The great northern boreal forest.
There if anywhere the great untouched virgin forest is intact.
Right?
For centuries—at least since the botanist Linnaeus, who traveled among the Lapps—visiting Europeans have wondered about the scars found about breast height on the north sides of scots pines in the forests where Sami people live or lived, in present-day Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Some decided that the elliptical openings were marks made by farmer settlers in the nineteenth century. But study of the growth rings of the folds of wood closing the wounds showed they were far too old for that. The Lapps, the Sami, had made them. Were they sacred signs? Were they trail markers? Were they records of reindeer migration? What were they doing there, and why were there so many of them?
After much questioning, some native informants shamefacedly admitted that when their ancestors had been starving, they might have harvested some of the tasty and nutritious phloem, or inner bark, the carrier of the food elaborated in the pine needles, to make a famine bread. But, they contended, they had learned this practice from others, and now eschewed it. So ingrained was the notion that they were an inferior people, who had only lately benefited from God’s gift of cereal grains, that they would not own a practice as old as their people.
I found a similar attitude in New York City in the 1990s, when I went to teach poetry in a bilingual class in a public school. I started the class in Spanish. “¿Quién domina el español?” I asked. “Who speaks Spanish here?” Not a single hand went up. I asked a few kids whom I thought must be native speakers. “¿Ud. no habla español?” I asked. “¿Yo? Yo no,” responded a nine-year-old boy. Whoops. I realized that I embarrassed him in front of all his friends.
I had better do something quick. I had been planning to transition into fun with tongue twisters in both Spanish and English. Instead, I said in English, “The great language for poetry in the twentieth century is not English. It is Spanish.” I started in on the rich names of the poets: Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Rafael Alberti, Antonio Machado, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo. As I pronounced the names, I could tell from the ears pricking up who really spoke Spanish, but I could also see they were dreading a lesson.
“Who can pronounce the Spanish double r?” I asked.
The same young man who had not spoken Spanish, ventured “errrre.” It rolls and rattles your lips and the roof of your mouth. When you were a child, did you ever tie a playing card to the back of your bike frame, so it made a rattling motorcycle noise as the spokes struck it? That is the errrre.
“Yes!”
“Rrrrapidos rrrrapidos corrrren los carrros del ferrrocarrrril.”
[How quickly how quickly run the cars of the railroad train.]
I asked everyone to say it. With hesitation, all did.
We said it again and again until the whole room was chanting it.
A girl volunteered, “El perrro de San Rrrroque no tiene rrrrabo. . . .”
[Saint Roque’s dog has lost his tail. . . .]
I finished it with the proper rejoinder, “Porque Rrrramon Rrramirez se lo ha rrrrrobado.”
[Because Ramon Ramirez stole it.]
We chanted that too.
Eventually, we found we had a lot of Spanish speakers, and those who were just beginners wanted to speak Spanish too. From there it is was not far to:
¡Oh, ciudad de los gitanos!
En las esquinas, banderas.
La luna y la calabaza
con las guindas en conserva.
Oh, city of the gypsies,
with flags on every corner.
The moon and the pumpkin
and the jars of cherry jam.
That is García Lorca, and it turns out you can chant that as well.
The Sami too are again finding pride in what their ancestors did, and in the deep knowledge through which they thrived in the north. Not only is pine phloem tasty and nutritious, but you can harvest it without destroying the trees, so your resource is perennial.
Scholars get angry when you tell them something has happened since time immemorial, but they are just going to have to get used to the fact that there was a time when measuring its passage was not so important. The truth is, no one knows when the Sami began to do this. They peeled back the bark and harvested strips of the long blond- to buff-colored inner bark. They did it in the spring, when the bark and the phloem peel easily. From the tree’s point of view, it is also a good time, because a wound will most quickly begin to close. It is the season for making and growing cells. The Sami then wrapped the strips in bark and buried them, building a slow fire above to cook the stuff. (Recently, they have slowly cooked it on direct flame.) The prepared phloem was ground into a flour. Just like rye or wheat flour, it was mixed into everything—in the Samis’ case, from cloudberries to reindeer blood.
And it turns out the Lapps were not the only ones to harvest and reharvest conifers. If you draw a circle with a compass around the northern cap of the world, almost everywhere it finds land and trees, it finds a people who lived by them: in the Adirondacks, in the Northwest Territories, in Siberia.