I pour water on the camp stove, but it does nothing but divert the flames. I yelp and look for more water, but it’s just about all gone. “You gotta smother the thing,” the family man says, “It’s the only way.” He takes my cooking pot and covers the flame; which struggles for a while and finally goes dead.
“These stoves are no good,” he says. “Check out mine. Flip a switch and it always lights.” I come over to his camp, where his teenage son and daughter are sulking and bitching. He shows me his table-top propane stove. “See!”
I know his stove, because it’s the same brand Jane’s mom uses to cook Korean barbecue. His telling me all this is a sick humiliation – but the fact remains, I wasn’t a boyscout, and I am simply not qualified for this job.
Perhaps. But last night by a raging fire, I made our first Indian meal at the base of Oregon’s Umpqua dunes, alongside a noisy coastal highway.
Large, rolling dunes of sand blanket Oregon’s coast for forty miles. Sometimes, these dunes are open and resemble those found in the desert southwest. But between these open dunes, stands of coastal pines rise, and underneath them are two shrub species of incredible importance to the Coastal Oregon Indians. Evergreen huckleberry bushes (Vaccinium ovatum) abound, and salal (Gaultheria shallon) as well. Each of these bushes yields a bluish berry. Huckleberries are similar in taste to blueberries, and salal is more tart.
Coastal Indians desired huckleberries, and salal was the their most important fruit, because of its abundance and ability to be mixed and used with other fruits.
I was at first intimidated by the inability to find ‘the recipe’ for these very basic coastal Indian ingredients. But think of gathering this way: you collect everything in a basket – your berries, your fruits, your roots, your mushrooms: the preparation is the diversity: the meal is a salad.