A Gen Xer forages for escape, companionship and optimism in a lockdown

As a typical Gen Xer raised on a media diet of dire projections of impending civilizational collapse, I considered myself prepared for the apocalypse. Like Deputy Grimes of The Walking Dead franchise, when the lights went out, I’d join a band of plucky fellow survivors and escape to the countryside, where we’d roam and live off the land.

But when the COVID lockdown hit in March, the only place I journeyed was up and down the aisles of the grocery store — frantic but obeying the new one-way arrows like a good Canadian — searching for spaghetti sauce and cat food as anxious shoppers stripped the aisles of flour, sugar, and, bizarrely, coconut milk.

After a come-to-Gaia moment in the [supermarket’s empty] toilet-paper aisle, I began exploring ways to reconnect with the land and reduce our family’s dependence on a food-supply chain revealed by the pandemic as terrifyingly fragile. In the spring I enlisted the help of our six-year-old son Charlie to expand our small garden to include a potato and cabbage patch and a veritable flotilla of potted tomato and pepper plants to our back deck. The summer saw me learning the dark art of natural fermentation, an education that yielded many jars of sauerkraut—I may not survive an apocalypse, but my gut health was ensured.

Even after the growing season ended, I ventured beyond our backyard. Which is how I ended up foraging for mushrooms, garlic mustard roots, and white pine needles on a patch of crown land behind a friend’s house in Dundas, ON in December. I’d recently discovered foraging, the ancient practice of gathering edible plants and mushrooms from the wild.

Once viewed as a fringe activity for hippies and the destitute, foraging has enjoyed a surge in popularity in the last decade, with lifestyle gurus and super chefs touting the environmental, nutritional, and even medicinal benefits of harvesting wild foods. Although much of southwestern Ontario is densely populated, even the urban areas still abound in green spaces rich with wild edibles.

Armed with a field guide to edible plants and with several hours of online education under my belt, I entered the woodlands with Charlie that December afternoon. Our mission: gather a feast from the land. (Because we were not able to enroll in a foraging class due to COVID-19 restrictions, we would avoid harvesting mushrooms since there are several toxic varieties, or any potentially noxious plants.)

The land before us sloped gently toward a distant valley, and we followed a meandering path through the trees probably formed by decades of spring runoff. The forest was dominated by deciduous trees stripped of their greenery for the winter and the earth was a carpet of rotting leaves.

But what at first appeared to be a monotonous landscape of dead and sleeping vegetation soon revealed a remarkable variety of texture, colour and little pockets of rich, resilient life. Patches of garlic mustard, an invasive species whose leaves make an excellent salad addition, poked through the loam, and in the forest’s few sunny patches, spindly fern plants lifted their curling stems into the air. In a copse of evergreens, we gathered some needles from a white pine, which are said to make an excellent medicinal tea for winter ailments and found a cluster of turkey tail mushrooms sprouting like a great bushy beard from a tree trunk blanketed in a dazzling baize of moss. Though the fungi can be dried and added to soups or used as a medicinal tea, we opted to leave it where it was.

Less than half an hour into our foraging expedition, we’d abandoned our goal-oriented mission for a contented ramble through the woods. Charlie raced between the trees, lost in an imaginary game where talking coyotes battled wild pigs, while I followed at an ambling pace, giving myself over to the incredible detail around me, the twigs and stems and leaves, the clouds and soil, the creeks and hollows, a rich web of life and death constantly renewing itself.

The anxiety I’d felt since those first days of the lockdown soon faded to the merest tingle as the forest forced upon my over-stimulated senses a deeper truth about the saga of the past year. Nature, I realized, had delivered a near knock-out punch in the form of a virus invisible to the eye but powerful enough to threaten our cherished notions of invincibility. But it also provided a balm to that fragility in the form of this, a patch of wild space teeming with life.

An hour later, Charlie and I were back in the car, ready to head home with our modest harvest for the day: a few handfuls of pine needles and garlic mustard leaves. When the spring comes, we’ll enroll in a foraging course with a seasoned professional, but until then, we’ll keep returning to the woods to remind us that better days are on their way.

Getting Started

Peter Blush, owner of Puck’s Plenty Foraging Tours in Stratford, shares a few pro tips on how to spend the day exploring and foraging respectfully

· Beginners should be accompanied by an experienced forager. Once you have a good base of knowledge and are out on your own, it is important to cross-reference plants and mushrooms through photos and field guides. Blush recommends A Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants and The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Mushrooms.

· Be careful of what you collect. There are delicious wild edibles out there but also toxic ones—especially mushrooms.

· Practice sustainability. Learn the correct way of harvesting. Mushrooms, for example, should only be cut so that the fruiting body remains.

What to forage in the winter:

· Watercress, rose hips, white pine needles, wild cranberries, and cattail roots grow wild in regional green spaces and forests.

· Chicory root and dandelion root, both of which make good coffee substitutes, are readily available in Ontario.

· Scarlet cups are small red mushrooms shaped like half an egg shell, which are great sautéed or in stews.