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05/19/2006: "Hunting for Wild Asparagus" by Andrew Wielawski
There’s a Roman quarry behind my house, used again through the eighteen hundreds, and abandoned just before the Second World War. In town drinking with the marble workers a few years ago, a guy named Gaucho tells me it’s full of wild asparagus. “But be careful! he warns, “it’s also full of vipers”
And rock slides, cliffs, pricker bushes, steep slopes, and further up in the quarry, wild boars. Sem told me that wild boars actually eat vipers, and that in the springtime, you have to be careful walking under the olive trees, because these snakes are born live, and to protect herself from their bites, the mother has to drop them from a height as she gives birth. The olive grove keepers always seemed to have their necks covered by a thick scarf, no matter how hot it is, and wide straw hats on their heads. Sem had made the large travertine sculptures for Henry Moore.
“Ho detto a lui di non usare il travertino,” he laughed one day when we were out hunting in the hills of Strettoia. The stone is porous, and won’t stand up to climates where it goes down much below freezing. Sure enough, there were two huge travertine Moores full of cracks in his studio that he’d been asked to make again. Moore had died ten years before, and hadn’t lived long enough to see the results of his choice. Sem drank so much grappa it wasn’t likely that he was going to live to see the cracks that would develop that time around either, and in fact, he didn’t. In his fifties, first he crashed his car, and then just dwindled into nothingness. Two years passed, and the man that made the Moores, not once, but twice, was dead.
The first rock slide is sun bleached, because it’s so vast that the forest, even after eighty years, still hasn’t managed to cover it. I climb up, my house in the distance behind me. It’s a sunny day, and hot, probably the last one that will let me go asparagus hunting before the thorn bushes get so thick you can’t get through. I try to balance my way across the rock slide so as not to put my hands down where a viper could snap at it. These first hot days are supposed to be what brings them out. I have never seen one, except for the snake in the big jar that the junkies down the street had caught.As I find a relatively stable spot at the edge of the forest, I see them. They’re coiled and swaying in the breeze, and I pull the plastic bag from my pocket. Feeling along their length, I find the spot where the woodiness suddenly softens, and I break them free just there. Three small to medium asparagus. I tie the bag to my belt so I have both hands free, and start into the woods. This place is steep too, but with soft red clay and smaller rocks that slip away beneath your feet, clattering down and out of earshot. I use the small trees as handholds, watching out for the monstrous thorns that stick out of the Acaccia. I broke one off under the skin near my elbow once, and the next day I couldn’t move my arm. At the hospital, they told me there was a slow poison in those thorns that went straight to the joints, and created severe pain over a wide area around the puncture. I thought of Christ and his crown of thorns, and am sure that’s what they were. If historically someone has documented them as being something else, then I believe they’re wrong. It’s just too easy with a plant that grows everywhere around here, to imagine that the Romans didn’t know about a slow, steadily increasing torture, that could be put into action with so little effort.
I work my way along the edge of the quarry, steadily climbing up, after seeing the broken stems all around that tell me someone else has been here before me. At the edge of a sheer drop grow the biggest ones. It may be the light, or the soil drainage, or the air space. Oh yes, I can’t be satisfied with just any asparagus, I want at least a few that when I show them around will make people say, “Wow!” And although I’ve only been at it a few years, I like to think I’m the best there is, and I get really angry when I see a stalk someone else got that was bigger than any of mine. And if I see a car parked at the bottom of the mountain, I want to slash the tires so they’ll think twice about picking anything here on this, my mountain.
There are some big ones along this cliff. I find a tree, check that it can support my weight, and hang onto a branch as I lean out over the edge to grab two stalks. There are lots of dead trees here, and many times I’ve fallen by grabbing onto a branch that looked solid. Here, the drop is three hundred feet, so I’m more careful. Into the bag they go. I ignore a couple of smaller ones, as I go further up the path. I sneer at those who would bag them. Still higher, I don’t see any more big ones I can reach, so, shamefacedly looking around to see if anyone can see me, I start picking the little ones. I tell myself they’ll add a variety of texture to whatever I cook with them.
The path is narrow, steep, and now marked by cloven hoofs. I imagine a boar charging out of the underbrush at me, and, jumping out of the way at the last second, seeing him turn end over end as he careens over the edge of the cliff. Boar steaks for dinner. I have another image now; the boar charges, and as I look for someplace to go, he strikes me, and I go sailing over the cliff. Time to head into the forest, away from the edge.There’s a kind of glade, and here, the asparagus are untouched. The ground is covered with small rocks, quarry refuse, and in half an hour, I’ve got more than a pound in my bag. A few big ones. Asparagus heaven. I start down, following a new direction I haven’t tried before. There are more glades, and more to collect, and as I go, I find a small gun emplacement from the Second World War. I look out from here, and sure enough, it has a view of the entire valley, the road snaking alongside the river at the bottom. People say it was so hard to move around down there without getting shot, that many of the locals starved. The Nazis were holed up here for six months, along the Gothic line, the Allies pounding at them, but unable to move past those eagle’s nest positions.
An image flashes in my mind, of Henry Moore posing with a chisel and a hammer on the scaffolding around a sculpture Sem had just finished. The distance down was not nearly as far, but more memorable to a much wider group. I look back at the entranceway of the dugout, torn by shrapnel. At its corner was a medium sized asparagus. I break it off and put it in my bag.
I can feel the weight of the bag now. Further down, I come upon a thick growth of thorn bushes, and am blocked. On the left is a rock outcropping going straight up, too steep to climb, and on the right, a rock slide made of enormous slabs. I pick my way across it, going down. Nearly at the bottom, I feel a groaning like I’m standing on some huge creature, and the rock I’m on starts to shudder. I remember the young assistant of Anish Kapoor, following the progress of the work, the artist being too busy to stay much longer than a few days in Italy before heading off to parts unknown. He’d gone to a swimming hole in the mountains, and had stepped on a big rock, lost his balance, and had his leg crushed under it as it came rolling down on top of him. After a stay in a local hospital, he’d been medivac’ed back to England and just made it in time to avoid amputation, because gangrene had set in. At that time in Italy, doctors needed the prodding of family members to do much more than set bones in the position they were in after an accident…today, they’re much better than that, at least where I live.
It’s a split second image that sets me scampering from boulder to boulder, all of them moving (at least in my mind) and finally, onto a solid bit of the mountain itself. The motion of the rocks stops as suddenly as it had started. They say you can virtually ski down a rock slide if it starts to move, as long as its bits don’t begin to roll and just keep sliding. I have seen them roll…van size chunks of marble bouncing in slow motion, the earth shaking each time they strike, even if I’ve usually been a safe distance away.
Apart from inevitable quarry accidents and mishaps of asparagus hunters like me, the mountain has seen deaths from the most absurd of causes, too. In November of 1988, Isamu Noguchi was taken up here by a group of rich wannabees hoping to show him how well versed they were in local history, places, and traditions. They acquired local foods, found a folk guitarist, and arranged an evening by campfirelite in one of the higher plateaus of the quarry, accessible by a service road. This part is also claimed for such events by local drug users, and these were not pleased by the intrusion of foreigners, so they slashed the tires of the car that had brought Noguchi up there. The evening was chill, and by the time they got the frail old man down, he’d already suffered too much to ever fully recover. Back in New York, this place’s reach found him, and he was dead a few weeks later.
From where I’ve gotten to, now the going is easy, and still no trace of anyone having been here before me. I have to climb down a tree at the edge of a cliff, and find myself back on the rock slide where I started out. I can see my house in the distance.
Recipes (if you know where to find wild asparagus; what’s called wild in stores is fake…it looks similar, is thin and small, but is farm grown, and as flavorless as the big ones are);Asparagus and Calamari; Get some tiny calamari (fresh, not frozen), and marinate them in olive oil, white wine, and lemon juice, with a bit of peperoncino and salt. Grill them on a barbecue, basting them every so often with the marinade. Cook the asparagus separately for fifty to sixty seconds in boiling salted water, cut the calamari into nickel size pieces, and mix everything together. Bring the left over marinade to a boil, and douse the mix with it.
Frittata; make an egg omelet mix, and just put a bunch of asparagus in it. They’ll be fully cooked when the eggs are. You can add anything else you want…sausage, cheese, whatever.
Shrimp; same as Calamari.
Ernest Hemingway, from the Hemingway Cookbook by Craig Boreth;
“…I have discovered that there is a romance in food when romance has disappeared from everywhere else. As long as my digestion holds out, I will follow romance…”
What’s really, really special in life you can’t buy or follow a sign to. Nor will many other people give you any support or validation for your choices. We tend to think we like the things made by names our friends know. But remember, nothing of great value is easy to find. If you see a sign that points to heaven, take care. It was probably put there by a false prophet.
