Just the tip

I was doing some community tree planting this morning with my kids, and while we were waiting around, I started nibbling on some of the new growth that was coming in on the spruce trees.  If you look around at the conifers this timee of year, you're bound to see the new needles forming.  They are a totally different shade of green from the rest of the tree, and a much softer texture:

By now, my kids are completely used to me eating random plants and things growing all over the place, and they usually want to try stuff too.  These spruce tips were a huge hit however.  And well they should be - they're delicious.  Plus they're much cheaper vitamins than the pills you buy at the local pharmacy.

Long ago I had heard the story of how Jacques Cartier's crew had reportedly cured the scurvy from their long sea voyage by drinking spuce tea, which they learned from the local Iroquois.  The practice of using evergreen tea or flavoured ale, rich in Vitamin C (as well as a whole bunch of other vitamins and minerals), apparently became popular among the British Royal Navy as well.  I use it throughout the year, especially in the winter, if I ever feel a cold coming on.  However, this is the best time of year because you can just eat the new needle growth as a convenient trailside snack, rather than having to boil the branches down into tea.  They taste sour and kind of lemony, with just a bit of a Christmas Tree undertone.

I think you can use basically any kind of coniferous evergreen.  I've tried fir and pine as well, but spruce seems to me the best.  The only kind you absolutely CANNOT use is Yew.  That shit is great for making bows, but it'll kill you five ways before you hit the ground if you eat it.  Luckily Yew is pretty distinctive looking and it'd be hard to confuse it for other coniferous trees.  I've also read that pregnant ladies shouldn't use spruce tea, which is probably good advice.  I think if you're pregnant, you probably shouldn't go around nibbling on random foliage anyway, but that's just me.

For athletes, the advantages of Vitamin C are huge, of course for preventing illness but also for it's antioxidant capacity in terms of muscle soreness and recovery.  Spuce and pine have FAR more Vitamin C than citrus fruits, as well as a pile of other vitamins and phytonutrients.  No sugar and none of the filler shit that you'd get in vitamin pills.  Give them a try. But remember, just the tip....

I'd tap that

I love trees. Not, as the title might suggest, in some sort of ‘unholy’ way (It’s actually quite ‘hole-y”, as you’ll soon learn), but I just love being around trees, the sound of their leaves, the way they look silhouetted against the evening sky.  But this time of year, I love them just a little bit more than usual, for the very utilitarian fact that they provide delicious sap.  Sure it came a little later than usual this year thanks to the brutal winter we’ve had, but my maple trees finally started running this past week.

I don’t have a huge woodlot or anything either, just a modest suburban corner lot with a grand total of 5 maple trees (I had 6 until a storm blew one down last fall, destroying some fence but thankfully narrowly missing both my kids’ playhouse and my boat trailer).  But on a day like today (around 6 degrees Celsius and sunny) the sap will be running out of those things like nobody’s business.  My method is to drill a hole in the south-facing side of the tree – I don’t think the height really matters all that much but I tend to make it about 2-3 feet off the ground.  I make them about 3 inches deep, and you could use a drill bit anywhere from about ¼ to ½ an inch.  I have an old hand crank drill that I inherited from my grandfather (which I like to use because it makes me feel like an old-time voyageur or something), but a regular power drill works fine too.   

The important thing is to drill the hole so that you can wedge the end of some plastic tubing firmly into the hole so that it stays there by friction.  I use just regular clear plastic tubing that you should be able to find for dirt cheap at any plumbing or hardware store.  I run each tube from the tree into the mouth of a 1.5 Litre wine bottle (Why do I have a tonne of empty 1.5 Litre wine bottles? Don’t you judge me!). Wine bottles work well because they’re narrow enough at the top that no bark and other shit from the tree will fall into your sap.  If there’s snow on the ground still, you can hold the bottle in place by wedging it in the snow (which has the added advantage of keeping the sap cool.  On a sunny day like today, that bottle will be full to the brim of sap by the time I get home from work.

Now for the interesting part.  You may be tempted to boil that shit down to make maple syrup.  Well don’t! Just drink it straight up.  I’ve been collecting sap for four years now.  The first year I collected massive amounts and froze it in my deep freeze.  Then one day we set up a propane cooker and poured it all into a big lobster pot and spend the day boiling it down.  It consumed almost an entire tank of propane to keep the sap bubbling away all day, and all of the stirring and monitoring the temperature to prevent burning proved to be more effort than the end product justified.  We ended up with about a Litre of syrup, and it was delicious.  But chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you aren’t shovelling down pancakes and waffles on the regular.  And if you are, you should really stop that you tubby bitch – that shit is bad for you.  Aside from using it as a glaze for grilled salmon or maybe sparingly in salad dressings, the uses of large quantities of maple syrup for the health conscious person, are somewhat limited.

But sap on the other hand…it’s nature’s Gatorade.  In the past three years, I’ve foregone the boiling down process and just drank the sap directly from the tree as an energy drink.

Sap from two different trees - notice the different colour

According to Nutrition Data (which I have no reason to doubt), one cup of maple syrup has 216 grams of carbohydrate (of which 192 grams are sugar).  When I boiled the sap down that year, I didn’t measure the ratio precisely (sap to syrup yield), but from what I’ve read, the usual ratio is about 40:1.  That is, you need 40 Litres of sap to yield one Litre of syrup.  That varies a bit through the season, and the species of tree (I’ve used Sugar Maple, Red Maple and even Manitoba Maple) but I suspect it’s roughly correct.  By that logic, a cup of straight-up sap would contain about 5 grams of sugar.  That’s only a teaspoon, which is a hell of a lot better than commercial energy drinks that probably contain 25-30 grams per cup.  It fits with the taste of the sap, which is like very mildly sweet water with a subtle treeish undertone (fellow Tolkien fans will get that one).  I don’t think it’s made me grow any taller or made my hair curlier, but it’s incredibly refreshing.  I haven’t been able to find a nutritional analysis of maple sap anywhere, but it stands to reason that it would have trace amounts of a bunch of vitamins and minerals as well.  I trust that more so than I do the manufactured ratios of electrolytes (mostly sodium) found in commercial drinks.  

According to this article, sap contains quite a bit of calcium, which might explain the folk belief that it was good for the bones.  I actually lived in South Korea for a little over a year between 2005-2006, but I was oblivious to the fact that this is the one place in the world where people seem to have a tradition of drinking maple sap. Whether the “good for bones” claims are true or not, it’s a delicious drink that I look forward to each spring.  I took about a Litre of it with me to my regular Monday evening basketball league this week.  We play for about 90 minutes, so I usually just drink water.  And I’m not going to lie that my energy levels are usually a bit lower towards the end of the night.  But this week, I was busting my ass down the court right until the end of the night.  I felt great, was grabbing more rebounds, felt lighter on my feet.  It could have been placebo…but then again maybe it was something in the water.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

                                          

- Dylan Thomas

Blast from the Past

I just stumbled across a poem that I wrote a long time ago....almost exactly 10 years to the day  (February 2004).  In the absence of making any kind of New Year's resolutions I thought that maybe I reflect on this and see if I'm being consistent with the kind of life I envisioned a decade ago, when I was a scraggly haired hippie, living on a farm and studying Latin poetry in graduate school.  A lot has changed obviously, but I think I still identify with the core values that I wrote about back then.  You have to get past the bad poetry, but I think i was kind of writing a manifesto of sorts on the idea of simplicity and authenticity.  As Kierkegaard wrote, "Whoever you are, eternity asks you just one thing: whether you have lived authentically or not."  The title refers to an ancient Greek political/philosophical concept roughly translated as 'self-rule', or what might be extrapolated to self-reliance or self-sufficiency (I was reading a lot of RW Emerson at the time). Some of this stuff is still what I'm trying to convey with this blog.  I.e. the real good shit in life (be that in the realm of fitness or more broadly) doesn't have to cost anything.  It isn't complicated or hard to grasp.  It's right in front of you at all times, if you care to see it.  I look at this poem now and I see a lot that still resonates with me today.  When I wrote this, those 'straw-haired children' were just a glimmer in my mind's eye, still many years off.  But nowadays, with them 5 and 3-years-old and growing so fast (although only one has blonde hair), I still can't think of a happier way to spend a day than sitting beside them, putting worms on hooks and tossing lines into the water.

Autarcheia

Split wood, blow life into woolen hands,

frosty beard.

Stalk deer in the crackling dawn

of November.

Study overnight cottontail triad prints in the soft powder,

piecing together the scene.

Drink Lapsang Souchong on a stump in the vernal woods.

Wade swift trout streams with your straw-haired children.

Gather cattail pollen by bicycle, shaking seedheads into Tupperware,

Bake golden bread.

Sprout mung beans and lentils in glass jars on the windowsill.

Build a stanchion from scrap wood,

To milk your goats.

Pick beets and kohlrabi,

Steam and eat with butter.

Gather acorns from the white oak, boil out the tannins

Several times.

Learn to carve wood like your grandfather.

Build wind turbines like your great-uncle did

In dust bowl Saskatchewan nineteen thirties,

Outta the rear axle of an old Ford van.

Learn the plants,

Gather mallows as Hesiod did, and lamb’s quarters,

Mint for headaches, wild ginger for the stomach,

Plantain and spotted touch-me-not for stings.

Clip fiery blossoms of staghorn sumac,

For sun tea, sweetened with honey from your hives.

Plant a Linden tree for the bees,

Learn the craft from Aristaeus,

Smoke from burnt sumac calms them.

Waft sunset clove cigarettes,

Reclining on porch steps.

Learn the language of birds,

Coverse with crickets in the dewy crepuscule.

Re-use everything.

Catch rainwater in beautiful glass vessels.

Save seeds.

Scribble poems on rafters,

Read Milton by firelight,

Watching wax drip from the candelabra.

Shudder beneath Orion

And the inky black of January skies

To glimpse chimney smoke and the brilliance

Of undulating snowbanks refracting the moonlight.

Make noontime love in the summer grass

Backs of your knees sweating.

Take long hesperial walks along dusty roads,

Holding your wife’s slender hand.

Feed your chickens

Grains and crushed eggshells, like your grandmother said to.

Cut lilac sprigs for the kitchen table

Stain your teeth violet

With wild grape wine

And howl at the coyotes.

Value simplicity.

- DB (2004)

Watered down fitness advice

My new favourite lunchtime workout lately has been swimming in the river outside my office.  I used to occassionally swim at lunch at my old office (mostly to do with trying to pass random military swim tests), but it was a complicated affair of driving to the closest indoor city pool and then getting back in reasonable time.  At my new office, I step out the door and am faced with the glorious Ottawa River.  A few months ago, in the peak of summer, I couldn't resist any longer and decided to go for a dip.  Since then it's become a weekly habit to go at least once.  And despite the temperatures getting a bit cooler now, when I went last (earlier this week) the water was still quite pleasant.  

Each time is a little bit different.  There's a little rocky island about 150-200 metres offshore to which I often head.  There's nothing much on it but a few shrubs, seagull bones and shit.  There's a lot of wild purslane all over the place, which makes a nice lemony snack.  I usually am still fasting at that point in the day so it always feels like a treat.  I've even discovered two scraggly tomato plants, with some green tomatoes on them, which i can only figure grew from some seeds that wafted downstream in the breeze or from compost drifting ashore.  It doesn't look like another soul has been on the island for years, which is kind of nice because it gives a person that sort of Robinson Crusoe, 'undiscovered country' feeling when you step ashore, even though it's in the midst of the city.

Other times I just swim around randomly.  This past week, I swam out along some rocky bluffs that skirt the edge of the river and climbed up into some of the little overhangs and caverns that have been eroded by the river over the years.  Pretty neat area.  Even found some interesting patterns in the rocks that look like little fossilized worms or vegetation of some sort.  All in all much more interesting that a chlorinated indoor pool.

I have to admit I get some weird looks from passers-by on the shoreline.  There's a nice walking trail along the river so there's a lot of foot traffic during the lunch hour, especially on nice days.  I've never seen another person in the water here, or anywhere close by.  It strikes me as a bit strange. There's no beach or anything, but it's not like the water is hard to access.  It's rocky, yes, but you only have to get in about 10 feet or so and it drops off very deep and the water is clear and free from weeds.  I can't figure out what the reason is.  A lot of people I tell seem a bit shocked at first, i think because they think it must be dirty.  Admittedly, there have been a few cases where the city has allowed raw sewage to dump into the river during heavy storm overflows, but it doesn't seem to discourage people from the beaches in the summer.  And while I certainly would rather there was no untreated sewage going into the river ever, it's a big, deep river and I'm sure it's pretty diluted by the time it gets to me.  Besides, I fully agree with George Carlin's very Nietzschean bit about how swimming in raw sewage strengthens the immune system.  Same reason I get about 10-20% of my calories from food that's fallen on the ground (actually no, wait, that's because I have young kids).  Of course Carlin is dead....but so far I'm not. Part of me really wants to rebel against this whole notion that we can somehow wall ourselves off from pollution by avoiding the 'dirty' places.  If ecology teaches anything it's that there's no hope in that...everything is connected to everything else and the fences we try to put up just serve to make us feel better.  We need to take better care of the whole place, not just try to avoid the nasty stuff.  We're all downstream so to speak.

We're well into October now and I'm hoping I can at least make it into November.  I met a very cool Swedish guy when we were vacationing in Cuba last winter, and he was telling me about how he was on track to swim in the ocean every month of the year.  Now I think he was from the southern part of Sweden but that's still pretty bad-ass.  The river here freezes over by December/January so I think November is probably the best I can hope for, but you never know.

Speaking of Swedes, you know else was a fan of open water swimming - a dude named Beowulf:

Unferth spoke:  
"Are you that Beowulf
who struggled with Brecca
in the broad sea
in a swimming contest?
The one who, out of pride,
risked his life in the deep water
though both friends and enemies
told you it was too dangerous?
Are you the one who hugged
the sea, gliding through the boiling
waves of the winter's swell?
You and Brecca toiled
seven nights in the sea,
and he, with more strength,
overcame you."

Beowulf spoke:
"Well, my friend Unferth, you
have said a good many things
about Brecca and that trip,
drunk on beer as you are.
Truth to tell, I had more strength
but also more hardships in the waves.
He and I were both boys
and boasted out of our youth
that we two would risk
our lives in the sea.
And so we did.
With naked swords in hand,
to ward off whales,
we swam. Brecca could not
out-swim me, nor could I
out-distance him. And thus
we were, for five nights.
It was cold weather and
the waves surged, driving us
apart, and the North wind came
like a battle in the night.
Fierce were the waves
and the anger of the sea fish
stirred. My coat of mail,
adorned in gold
and locked hard by hand,
helped against those foes.
A hostile thing drew me
to the bottom in its grim grip,
but it was granted to me
to reach it with my sword's
point. The battle storm
destroyed that mighty
sea beast through my hand.
And on and on evil
things threatened me.
I served them with my sword
as it was right to do.
Those wicked things
had no joy of the feast,
did not sit at the sea's
bottom eating my bones." (translation by D.Breeden)

Now that's some really bad-ass shit.  Dude swam for 5 days in a full suit of armour and a carrying a sword, and killed a bunch of sea monsters at the same time.  The least I can do is go for a little dip on my lunch break and carry back some tomatoes and fossils!

Another swimming contest I like to think about is the one from the movie Gattaca.  It's a great scene from an ever greater movie.  Serves as a good bit of admonition for those times when a person feels like they're a slave to their genetic limitations or that somehow other people have it easier.  Goes to show that it's most often the people that work the hardest and want it the baddest that succeed, not necessarily the ones with the most natural talent or advantages.  A good reminder at all times, especially for those of us in the fitness realm.  And swimming always makes me think of this scene, and the message therein - a good mnemonic kick in the ass!

Well, that got a little more philological and philosophical than intended.... 

All I'm really trying to say is that I'd encourage anyone who has access to a river to ignore the strange stares you might get and just use it.  Swimming is killer exercise.  I'm not even that great at it but it always leaves me feeling like I had a good workout, especially in open water with a decent current (this spot is downstream from some crazy rapids at Chaudierre Falls).  I'm always starving afterwards, which to me is a good sign that I worked hard.  Plus, I used to pay 5 bucks a shot to swim in the public pool, plus gas to get there.  This is free for the taking.
So dive in.  
 

Pacing - Hiking with kids

Having the day off work, I took both of my kids hiking last Monday.  My daughter has been obsessed with waterfalls lately, so we drove about 40 minutes out of the city to the Eardley escarpment of Gatineau Park, to do one of my favourite local hikes at Luskville Falls.  I love the scenery out there – for some reason it always reminds me of the mountains in South Korea and brings back a lot of good memories of hiking around the forests there.  

The last time I had done the trail was in the Fall and I had been able to get away and do it alone, without the kids.  I had taken them before, but they had been young enough to ride in those backpack kid-carrier devices.  This was the first time that I figured they were both mobile enough to hike on their own.  There are some pretty steep sections and I had pretty low expectations about how far we would get.

Was I ever pleasantly surprised!  We managed to hike probably 2-3 kilometres up and back, with much of that steep enough that the kids had to scamper over rocks on all fours.  I don’t think I heard a complaint the entire time.  We usually go for hikes on trails that are much flatter and easier for little feet to navigate, but still I’m usually well prepared for a chorus of “My legs are tired”, etc.  It didn’t happen this time.  I don’t know exactly what it was but they really rose to the challenge.  No complaints at all.  My only guess is that beforehand I had talked it up to them as a bit of a challenge and that it was okay if we didn’t get very far because it was a pretty steep climb – I think that element of a challenge really made them want to do it even more.  Goal-setting starts by age 3 apparently!

Of course, we kept a pretty slow pace, but it turned out to be a nice change.  Like I said, the last time I did the trail I had done so alone and I recall it was in the Fall and I had stopped in just before dusk on a road trip up to the Ottawa Valley.  I had set a pretty quick pace that time because I had wanted to get up and back before the mountain got really dark and I’d end up tripping and falling on the way down.  While that was great too, this time the slow pace set by the kids really forced me to relax and appreciate the beautiful day, the scenery, the smells and the small details.

Once the first acorn was found, the hike turned into a roving quest to find others.  We’d take 10 steps, scamper over a few rocks and then find another.  Each one had to be carefully examined for quality and either kept or discarded.  Despite my reassurances that only white oak acorns were usually palatable enough to eat, after boiling away the bitter tannins, we collected pocketfuls of the things, with my assurances that we’d try boiling these ones when we got home…just to see.

We took frequent breaks.  In addition to giving little legs a chance to rest, these opened my eyes to a few things I might have otherwise missed.  As the kids sipped their water bottles on one rocky outcropping, I caught the scent of sweetfern and noticed some clumps growing nearby.  I picked a bit, mentioning to my daughter that it made good tea.  To which she responded, “Is there anything on this mountain that we can just eat without cooking it first?”  I told her, a bit optimistically, that we might find some berries, but I’m not sure she was convinced.

Lo and behold, another 10-15 minutes up the trail, there was a little narrow, overgrown side-trail that led down to the stream atop the waterfall.  In August, it wasn’t much more than a trickle but the kids wanted to go see it.  Initially I said no, as I was a little worried about them making it down the steep footing, but I reconsidered and, holding my youngest really closely, we made our way slowly down to the water.  There was a little pool of water where they could take off their shoes and cool their feet.  We saw a little frog perched on the moss and watched him for a while.  And then, as they were splashing around a bit, I spotted a few small blueberry bushes along the water’s edge.  There were only about 10 small berries on the bushes but it was enough to mean I hadn’t been a liar earlier on.  I divided them (equally of course or it would have been tragic!) between both kids.  I thought to myself that, had I pushed on as I initially wanted to (and most certainly would have if I had been solo), I would never have gone down this little trail and would have never found the blueberries.  It was the slow, meandering pace, set by my kids that had led us to them.

We went a little bit further and then I made an executive decision to start heading back.  Again, it was me, thinking about the steep descent, that spurred this, not any complaints from the kids. They wanted to keep going.  We had a few minor slips on the way down, but overall they were very sturdy and cautious and we got back down with minimal scrapes and injury.  I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day if I tried.  And a big part of that was because I had to slow down and adapt to a child’s pace.  There’s a broader lesson in there somewhere…assuming I can remember to apply it.