Old Lenard once said when asked about his efforts to secure some wild grapes, “Yah, they was wild alright, but I didn’t have no trouble getting up next to ‘em.” He was one very backwoods character in the little town we called home for twenty three years out there on the high plains of Colorado. In the fall he just went out scrounging for what he thought he might use.
Now me, getting up next to a few wild things has always had more than a distant ring to it. Don’t think I got the interest from Lenard because he was not a totally admirable man---- he was also a yahoo who tried to sell me firewood that mostly resembled compost. Still, if he could “find” good things to eat out in the frequently dismissed backcountry. Why not take a look around.
Here in Central Wisconsin, wild rice does show up around lakes and rivers and with the assistance of a canoe, and some good advice, or better yet an experienced guide in the form of an old friend, who interestingly passed through our Colorado home some forty years ago, it is possible to harvest enough wild rice to pleasantly grace a winter meal on many a cold night.
A couple of years ago Ann and I tried gathering rice south of Amherst in the Harrisville mill pond. The place was filled with giant stalks of “wild rice” but it was, as I learned later after coming home with but a partial cup of grain, the wrong wild rice. Wild it was, but big grained, and yummy it was not. We were but fools on the local pond, the scoff of every duck that flew the airways.
This year, with Rollie and Crow in tow, we headed out on a most glorious day, into the rice marshes on the Wisconsin River, marshes that I cannot fully disclose due to personal security issues. Ann was our picker as the other two marsh moguls wanted little to do with our inexperience and lack of physical prowess. Oh, they liked us but we were slow. After a brief demonstration on the appropriate ways to approach the project, we
were turned loose to find our way.
The method of picking was simple enough. The idea was to take the outside picking stick and carefully bring a clump of rice over the edge of the canoe and then with a single smooth stroke of the other stick gently tap off the ripe rice. The tap could not be too hard as there was still rice that needed ripening. It was also pointed out that some rice would not fall in the boat but rather into the water where it would sink and thus plant next year’s crop. The person in the back would propel the boat through the marsh with a pole, or in our case with a paddle. It was a team effort and as I learned later while picking with Rollie, it is a time to exchange chatter and ridicule the other’s weaknesses---any and all weaknesses including personal appearances. I thought his sodden hat was too western. He consistently reminded me that my central Wisconsin double tap was crude, unaesthetic and pointless while the Rollman Smooth Stroke was one of the finest in the state. Unscathed, and filled with the day, we flowed onward.
In addition to technique, we learned of the other distractions in the marsh, one being the six pound spiders as Rollie called them. He insisted we tie up our cuffs to prevent them from running up our legs. He made a point of showing us a giant Wolf Spider in his backyard as a way of creating fear and apprehension of the coming adventure. There was also the issue of the birds, meaning the Bald Eagles, The Rice Rails, murmurations of Red-winged Blackbirds and all that waterfowl distracting us from our task, the harvest of great quantities of rice much needed to get us through another winter. It was going to be brutal out there. Yah, sunburn was another problem not to mention the changing of fall colors.
The work was not easy. That is the truth. The distractions were there in full force but the six pound spiders proved to be many pounds smaller but numerous and friendly. The rice came to us well even though I am sure Ann did more planting than harvesting. After four hours we had a great carpet of rice on the bottom of the canoe. We were puffed up like a couple of toads under a summer street light. At the dock, Crow and Rollie pulled in minutes after us noting they had close to one hundred pounds while we had a dribbling eighteen.
That evening we learned about the processing, the history and how what was being done here was no different than how it was done thousands of years ago in these same marshes. The indigenous peoples pushed their bark canoes through the same paths we had traveled using the same methods. As we started leaving the water’s edge Rollie removed one handful of newly harvest grain from his boat and threw it back into the water as a offering, probably a gesture that had also been done many times before by others.
The rice is wild but with much pleasure, some hard work and the struggles of watching birds and changing colors, we were, in fact, able to “get up next to plenty of ‘em.”
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