On Urban Foraging and Climbing Trees

I live on the scruffy west side of Providence. In contrast to the pristine, historic, white, afflutent, artsy, and intellectual east side—the one with the high rents—my neighborhood sports dilapidated houses and yards, gutters full of broken glass, curbs with mattresses on them. Laundry hangs from windows. Kids ride bikes and macho guys walk their pit bulls to show off. Someone’s always blasting rap or Mariachi music. One of the things I love about my neighborhood is how ethnically mixed it is. Families are Lao, or African America, or Afro-Hispanic, from the DR. There are punk white DIY kids and older Italian folks who remember the neighborhood back from when it was nice. A two-story, once-nice house on my street has a handwritten poster hanging on the fence, blue marker on yellow posterboard: “For Sale, $65,000.” I guess that’s one way to get around a realtor. The commonality in the neighborhood is that everyone’s struggling to make ends meet. That includes me.

Like a lot of folks these days, I’m feeling financially insecure, and somewhat food insecure. It’s not that I go hungry; I eat well, but I worry. It’s late summer and I’m continuing an experiment I started last year: how much food can I put up for the winter, preferably without going to the grocery story, ideally without buying it? In addition to growing my garden, shopping for bargains at the farmer’s market, and taking leftover odds and ends, I’ve been urban foraging.



Lately, I’ve been scoping out fruit. Wild elderberries by the swamp in the park, weedy crabapples, abandoned trees someone once planted with care, trees with small ornamental fruit that no one wants. It’s amazing how few people notice or care about all the food that’s going to waste around them. One of the best ways to find these is to look on the ground for dropped fruit. If the fruit is falling, chances are it’s ripe. Lately, too, I’ve been asking permission to pick. So far, the response has been the same: slight bafflement, followed by cordial permission. I picked half a bag of beautiful pink ornamental apples over on the snazzy east side, only to see the same variety of apples being offered for sale at the farmer’s market the following week. I don’t know what was more satisfying: seeing them for sale, or knowing I have four bags of amazing, insanely, naturally-pink applesauce in my freezer. I wonder if they actually sell those apples at the market, and if so, to whom.

When I walk my neighborhood, I not only see fruit trees. I see gardens. In the yards of broken bottles and cans, where the weeds are growing up, I see the potential urban farms, places that could be cultivated and used to grow healthy vegetables for people to eat. One of these days I’d like to find a way to make my living teaching folks to grow their own food. I often think this would be a better use of my teaching skills than being in the classroom, with students who feel disconnected from the natural world and, all too often, don’t care that much about learning anyway. Once in a while, there’s a house where the yard is all burgeoning garden. These are invariably the houses of immigrants—Hispanic or Lao, who care deeply about their small properties and have transformed them into some semblance of a subtropical paradise. The Lao family down the street from me not only has a beautiful yard decked out with impatiens; they also grow taro, Asian pears, and rows and rows of chili peppers in five-gallon buckets. I’d love to know how they put them all to use. But for the most part, no one notices or cares much about the unused potential urban gardening space all around them. At times, I’m painfully aware at how out of tune my values are with most of the people around me—and I don’t just mean in my neighborhood. I mean in our consumerist American culture as a whole. Urban foraging? What’s that? Why would you bother with it when you could just go buy some mass-produced, pesticide-laden applesauce at Stop N Shop?

A couple of weeks ago, I found a pear tree as I was driving home. It was easy to remember where it was: across the street from an abandoned house painted with bright horizontal orange and yellow stripes all the way around. This was not some scrawny thing with five pears, like the one I also found on the east side and watched all summer last summer. This tree must be at least 25 years old. It’s huge, and absolutely filled with small, perfectly-formed pears, rusky green on one side and softly russet on the other. This tree is also in someone’s yard. The pears have been falling and as a result the yard, and rooftop, are often filled with pigeons. I watched the situation as I drove by again and again. Pigeons on roof. Pears on ground. Surely, the residents of the house were not thrilled about the pigeon-roost situation. Surely no one would mind if I relieved them of some of this pigeon food.

This evening, I set out to find the answer. Carrying my biggest, heavy-duty tote bag, I walked down to the house in question. I felt some anxiety: in this neighborhood, you never know who will answer the door. It could be a thug drug dealer with a gun in his pants—and I mean a white guy—there seem to be a lot of these types around. Or a renter who doesn’t get it and doesn’t care. Or, like the woman downstairs from me, someone who speaks very little English. I reasoned that it didn’t matter: the goal was to get permission from someone. I walked along, rehearsing what I would say in English and Spanish. Excuse me, would you mind if I picked these pears? Me llamo Ana. Vivo alla en Raymond Street. Puedo tomar las peras? Tomar, I reminded myself, meaning to take. This is the word for catching a fish, so surely it must also be the word for picking? Anyway, the meaning would be clear. Don’t forget and use tocar, I told myself, or you’ll just be asking to touch the pears, and that would be weird.

Having arrived at the tree, I rang both bells out front and knocked on the back door. No response. Should I just start picking a few? I looked around. The yard also sported a beautiful grape arbor in back. Clearly, someone here had once been an attentive gardener. Finally, a voice drifted through the evening air. “Can I help you?” I looked around, lost. At last I located the voice. An older woman peered out from the second-story window. I suddenly felt self-conscious about the fact that I was brazenly traipsing through her yard.



“Would you mind if I picked some of these pears?” I called up. I readied my but-the-piegones-are-attracted-to-them rejoinder in case she refused.

“Sure.”

“Thank you very much!” It never hurts to be polite to folks, especially if you’re asking for something strange.

How you going to reach them?” It’s true: I’m short, and most of the pears were pretty high up.

“I’ll climb on up,” I assured her.

“Well, be careful!”

I was touched by this maternal warning. “Is this your house?”

“Yes,”

“What about the grapes, could I pick some of those?”

“I have someone for those.”

“Oh, ok. Thank you very much!” I began pulling at the lowest branches, trying to bring the fruit closer to where I could get it. A few minutes passed.

“The pears, they’re sweet.” This time the voice belonged to a kindly-looking grey-haired man in the same window.

“Do you know what kind they are?” I called up.

“I didn’t hear you. I have trouble hearing.”

“Do you know what variety they are?” I attempted again. One of the other things about being small is that my voice gets lost easily in ambient noise.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Do you know what VARIETY they are?” I tried again.

He shook his head and put his hand to his hear. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Nevermind.” I waved him off cheerfully. “Thank you.”

“You want grapes?”

“She said she had someone for those.”

“Eh?”

“She said she had someone for those,”

“Eh? You want grapes?”

“Sure!” I said, spreading my arms in what I hoped was a casual and offer-accepting gesture.

“I’m sorry I haven’t got any bananas!” He smiled agreeably. I wondered...were these two the original proprietors of the garden, no longer able to keep up with it? Like the other people I’ve talked to, in the end, were these folks just glad, if a little surprised, to see someone using their fruit? I reminded myself to take only some of the grapes, in case there really was someone else with a claim on them.

Now I commenced to picking. Some of the pears I could reach, but I couldn’t help thinking that I should be taller if I’m going to be an urban forager. I need one of those poles that apple-pickers use. The thought of walking through the neighborhood sporting an apple-picking pole made me laugh. But so did the warning against climbing the tree.



This is because I’m a farm kid and a tree climber from way back. No one cared when I was a kid. I climbed every kind of tree I could find. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that the suggestion of climbing a tree invariably arouses suspicion, especially in urban areas. In college, a woman warned me that I might get a disease from the tree I was happily perched in. Dutch elm disease, perhaps? What an embarrassing doctor visit that would make. Doctor, I think I’ve contracted bark beetles.

At any rate, as a kid I formulated my own simple set of tree-climbing principles, and they have served me well over the years. I used to think I could make some money teaching tree-climbing to city kids. It still seems like a good idea, but liability would make this impossible, I suppose. Speaking of which, I am not endorsing the following. Someone could read this and sue me after they break their neck. So, don’t try this at home. But here are a few simple principles I follow for climbing trees..in the event that you find yourself in one with no idea what to do. Oh, and wear jeans. You’ll get terribly scraped up in shorts.

1. Look for the ladder. Each species of tree has its own particular branch pattern. Pine trees, for instance, spiral around in an almost perfect staircase—if you can get around the needles. Hickory trees have a straight trunk and a symmetrical ladder up. Look for the big limbs and plan how you’ll get there before you start. Often, the hardest part is getting up onto that first branch. That was the case here. This pear tree had had its lower limbs pruned. But I grew up climbing pear trees that my dad assiduously pruned—and he went pretty high up. I knew I could make it.

2. Don’t put all your weight on any one limb, especially on the way up. Make sure that if one of the limbs gave way, you are already hanging onto something else. I’ve really never had to put this rule to the test, but it seems like a good idea.

3. Putting your weight on a dead limb is stupid. At least test it first. One of the advantages to being small is that I’m also light. In this case, there were a few dead and brittle limbs in the tree, clustered in with live ones. I made it up just fine, although one of the dead branches did break out when I rested too much weight on it.

Up high, the pears were cluster in beautiful bunches, not too hard to reach if one can balance well on a limb while reaching as far out as possible....which I can. For this adventure, I mentally added a fourth rule:

4. A heavy bag of fruit can seriously unbalance you. Be careful. Don’t try to climb down with it. Tie the handles together and drop it when you’re done.

So I balanced and reached, at times dropping more pears than I got into the bag. I picked which ones to go for carefully, thanking the tree and asking which pears wanted to be picked. Yes, I talk to trees. I always have. Not out loud—people will think you’re nuts if you do that. Either this makes sense to you or it doesn’t, in which case you already think I’m nuts anyway. Some of the pears didn’t want to be picked and I tried to leave them. Some wanted to go together with their siblings in the bunch. I felt bad when I dropped one of these. I went for the russet ones, but these were farthest out on the branches. I’ve been dealing with some pretty heavy-duty exhaustion lately, but picking the pears, I felt invigorated. Greedy and giddy, I wanted to get as many as possible, but I reminded myself that I didn’t have to pick them all. There was no way I could have done this anyway.

Finally, I had half a bag full. It’s a huge bag, so half is a lot. It was getting later, and something in me signaled that it was time to stop. Tying the bag handles, I carefully dropped it out of the tree with a thunk, then climbed down after it. This brings me to Rule 5: When coming down, it helps to take the same route you did going up. At some point you’ll have to jump. Gauge the distance and go for it.

Yes, I landed unhurt.

Inside the grape arbor were bunches and bunches of grapes. Too many to comtemplate. Another time, perhaps. I picked three bunches and called up to the window “Thank you!” But no one seemed to hear me as I left. I don’t have the energy to core all of the pears, so I’m thinking of pearsauce, like applesauce, or pear butter. Thanks to these two folks who let me pick them. Maybe I’ll bring a jar on by when I’m done.