How I Live Now

28

We couldn’t go on. We went on.

Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.

Ages ago I learned in social studies about how the Cavemen and the Bushmen and other Primitive Tribes spent every waking hour searching for food and it was nice to be able to draw a good straight line through history between Hairy Old Neanderthal Man and us. I was thinking of approaching my old school next time I was in New York and telling them to replace the unit on Media Communications with one on How to Survive Half Dead in the Wild Without Much in the Way of Hope.

Luckily there was a fair amount of stuff around to eat just now, it being autumn the season of Fruitfulness and Thanksgiving etc., but I won’t pretend it was an interesting diet and I could have killed for a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on rye and a Diet Coke, which come to think of it was pretty radical for me and if only some of my thousand shrinks were here to pat themselves on the back and take the credit.

Anyway there were lots of potatoes because in order to get to the barn you had to walk along an entire field planted with potatoes and though the army guys living at our house had obviously noticed this too, there are still only so many potatoes a small platoon of hungry sequesterers can eat in a month especially without any of the essential ingredients for mashed, French fried or potato salad. In other words, we still had about nine-tenths of a field left to eat.

I spent most mornings digging potatoes and carrying them back to the barn to store in the feed bins while Piper went off searching for natural morsels like watercress and sweet chestnuts and honey. As usual, she cornered the Wood Nymph market while I settled for Old Faithful.

Some days when I couldn’t bear to dig up another spud, I went with her, and seeing Piper in full flight you realized that whoever the father of these kids was, he had to be some kind of bona fide Pixie. She knew how to follow honeybees back to their hives and then how to get honeycomb out of them by making a torch out of a green branch so it smoked and the bees either flew away or got dopey enough to let her break off a chunk of the comb without stinging her, but to be safe I watched this operation from as far away as possible.

One day she showed me about getting watercress out of a river and explained that you had to get it out of a RUNNING river otherwise it would destroy your liver. What about a meandering river I wondered to myself. This is one of the things I most dislike about nature, namely that the rules are not at all precise. Like when Piper says I’m pretty sure that mushroom isn’t poisonous.

Anyway I didn’t really know what to do with a big fat sticky dripping honeycomb or a couple of fistfuls of watercress other than sending them to some factory where they’d be wrapped up in Styrofoam and plastic, but amazingly they tasted just like honey and watercress without having to do anything at all to them and what with digging up potatoes as well, I was starting to think that except for the deli counters and five or ten thousand other total essentials, supermarkets were pretty much a waste of time.

In the meantime I learned the hard way to store things like honey in a tightly covered container if you didn’t want to get every bug on earth flying in for a taste.

Piper could smell wild garlic and onions in a meadow and she came home with armfuls of the stuff, which we shredded up to make potatoes with wild onions and garlic for a change from potatoes without wild onions and garlic. There were days I would happily have traded the entire future of England for a single jar of mayonnaise but unfortunately the opportunity never arose.

We roasted sweet chestnuts in the fire and they were pretty good except incredibly hard to peel and the skins got under your fingernails and hurt for days. I spent practically a whole afternoon collecting chestnuts and when I got back Piper looked at me with as close as she ever got to contempt and said Those are Horse Chestnuts and Inedible.

There were a few rows of sweet corn in Aunt Penn’s vegetable garden, along with whatever cabbages hadn’t been eaten by the British Army and the slug army, and also a fair number of squashes, some leeks and beans and mint running wild.

I brought a heavy frying pan up from the house and because we had no cooking oil we steamed vegetables in water over the fire. Piper said we should catch a rabbit and kill it for the fat to cook with but when I looked to see if she was out of her mind she got kind of defensive and said That’s what the Boy Scout Handbook says.

A few days later Piper said we should try a fishing expedition and the thought of it made my heart sink because of our Perfect Day and not wanting ever to go there again and ruin it, but nostalgia wasn’t a big part of the decision-making process these days so we got Piper’s fishing rod and set off.

It was cloudy and drizzling which Piper said was good for fishing and as usual I watched while she lured food onto the bank, but once she caught anything I had to follow her directions about killing and cleaning it while she turned her head away. I had no complaints about Piper but I could have lived without ripping the guts out of dead trout to save her from doing it. Not to mention whacking them over the head with a club in the first place. I hated doing it but I COULD do it and I guess that was the difference between us.

Later there was poached pink trout that made most of the things you eat in life taste gross by comparison, followed by hazelnuts mashed up with honey and afterwards we had mint tea and it was nice but you couldn’t help lying awake at night thinking about toast and butter.

In the days that followed we figured out how to make soup from whatever we could add to a pot and that was much better than just boiling things one by one. Leek and potato was the best and when we ran out of leeks we used wild onions.

We set as much as we could store aside. There were only two feed bins in the barn built to keep out mice and I’d already stacked one with potatoes and the other halfway with nuts and corn and cabbages. What we really needed was a huge Amana refrigerator-freezer with ice maker and root beer dispenser.

One funny thing was that I didn’t look much different now from the day I arrived in England but the difference was that now I ate what I could.

Somewhere along the line I’d lost the will not to eat.

Partly I wouldn’t be good old Daisy if I didn’t get my appetite back just when everyone else in the world was learning how to starve, and partly the idea of wanting to be thin in a world full of people dying from lack of food struck even me as stupid.

Well what do you know?

Every war has its silver lining.