Emily Hunting for Wapato, Photo by Henry Stanley
Regular readers might remember in May when I helped my friend Becky Lerner with her wild food challenge where she attempted to eat only foraged fare for a week. She repeated the experiment this November with day seven culminating in a wild Thanksgiving feast. In the days preceding the feast myself and a few or our friends helped gather provisions. You can read all about Becky’s experience on her own blog First Ways. Meanwhile I will recap some of my contributions here.
On Tuesday a large group of us wetsuited up to gather wapato at Sauvie Island. We had a total blast. Wapato leaves are dead and gone by this time of year, so we had to trust a map to lead us to our harvesting location. At first all we found were flooded farm fields, with bottoms of hard packed clay, and it looked like it was going to be a feral failure, but true to my name I tracked down that wapato and we hit the jackpot. I also coined the term “wapato shimmy” to describe our harvesting method.
Here is a video clip of our adventure:
Nice write-up