Hunting deer this week, I came across a
persimmon tree loaded with persimmons. I ate several and left the rest for deer
and raccoons and possums. Every time I eat a persimmon I get the feeling that
God made them for wild creatures and meant for man to leave them alone. The
seeds are large, and too many. The skin makes your mouth feel like you ought to
drink a quart or so of water. You can eat them, and you can even eat white oak
acorns.
You have to boil white oak acorns in
clean water ‘til the water turns brown, then pour it off and boil them again
and again until the water is clear after you boil them, and then you can bake
them for ten minutes and roll them in cinnamon and sugar and eat them like
little tiny donut holes.
But the Creator made pecans and walnuts
and apples and blackberries and mushrooms and poke greens and plenty of other
things for us to eat and I am not sure he didn’t mean for men to not be eating
persimmons and acorns.
There are really good recipes for
persimmon jelly and persimmon pie, but I’m darned if I wouldn’t rather have a
good pecan pie or blackberry cobbler than a persimmon pie, and if I am going to
put jelly on my toast I want strawberry jelly, not persimmon. However if you
insist on eating persimmons, try this… remove the skin and seeds from about
forty persimmons, so you end up with about a cup of the orange inside pulp with
no seeds or skin. Put that in a bowl and sprinkle about a half a teaspoon of
cinnamon on it, and then add a tablespoon of cream or whole milk. Then add one
whole graham cracker, all crushed up.
Stir it all up and eat it and let me know
what you think. I hope it don’t make you sick! I have never tried it myself,
but it seems like it ought to be good. Every now and then, as an outdoor
writer, I get carried away with the power to talk people into doing things like
frying a coot or baking a chicken hawk, or trying to make something out of
persimmons. I don’t know why I do that, but I reckon everyone needs to feel
powerful on occasion.
Thanksgiving originally was a time for
early Americans to give thanks for what they had grown and harvested, for what
they had in a cellar or barn or smokehouse. Cellars and smokehouses are nearly
non-existent now, and there are remnants of old barns sitting back in the
weeds, falling apart, that tell us what country living was all about.
Only a small percentage of Americans
still can give thanks for the harvest. Not many of us have chickens, grow a
garden, or raise a hog or a calf to butcher in the fall. Not many give thanks
for the catfish of the past summer, the meals of wild rabbit, wild duck and
crappie. But I do.
I even thank God for giving us a good
season for tomatoes and green beans and cucumbers. It was a great year for
gardens. Maybe the acorns and walnuts weren’t quite as good, but there was a
plentiful crop of mushrooms, apples, blackberries and persimmons.
For all that, I am thankful. And I thank
God this week for good health for myself and family, for happiness, for the
technology which stems from the knowledge He gives man and the good things it
does for us. I hope you give thanks for the same things, blessed as greatly as
I feel I have been.
But I thank Him often, all year long,
when I am in the woods or on the river in the winter, when I am all by myself. Sometimes
I am thanking Him for nothing in particular, but just for letting me be far
away from people and the problems men create, where I do not need any change in
my pocket, nor bills in my wallet. More and more there is that urge to just
never go into a town anywhere but to try my best to get as far into the woods
as I can get as often as possible.
I don’t know what I would give thanks for
as I gather my family together on Thanksgiving Day, if I lived in St. Louis or
Springfield or Detroit or Los Angeles. If I were confined to a life in Chicago
or New York, how could I thank God for putting me there? I guess if I were
there, and I asked, He would tell me he didn’t put me there, nor did he put
anyone else there… he didn’t create us as puppets, he gave us the power to
choose to make the earth what we want it to be rather than what He wants it to
be.
Those who live in cities and suburbs
often seemed trapped, but I guess they are happier there as long as the
electric lines and the petroleum they have to have to live are uninterrupted. Without
them, they aren’t going to be very happy. There are only a few of us who do not
need electric lines or petroleum to have a great life, and I am thankful I am
one of those few.
I can live just fine as my grandparents
did, without any money. Think of how many people could actually live this
coming year without making one single dollar. Think of how few people in our
nation today would actually give thanks to God if that happened to them.
One of the things I thank God for at
Thanksgiving is that those of us who find such tremendous satisfaction in
seeing places which the hand of man has not altered are a small group. If the
great masses who walk the worn trails on rare escapes from the city are happy
with that, it spares the places where men like me go where there are no eroded
footpaths, or vehicle ruts.
We need places too far and too hard to
reach to become those calendar and postcard pictures, often visited, often
photographed. One naturalist writer once said, “In wildness is the preservation
of the world.” I might add, “In
wildness is the continuation of life, mankind included.”
I keep giving thanks, all year long, when
I find a new waterfall or a new cave, when I come across the track of a wild
cat or a bear or a buck rub on a 6-inch cedar tree. It may not seem like much
to give thanks for, but when I walk where there are no trails made by man, when
I find some treasure far away from eroded footpaths, I know God is there, and
he knows about me. I give thanks during all seasons, more than I ever did. And
at Thanksgiving too, more than I ever did.
I also know that such days are limited
for me. I am growing older as each season passes, and the coming and passing of
that time of falling leaves and falling snow-flakes means I have less time to
find places I have never seen. But advancing age may be a blessing for someone
who cannot live without such far, wild places. I know beyond a shadow of a
doubt that a time will come when there are no such places left and I don’t
think people like me should be here when that happens.
I am thinking Heaven must be a big, big
place, with room for saints and streets of gold and mansions on one side, and a
vast beautiful wilderness on another side for those of us who didn’t wind up
being good saint material and couldn’t care less about gold, or mansions.
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613
or email lightninridge@windstream.net
My website, where you can leave
comments, if you don’t mind giving your name, is
www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
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