Lost In Bastrop State Park

There isn’t any television for me, after football season.  It’s a long seven months!  My wife has no problems with TV.  She can always fall back on the game shows, her favorite soap opera, several home makeover series and Dancing with the Stars; these are only fallback positions—in  case her smart phone should suddenly die, cutting her off from the human race! TV journalism is difficult to find, after 60 Minutes, so I’m trapped by reality shows. One evening a year ago, I stumbled upon The Discovery Channel’s Naked and Afraid series. This is where two naked people—one man and one woman—are stranded in a dangerous, desolate location without food and water.  As blood sparkled in my veins, I realized it wasn’t as cool as it looked! The idea is they must survive on their own for 21 days.  They must quickly get to know one another and struggle to successfully overcome a totally wild environment using nothing but their wits, instincts, survival skills and whatever luck comes their way.  Could something like that really happen?

Let’s say you’re out with the Bridge Maniacs in Bastrop State Park and you unwittingly get separated from everyone else. . .it happens all the time, just ask  Ronnie Lanier, Dave Hill and Gary Buckwalter!  There’s almost 6,000 acres in Bastrop State Park. Let’s further hypothesize you find yourself in the deepest, darkest, most remote part of the park.  I know, I know. . .it’s all burned and all you gotta do is look for the highway, but this is a metaphorical example, okay? So the serious question is:  if you found yourself hopelessly lost in an environment like Bastrop State Park for 21 days, could you survive?

Well, there’s water and there’s plenty of material to fashion a shelter, so the main issue would soon become food.  What is there to eat?  Some might build ingenious snares to catch small game and others might fabricate crude fishing devices (I can’t catch a fish in an inverted hub cap, much less with a crude fishing device). For me it would be about tossed salads!  I like salads.  Are any of the plants in the park edible?  Let’s find out.

Bracken ferns.  Brackens grow in acid soils in both older forests and new pine forests, especially those that have been recently burned.  Wide triangular fronds move up from a creeping horizontal underground rootstock (rhizomes), and form dense thickets.  You can see them along the Black Trail, near the water, and many other places in the park.  Brackens do not have fruits or nuts, but the immature fronds (fiddleheads) are edible.  Native Americans would sometimes eat the fiddleheads and rootstock.  The fiddleheads were usually boiled. The rhizomes were dug up and roasted over an open fire, the bark peeled off, broken into pieces and eaten—the hard centers discarded.  Other tribes preferred to steam the rhizomes in deep pits.  Hmmm.  Fire, boiling and deep pits. . .well, the tender fiddleheads might just have make do as a salad! There are two choices here:  take it or leave it. I like salad.

Greenbriar. This is my second-least favorite plant in this region, after yaupon holly.  But apparently it does have redeeming qualities, especially if you’re hungry.  I first discovered the amazing structure of this vine after moving to our property in Bastrop.  There was this tremendous tangle of vines bursting from the forest floor and I was curious about what was under the ground, so I commenced digging.  Before the day was over, I had uncovered this bulb-like tuber the size and shape of a coffin—it was huge.  It was so large and so well rooted to the soil that I had to use an axe to chop it all out of the ground.  I filled two wheelbarrows full!  Turns out, I had struck a mother load of starch and minerals, for this was the most important wild plant of the early Southeast as a free food source. The tubers were chopped up for bread or soup.  The youngest, best parts of the tuber are white, just where the vine joins.  The vine stocks, closest to the ground, can also be chewed for nourishment but beware the thorns.  Greenbriers and Catbriers are the only vines known to have both thorns and tendrils.  Leave the thorns; eat the tendrils.  As an added bonus, there are berries in January.  They have a slight sweet taste and contain 1-2 inedible seeds.

Yucca.  Several varieties grow in our region, everything from Buckley’s Yucca to Spanish Daggers.  The flowers are the primary food source (they reportedly taste like cauliflower), but you can also eat the flower stalks just before the flower blooms—they are best roasted.  Timing is apparently critical.  Flowers are best within the first few days of opening; after that they turn nasty. Stalks become tasteless and tough as the flower pod matures. Do some taste tests before getting too carried away.  From March through the end of summer, the fruit (pod-like appendages) of most yuccas ripen. All of these parts can be cooked, roasted or eaten raw—if you’re really hungry. Be selective, most of the yucca plant is poisonous to humans.  In fact, if you really want a good meal and can find water with fish in it, and your fishing skills are as bad as mine, try this:  Native Americans used to mash up yucca roots and put them in a woven bag, which was then dropped into a small pond or stream which had been dammed.  The chemicals in the roots would then enter the bloodstreams of the trapped fish, rendering them “stoned.”  They float to the surface where they can be easily caught.  If quickly placed in clean, un-poisoned water, the fish would revive and voila—Bastrop sushi!

Mesquite.  This scrub tree is considered the scourge of much of Texas—unless you’re starving. If you can find a couple good-sized rocks and a little water, you’re in luck. Indians used to grind up the ripe beans into meal and then mix them with water to make “cakes.”  The cakes were dried and eaten raw, or cooked. This is not exotic fare, but it’ll keep you in the game until something more palatable comes along.  Sometimes the beans were parched before being ground, and sometimes the entire pod was ground for food. Up to 20% of mesquite pods are infected with an aflatoxin-producing fungus.  Only pick pods that are still on the tree and that have not been attacked by boring-beetles. Seed pods contain fructose, which make them a very good food for diabetics, as the body does not use insulin to break down fructose. Leaves and young flowers can also make a great salad. . .and I do like salad.

 

Cactus. Many cacti provide food for man; however, here the prickly pear cactus is the most common.  What can you do with it?  You can drink the juice, or eat the pads (nopalitos), fruits (tunas) or flowers. A good source of Vitamin C.  The most difficult problem in the wild is removing the spines (they can lodge in your throat), so having a knife or fire to burn them off is best.  If you do have a knife, peeling the nopalitos and cutting them into thin strips is a field expedient for green beans, just a bit slimy. Nothing but your bare hands?  Eat the fruits (after sucking the sweet juice out) and flowers.   Yum!

Loblolly Pine.  Who would’ve thought?  Yep, the needles of the loblolly are long, stringy and come in threes.  We’re talking green pine needles soaked in hot water that eventually makes a Vitamin C-rich tea (not good for pregnant women, but then neither is being lost in the woods alone).  Course, it helps if you have fire and a water container, but a hollow in a rock outcropping, filled with water and exposed to the hot Texas sun will work, eventually.  You have to be pretty desperate to go this course, however.  The bark of the tree is too thick to provide moisture and the cambium layer has no caloric value, unlike other white pines.  Bummer.

American Beautyberry.  Birds love the berries; they are toxic to people in large quantity, so they don’t taste good. I once had a hiker ask, “If birds can eat them, why can’t people?” Oh, I dunno, maybe because birds and people are different?  Duh! If it’s a matter of life and death, hope it’s late summer or early fall when the berries reach full ripeness (dark purple and not wrinkled). Limit yourself to small servings and keep looking for something else to eat.  If you don’t find anything else, the best use of this plant is toilet paper.  Consider the large, velvety leaves a small final comfort. If this is all you are able to find to eat in 21 days you might as well just bend over, spread your legs . . .and kiss your ass goodbye!