Hiking with Zach, by Patrick Sweeney

“I don’t think it’s likely that there is more than one guy barefoot and wearing jorts in the woods right now” I said as we were trying to decide if the man in the distance was Zach or not. It did so happen to be Zach and his dog, Wiley. We hung out at the meeting spot and talked for a while waiting to see if anyone else would show up for the five o’clock seed planting expedition, but as no one else came after about fifteen minutes, Zach, my friends, Julia and Ellie, and myself, headed out into White Clay with a big bucket of native seeds.

The ends of just a handful of leaves had just begun to yellow, barely even noticeable if you weren’t looking up at the right tree. Zach knew the dates of when all of the trees started to change color and when all of the wild flowers would bloom, but he listed so many as we walked that I can only remember a few of them. Zach found some wild berries for us that we warily ate, only after he ate some first. They were small and red with tiny white spots and had some weird name that I also don’t remember either. We kept on walking, Zach explaining various things as we passed them, how he could tell how old a certain section of woods was with just a click glance, and how some strange caterpillars way up in the trees made their nests.

We walked down the path and Zach turned sharply and headed into the woods. I had never gone far off the paths in White Clay Creek before. It had never even really occurred to me that I could. While Wiley swam around in a creek, Zach gave us all some seeds to plant. We went around digging shallow holes in the ground and placing the seeds within. Within the next two years, our very own leeks and wildflowers will be sprouting in White Clay Creek. The seeds we planted were plants that had been razed during logging operations and had not recovered well.

Zach then took us up an incredibly steep hill that I also never would have thought to have tried to scale. After struggling up the steep face, we planted some more leek seeds. We found a little turtle up towards the top of the hill which astounded me. This tiny turtle had made it all the way up this hill that I myself could barely make it up and it was just hanging out under a pile of leaves. Why did he climb all the way up this hill just to sit under some leaves when he could have just done that at the bottom of the hill? I definitely don’t know. Zach found us some wild mushrooms which can apparently be known to be safe if they have pores on them. He said that there are so many mushrooms out in the woods that he doesn’t even buy them anymore. He just goes out and picks them whenever he wants some, as he does with much of his food, sustaining himself on what he can find in the woods. I cooked up these mushrooms with the eggplant that I had picked earlier in a pasta dish.

Zach talked about how the woods offered an economically viable way to feed people by getting more in touch with our hunter gatherer roots. The woods produce a large and varied amount of healthy food, all while benefiting the ecological health of the region. This woods agriculture offers an alternative that promotes local plant species and gets people more involved in their local environment, all without the use of pesticides or industrial agriculture. With proper education, people could get much of their food from the woods, leading to a more sustainable lifestyle.

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