Nutting

Yesterday I went nutting for black walnuts, something I haven't done since I was ten, when my mother, intent on saving on our food budget, had us collect black walnuts from the back yard of the house next door, where a man was dying of emphysema. The invalid's name, if I remember right, was Mr. Bell, Edward Bell, and he liked to sit out on his white porch, his oxygen tank beside him like a fire hydrant. On one occasion as we were gathering the nuts, his eyes met mine and he lifted his hand like a saint in an icon, except no gold leafing was involved here and no halo and just a whole lot of tiredness. Still you got the meaning in the gesture, which was "Hope you like the nuts." 

To get to the nutting place yesterday I rode my bike, which is an aluminum three-speed equipped with spacious baskets on the back (I get a remarkable number of compliments on my bike baskets; sometimes these are so sincere that I worry for the sanity of the speakers. You can almost hear them saying "nifty" or "swell.") For this particular transport job, I lined my baskets with large plastic bags. You see, the nuts in their freshly fallen state (still in their husks) are pungently odiferous, or if you prefer, smelly. Also, anything they come into contact with, they'll stain an inky green or black color, so if you're the cleanly sort, be cautious. On my own hands as I handle the nuts I wear gloves of thick neoprene, which just for good measure extend most of the way up the forearm.

The trees, all owned by the same household, are wonderful tall mature black walnut trees that produce fine chunky nuts. The family that owns the trees has never used the nuts for eating. I certainly don't blame them for this. Even folks who are crazy for the flavor of black walnuts--a flavor dark and complex as swirled smoke--might not care to do all the work necessary to gather, husk, cure, crack, and extract. Heck just the job of raking them up for removal is work enough. The family is happy to let me take the nuts though. They really love the trees too; in fact they treasure everything about their house and yard. It's one of the handsomest houses in the city: brick and clean and charismatic and imposing. If their house were one of our forty-four presidents, I suppose it would be Thomas Jefferson. Its many windows are as clear as that man's perspicuous mind.

There are some ten trees in all: four in front along the road, and half a dozen standing at the southern edge of the lot. The trees in the front yard drop their nuts onto the sidewalk and the road, and they must get a sweet perennial kick out of doing this. Drop. Drop. I've heard them drop nuts on cars both passing and parked. Thonk. Thonk. One time while I was walking past the area a driver stopped his vehicle with a jerk, got out, and inspected the roof. Sure enough there was a messy stain on top of his car, although no dent. He looked at me as if he suspected I had had some part in the affair. "Black walnut trees," I said pointing up. "That's so crazy," he answered. So much for oneness with nature.

Yesterday I stuck to the back-yard trees. I bent down and picked up nut after nut, dropping the keepers into one of my bags. Occasionally as I worked, just for the olfactory pleasure of it I might bring one of the nuts closer up to my nose for a good sniff. It's a vaguely piney or juniperish smell but with a definite difference. Once you've smelled it, you'll never confuse it with anything else. It's like cinnamon that way. Or vanilla extract. Or your college roommate's foot odor (after he came back from working a factory shift at Malt-O-Meal). The source of the scent lies in the husks of the nut, in a compound called juglone, and it's bitter--juglone is--so it's important to get the nut as soon as possible out of the husk; you must not, repeat must not wait till the husks dry out, because by then the nut will have been rendered bitter and inedible. Think of this as a culinary fire alarm situation. Keeper-nuts by the way are especially the ones with yellow husks, the green ones being still unripe, and the black ones too decomposed and perhaps already too bitter in the nut itself to be taking a chance on.

Husking is not a job for the squeamish; invariably it involves worms and maggots, which lay their eggs in the mushy undersides of the husks--party revelers you just have to ignore. I sit at home in the driveway, the nut bags beside me and a tarp in front of me to keep the husks from staining the concrete. There is a small tool I use for any husk that proves stubborn, but for the most part all I need is my gloved hands. Now regarding the wrigglies again, maybe one in three nuts will contain something of that sort. As far as the nuts themselves are concerned, it's unlikely that the worms at this stage have done any damage to the inside chambers or the nut, and if you just rob them of their warm husky homes, they pretty much evaporate on their own. As for the yuck factor, I myself am immune to it, in the first place because I own a colony of red wigglers in my basement who help me with my composting and who might as well be my drinking buddies I get along with them so well, and in the second place because I grew up in India, where I must have eaten a good deal of dirt, because I was always getting roundworms. You took a chalky orange-tasting medicine to get rid of them, as I recall. By the way Richard the III had roundworms too. Or so they say. Trivia for the day.

As I labor, the husks smell more and more wonderful, and curiously enough some of them actually feel warm. And yes I mean the nuts themselves are warm. Like miniature reactors. And this warmth is actually from decay. Each underside of the husk is like a compost heap that's chemically and biologically fired. But do any of them smell of rot? No, not at all. Again it's all quite aromatic and sensual, and in fact the mucky softness of the undersides, yes that mucky softness reminds me of something my mother used to tell me about. She told me that when she was a girl, often after it rained she would run from her house to a nearby park, and there she'd take off her shoes and socks and walk around barefoot in the mud, which at least in that special corner of the park always proved incredibly soft and delicate and liked to squeeze its way deliciously up between her toes. These girlhood mud-walks must have been important to her, because she told me about them on several occasions, including one on which she was very close to death. It had to have been a magnificent discovery, that mud, and a wonderful deed to walk through it, palpating the cosmos.

Nut after nut comes free from its husk, and I drop each one (dark as a newborn slick with blood) into a sky-blue bucket: thunk, thunk. That's Edward Bell, that's my mother, and someday soon enough, that's me...

HB