STALKING THE WILD ASPARAGUS

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After getting the size, color and form thoroughly in my mind, I stood up and looked back along the ditch bank. Instantly, I saw a dozen old dead asparagus stalks that I had missed. I went back to where I had found the first clump and worked my way down the ditch again, and this time I really reaped a harvest. My pail was soon full, so I took off my undershirt, tied up the sleeves and neck opening, and filled it, too, full of fresh asparagus. I didn't bother to go fishing at all. Fresh, tender asparagus tips were far better food than the bony suckers I could catch in the reservoir.

During the next week we ate fresh asparagus every day. We had boiled and buttered asparagus, creamed asparagus, asparagus on toast and asparagus soup. I doubt that young people today can realize how good the first green vegetables of spring tasted in those days before quick freezing and fast transportation began furnishing us with fresh green vegetables all winter.

The next Saturday I was back out along the ditch bank gathering asparagus. Until school was out in June, I made a weekly visit to what I had come to think of as my asparagus patch. By this time, all the wild asparagus that had not been kept closely cut was waving its fernlike foliage in the breeze, but where I had taken each spear as soon as it had appeared, the perennial roots kept sending up more new shoots to replace those I had stolen. My family grew tired of asparagus, but they never complained. Only recently my mother told me that she was actually giving a large portion of the bounty I was bringing home to the neighbors secretly, for she did not want to dampen my enthusiasm or dull my enjoyment of the task.

Before another spring, my parents had moved to a high, dry plateau farther west, and I was a middle-aged man before I saw wild asparagus again. The next time I saw those familiar dead stalks that had beckoned for me to come and pick the green treasure at their bases was one spring when I was driving along a country road in Pennsylvania, shortly after moving to the Commonwealth where I now make my home. At first I wondered why those bright, straw-colored dead weeds by the roadside gave me such a feeling of nostalgia. Then the memory of those long-past spring days on the ditch bank came rolling back. I stopped the car and examined the nearest stalk. Sure enough, near its base the little green tips were just peeping through the ground. Although I was a stranger in the East, this was like a welcome home. I was back in wild asparagus country again.

Since then, each spring I go out along the field borders and byways and gather wild asparagus, not only enough for current use, but some to store in the freezer, so I can bring back the joyous spring days any time of the year merely by cooking a dish of wild asparagus. That five minutes I spent so long ago, concentrating on one dead asparagus plant, has led me to many pounds of this most delicious of early vegetables. The eye-training it gave me has lasted until now. Whenever I drive, in late winter or early spring, my eye automatically picks up the dead asparagus stalks by the roadside, and I make an almost unconscious mental note of the places where the green spears will be plentiful when warm weather arrives.

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