March Madness

First of all, my apologies for being a bit late with this month’s edition. I’m still in recovery mode from the National Wild Turkey Federation Convention in Nashville. It was a grand occasion, with some 42,000 in attendance, and as always I enjoyed seeing old friends, making new ones, and seeing all that’s new and noteworthy the world of the wild turkey. We also sold enough books to justify the trip financially. The downside was that I arrived with some sort of bug that rendered me literally speechless by late Friday (I flat-out lost my voice, something those who know me well might consider a blessing) and feeling miserable. Thank goodness Dr. Bobby Dale, a friend and fellow writer on wild turkeys (his latest book is Turkey Roost Tales, and I have both the regular and deluxe editions for sale on my website turkey list), was there to help me out. A Z-pack and some steroids helped me weather the convention, but after returning home I had lingering problems that are only now clearing up (after another round of antibiotics). The bottom line, I fear, is that I ain’t got the “get up and go” I once had, or, to put it another way while using an old mountain saying in a different context, “the spirit’s willing but the flesh is weak.” At any rate, I’m late, and my apologies, but hopefully the words that follow will evoke some memories or maybe remind you that March always gives way, in due course, to the glories of April.

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It’s a time of the year which can be, depending on your outlook or maybe just the weather on a given day, anywhere from marvelous to miserable. That’s quite possibly why old Will Shakespeare warned about the Ides of March. (I wonder how many of you know what “Ides” means? I certainly didn’t until I looked it up. Turns out it refers to the 15^th day of the month in March, May, July, and October and the 13^th for the other eight months.)

At any rate, being one who generally prefers to look at the optimistic side of matters, my means of dealing with March madness take a positive turn. For starters, once March arrives you can pretty well reckon that the miserable state of mind usually described as cabin fever won’t be around much longer. As greening-up time arrives, birds start singing with a will, poke shoots stick their heads through the warming soil, and old-timers start thinking about some type of spring tonic to clear the system. The latter might take the form of tired-and-true sulfur and molasses, some early field greens (a bait of poke salad will work wonders in cleaning out the system—so much so you’ve got to wonder why someone hasn’t figured out how to turn it into a foodstuff to address problems with constipation), or a soothing cup of sassafras tea liberally laced with sourwood honey and maybe even a few drops of anti-snakebite medicine.

When it comes to the matter of poke salad, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. These wild greens, cooked in two or three washings of water then topped with had-boiled eggs, can be a tasty dish indeed. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for this wild vegetable, thanks at least in part to the fact that it provided the first “cash money” I ever earned. My second grade teacher, Emily Davis, flat-out loved poke salad, and anytime I could fill a number eight poke (another use of the word, this time meaning a paper bag) with the tender young shoots it would put two bits in my pocket.

Another aspect of March that brings positive thoughts is the fact that once the month arrives trout fishing lies just around the corner. Although today streams in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where I cut my fly-fishing teeth, stay open throughout the year, when I was a boy there was an “opening day” for all trout streams. If memory serves it came on the first Saturday in April and was invariably the occasion for a grand and long anticipated weekend camping trip. State opening day must have been a bit different (maybe just the first day of April), because I have distinct memories of fishing waters stocked by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (lower Deep Creek and Coopers Creek) for stocked trout, only to be camping at Poke Patch (there’s the word again!) the following weekend.

Incidentally, catching stocked trout, while acceptable, was considered a distinctly inferior experience in comparison with that associated with catching stream-bred fish. Trout fresh from the hatchery were locally known as “dough bellies” or “soap heads,” and in addition to being far easier to catch than their wild cousins, the stockers were distinctly inferior on the table.

As often as not, opening day in my boyhood years was bitterly cold, although I need to make it known here and now that I think all the hoopla about global warming is sheer claptrap. Any cause that has the name Al Gore associated with it immediately sets my bull butter barometer in overdrive. With that necessary aside out of the way, back to my boyhood. In those years my minimal equipment most certainly did not run to waders, so that meant braving the icy waters if I wanted to catch any fish. One occasion I particularly recall took place at Poke Patch (yes, it takes its name from the fact that once upon a time poke salad aplenty grew there). In company with my buddy Bill Rolen and one or two others (I was a sophomore in high school, and the reason I recall that is because an election for student government vice-president had been held on the Friday we set out to camp), I hiked in for the opening weekend of fishing. I lost the election and don’t have a clue who won—so much for the “politics” of high school student offices—but I have to reckon I was the real winner because I was fishing.

It was cold, bitterly so for April, and on Saturday morning there was actually a skim of ice in the camp water bucket. Wading more than a half hour at a time would leave your toes painfully cold and slightly blue, but we braved the elements and caught enough trout to have fish for supper. Those were good times, a pointed reminder that you can sample a great measure of pleasure in the simplest sort of ways.

One culinary aspect of these boyhood trips into the back country deserves special mention. An integral part of opening up the season was enjoying a meal of fried trout, fried potatoes, and a glorious side dish from nature’s rich bounty in the form of ramps and branch lettuce (the latter is also known as saxifrage). Given the odiferous nature of ramps, if anyone ate them everyone did, in self-defense if nothing else, but this wild member of the leek family is truly delicious (see recipes below).

At that point in my life there was no connection whatsoever between coming spring and gobbling turkeys, but that’s one example of a situation where the “good old days” are now, not then. I never saw a wild turkey until well after I finished college, although I would hasten to add that I’ve done my level best to make up for lost time in the last quarter century or so. Dad mentioned getting into a bunch of turkeys one time when he was squirrel hunting in the Andrews Bald area along the main ridge of the Great Smokies back before the creation of the Park. Similarly, from time to time my Grandpa Joe alluded to experiences, back in the days when the American chestnut was still the monarch of the mountains, when he encountered a drove of wild turkeys every so often during his woodland wanderings.

Now March is a month of scouting for the serious turkey hunters. If a warm spell lasts for a few days, chances are pretty good you can hear some gobbling at daylight, and if nothing else there’s the opportunity to walk and wander through the bare woods of late winter looking for sign in the form of fresh scratching or droppings. While doing that, you can also hunt for whitetail sheds, maybe figure out a good place or two to position a deer stand a few months down the road, and enjoy the earliest signs of earth’s coming renewal.

That might mean service trees splashing a landscape that is largely grey and brown with a bit of white, or the first shoots of early blooming plants such as bloodroot or trilliums showing their heads. March is also a fine time for planning and preparing, or as Grandpa Joe used to describe it, “dreamin’ and schemin’.”

For me, that means an open invitation to get ready for two things—turkey hunting and trout fishing. Both are pure addictive poison. As a long deceased friend said to me early in my turkey hunting career: “These folks who talk about cocaine being addictive don’t know anything. If you want to lose your soul, get involved with wild turkeys.” Trout fishing laid a firm hold on a corner of my sporting heart more decades ago than I care to name, while about three decades ago turkey hunting made me a hopeless, helpless, regularly humbled, and even haunted slave to April dawns and the sound of old longbeards giving voice high atop a mountain ridge. Over the coming weeks, trout and turkeys will loom large in my existence, as they have done for most of my life, and I feel genuinely blessed that such is the case.

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PAN-FRIED TROUT

My personal preferences run distinctly in the direction of smaller fish, with those no longer than seven or eight inches being ideal. Trout are among the easiest of all fish to clean, and once you have dressed them, preparation is simplicity itself. I like to cook them in bacon grease, and the bacon has its own use in the next recipe. You want the grease so hot it is just short of smoking. Dip your trout in a zip-lock bag of stone-ground cornmeal to which you have added salt and pepper to taste, making sure that they get a complete “overcoat” of the meal. Then it is time for the kind of “release” my beloved Mom believed in practicing when it came to dealing with trout; namely, “release to grease.” Fry the fish until they are golden brown on either side, and if they are small ones cooked the right way, you can actually eat bones and all. I can consume a Park limit of five without batting an eye, and there were times in my greedy gut boyhood days when twice that number was about right.

RAMPS WITH “WILTED” BRANCH LETTUCE

Gather a good mess of ramps—figure a dozen or so per person—and clean them thoroughly. Chop up with branch lettuce to make a salad-like mixture. Crumble the bacon used to obtain grease for the trout recipe above into bits and sprinkle it liberally over the ramps and branch lettuce. Finally, pour some of the piping hot grease left from frying fish over the salad as a dressing (hence the “wilted” lettuce). It’s a might satisfying side dish for fish, and if you really want to do things up right, give some consideration to baking a pone of cornbread to go with the meal. I get hungry just thinking about it, and it is thoughts of such fare, along with gobbling turkeys and rising trout, that sustain me through the madness of March.

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