mental ward orderly, beachcomber, teacher, student, and novelist, he was also, at various times, a Southern Baptist, a Communist, an alcoholic, and a Quaker. Along the way he married twice, and lived in every region and many states of the US. But the thread that wound through all of his adventures was foraging. Sometimes he hunted wild foods for the challenge, sometimes for variety. In Hawai'i, flat broke and living in a mat-walled shack, he threw sumptuous parties with food collected from the beach and jungle. And sometimes, Gibbons foraged just to stay alive. That bleak day in New Mexico, young Euell fed himself, his mother, and three siblings on rabbit, wild garlic, wild potatoes, and puffballs. With prickly pears for dessert.

Ultimately, more by accident than design, Gibbons became the world's leading authority on wild foods. Bulrushes, wintercress, coltsfoot, mulberries -- it was all money in the bank to him. Thanks to his peregrinations, he could find a meal in any field, forest, or vacant lot in North America. In his first book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Gibbons advanced the startling suggestion that wild edibles are not merely survival rations, but gourmet fare. "On the whole," he explained, "people might be better off if they threw away the crops they so tenderly raise and ate the weeds they spend so much time exterminating." Asparagus, published in 1962, and the short shelf of volumes that followed, kinked a final twist into a lifetime of bumps and grinds: the skills Gibbons acquired to weather poverty and rejection, made him rich and famous.

Gibbons' philosophy dovetailed nicely with the "back to the land" movement of the 1960s, and his exploits made good copy. He speared carp with a pitchfork from horseback. He pit-roasted a Georgia pig, Polynesian style, with a side of palm hearts. He produced haute cuisine from Central Park weeds. He foraged on the White House lawn.

By November 1967, his name had become a household word. In that month, writer John McPhee accompanied Gibbons on a six-day trek through the Pennsylvania hills, fuelled by foraged food alone. In spite of the inhospitable season, they gained weight. In a memorable New Yorker article, McPhee reverently proclaimed that Gibbons' passion for found food held "a suggestion of madness".

Euell Gibbons' celebrity, barely conceivable in our time, rested on the incredible breadth of his experience and his skill at sharing it with others. His writing, still fresh half a century later, blends technical precision with anecdotes about his successes and failures, and the fine points of practice that come only of first-hand experience. Of his first knotweed pie, he confides, "the less said, the better". He ponders whether the strength-building reputation of burdock isn't due to the effort required to dig it up. His many wine recipes are attributed to a "drinking uncle"; he himself, he says pointedly, doesn't drink.

Even in stardom, Gibbons remained remarkably grounded. He continued to forage, though he told McPhee he'd learned not to admit it to onlookers, because they'd insist on feeding him. He attended his Quaker meeting and taught Outward Bound. Most of all, he made foraging acceptable to the mainstream. If books on wild edibles (including my own) continue to sell, it's because Euell taught us that weeds are good.


(A version of this article originally appeared in The Herb Companion. Signed and dedicated copies of The Neighborhood Forager, my guide to wild edibles, can be had by contacting me directly. Unsigned copies can be purchased from Amazon.)

WW: Union Station, Portland

(Because that's how we roll. 'Nother brilliant photo by Zen droogie Dannon "The Robert Doisneau of the Cellphone" Raith.)

The Face of Power

I found this guy beside the compost bin last November. His legal name is Taricha granulosa, but his friends call him the rough-skinned newt. (And here in the woods we call him a waterdog.) This lot are pretty much year-rounders on the North Coast, liable to show up on rainy roads and trails, night or day, in any season. Along with the Pacific chorus frog, they're a fixture of rural life here.

They're also personable little fellows, unfrightened, if slightly irritated, by handling. (A close relative, the firebellied newt, is often sold in pet stores.) In fact, fearlessness is a waterdog trademark, as they often hike hundreds of yards, in the open and in broad daylight, from the ponds where they live and breed.

This is not exactly courage on their part, however; Taricha is also one of the most poisonous creatures on earth. Let an attacker get the slightest bit mouthy with one, and a droplet of tetrodotoxin will sear its tongue and throat like molten iron. There will follow much choking and flailing, with convulsions and foaming at the mouth, progressing to paralysis, and finally, not nearly soon enough, a severe case of death. There is no known antidote, and so far as we know, only one creature on the entire planet is immune.

Of course, this may be cold comfort if your attacker has already bitten your leg off. But that's just an inconvience for my little sangha mate here: he can grow that back. Or an eye. Or a jaw. Or an intestine. Or his spinal chord. Or his heart.

So get a good look at this face: this is what true power looks like. Complete absence of violence or arrogance. No monologuing, no trash-talking, no machismo of any kind. He's a dumpy little blighter, without lurid fangs or claws or rippling muscles. And he could kill you, horribly, without lifting a Muppety finger. He knows it, too; that's why he doesn't have to prance and swagger.

Remember that next time somebody starts making speeches about power and glory.

WW: Last winter's done, next winter's begun

WW: Good advice

(Found on my beach, 150 miles from the one it came from.)