Under the Alders

I was seventeen and I was scared.  For the first time in my life I was leaving the comforts of my valley home for an extended period of time.  This valley, this land, the place on earth that sings in my blood, and I was leaving it.  Not for a few weeks like on our family trips, but for a few years.  I was going off to get an education, something that I had always wanted to do.  I had lived my life up to this moment to do this.  But now I was scared.  I was this little country girl that was going to the big University of Madison, WI.  I would be there with hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world, people who's lives were so different from mine.  How would I cope with all of them when my life had revolved around this one little valley near this one little town in a sparsely populated area of what is now referred to as a "Fly Over" state?

I changed my mind.  I didn't want to further my education.  I wanted to stay home with my horses and dogs and the forests and farms and the rivers and...  My father, ever the patient man, was at his wits end to why his middle child, his foolish and reckless offspring, was too scared to do what she had dreamed of for seventeen years.

"I've seen you walk into paddocks with wild mustangs, shoot rapids on The Wolf, and bivouac off the side of a cliff just to see the sunrise!  You've had more broken bones than your four brothers and sisters combined.  You aren't scared of anything!" He growled something to that affect.

But that was different.  Broken bones heal, The Wolf River and I are good friends, even if she tries to kill me from time to time, and horses...well, I've never met a horse I couldn't work with eventually.  This was different.  This was the unknown.  This I might fail at.

I remember saying something like how sophisticated these people were going to be.  I was going to meet people from cities all over the world.  They will have slept under skyscrapers and city lights.  They would have seen Broadway shows and gone to concerts.  They will have people skills from being around people so much.  I was nothing more than a redneck living in the backwoods and I had the people skills of a fencepost!  Then I said a phrase that I believe has come to define who I am.

"My babysitters were the hickory trees in the fields!"

When my parents would go to work in the fields they would put us kids in the shade of one of the two shagbark hickory trees the grew in the center of those field.  I didn't have daycare, I had hickory shade.  How backwoods could a person be?

My father was pretty much exasperated by this time and said the phrase that still makes me smile.

"I was raised under the alders!  If I could go to college and give you kids a better opportunity I would.  But I can't and I want you to have what I didn't!"

My father was the bravest and wisest man I have ever known and he never had a day of education.  No elementary school, no middle school, no high school.  He was a swamp rat and everything he learn, he learned in the bottom of a skiff, gliding under the alders in the backwaters of the Mississippi River and Her tributaries.

Well, needless to say, I went to college, which for me was the best move of my life.  But I often think of my father and his wildness.  Raised under the alders.  How much more wild could a person be?

Alders are hard to classify, which wild things should be.  Is she a tree?  Is she a bush?  Is she a shrub?  A small tree, and large shrub, a bush if she is cut back, she is all of those things.  She is also a healer of the land.  She form a symbiosis with a bacteria of the genus Frankia, which fixes atmospheric nitrogen.  Which is a fancy, scientific way of saying she take nitrogen out of the air and puts it into the soil.  And she does it better than almost any other plant out there.  In fact she does this healing best when she is broken herself.  Heavy snows, high water or even human cutting damaging her makes her give even more nitrogen to that soil.  She gives her all even when hurt.

Because of this extra nitrogen, alder has many of my wild medicinals growing at her feet.  Boneset, hops, angelica, skullcap, joe pye weed...to name a few.  Alder gives them what they need to thrive in the wet areas.  Without her tangled branches I would have less and less wild medicinals every year until finally they would fade from the area.  She gives me those gifts. 

But alder isn't one of those sweet friends that will do anything for you.  Nope, she is a wild one, living by her own rules.  Walking through alder swamps is the art in ducking, twisting, stepping over and sometimes leaving a few pieces of hair and clothing to her clinging mass.  She is thousands of stems weaving together to form an almost impenetrable fortress.  Add to this the northern water snake and the hundreds of different spiders that call her home and its no wonder that most people avoid going into her hidden depths.  This makes her a safe haven for mink and otter and many different birds, some of which even carry her name such as the alder flycatcher.  The bigger predators like wolves, bobcat, bear, coyote and humans very seldom enter into her core, making it safer for the little ones to live their lives undisturbed.

Alder has uses for humans who want to venture into her.  She is the perfect place to find oyster mushrooms.  Many of my casseroles I serve have dried mushrooms I found while weaving my way through the alders.  Her dead wood (and she breaks easily so she has a lot of it) makes really hot fires, often referred to as "biscuit fires" out here in the boonies because a quick hot fire is needed to make biscuits.  She can be tapped like a maple tree and about 60 gallons of her sap can make 1 gallon of syrup.  With our changing climate she may be the "last man standing" on the syrup front in generations to come.  Her wood has a "tone" to it and is used to make musical instruments that need a vibrations board like guitars and pianos.  And many woodworkers cut their teeth on her because her wood is pretty and easy to work with, though it doesn't last long.

Alder this time of year has catkins, or male flowers that will soon produce pollen. Until they do they make a nice addition to salads or breads or even just boiled and eaten with some crumbles of a tart cheese on it.  Think pine nuts and you can find uses for the catkins.  This is what I was doing down in the alder swamp today.  With the snakes and spiders gone for the year, she is just a touch different to climb though.  I am collecting a few bags of catkins to add flavor and texture to the 'end of winter' fare I still have down in the cellar.  My body is craving the wild flavors that spring will bring but...aren't...quite...here...yet...  Alder gives her flavor to foods my body is starting to tire from, stretching my larder for a little longer until I can stuff the first nettle leaf boiled in maple sap into my mouth.

Medicinally alder has much to offer as well.  First her inner bark is a bitter.  Bitters were used in the past to help aid in digestion.  The bitter flavor forces the body to make more bile and bile aids in digestion and cleaning of the system.  Chewing on the inner bark for a few seconds and swallowing the juices or making a strong decoction of it and take a few quick swallows with help your body calm your stomach down after a heavy meal. 

This same decoction can be used much the same way a witch hazel decoction is used, as a tightener and toner.  It is a good decotion to close off pore after the skin has been cleansed as a way to prevent acne and good to soothe hemorrhoid flare ups as well.   When we had chicken pox as children mamma would give us alder baths by putting the bark and wine vinegar into warm bath water and letting us soak the itches away.  When people come to me with the problem of smelly feet alder bark may be one of the medicines I reach for to bath their feet in.  This same tightening and toning is a good thing to do to your feet if you are planning on a long hike. Soak you feet in a foot bath made of alder and white oak bark and your feet will toughen up so's not to get blisters on the trail.

Modern medicine is looking into alder leaves as a healer for tumors, something that healers have known for a long time.  Way back in the 1600s, Parkinson wrote how the fresh leaves could be laid on open tumors to dissolve them.  In the 1970s, in the "Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences"  it was found that the leaves and inner bark or the red alder contained lupeol and betulin, two compounds that help heal tumor activity in the body.   Simple things like putting a piece of chewed bark on a cancer sore or cold sore can help heal them faster than they would on their own.

So leaving a few hairs behind in the alder swamp can be helpful in healing the body just as much as it is helpful in healing the soul.  Stepping into the alder swamps may be just as frightening to some people as stepping into college life in Madison, Wisconsin was to me all those years ago.  But both worlds have much to offer us.  College campuses are full of information, shared in hopes of making a better world.  Alder swamps are full of information too, just share in a different way, a more tangled and wild way.  

Under the alders is a wild place, filled with wild things...and every now and again, one of those wild things is me.  Not a bad way of spending a day.