In a former island life, I made the best trade of my short existence up to that time. I wanted a boat to take me to Maine islands and Outward Bound wanted someone to teach its students what they could forage on their character-building “solos.” We were both perennially short of cash, so we resorted to the ancient practice of barter. In exchange for access to their small private navy to take me to any island from Cape Small to Cutler, I would teach groups of 12-24 suddenly interested teenagers what nature offered them in the way of not wasting away with hunger during three days on an uninhabited island.
Which meant I had to take a crash course myself on wild edible foods, and so I developed a palette for a host of deep woods greens and intertidal invertebrates that I would never have thought of ingesting until I had to pretend these were really good to eat. And then learned to love them. Really.
Of course on Maine’s islands, surrounded as they are by the impossibly frigid waters of the Gulf of Maine, spring takes forever to unfold. In July and August, every island beach is a riot of edible beach pea, mustardy sea rocket, and delicate orach greens and the rocky shores are replete with spikes of goose tongue, sea celery and rose hips.
But May is a whole different story. It’s foggy, chilly and desolate—just the right conditions for fiddlehead fever.
The uncurling of the fronds of certain ferns are called fiddleheads here, named for their classic violin-like necks as they come out of the soggy earth. But not just any fern is an edible fiddlehead.
Ostrich ferns, with their brown papery covering and U-shaped stems are the iconic northern New England foraged green of the deep woods glades. Sweet when young, slightly astringent, but with a mild grassy finish, you might say. Sadly, ostrich ferns, though common on rich soils in the woods on the mainland, are rare on small islands.
Thus my first eager young foragers had to learn to love cinnamon ferns, which are slightly tougher and more bitter, and altogether more papery, but still a wild delight, especially by your third day.
Penobscots, Passamaquoddys and Maliseets collected fiddleheads in the spring and from following their lead, early settlers learned to collect and prepare them. The settlers’ astringent Yankee and Acadian French descendants have been repairing to the woods ever since in time honored traditions.
Fiddleheads, the spring’s first greens, remind us that the season has finally turned. It is an axiom among principled fiddlehead foragers that you never take more than a third of the fiddleheads from a single group of fronds lest you shorten their already impermanent existence. And another rule of thumb (or coin of the realm) is that any fiddlehead bigger than a half dollar is likely to be bitter. The earlier you get them, the sweeter the reward.
But all is not calm in these northern woods, what with more and more farmers markets sprouting up all over and adventuresome foodies prowling the landscape for a new gustatory experience. A pound of fiddleheads can now fetch $10 and in some especially favorable locations, a forager might be able to gather between 100 and 200 pounds per acre. It is highway robbery if you are near a highway.
Hard as it might be to imagine, the idea that someone abroad in the land might be taking advantage of the rapid increase in value of the Maine fiddlehead to make a handful of Franklins at someone else’s expense led one Maine lawmaker, Rep. Tim Marks of Pittston, to introduce “An Act To Prohibit the Unauthorized Harvesting of Wild Mushrooms and Fiddleheads.”
A retired state trooper, Rep. Marks admitted “I’ve been a victim of fiddlehead theft for years.” As eternal vigilance is not necessarily an effective option, Marks suggested to his colleagues that it is time for the state to put its foot down—not on the gentle head of the uncurling fiddlehead, but on those who trespass against them—and us.
But David Spahr, author of a book on foraging for wild edible and medicinal mushrooms suggested it was impractical for lawmakers to expect him to be able to locate an owner when trooping through the woods.
As a mostly retired former forager, I can attest to the thrill of the chase, when you sense you are closing in on the habitat of the shy but delicate ostrich fern, from whom you will only ask for a frond or two before you go your separate ways in the woods. So I was not on the side of the landowner here. Besides which, the author pointed to the instructive story from one of his neighbors who had bristled at the notion that strangers might be required to line up at her door seeking a license to forage for fiddleheads on her land.
Thankfully for lawmakers, the fiddlehead season does not last more than two or three weeks and by the time they get around to considering what action to take on their colleague’s fiddlehead bill, they will most certainly have fiddled away the fiddlehead season.
What’s not to love in the law’s delay?