So I haven't posted any fishing photos lately. Which for me is incredible. What I've been doing is ginseng hunting. Something that in years past I was as passionate about as my fishing. If you are one of the two and a half people that read my stuff you already know I do some pretty hillbilly stuff. No glittery bass boats with ground penetrating, side imaging radar for me. I'm more the camping out on a rock bar, watching the fire type guy. My idea of an exotic fishing vacation isn't bonefish in Belize, instead in a couple weeks I'll be camped out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area catching smallmouth. I come by these sensibilities honestly. My first job was skinning muskrats for my father who bought fur and ginseng from other good old boys back in the day when you could still do that sort of thing in southern Ohio without getting run out of town on a rail. I used to tag along with my grandfather and great uncle when I was probably 12 or 14 on trips to the woods hunting ginseng or "sang" as they called it. My grandfather Ofa was old school country from the hollers of Kentucky as were his best friends, Wilse and Buell. Yep, Ofa, Wilse, and Buell, it doesn't get much more hunting dogs, ginseng, and running trot lines country than that.
I used to watch intently every time my dad bought ginseng. At the time ginseng was bringing "big money", maybe 50 or 60 bucks a pound. These old guys would pull up in equally old trucks and invariably have a brown paper grocery bag with a bit of dried ginseng in it. A brown paper bag or "tote" had to be the unofficial standard way of transporting your sang, I'd say 90% of it was brought in that way. This was pre digital scale days so dad would carefully check the grocery scale with little steel weights as the customer watched intently. I remember clearly my dad buying that old scale too. It was one of the few times my dad had a serious talk with me about what was right and wrong instead of just being a good example of how to live. The cause of this conversation was the fact that the only place he could find to buy a nice grocery scale was off of a former grand imperial wizard of the kkk. This was pre internet and he just couldn't find another. Out little town of South Lebanon was entirely white as was my class that year in school. But dad had served with blacks in the army and worked with some at GE and made sure I understood that people were just people and there were good ones and bad ones of all races.
My dad was an avid gardener and naturally began to grow some ginseng in the woods behind our house. Every year adding another bed or two till he ended up with something like a quarter acre covered in ginseng. So I've pretty much spent my life immersed in a ginseng culture. I found that hunting ginseng, like fishing or hunting or most anything in life really, can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it out to be. You can simply go for a walk in the woods hoping to find some or you can apply serious thought to the process. Ginseng you see won't thrive just anywhere, it is in fact pretty strict about the conditions it prefers. Nowadays scouting trips don't involve looking for ginseng itself so much as looking for the correct set of conditions and most notably the right companion plants that also prefer the same conditions. Plants like maidenhair fern, cohosh, jack in the pulpit, and goldenseal prefer roughly the same conditions as sang and I'll skim thru a new woods looking for these as much or more than actual ginseng while scouting. In my part of the country probably the best indicator plant for me is baneberry. Baneberry looks a lot like cohosh but has white berries on vivid red stems. These white berries are deadly poison, as poisonous as anything around here if I remember right and make the plant easy to ID. Whenever I see baneberry I stop in my tracks and begin looking intently for ginseng. I think the only time you see baneberry without ginseng is in woods where the ginseng has long been dug out. If you are walking a woods and finding sang once in a great while then you start finding baneberry slow down there's probably ginseng growing somewhere nearby.
Even though ginseng has trended mostly upward in price over the years, to the point I once sold some for around a thousand dollars a pound, it's still hard to make any serious money at it if you add up all the time you spend in the woods scouting and digging. I doubt you are making more on the hour than a decent factory job and you are working ten times harder. That being said I love it. You have to be really connected to the land to be good at it. and of course you get all the side benefits of time spent outdoors. This year I've seen deer, wild turkeys, had squirrels rain down hickory shells on me and even seen a big coyote slipping thru the underbrush. Just today I sat against a big tree having my lunch watching the sunlight send beams of light into a dark holler while the wind swept thru the treetops up on the ridge. Then off thru the woods a turkey began to yelp and continued to do so for ten minutes. It's times like this when I'd just as soon be from solid hillbilly stock as anything else...
No comments:
Post a Comment