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The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

ISSN: 2472-7318

WOMAN THE GATHERER, WRITER, PANDEMIC

 

SURVIVOR (2020)

 

Kylie Herrera 


Keywords: childcare; disabled child; gathering

 

Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Sick/Disabled Bodyminds during Sick/Disabling Times; Arting/Crafting/Making in a Crisis

 


 

Bitter lemon. Creamy butter garlic.

 

 

My daughter plucks a morel from the wood wide web. We’ll later fry it in butter and garlic, with a spritz of lemon.

Image: Photograph of a child’s hand lifting a morel from leaf-scattered forest floor.

 

I feed myself with little passion. I have none left. It all nourishes the words I put to page in the silence of the late morning. The rest goes to the classroom, where I ask students to reject the Present-ist[1] notion of man the hunter, woman the gatherer. While I teach anthropological ways of knowing human variation, I rail against false binaries and convenient categorizations.

Yet we collect categorically. My children, me, my hunter of a spouse from Peru. We married when he was a Pacific coast surfer. I coerced him to move to the Midwest, where he became a camo-wearing, buck-trophy-mounting, image-of-a-good-ole-boy. The visual input feeds unwelcome and unfair reminders of the boys I went to high school with, but I won’t complain if the freezer is filled with venison. In wooded patches dotting our urban jungle and in vast forests found on long drives set upon to escape the confines of stay-at-home, we collect the immobile fruits of the earth, while he alone stalks and kills large game. The hunting and the gathering are not the same, but the sustenance is, I guess.

But how do you teach a completely blind three-year-old how to gather plants and fungi in a way that won’t kill him? Will I be able to teach him when he’s 23? I think I excel at teaching 23-year-olds. Perhaps not this one human, in this particular humanistic subject of food collecting. Is deep knowledge of the human past enough to know how to teach the practicalities of a human’s present? Probably not.

They didn’t teach me to teach in graduate school. Students always find this hilarious. It was my colleagues and the students themselves who taught me to teach those 23-year-olds. One day I might learn to teach a blind 23-year-old. For now, he erupts into a panic at the mere suggestion of attending his virtual preschool day. They can’t teach him, and I can’t either. No wonder my professional life is stalled.

I said I feed myself with little passion. I have to take that back now. I now languish in the pleasure of the bitter lemon of sorrel, the creamy butter garlic of morel.

A forest’s abundance provides momentary reprieve from the chronic scarcity that marked our first pandemic summer.

Image: Photograph of a wooden table piled high with wild mushrooms.

 

You see, my way of coping with impending pandemic-induced chaos and lack of sustenance on store shelves is to walk out into the woods and learn to feed myself.

We’re now man-the-hunter, woman-the-gatherer. I can’t decide if it’s hypocrisy or survival.

What will we pass on to our children? How will we prepare them to live in the dusty wreckage of USian institutions in the coming decades? Will the dandelions still grow between the cracks in the pavement? Will industrial waste make consumption of these dirt-bound foods unsafe?

There are many ways to eat the anatomical elements of a dandelion. I like to think about this, about which parts I would eat first in a supermarket-less apocalypse. This must be the logical outcome of my failed attempt to make a career out of quantifying the human consumption of meat by identifying the skeletal elements of Andean animals.

One thing I (believe I) know is that—unfolding Anthropocene disasters or not—what I wrote amid the pandemic will not sustain my children. It didn’t help them now, and they sure won’t give a damn later.

My children roll in leaves as we search their wake for Hydnum repandum, a favorite for preparing crimson-tinged Hungarian mushroom soup.

Image: Photograph of woods and thick, fallen leaves, with two young children embracing on the ground.

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[1] Present-ist. \ pre-zᵊn-ˌtist \ noun

An idea about the past unduly based on attitudes dominant in present society: Attributing the evolution of bipedalism to males needing to carry loads of food for females is Present-ist.

 


Bio

Kylie is an assistant professor of writing and a PhD in anthropology and archaeology.