Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, won a 2010 PNBA Award.

Boundaries Feb 2011

Clockwork

Around mid-December, 2008, a very light powdery snow began to sift down over many parts of the Columbia River’s interior. The moist system that carried it stalled between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains, so fluffy snow kept coming--never heavy, but rarely stopping. By the turn of the new year, upwards of three feet covered much of the landscape from the Okanogan east past the Kettle and into the Flathead drainage, south across the Palouse, and north to the Kootenai. Unlike most years in the recent past, no warm January thaw arrived to break it down, so that when the spring equinox arrived, a glaze still coated the North Columbia country. At higher elevations, old snow connected the eaves of many houses to the ground, and made it hard to get around. Lots of people complained about being a little stir crazy.

“That’s what my grandmother Di Di told me,” smiled Robert Louie, a Kootenai friend from across the Canadian border. “Back when she was little and way before that, winter meant snow up past your waist that came early and hung on forever. Story time stretched out so long you got to hear all the good ones. It was almost always that way until she grew up, and then it wasn’t any more. ‘You wait,’ she’d say when I was a boy. ‘The elders believe that times will turn, and after you’re a grown man, maybe winter will bring snow up past your waist again.’”

When I drove out to the confluence of the Okanogan River with the Columbia early the following April, a high sun bounced white off the hillsides, so that Di Di’s prediction of time peeling back to winters past seemed very real. Thick ice still rimmed the broad bays around the entry point of the Okanogan. In open water, large rafts of migrating waterfowl waited for more spring. On the benches above the river, jumbled, crunchy snow hid the open bunchgrass and drifted thick against antelope bitterbrush.

All these things made it easy to conjure the moment when David Douglas hopped out of a Hudson’s Bay Company spring express canoe at the Fort Okanagan fur trade post during the same April week of 1826. “We were kindly received by the Factor, Mr. Annance,” wrote the frustrated plant collector, “but the ground being covered three or four feet deep with snow, nothing could be done in the way of Botany.”

And yet over the next few days, as he moved upstream between the mouth of the Okanogan and the Spokane rivers, Douglas made the first thirty-three entries onto his year’s carefully constructed plant list. To understand how the naturalist had discovered such treasures in a country covered with snow, I had to do nothing more than follow the tongue of land that sloped from Fort Okanogan State Park down to the Columbia. As the path bent conveniently into a more southerly exposure, snow wells around the larger bitterbrush melted away to reveal scatters of fractured basalt. Within those circles, bare pockets of volcanic ash and wind-blown dust glistened like mud, and many showed the first colors of spring growth. Fuzzy silver clumps that would become arrowleaf balsamroot peeked out of the muck, and a few sagebrush buttercups glowed yellow. Even more evident were the small-flowered compound umbels of the biscuitroot or desert parsley genus known as Lomatium. During his visit many Aprils ago, David Douglas had collected half a dozen different unnamed species of these nondescript but particularly abundant wildflowers. Later in the year returned to his initial list to record features of one that he particularly liked: “flowers white; anthers purple; a fine small plant.”

Although Douglas never did properly sort out these desert parsleys--taxonomists still argue over their names today--the one with the purple anthers was most likely Lomatium gormanii, also called salt and pepper because that’s exactly what the dark purple anthers against the fluffy white flowers look like. It has a small, globular root that is easy to dig, and comes up roughly the size of a fingertip.

What Douglas did not say was that salt and pepper and many of its desert parsley cousins qualified as important early food plants for Interior peoples all across the Columbia Basin. While Douglas was crouching to sample this unfamiliar growth, it is likely that Okanagan women and children were bending around him to gather their own luscious greenery and crunchy tubers. Even today, such a harvest begins the age-old first roots festival that celebrates the end of dried food and winter’s grip. By coincidence, in April 1826, the plants’ emergence coincided with the moment of Mr. Douglas’s arrival on the scene.

While Douglas lumped his several species of Lomatiums under a single name, it’s worth noting that in the 1970s anthropologist Eugene Hunn recorded words for twelve different kinds from people on the Yakama Reservation alone. Some families dug the little salt and peppers plants as an early taste treat, while others avoided them to wait for different species with larger roots. Among the various people Hunn interviewed, he received three distinct Sahaptin words for salt and pepper all by itself. Although a small plant whose nutritional importance was dwarfed by larger species, everyone seemed to know what it was. That’s the natural impact of spring’s first abundant bloom.

As far as seasonal timing goes, our current winter of 2010-11 has a much more modern feel to it than the one David Douglas experienced in 1825-26; anyone living in the along the border today is familiar with our annoying endless cycle of cold, snow, thaw, and rain. So a modern investigator, seeking to connect with what Douglas saw, might have to adjust Di Di’s Kootenai clock forward a few ticks to catch the proper turn. This can be as simple as taking a look at the weather outside, and trying to arrive at a place David Douglas visited when the moment and conditions somewhat match what he would have experienced. At the mouth of the Okanogan, that would mean a greening tongue of land that stretches down toward the water, where a person can bend close to catch dark purple spots peppered atop the smallest flower around. It won’t be long now before they magically begin to reappear, right on time.

For more on the Lomatium genus of biscuitroots and desert parleys, visit the North Columbia Monthly web site and click on the Boundaries column for July 2008, entitled “Biscuitroots.”

Illustration: Salt and Pepper (Lomatium gormanii) by Emily Nisbet

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