Worthless Dog

You might think that, Chet Baker being a pretty smart example of a pretty smart breed, I could train him to find and fetch pawpaws for me. Well, I am here to tell you that I have tried, to no avail.

I would love to say this is a photo of Chet looking for pawpaws, but he is looking for a squirtle.

Chet Baker! Get the pawpaw! Fetch the pawpaw! Bring it to Mether!

You are kidding, right? I have things to do, rodents to meet.

I saw a pawpaw tree leaning over a wide, deep creek (pawpaws love bottomland). It was loaded with big fruits, but as luck would have it, I knew they'd roll right down the steep, slippery, muddy bank and go right into the creek. So I called Chet Baker to my side and shook the tree. 

Six big pawpaws thudded to the ground and began to roll. Get the pawpaw, Chet Baker! Fetch it!

And I was astonished when he skibbled right down that bank and to the shore and catpawed a pawpaw to him, bobbed a couple of times and came up with it in his jaws!

GOOD BOY!! OK, bring it Mether! Come on Chet! Bring me the pawpaw!

And after a couple of false starts he picked it up and carried it up the slope! It was like an episode of Lassie. It was amazing.

He bounded up the slope and stopped about 15 feet away and put the pawpaw down.

And he buried it.

He took that big beautiful pawpaw and covered it with leaves and there was nothing I could do about it. No amount of coaxing, yelling, encouraging or dissolving in helpless laughter could change his plan for the pawpaw. The slope was so severe and so slick I could barely move, much less get over to rescue the pawpaw. For awhile I thought I might not get back up to the level part, it was that slick and that steep. I was on all fours, 16 pounds of pawpaws in my backpack, crawling around like a hurt spider, slipping two feet back for every foot I got up. And my dog was burying a pawpaw just out of reach.

With a final push of his nose, he dislodged the pawpaw and it rolled back down the slope into the creek. I saw my chance. 

"Come ON, Baker! Bring it to me! Come on! Good Boy! Bring it to Mether!"

He waded in, grabbed it again, carried it back up the slope near me and dropped it again and it rolled back down into the creek. Together, we sat and watched it bob off  toward McConnellsville. Chet silent, me laughing like a loon, us all alone there in the woods over the deep creek.

I thanked the Lord I wasn't sprawled on the ground with my leg in a bear trap and the trap key just inches out of my reach with only Chet Baker there to help me.

Lassie he is not.

We made our way back to the parking lot where we'd left the car and Chet indicated that he would like to case the school and see if there was anyone inside who needed their face washed.

No, Bacon, there's nobody there and they probably wouldn't let you in if there were. I'm sorry. Come on, let's head home.

You could have opened that door for me. I like schools and chirren. Sometimes you really let me down, too. I have tried to train you to let me in everywhere there is a door and you have failed to learn it.

 Back in the car I kissed him, hugged him and told him that he was simple, the most utterly worthless dog the world had ever known. 

 I notice you are saying those awful words in a very loving tone, Mether. Here is what you do not understand. When you have a food that is smelly, and the pawpaw was VERY smelly, you have to bury it immediately. You do not bring it to anyone. You bury it and then nobody else can find it and then what you do is you come back and get it later.  Why you do not understand such a simple thing I do not know, but I was doing you a big favor, burying that smelly fruit for you to get later.

We made our way home through the countryside we love so much, and that darn dog ruined my best picture with his little punkin head, a blocky little cartoon head full of strange ideas and unrealized abilities.

 Worthless.

Pawpaw Frenzy

This secret pawpaw patch is an exceptionally nice one to hunt--level ground, open understory, very little poison ivy and comparatively few nettles. Sometimes pawpaws grow in such thick undergrowth that you can't find the fruit after you shake it down.

No such problem here. Although good technique involves locating the fruit overhead, marking its position in the tree, then shaking it vigorously while watching closely for the fruit to fall. It's really nice to have a couple of helpers along who can stand aside and watch for falling fruit while the shaker winces and ducks (we each took a pawpaw to the head in this hunt).

We had to work on that with Liam, who is given to wildly shaking trees without waiting for backup.

It helps to have a tall drink of water for a daughter when picking pawpaws. 

It helps to have help carrying your haul. I strongly recommend a sturdy backpack for mulepacking them out. I take this little JanetBasket everywhere I go. It's held everything from pawpaws to squash and strawberries to cameras and laptops.

 The kids are hoisting 23 pounds of pawpaws in this photo. We had to take shifts carrying them out of the woods.

You'd think I'd be satisfied. But no. The very next morning I had to take Phoebe back to school for a track meet, so I ventured into the pawpaw patch again. We'd gotten 23 pounds the evening before--could I squeeze more out of it?

I took my best pawpaw doggeh with me this time.

He is admittedly more interested in chiptymunks and squirtles than pawpaws.

It was only 58 degrees, drippy and cold in the woods, but that was perfect, for pawpaw hunting can be sweaty work. 

Tromping around, looking up, shaking, ducking, bending, collecting, and hauling the booty.

Within two hours I had 16 more pounds of pawpaws. I'd brought my trusty Osprey backpack this time, so toting them wasn't so onerous. I'd also thought to include some plastic bags.  The riper pawpaws can split upon hitting the ground, and the custardy pulp gets all over everything.

More than that, their sheer weight in the pack crushes the ripe ones.

So here's a tip for the pawpaw hunter. Take the softest, ripest ones and bag them before putting them in your pack. And try to keep them on top!

One finds the most beautiful and mysterious things while hunting pawpaws. 

There are many puffballs out this fall, but this one was different. About the size of a cantaloupe, it had a nettle leaf imprinted on its humid skin.

There was nothing left of the leaf but its color, a membranous shadow, a memory of the leaf that had somehow dissolved into the mushroom. So beautiful, a natural decoupage.

I carried the memory of my babies picking the night before in the silent, dripping woods

and was completely happy.

Pickin' Up Paw Paws

But most assuredly NOT putting them in my pocket.  This is the photographic journey of a woman (temporarily) possessed by pawpaws.

 Thirty-nine pounds of pawpaws. I am not making this up.

Phoebe, she of the flame-red hair, spied a large grove of pawpaws while training for cross-country near Beverly, Ohio. She stopped and picked one and shared it with her teammates. This thrilled me on a number of levels. First, my girl recognizes the trees when she sees them. Second, Phoebe doesn't like the taste of pawpaws, but she still wanted to share them. She's showing strong Science Chimp tendencies.

 She came home and told me of her find, and that Friday when I had to drive over to the same area and pick her up from training she and Liam and I went to investigate.

It was rich bottomland woods along a creek, low and mucky and just what pawpaws love. It was full of the trees, mostly quite young and slender. But pawpaws can be deceiving--they can bear fruit when they look barely old enough to think about sex.

Here's the take from a tree about 1.5" dbh--just a sapling, really, but loaded with eight nice fruit. Average take from a young pawpaw like this is about four fruits. Pretty amazing for a tree that small (that's its trunk in the picture).

They were slender and pliant enough to allow us to bend them so we could reach the fruit. 

A little albino spider monkey, foraging for his lunch.

Sometimes monkeys work in tandem. One bends the pawpaw tree while the other gathers the fruit.

The most commonly used and exciting technique, though, is to shake the tree and wait, head down and wincing, for the heavy plop plop plopadop! of fruit all around you. 

Only rarely are they good enough to land at your feet. Usually they land and roll and hide under nettle leaves.

Nettles are the constant companion and plague of the Ohio pawpaw hunter. 

Wickedly armed with urticating spines, stinging nettles go right through Columbia's "Titanium" fabric, so forget wearing the nice light zip-off birding trou while hunting pawpaws. Just sayin'. Wear long pants and long sleeves, and make them thick. And prepare to be sent after the fruit in the thickest nettle patches, or hear the moans and yelps of your shorts-wearing progeny.

Next post: You'd think 23 pounds would be enough...

Paw Paw Processing

A naturalist's table: freshly picked paw paws, a blooming Cattleytonia orchid, a couple of monarch chrysalides waiting to hatch. Yes, I will get to the chrysalis posts. But there are overripe paw paws in my blog pantry right now.
Consumed by paw paw fever, Phoebe and I went looking in our own woods where we had seen some paw paw saplings coming up a couple of years ago. Imagine how wonderful it would be to find them old enough to fruit, on our own land! We had a big bowl of fruit from Athens; now we'd look for some on our place. Our excitement built as we got ready for the paw paw safari. We wanted to wait for Daddy, but he wouldn't be home until after dark, so we set off by ourselves.

There were the trees--a veritable paw paw grove! And there, hanging above us, was the fruit.
Can you hear the heavenly chorus? Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh! Perfectly, splendidly, softly, fragrantly ripe. Here is the haul from our little grove:
We thought them much superior in looks and flavor to the Athens ones. Perhaps it's because they weren't hauled for miles in a backpack.

We tried to teach Chet Baker to find them once they'd fallen from the trees as we shook them, but he was no help. He found lots of sticks and pillbugs, but never got the point of our giving him a paw paw to smell, then saying, "Go find it, boy!"It was not for lack of interest. Chet Baker likes paw paws, as you will see. We just couldn't get the concept through his little melon head that he might look for them and find them for us.

All right. Now I had a whole mess o' paw paws. Time to process them. I'd learned from my previous big haul that they are a bit time-consuming to prepare. In short, the pulp can be separated from the huge and abundant seeds in only one way: by squishing the fruit through a colander.

I separated out the ripest fruit to work on first. You definitely want the fruit to be soft to the touch before you process it. It tastes best when fully ripe, and it separates best from the seeds and skin when ripe.You lay the fruit in the colander and squish it flat with your palm and your knuckles. It separates readily from the skin. Then you grind it around, seeds, pulp, skin and all, until just the pulp squeezes through the colander holes into a bowl below. After awhile, you have something that looks like this in your colanderand this in the bowl below:That's the money shot, right there. Pure gold.

Chet Baker got to lick the colander when I was all done.I will say this about processing paw paws. It is messy. You want to do it outdoors, because the vigor required to squash the paw paws around means that a certain amount of pulp winds up elsewhere than in the catch bowl. The pulp is extremely sticky, and I found I had to whack the colander on the catch bowl to dislodge the pulp and make it go into the bowl. Little bits of pulp fly about when I do this. When these bits dry, they set up like cement on clothing and kitchen surfaces. By my third big batch of fruit, I was processing paw paws in my underwear, out on the deck. By this, I mean to say that I was wearing only underwear whilst smashing paw paws. Not that I was processing paw paws in my underwear.

There are blogs that titillate. This is not intended to be one of them, unless you are talking about the titillation of delicious food and the occasional bizarre play of words or a seductively misplaced modifier.The entree that night? Chicken korma, with fresh tomatoes from the garden, cilantro garnish, and a sweet paw paw yogurt sauce over jasmine rice. Swoon.

Here ends the paw paw series. I have loved coming to know the paw paw, abundant native fruit of the Ohio Valley. The pounds that we harvested are now reduced to two large zip-loc bags of pulp in the freezer. I'll saw off chunks for smoothies and sauces all winter long, into spring.For all you could want to know (and some things I'd rather not know) about the paw paw, check this page. Thanks to JW for the link!

I leave Friday morning for a jaunt to Columbus, where I will be accepting an Ohioana Library Association Citation for "outstanding contributions and accomplishments in a specific field or area of the arts and humanities." I think you can tell that I find it great fun to live in Ohio. I celebrate it every day, right here with you all. Well, now it's even more fun. Thank you, Ohioana Library Association, for digging my stuff.

Picking Up Paw Paws

This is paw paw country, the river bottomlands of southeast Ohio. Tall ironweed and the autumnal haze on the meadows. It's hot, but in the shade it's shivery cool. That's how you know autumn is here.

I am not done with paw paws, my friends. After posting about them, and hoping to someday find some more, the kids and I took off on the Hock Hocking Adena Bicycle Trail, that runs from Athens to Nelsonville, Ohio. It turns out that last time, we had unknowingly turned around and headed home at just about the point on the trail where the paw paw hunting gets crazy. So on a fine Sunday we drove to the point where we'd left off last time, and as luck would have it we saw more and more paw paw trees the farther we rode.

This is prime Southern Ohio paw paw country.
The more we looked, the more we saw--beautiful big green paw paws hanging, big as a newborn kitten, in the long green leaves.
Phoebe and Liam's natural foraging skills kicked in, and they grew adept at spotting the trees and their luscious cargo as we tooled along. We had to give some of them up to unsure footing or patches of defensive poison ivy or stinging nettle, but there were more than enough that we could reach.
I forgot my hastily-shed backpack as I shook trees and clambered around in the bottomland forest just off the trail, so I pressed my Life is Good shirt into service as a paw paw smuggler. No one has ever accused me of being a melon smuggler.photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson.

So. Is this a good look for me? Should I maybe wear them a little higher? Or in rows down my sides, piggy style?

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

No?

Liam found a paw paw hanging all alone and got to shake it down.
Then he called Daddy to tell him all about it. My sweet little paw paw picker, my sweet little guy.With each paw paw he picked, he'd ask, "May I eat this one?" Oh, yes. They're free.In my next installment, I'll tell you what it's like to process paw paws. I'm posting from the biggest Apple store I've ever seen, on the Magnificent Mile along Lake Michigan in Chicago. Cute spiky-haired Genius (why are they all pale brunettes?) just walked up and gave me his blessing to post away. Giving a talk to the DuPage Birding Club tonight. Sun shining, breeze blowing. Life is great.