So, Southeast Asia... where exactly is that?

As I have told more friends and family about my very exciting upcoming trip, to Southeast Asia, I always get the same question... so where exactly are you going?

I'm attaching a map of greater "Southeast Asia" and a zoomed-in map of the portion of SE Asia that I'll be traveling to: Thailand, Laos (which is the green-colored country strangely not labeled on the map), Cambodia, and Vietnam. It is my mission over the next month to learn as much as I can about these 4 countries. The only things that I know about SE Asian history and culture, in fact, are some particles of likely-inaccurate information from a World History course I took freshman year of high school (1999) and text about Theravada Buddhism from a college course (2008).

Luckily, I have several friends who have traveled to SE Asia who have been e-mailing me advice for the trip. A rapid-speed internet search also culled these recent news articles on the region: "Thailand preparing military action against Cambodia"; "Dams and Development Threaten the Mekong"; "How to Eat Fried Tarantulas in Cambodia"; "2 tons of snakes, tortoises seized in Cambodia"; "Vietnam's 'illegal' Buddhists seek French asylum"; "Agent Orange Continues to Poison New Generations in Vietnam". Let me just stop and let you reflect on the reality of 4,000 POUNDS of reptiles.

I will be in Asia for 7 weeks (Jan 19 to March 9). For 6 of those weeks, I'm traveling with my boyfriend and 1-2 of his friends from Minneapolis. It's going to be an adjustment - I've never traveled for that long with someone else. This is also the first trip I have made abroad without a purpose, which I am somewhat worried about. It also seems strange to me that I have less than 2 months to travel to four distinct countries. That is less than 2 weeks in each country. I guess the scale of the countries is small - Cambodia is about the size of Washington State.

This will also be the first time since the summer of 2007 when I will have left the country!! I am completely ready to take a break from US-living. I leave one month from today!

The Goose is Getting FAT

It is getting colder. My brain is foggy. Not in an "overstimulated mush, only able to produce mildly clever-sounding phrases at random" kind of way. Those days are over for me. It is foggy because my days feel moderately directionless. I am sustaining on a cloud of happiness and the knowledge that I am only working at Jimmy John's gourmet sandwich shop for another three weeks. Winter is coming.

"A Lot of Moving... a Lot of Rolling"

A lot of driving, A lot of strolling
A lot of leaving here
A lot of arriving there
Trying to go just about everywhere
A lot of thinking about where I'm going next
-Avett Brothers





I have been in a strange mode halfway between leaving and arriving, enjoying the blissful peace of finishing former responsibilities, discarding excess possessions, packing everything into two bags, and taking off on the road. I like to take time moving. I usually try to give myself a few days to process the going and coming. Which is why I am now here in Chicago, between North Carolina and Minnesota.

Some adventures between there and here:
*A few days back at the CAMP, culminating in a failed attempt at adventuring on the Huffy bike of my last bike trip. It was a 45 mile trip from Cedar Mountain to Asheville, on mostly backroads through the green, gorgeous, warm hills of southwest NC. I knew that the bike was in bad shape - it had worn tires, one partly functional brake, a very heavy frame, and a derailleur that did not line up perfectly, so that there was a high-pitched sound of chain on metal. I traveled 20 miles on bike, when the back tire began to wobble and a strange clicking sound began. I stopped and inspected, only to find that the rear axle was rusted, corroded, and now broken, making the peddling disconcerting and arduous. I walked for 2 miles until I passed a cyclist from Hendersonville, who told me that I could bike safely. I biked another 5 miles, to a gas station where I obtained a marker and paper to make a sign to ask for a ride. After about 10 minutes, a woman in a Prius pulled over and picked me up. She was a real estate agent looking to obtain "good energy" by picking me up and checking out the fall colors of the trees on her day off. She drove me into Asheville "even though I don't normally pick up hitchhikers alone, you looked so innocent!" she said. Typical.
*Wrangling honey-bees in order to extract a small amount of honey from their supers, in a fabulous bee-suit. This is a photo that I took on my computer last spring of what the top half of the bee-suit looks like. This time I was mistaken for an astronaut by some children as I walked across camp with the supers (top drawers on a bee hive that contain comb where honey is stored).













*Seeing Solas and the Duhks at the Orange Peel with Reid and Lara, dancing like mad
*Making a new dog-friend (malamute-German shepherd mix).













*Spending a couple of days at a rental lake home in the backwoods of South Carolina with some pest exterminators from Atlanta, who were on a mission to clean out hundreds of pounds of bat guano (shit) from a historical monument.
*Accidentally crashing a breast cancer survivor party in my swimsuit (underwear and sports bra) while chasing after afore-mentioned new dog friend.
*Adventuring in St. Louis with college friend Jake, going to the AMAZING Missouri Botanical Gardens, a bar that allows dogs with his man-child friend Jeff, and on a run past beautiful brick buildings. We had a great time watching dog friend humping three different people at the bar.













And the usual enjoyment of watching the demographics and landscape change as we traveled from the Southeast to Midwest, through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. I am ready to be back in the North for the next couple of months. I don't have a job yet.

Durham: America's Foodiest Town

A co-worker and friend showed me this article from Bon Appetit magazine, featuring Durham-Chapel Hill as "America's Foodiest Small Town" which is funny because Durham is not a small town. The article is from last year, but it was still neat to see the region highlighted for so many of the reasons that I love it - the Durham Farmer's Market, the familiar farmer and restaurant faces, the unpretentious casual good food that can be found around - while the Whole Foods in Durham DID beat out the former Durham Food Co-op (now closed). The good news is that another food cooperative is on the way! The bad news is that I am on my way out. My research friends have left the area for the most part and my closest farm friends from last summer are gone.

Here are some photos of some beautiful veggies and fiesta (multi-color ground pepper) goat cheese purchased and gifted to me at the Durham Farmer's Market. The veggies (edamame, basil, tomatoes) are from Piedmont BioFarm of Pittsboro (where I interned last summer) and goat cheese from Celebrity Dairy of Siler City:

A reason to live in N. Carolina

I just saw the Carolina Chocolate Drops (for the 3rd time this year) at Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC last night. This video will give you maybe an iota of an idea how amazing it was to see them live. Just try to imagine them in a venue late at night, with a crowd of bouncing student-hippies going wild.

This photo is of them in August at the American Tobacco Company's "campus" where they feature free concerts in the summertime.

Sometimes it doesn't snow in the Smokies

It took me over three years to go back to Smoky Mountain National Park, but I finally did. Last time, I was hiking in a foot and a half of freshly fallen snow and worried about hypothermia and running out of food. This time, it was beautiful 80-degree weather, and the mushrooms and millipedes were out in full force. I visited the Deep Creek area for a weekend of backpacking.

I have been devoting a lot of my energy to fungus this summer - mostly not the charismatic megafauna seen in these photos (fungus = flora or fauna if you had to characterize it of one of them? as it is more related to animals, I am going to call it fauna). I have been raising a little fungal farm on petri plates - of filamentous fungi of the plant pathogen variety. It is charismatic microfauna! Super-nerdy. Mycologists have more fungi.

Cities

Last week, I drove up to Philly and Brooklyn with a friend. We stayed in Philly with my friend Amy. The next day, Amy and I rode all around Philly (or at least it felt like we circumnavigated the city) - from West Philly to UPenn to downtown, to South Philly. We were on bicycles, and Amy was carting behind her a trailer topped with compost and recycling. She is a member of the Philadelphia Pedal Co-op. Check out this short video about their group.













On Saturday, we went to the farmer's market in West Philly, and a wonderful flea market next door. She says that there are more than 300 community gardens in the city. It is because, she explained, there are so many abandoned lots. Which makes sense. If land is not being used for housing or business, it may as well be productive, beautified, and profitable. Why doesn't my hometown rust belt city (Buffalo) have just as many community gardens?

I also visited Brooklyn for a night, and met up with a couple clusters of friends in City. And took a dozen bagels back with me to Durham.

What Tom Robbins thinks about Dancing

I just ordered and read the new book by Tom Robbins.
It's written in the style of a children's book, with large print and everything.
It's called B is for Beer.
It's not the same as the others.
I didn't really like it, in that it isn't dense with sexy metaphors and strange and appealing free-loving characters and bizarre, unbelievable, yet well-developed plot lines.
However, here's a lovely little nougat of sultry wisdom to spoon with:

"When civilized people dance they reconnect with their old animal
nature. It reminds them that they aren't mechanical chess pieces or
rooted trees, but free-flowing meat waves of possibility"

These photos are a little old (from May and June) but of two wonderful animal-nature-inducing dancing evenings. The first is from the White Squirrel Festival in Brevard, North Carolina. This is the local (but widely renowned) Steep Canyon Rangers - a crazy amazing bluegrass band. This concert was outside in the rain, and much of it was spent avoiding being pegged in the head by the saturated white squirrel stuffed animal being thrown in the air. While dancing wildly of course.













The second photo is of some members of STOMP! the freestyle percussion group that uses nontraditional instruments. I went to a wonderful Rusted Root concert in Greenville, South Carolina with Lara. For the last song (Ecstasy), they had some members of STOMP in the audience come up with buckets from the kitchen and drum sticks. It was one of the most ecstatic ten minutes of the last year. Afterwards, Lara caught a drum stick they threw into the audience, had Rusted Root sign it, and gave it to me to hold onto for the year.













Inhibition-free dancing is one of my favorite things in the world.

good point.

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
-Henry David Thoreau

Yeah, seriously.

Gardening

I haven't written much about gardening, especially for the proportion of my energy and time it has filled during the last year. I am going to take a stab at describing my intro efforts at understanding the natural world in a garden plot. This isn't the most eloquent description, but it's hard to summarize 10 months' worth of investment articulately. So, gardening - the harnessing of plant ecology to drive evolution in a more controlled and delicious direction; the melding of eating and the outdoors!

When I arrived at the camp, I was handed the position of garden, compost bin, and animal center czar (caretaker). I considered myself fairly proficient, because I had spent the two prior months working on a vegetable farm. Kelley, the previous Naturalist, gave me a tour of the garden, naming the plants as we passed them. I frantically wrote down their names. I tried to get a history of the garden plots. And then I was left in charge of the veggie, herb, and flower garden!

In the fall, I harvested the last of the vegetables, collected seeds from the basil, sage, daylilies, and echinacea flowers, and maintained the plots. I strung up the tomatillos and tomatoes with twine and gathered posts. I covered the crops to protect them from nighttime frost and extend their production. Sometimes I forgot to cover them. I dreamed. I used some of the crops for my cooking, shared the crops with other staff members and a couple of times, with the kitchen for student meals. I planted a few late-season crops - kale, arugula, cilantro, carrots, and radishes, especially. I made a map of the garden. With help, I made signs to identify the different plants in the garden. I made an interpretive sign for the compost bins.

By the spring, I was ready to get started. I looked up recipes for potting soil and ordered free seeds from Seeds of Change (for educational purposes they give away older saved seeds in unpredictable assorted boxes). I brainstormed, with the help of new Naturalist Lara, what and where we wanted to put the plants in the garden. We planted some seeds in the flats, by a big sunny window in the animal center. We planted some seeds outside when the ground defrosted. We weeded and cut back overgrowth. We added lime and compost to the garden beds. We dug up two new gardens - behind my house, and a Three Sisters demonstration garden at the base of the dining hall. I made an interpretive sign for the garden.

These are just lists of things - and for all of the things that Lara and I accomplished, we forgot to do things, and were late planting seeds, and didn't water all of the plants enough. I put a lot of love, time, and energy into those gardens. When I left the camp in June, the plants were doing well (at least the ones that had germinated and not been dug up by moles or eaten by insects/slugs). I don't think of all of that effort as pointless - I learned a lot from diving in and screwing up. I came back in the fall to see friends, and to see the garden. Lara showed me photos of all of our plants that had grown. The hardest part of a garden is letting it go at the end of the year - letting the plants die.

These photos feel like photos of newborn babies to me:







































I have become, against all odds, a plant person. Looking back, I realize that this was inevitable. I love animals, and am becoming more infatuated with fungus by the day (bacteria and viruses, you will have to wait for another period of my life). But there has always been something so immediate, so tangible about interactions with plants - they define places more than any of the other living things that occupy the world. A landscape is made up of plants that cloak the geological figures. Before I could identify plants, I spent time knowing them intimately. Each place I have lived has its foliage and accompanying scents that draw me to it. Here in Durham, the mimosa trees are in bloom. While an invasive species, their blossoms are beautiful and fragrant. Their scent has followed me gently as I've biked in Durham.

These photos are my documentation of the production of a raised bed garden in my old backyard:

Ze Magick of Communitee

I recently had an epiphany - one of those epiphanies that is actually a realization of something that I should have, perhaps, known long ago (like that "genre" is pronounced "jjjohn-ray" or even "jjjjohn-ruh", or that linkin' logs are actually Lincoln logs after the log-cabin-prez). This epiphany has to do with community.

I was talking to my friend Sarah about our respective experiences this summer, explaining how amazing it was to run into and meet people, who were all intertwined in some way. Going contra-dancing here, and seeing 3 people I knew from different settings. Or running into other people who went to my college, and know my friends or professors. It keeps happening to me. Running into people at the farmer's market, concerts, bike co-op... Last summer, there was so much of this coincidence, that I began to attribute it to something other than random luck. I gave it the title of fate & magic, I believe? More appropriate, I think, is community. That's what community is, after all, isn't it -- a group of people who are intertwined, involved, and invested in each other, somehow?

Anyways, I am revelling in this magic-community I am once more a part of. Maybe community is the less mysterious cousin to trail magic (the unseen forces that bring you what you need while you are hiking, or traveling). It's a pretty amazing force field and I am truly enjoying the homing process.

Photo Journal: Goodbye Voyage

This is my ode to these fabulous mountains that have incubated my soul, taught me so much, and introduced me to some kickass friends this year. I spent two days, two nights of revelry before leaving in a friend's vehicle to begin the drive to my summer home: Durham.

I cooked some daylily buds with my foraging friend, Ann, then said goodbye to my old bicicleta, the famed P.Diddy (formerly known as Puffy the Huffy) giving it a new chain and new life as a communal bike (leaving threatening directions on the mandatory love and respect that should be given to P.Diddy). I then took my backpack and tarped a couple miles from my house, falling asleep to the flickering blue fairies (a lingering firefly).






























The next day, I hiked a new trail for me: to Falls Creek Falls and down into Jones Gap from a new approach, swooping past the the River Falls lodge where I no longer can contra dance, and up past Rainbow Falls to say goodbye to the waterfall, and up to the house to collect my new-to-me bicycle (as will be fondly remembered by my loyal hiking blog readers as the one I used to bike from Falls Lake to Stone Mountain in 2008). I biked down (mostly down) to Brevard, and through town to Pisgah Forest, a total of 23 miles. Along the way, I had my first flat bike tube! Of course, I wasn't carrying my spare tube with me, but as luck had it, I broke down practically in front of Pierce's house - a Cleveland of Cleveland Cliffs fame - and he is a wiz bike mechanic. In town, I got ice cream at Dolly's for the last time (for now) and migrated into the forest to stealth-camp with my tarp by the Davidson River.

Wild Edible Feast: Spring 2009

This spring, Ann and I again resurrected a wild feast for the staff at camp. We drank dandelion coffee, described in “the first spring harvesting” and ate some snacks, including a wild edibles salad, locust blossom fritters, and fried kutzo chips.














The salad contained wild plantain leaves and cinquefoil leaves (both found as weeds in open areas and grassy areas), young tendrils of green briars, sheep sorrel, sassafras, sourwood, and yellow poplar leaves, and topped with the blossoms of violets and locust trees. The leaves are all collected young (a lighter spring-ier green) and all except the sourwood should be collected as small as possible. The salad had a mix of sour and sweet and nutty, and we ate it with a raspberry vinegarette. The spring is the perfect time to make a wild salad, because all of the leaves are young and tender. As the season progresses, the greens become tough and some become bitter. It was hard to find some tasty sorrel, however, because most of it was going to seed and the taste of the leaf turns from sour to bitter/nasty.


























Ann made the locust blossom fritters using a simple batter (about a cup and a half of it) of flour, water, a tablespoon of sugar, and some baking powder/soda. She coated the beautiful, sweet-pea like blossoms that I had collected thickly with the batter and popped them in the kitchen’s deep fryer for a minute. After toweling off some of the oil, she sifted powdered sugar on top of the fritters. They were delicious – like donuts, really. Even the not-so-adventurous staff loved them.














Ann also made the kutzo chips in the deep fryer, but we agreed that they would have tasted better if they had been made in a frying pan with less oil. She picked fresh kutzo leaves, which are unfortunately conveniently found along the road, even up here in our secluded camp with its vestige of wilderness protecting it much other corruption. If you are not aware, kutzo is a highly invasive plant of Asian origin that unfairly outcompetes trees and understory plants for their water, nutrients, and sunlight. It is a parasitic vine often found along roadways in the southeastern United States. It was actually introduced for erosion control by some poor sucker. The leaves were fried and seasoned with seasoning salt. Pretty good for an invasive plant (but still not as tasty as Russian olive jam!).

I used to try, when I was hiking, to keep my eyes up from the ground. Now that I am learning so many of the local plants, I can hardly keep my eyes on any one thing. I am constantly scanning the forest floor and the canopy, identifying plants everywhere. I guess that this is why many scientists study one thing for their lives, or why people settle down and stay in one place: in order to understand more deeply an area, you have to REALLY see it through an entire year, or longer. I feel very confident when I am leading naturalist hikes here. As soon as I move, the natural world will once again be foreign. I can’t believe that I have been here for ten months.

Wild Edible Feast: Fall 2008

Once in the fall, and once this spring, Ann and I put on a Wild Edibles feast for the staff, in which the bulk of our food came from (you guessed it) the wilds of camp. Putting on this feast, and through my own exploring, I have come to view the forest as a giant salad bowl. It’s a beautiful thing, to be able to identify most of the plants in this area.

Some of these wild edibles can be collected at any point in the year, and some need to be collected during a particular season, or at a particular stage of development.














Iced sassafras tea: I collected the roots of numerous sassafras saplings in October, washed them of dirt, cut them into 2-3” pieces, air-dried them, stripped the bark and outer woody layer from the roots, through away the inner section of the roots (the heartwood), and then froze these root bark strips in a ziplock bag until the feast (the beginning of November). To brew the roots into tea, I simmered the quarter cup of roots in about a covered quart of water for twenty minutes. I allowed this to steep overnight, and in the morning added sugar to sweeten and ice cubes to cool the tea, bringing the volume up to two quarts. The roots should be collected close to winter months, because the sap of the tree descends into the roots through the phloem channels to be stored for safekeeping during the dormant months of woody plants.

I made a hot Echinacea, lemongrass, and mint tea. I collected the roots of an Echinacea flower (also know as a coneflower – the variety that we have growing is Echinacea purpurea) in November (after a frost or two) and washed and dried the roots (cutting into pieces smaller than 1” to speed drying and prevent molding). I have read that for the best quality Echinacea roots, the plants should be at least three years old. Echinacea is widely cultivated for its resilience and beauty, but it is also a highly valued native medicinal plant that can be found in the wild throughout eastern North America. It is most valued for its ability to boost the immune system. Brewing a tea from the roots is called decoction, which produces a very strong tea. The ratio of roots to water should be 2 tsp to 1 cup of water. In order to temper the strong flavor of Echinacea roots, I also added some fresh Lemongrass and Mint leaves from our herb garden. The tea was brewed for 15 to 20 minutes and served warm.














Ann made hot sweet birch tea. She picked young twigs from a sweet birch tree near to her house, boiled them in water, and sweetened the tea with sugar. Birch trees smell like wintergreen. Wintergreen is, in fact, extracted from sweet birch trees.

All of these teas were highly successful.

For food, we served a salad made from garden vegetables, cooked greens, rock tripe, fresh herbs, and quinoa with pesto.













The greens were garden grown kale and a weed called purslane (although I have a sneaking suspicion that this was not in fact purslane. It did, however, taste good!). They were sautéed in olive oil with wild onions.

Rock tripe is a black (and sometimes olive green) fungus that grows on (surprise!) rocks. I think that it has the texture of tripe (the lining of the stomach of a ruminant, such as a cow). It has the ability to actually chemically corrode the rock that it is growing on. Because of those powerful enzymes, Ann soaked the tripe in water for a day or two before cooking it. It can also be eaten raw, once the enzymes have been leached from it with water. She cooked the tripe with garlic and butter. It was rubbery with crispy edges.













Sheep sorrel, parsley, and cilantro













Wood sorrel in the garden

We served some raw herbs for tasting – including garden-grown parsley and cilantro, and the weed sheep sorrel. We also have wood sorrel growing as a weed, which is equally as delicious in a delightfully tart kind of way.














I made pesto with arugula grown in the garden, garlic from last summer on the farm, the acorns that I had gathered, soaked, dried, and frozen early in the fall, and some olive oil. It took a lot of chopping to break the acorns into small enough pieces as to be digestible. I think that recipe needs a little more modification. Definitely, next time that I use acorns, I will remember not to dry the acorns after soaking them. They would have been better employed in a maraca.