The Art of Taking a Walk.

Quick, name five indigenous plants on your block. Now tell me of the five, three you could eat. Seems like a ridiculous question. There is crabgrass, weeds, and grocery stores. Why would we NEED to know about edible plants? See that. Taking knowledge, and creating of it, the sense of burden. Why would we need to know our landbase? Why should I have to learn to speak Spanish? Really though, is this the idea we have grasped onto? Do we live in the land of the "free from having to do anything ever"? Bah! Nay, I say, nay nay nay.

I have lived in this country for all of my life, (30 years for those who have to gauge superficial things such as age), and in that tenure, I have occupied four regions of our continent. The midwest(agriculture, plains), the southwest (desert, mountains), the west coast (beaches, oceans, freeways), and the pacific northwest (temperate rain forest) and I could not, until today, step out of the house, and off of the concrete, and name any of the plants of the region, not tell you if they were native or invasive. that is, until I went to the woods to live deliberately with a 3 and 5 year old.

Okay, a little romanticized, I did not go to Walden Pond, I went for a hike. A six hour hike, all along the banks of the Missouri River, purportedly the exact spot that Lewis and Clark set off west from. Yay, history class taught me imperialism, and I remembered it! I have been to the river for many occasions. Festivals, fairs, carnivals, drum circles, poetry readings, even painted the set for and acted in Shakespeare In The Park beside this river, but never really walked there for the sake of walking. Today, we walked. (and walked and walked and walked)

We had prepared ourselves with sketchbooks, a field guide, water bottle and a few various amenities (first aid kit, dried fruit, gloves, and cutting tool) and a sense of adventure. We got to the edge of the Katy trail and I posed the question to the kids. Do we stay on this trail, or go into those woods with no real trail? WOODS! Alright, it begins. Myself having lived in the city for most of my life, I was on wild beast alert the first half an hour. Is that a snake? Is that poison ivy? Is that bear shit? (they do apparently do that in the woods, riddle solved) But soon I actually settled in, albeit still a tourist, but a comfortable tourist, and it may be that I had the encouragement of and the need to not disappoint these two young ramblers. We started looking for interesting plants to identify with our new field manual.


This is the first plant we found. We snipped a small branch off and scurried over to do our scientific research. Sitting in a circle, we pulled out our sketch books and field manual and starting sketching, talking and flipping pages. First we had to identify the leaf pattern. Alternate or Opposite? Alternate. Then the leaf structure: simple or compound? Simple. Then decide if the leaves were smooth margin, toothed margin, or wavy margin? Smooth, lance shaped (lance like a sword says Fair). Okay, we got it, now to the book. Flip, flip.....flip.....flip. Nothing. You would think this was disappointing, I mean, this 80 page book should have all the answers, right? Wrong. It was exciting. we now had a challenge ahead. we decided to take a field sample and check in with Ranger Dale, the park ranger we met on the way down.

We moved on, as all good travelers do, and searched around for the next two hours for something really cool. We found butterflies, birds, hemlock, a keel boat and barge. We even stumbled onto the wetlands. This was really cool. I had no idea that most of the foliage in the wetlands is perfectly edible and even a staple of native diets. That is, before McWhite culture.


This is where we made two new discoveries. The first was the Arrowhead. Why, because it is shaped like an arrow. It is an awesome little pant, and edible. The second was what I call the Natural Stamp. I am sure there is another name for it, but I call it that because it happened naturally, actually accidentally, but there are no accidents. We were taking rubbings of the leaves of arrowheads, when we realized that the chloroform was staining the page in the exact pattern of the leaf and it's veins. We stopped doing lead rubbings and began simply rolling our pencil over the leaves, and voila, a full color representation of the leaf. Good times. Try it.

We then found a trail in the woods that had a sign that stated that this trail was made in one summer by one kid, aged 13, as a boy scout project. The kids were thrilled to know that one kid could do something so grand. He had found-wood benches, signs that described the plant life, ample room for even a wheelchair. Too cool. About eight plants later and still not one was found in our field guide. We were determined. We spotted a picnic area where others were and decided to give ourselves a rest, it had been about 4 hours at this point, and eat some yummy trail mix we made from dried bananas, sunflower seeds and dried ginger. We sit down beside a tall, pretty brush with red bell shaped flowers. We inspected the leaves and decided to check the book. there is was:
the Trumpet Creeper. We were ecstatic. Finally, the 10 bucks paid off. We had identified our first plant using a field guide and our own deductive reasoning. Greatness. We also got to talk a lot. Not the kind of talk that we usually have, about books, and movies, and fart jokes, but really talk, and not just with each other. We listened to the river, the sounds that it makes, the groans of it's great and speedy underbelly shifting the trees and breaking the rocks into sand slowly. We listened to the birds songs, and the rabbit's nervous feet. We listened, and we talked back. We talked a lot about the river. I fielded many questions form Fair and Whitman about the river, that I had no good answer for. "Why can't we swim in there?" Well, undertow is strong. "But can't we just stand in the shallow part?" Well, no, because it is very polluted. "Can we fish here?" We could but we should not eat the fish from here. "Because of the pollution?" Yes. "Why do people pollute the river, that is bad." Well kids, they do it for profit. For a quick release of the outcrop of their industrial jobs. For the shipping of waste from one side of the river to the other. For the cheap dumping of toxic chemicals created by ATnT and Amerin UE. The river catches every bit of chemical drainage from every farm along it's path that opts to use Monsanto's deadly poisons to yield a higher, more efficient, less nutritious crop. they do it, kids, for money.

"Well, we just have to stop them. We have to stop money."

Yes, we do. How can one argue that. This is not one of the "darndest things" kids say. this is the pure truth. This is unfiltered and unfettered by the ways of nicety. This three year old knows better than any of us, and we ignore him. We will pay for our crimes.

See, the river, this river, for hundreds, even thousands or millions of years, fed and nourished this land. Animals of all types use it as a daily source of food, travel, recreation, cleansing, calm and replenishment. Not anymore. Not us. we live two blocks from a river we can never use safely in our lifetime for the life giving qualities it once held. It has been raped, truly raped by culture and all for profit and for self hatred does this continue. This is the worst thievery since religions stole God and placed a copyright on her name. They have stolen our ability to care for ourselves, to learn for ourselves and to love for ourselves. We are Prometheus. We are taking it back, taking it all back.

We made our way home, slowly, but not because we were tired, because we were starting to understand the art of taking a walk.