the fruit of the juglans nigra
According to a pleasant legend
Isaac Newton sat musing beneath an apple tree when a falling piece of fruit
bonked him on the head. So he decided to
invent modern physical theory. It is
stuff like this that has infused the word legend—which
ought to mean simply something you read—with implications of fiction if not
whopperism. The truth is that he was not
sitting, nor did the apple hit him. But
he did observe one falling, and it appeared to fall in an absolutely straight
path from bough to turf. So he decided
to invent modern physical theory.
on the tree
The Flemings are no less capable of
observation than the Newtons, though perhaps somewhat less deductively
brilliant. When I arrived at my son’s
country place a couple of weeks ago I caught him black-handed removing the
cortices of a basket of fallen wild walnuts which had first captured his
attention by the considerable noise created when they fell upon the roof of a
parked Volvo station-wagon. The black
walnut (juglans nigra) is a fairly
common tree in the northeastern United States, but he had not noticed that
there was a rather tall one looming over what you might call his private
parking lot. His discovery led him to no
modification of modern physical theory, but it did suggest the possibility of a
tasty walnut pie. I joined the project
with enthusiasm. I had to leave the
hunting part of my hunter-gatherer genes behind in Arkansas, but I still gather
with the best of them. By the time I left
for home we had liberated a few dozen walnut shells.
on the ground
Directly across the street from my
house is a largish tract of University-owned land recently cleared of its old
student housing units. It still has its paved roads and street lighting, but it
is blocked off from vehicular traffic, and has consequently become my
neighborhood’s own private park, with acres of greensward, fields of broadcast
wild flowers, and plenty of mature trees.
One of these, not a hundred yards from my front door, I knew to be a
black walnut. Sure enough, when I
sought it out, I found the ground beneath it thickly scattered with freshly fallen
green walnut balls and blackened ones that had been on the ground for a
while. As it happens, late September to
mid-October is the perfect season for harvesting walnuts. I gathered up a barrow load full, and wheeled
it to my back yard.
Removing the fibrous coverings from
the hard shells that enclose the actual nutmeats is a laborious and rather
messy business. The cortex has the
consistency of a hard raw sweet potato, and it wants to cling ferociously to
the inner shells. It emits a pungent
limey smell and secretes a dark greenish sap that indelibly stains whatever it
touches, especially that pale-toned Caucasian skin known for some reason as “white”. It turns such skin “black”. So I soon enough had black hands and a heap
of walnuts of my own. My general theory
of life is that if a little bit of something is a little bit of fun, a lot of
it is probably a lot more fun. So I made
an arboreal survey of the whole “park” and found three more specimens of juglans nigra, two of them magnificent in
their fecundity. Always searching for
plausible reasons to avoid real work, I spent the next two days in walnut
processing.
When done with pre-industrial
techniques it is a very labor-intensive business. Gathering large numbers of the green balls is
a trial for the ancient back. I soon
enough discovered that the really hard work could be done in a seated
position. This involves stomping hard on
the balls with a heavy boots, an attack that often
frees the inner shell with a single blow and rarely crushes it. It also frees a certain amount of juicy
splatter, of course. I eventually
learned that if I wore paper-thin medical gloves within a pair of robust work gloves I might emerge less swarthy.
on my kitchen table
There is much art to be mastered,
of course. The ideal nuts are big ones
on which the cortex has begun to soften but is not yet blackened. And freeing the inner walnut shell is by no
means the end of the process. You want
to get rid of as much of the adhering inky gunk as possible. According to a YouTube tutorial prepared by
some geezer in West Virginia the proper tool for this is a cement mixer. I don’t have one to hand at the moment, but I
discovered that if you put a couple of hundred of nuts and a few sharp gravels
into a few inches of water in a tight and sturdy wheelbarrow, then agitate it
all like mad with a garden hoe for about twenty minutes, then wash down the
results over a wire-mesh frame, then dry the shells for a few hours in full sun—well,
you end up with the plausible results pictured above: about twelve hundred
black walnuts ready to be seasoned for a few weeks before becoming Christmas
dessert. Furthermore, if you cost out
the time investment at the rate of the current minimum wage, it cannot be more
than about $1.12 per walnut. Of course
the fine work of cracking the shells and picking out the minute pieces of meat
still lies ahead.
nut-gatherer suffering from pollex niger
