Fathers Day!
photo by Kat Wilson
Foraging in the Ozarks
by Jared Wierman
It’s Father’s Day and I’ve been thinking about childhood and how I spent time with my dad, much of which was spent outdoors in the Ozarks. Growing up in the Arkansas woods was a dream. I spent hours wandering around the forests, following deer trails with my dad Gary and my mom Jan. The joke is that my parents had to think fast when they named me so they just combined their names: Gary + Jan = Jared. We would go hunting and hiking in the Hobbs state management area on the weekend; it was a blast.
Wierman family circa 2000 (not in the Ozarks..lol)
My family and I swam in Beaver Lake, we hiked the trails and picked huckleberries–the world's best blueberries; tiny, natural, and perfectly ripe varieties. My sisters, mom, and I would bag as many as possible and make pancakes with them. We foraged all sorts of delicious and strange ingredients like tiny tubular radishes called ‘Toothwort’ that grew under rocky clumps, which we added to salads and the like. During morel mushroom season friends would bring us piles after collecting near the boggy streams, and we would fry them up. We had wild strawberries growing in our yard that we would puree and make into delicious fruit leather that would put any store bought candy to shame. In the backyard, the neighbor’s pear tree would drop Arkansas pears (specifically sweet and earthy) onto our property, and my Mom would make a pear butter for biscuits. I can literally taste these flavors of home as I write this from my airbnb in Austin (because I have the pleasure of traveling for work with Pink House).
Since this is a post in honor ofis a Father’s Day, I asked my Dad to share some of his memories about growing up and exploring the forests together as a family. Here’s what he wrote.
“Back in the 90’s when our three children were small, I read a bunch of material by a guy named Paul Shepard. He was a Professor of Human Ecology, and he stressed the importance of human interaction with the natural world, especially for children. Understanding that most of us live urban sedentary lives and no longer depend on foraging to survive, he recommended frequent forays or adventures into wild places. The wonderful thing about living in Northwest Arkansas is being surrounded by great hiking trails, wildlife management areas, rivers, woods, and lakes. We have great memories of hiking on Saturdays, learning about different things to munch on and gather along the way to contribute to a meal later. Huckleberries have given us great memories–waiting for them to become ripe, gathering them as a family, and enjoying the wonderful huckleberry pancakes together. It would have been more convenient to just buy blueberries at the store, but by taking time to forage we had the experience of being in the woods, learning together, and enjoying the fruits of our labor.” - Gary Wierman”
Illustration by Mikayla Warford
One of the strongest memories I have of my dad centers around a very specific flavor—root beer, which we brewed from the roots of Sassafras—a little sapling tree with three fingers (please don't take my word for this without research and end up picking a poison ivy branch) that we would pull up, rinse off, and scrape the bark from. This ‘root bark’ would then be boiled down into a pan of water, extracting the earthy, minty, and caramel notes of the sassafras bark. It’s strained, and sugar is added to it to make old-school ‘Sarsaparilla’ soda. It was delicious—so natural, rich, and weird. And, funnily, Pink House Sarsaparilla tastes exactly like my memory of the hand-foraged homemade soda that I had with my Dad as a kid. It’s cool how taste and sense memory can bring you back to your childhood. Nostalgia can be captured in timeless ingredients that don’t change. Flavor is sort of like a time capsule in that way.
Thanks Dad for the tasty memories.
