Down at the PawPaw Patch

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working and traveling around hiking and biking with Buddy as always, seeing family and friends, but a lot of my attention has been devoted to..wait for it...the largest endemic fruit in North America. It's the fruit that resembles a custard-like banana and looks like a pale, ovoid cucumber. I try to stay on task, keeping up with the important, 'necessary' things in life, but this time of year, especially when I'm walking through a protected area such as a State or National Park, and stumble upon a PawPaw patch, all reason flies out the window, and I immediately look for a bag-type receptacle and start shaking trees. My justification as a fellow preservationist and would-be protector of the woods? Well, the deer will eat them anyways, and there's an overabundance of deer, so really, I'm culling an overpopulated herd, therefore saving the government money. I know, I know, but it works for me, just enough reason to remove the guilt. The PawPaw or Asimina triloba is a wonderful fruit that grows over a large swath of the East Coast and is under-appreciated. It's the king of Appalachian foraging fruits, and you'll have to get to the fruit before the deer do. These fruits have more nutritional value than many foods that we commonly associate with health foods. They contain tons of antioxidants and bioactive compounds that are not well understood, but which will have potential utility in pharmaceuticals upon further study. Ask around and you'll find that a majority of the population doesn't know PawPaws exist, and many more don't understand their incredible nutritional value. In a highly populated area of the tidewater region such as this (I'm currently living in Northern Virginia outside of D.C.) I'm glad that more people don't know about the fruit. More PawPaws for me, I say. It seems that we are so fixed on all the new, chic things out there, foods from different lands and cultures, that we forget some of the real gems that naturally abound here. I'm a niche guy, and I'm also into all of the incredible mushrooms that we have in our Appalachian Mountains. There are all sorts of great things here, wild leeks termed ramps, which have been causing long-term bad breath for hundreds of years in rural towns during harvest season, and ginseng, sassafras, black birch, teaberry, and all sorts of other edible and medicinal fruits of the land. We're not special really, because every natural place in the world has its edible and medicinal wild foods, it's just that it seems important to know the harvestable bounty in your specific area. Maybe I'm just weird about this, but it seems so primitive and essential to know what is around you, to know the flowers and trees and fruits that are part of your home, your place in the world. There's so much to learn right around us, so much to discover and appreciate. I suppose that goes for much of life, and a necessary satisfaction we should all shoot for. Why is it that we are so myopically entrenched in the buildings and man-made structures around us, creating new synthetic compounds on a daily basis, when our forests go unmanaged and untended, and we haven't even unleashed the mysterious potential in the compounds of the natural world? Once again, we see that balance is vital in all things. Wow, really off topic. Back to PawPaws. Word to the wise, if you desire to make PawPaw jam, prepare for a long ordeal, complete with stickiness all over a tiny apartment kitchen, your dog licking at seeds that pop out of your hand when you're squeezing the juice from them, and finally, prepare for the jam not to set right because, first of all, you 'eyeball' relentlessly although you should know better by now, and you're left telling co-workers that you have some non-viscous marmalade for them to try. Long story short, I really like PawPaws. So, if you or an attractive unattached female friend is in the Northern Virginia area and seeks a day of PawPaw picking, I'm game for the next week or two, or until every single tree is picked clean.