Today my friend and I went on a hike and something disturbing happened.
As we were walking back down the mountain, an older woman passed us and after noticing the basket I was carrying, called out after us “are those ramps?”
She then proceeded to tell us that it was illegal to harvest from a national forest. I could feel her anger rising as she shared with us how threatened she felt ramps were.
I wanted to tell her how we had just spent the past several hours in deep communion with the forest, using all of our senses to delight in her abundant offerings…how we were intimately aware of the concepts of sustainable harvest and reciprocity.
But she wasn’t interested in engaging with us in a true conversation, it seemed she only wanted to criminalize us.
We thanked her for letting us know and she ended the interaction by saying “well you know, it is a jail-able offense.” The words felt like a threat.
My friend responded, “i’m okay with that.”
We continued to walk on, processing how the interaction made us feel. We discussed the things we might have shared with her if she had been willing to listen...
how we had passed many abundant ramp patches in the forest that day, how we had asked the earth for permission to harvest and how we waited and listened for a resounding yes from two very plentiful ramp patches….how we only collected a very small amount to enjoy only over the next couple meals and did so with many words of praise and gratefulness.
We brought up how we did not see the federal government as the authority over our ability to harvest food from the earth, and how outlawing foraging has been used as a tool of oppression throughout history.
Soon a man (I presume her husband) came quickly walking towards us from behind. He called out “Stealing ramps is a federal crime” and then took several photos of us as he stormed ahead of us on the trail.
We were stunned. After a few moments, we called out to him asking if he would be willing to have a conversation with us. He replied that he would not stop and talk to us but he would listen as he walked in front of us.
My friend started by sharing how this interaction had made her feel. He listened for about 30 secs before stopping to face us and loudly exclaim “you are raping the earth, you are rapists”. He then stormed off down the trail in front of us.
I was completely shocked.
Here we were, two women (who are unfortunately very aware of what the expression of rape feels like) walking barefoot upon the earth as part of our own deep practice of courting and intimately being with the land. Women who have devoted our lives to living off the land in a good way… being called rapists by a stranger decked out in expensive hiking gear.
It was wild. We absolutely could not believe what had just happened.
A few minutes went by as we walked on and we found this man stopping to tell another woman on the trail all about our theft of ramps.
I had no idea what we were walking into but luckily this woman, an Appalachian native, proudly shared with him that she did not agree with his words, and that she too had been harvesting from this forest her entire life.
“As long as it is done sustainably”, peering into our basket to find only a small handful of ramps.
He continued to raise his voice, again calling us rapists and exclaiming that she must be our leader. This woman then with a strong energy of protection, demanded that he move along and leave us alone.
I feel so grateful that this woman was in the forest in that moment. It felt like walking into a bubble of safety after having felt so attacked and violated by our photos being taken for what I can only imagine was for some hateful intent.
She shared with us how people in Appalachia had been harvesting ramps from this forest for hundreds of years.
She became emotional as she told us that harvesting ramps had literally saved her life…that she walked into the forest one day suicidal, ready to end it all, and that the experience of harvesting ramps had brought her back from the brink.
We all reflected on how healing and important it is for humans to have access to the land and the forest not just for recreation but to find food and medicine.
My friend and I walked on imagining how silly it would be to have to confront authorities, basket in hand, explaining why we were foraging in public lands.
We finished our hike and luckily the man was not waiting for us.
As we lay in the grass next to our cars, attempting to regulate our nervous systems after such a bewildering encounter, we were able to acknowledge all of the beautiful things that were coming up for us.
We shared about our own journey of healing through the compulsion to police or control the people around us. We explored how deeply engrained it is in our society to categorize people into “wrong” or “right”.
We sat with how strange it is to be criminalized for intimately going to the earth, on our hands and knees, to be fed by the land we live on.
As I sit at home, still processing the day, I am deeply grateful that I still have access to a forest to walk in, to talk with, to be fed by, and to learn from. I feel grateful to lean even further into my dissolution with societal authority and more into the authority of my intuition and dropped in listening of my heart and the earth.
Thank you for sharing this experience. That man seems horribly entrenched in the colonizer paradigm. It's right up there with removing indigenous peoples from their homelands so the land can be "protected." It's unfortunate he wouldn't take the time to listen. All we can do is try and keep trying to dismantle and compost the colonial capitalist patriarchal paradigm. Keep fighting the good fight.