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...

What the Pawpaw Wants

I’ll admit it. As a card-carrying denizen of Appalachia, the first pawpaw I ever picked and ate was this year. I can tell you it will not be the last.

The pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is an ancient tree in the Annonaceae (Custard-Apple) family that I had known only as an understory shrub, a gangly, thin-trunked thing that holds its huge ovate leaves in fives and sixes and rarely fruits. On a recent trip along the bike trail from Athens to Nelsonville, I finally saw the Real Pawpaw. (Above, the Real PaPaw, hiding behind a pawpaw). Juvenile leaves, called shade leaves, are enormous; mature trees dial leaf size back to something more normal. Leaf size is influenced in large part by the amount of sunlight reaching the tree. Less sunlight stimulates the tree to put out huge, thin leaves in an attempt to gather as much light as possible.

These mature pawpaws were enormous trees stretching up into the canopy, their bark flaked with big ovoid defoliating patches; their tired autumnal leaves going burnt brown. Huge trees with green fruit the size of new potatoes hanging beneath the leaves. Real pawpaws.
I am happy to say that I had a handsome caveman with me, who was only too happy to hurl some branchtes at the trees to try to dislodge the still-green fruit.
Ragnar want pawpaw!
Urrf!
We’d been told by a friendly biker with his pockets full of pawpaws that we could shake the trees to dislodge the fruit, take them home, and wait for them to ripen like bananas on our windowsill. Clearly, he had been shaking the smaller trees all afternoon, so it was thin pickings for our little band of hungry gatherers. And over a certain DBH (diameter at breast height), you don't shake a pawpaw tree. We worked at it for awhile, though. It was hard to believe the rock-hard green ovoids would ever yield delicious flesh, but we shook a bunch of small trees and hurled sticks at big ones until we had about a dozen pawpaws in our backpack.
It’s been a week now, and the aroma of ripe pawpaws fills the kitchen. Peeling the fruit yields a hopeful orangey flesh.
I was shocked upon cutting into my first fruit to find it stuffed so full of seeds that it was barely a fruit. It was more of a soft capsule of seeds, cushioned by flesh. What in the world?? What could all the fuss be about, when it's more seeds than fruit? This'n had nine seeds the size of Fordhook limas inside. Phew!It was only four inches long. That's a lotta seeds. Edible slices to the left, peels to the right, seeds from a prior conquest above.

What little flesh was there, though, was so succulent, so richly redolent of mango, banana, and pineapple, that I found myself tearing off little bits of it and stuffing them into my mouth. With considerable difficulty, I convinced Liam and Phoebe to at least try it, and immediately found myself fighting them for the last scraps. Kids know good stuff when they taste it.

So I thought about pawpaws in a new way.

What does the pawpaw want?
It wants someone or something to disperse those enormous seeds.
How does it accomplish that goal?
It cushions the seeds in a fruity pericarp so delicious, so sticky, so irresistible, that medium to large-sized mammals wolf it down, and swallow the huge, slick seeds in the process.Exhibit A. Large mammal, or pawpaw dispersal agent.

I came close to swallowing two pawpaw seeds in my quest to separate them from the delicious flesh of the fruit. I’m sure they’d have passed along just fine, despite their size, for they’re as slick as Chinese chestnuts. However, I’m not sure that our septic tank is precisely where the pawpaw hopes they will end up. For that, it prefers to dupe raccoons, opossums, deer, coyotes and foxes, who will gorge on the sweet fruit and poop out its seeds somewhere else the next night. This photo, from January. I'm not at all sure where the coon found pawpaws in January; ours get ripe in late September. Someday I may solve that particular mystery.** But there are so many mysteries, I usually have to work on a bunch at once.
Large mammal gobbles fruit, ingests seeds, takes them elsewhere, plants them in a dollop of rich fertilizer. That is what the pawpaw wants.
And what I want is more pawpaws.

**Since writing the post above, I have made further observations on pawpaws. And I can say, with a sample size of three large mammals who have been repeatedly polled about what my mother would refer to as "regularity," that the pawpaw apparently wants said mammals to carry its seeds a long, long way before depositing them. One would think that stuffing oneself on a sweet, delicious, pulpy fruit would have a swift and possibly explosive impact. This appears not to be the case. Bananas are the only other fruit I can think of (with the possible exception of persimmons) that have a binding effect. Perhaps the folk name "Missouri banana" describes more than flavor.

Buhhhmmer.

Oh. My God. That poor, poor January raccoon.