Digging Deep

TAMARIND LITERARY MAGAZINE #4 2022

Gary Grossman

19

I have always been a forager; someone who derives deep and unique nourishment from harvesting my own food. Fishing, gardening, hunting, and gathering, all weave an internal braided strand that tethers body to my soul. I left my home and divorcée mom when I was 17 and a college sophomore, and have been self-supporting ever since. Growing up in Southern California in the Sixties and Seventies provided many opportunities and localities to develop my foraging skills. As a biological conservation undergrad, my bibles had been Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop and Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and my mom had spent many hours reading while I caught halibut, California bonito, and Pacific mackerel from various piers and jetties. As an undergrad in Berkeley I husbanded my first garden of radishes, lettuce, carrots, kale, cucumbers, and peas, all sustained by the East Bay’s foggy mornings and warm afternoons. The cold but productive waters of San Francisco Bay served as pastures for striped bass and surf perch which I harvested in sufficient quantities to fill my own freezer as well as those of my friendlier neighbours. But my foraging reached its zenith in the fall of 1975 when I left Berkeley to attend graduate school at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

San Luis Obispo was located midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, but lay 200 miles from either metropolis. Agriculture dominated the county, with thousands of acres of…