If my husband had died that spring day, I would’ve mourned a better man. It’s been over a decade and a divorce since, and I haven’t seen ramps until now. I dunk each one into cold water, watch the liquid turn muddy. Ease the thin skin toward the rootlet and slide it off the white bulb. I chop the green leaves to make pesto, set aside the bulbs for pickling. Place the rootlets in a pile to return to the soil later.
We were seven years into our marriage when I found out about the affair. On lunch waiting for my order, my office on the floor above, the man in front of me turned. Recognition passing over his face, he introduced himself: the boyfriend of my husband’s classmate. He began consoling me. No idea what he meant, my face went blank. Confused, he said, “You know they’re sleeping together, right?”
Someone yelled from the other side of the salad bar, and I turned to see Forrest’s classmate running at us. The lunch crowd formed a circle, boyfriend shouting, “She didn’t know!,” punctuated by her equally repetitive, “No!”
I used to be a caseworker, and it kicked in. Shoving my lunch tray at a coworker, I ordered the man to the cheese bar, and told the woman to go outside. Exiting through the same door, my only intention to get away, I found her hovering. She sobbed and apologized. I wanted the facts. When did it start? How many times? Where? Did you use condoms? Did you have oral sex? And then more specifically, You on him? Him on you?
I then walked around the block, returned to my desk without eating or telling anyone, and worked through the end of day.
Forrest wouldn’t be off work until eight. I imagined storming into his workplace, but that would be ridiculous and I’m not a ridiculous person. Besides, I wanted to talk. To understand why the only man I’d ever given my whole heart to, the one man I thought would never cheat on me, did.
Instead, I went home and drank chamomile tea. Then folded our laundry, pausing with his white briefs in my hands.
We live in a world that doesn’t listen to women. I knew this. I’d been an activist, a rape crisis line volunteer, a women’s studies instructor. Yet didn’t know I was a woman not listening to herself. Not listening to her body’s signals that something was wrong.
On our cross-country move to Oregon the year before, Forrest turned and confessed to a near affair with an acquaintance of ours. I believed him, a close call, nothing more, and convinced myself we were starting new. Soon after, I woke one morning and felt a bulge in my abdomen. I hadn’t uttered a word when Forrest placed his hand there and said, “Have you always had this?” Both of us were stunned by this strange overnight appearance, but newly arrived, with no jobs, insurance, or money to spare, I decided it wasn’t an emergency. A few months later at a free clinic visit, the doctor expressed alarm at the bulge and made me promise to get an ultrasound immediately.
Forrest went with me, a scenario I’d imagined for an actual baby that, in the months prior, I’d told him I was ready for. We always knew we’d have children; it was simply a matter of timing and money. The results showed a single uterine fibroid, benign, as they usually are, but uncommonly large, the size of a 20-week pregnancy. All that ignoring my body’s signals and stuffing down doubts came to life.
I found the ramps that morning by accident while walking through the woods behind my house. Ramps are native to the Appalachian region stretching from Canada to Virginia, including where I live in Southeastern Ohio, but aren’t common here. Stunned and sure, but I knew—god, did I ever—that even when you’re certain, you need to pause and verify the identity. I gently pulled one up from the soil and took it back to the house.
Eaten raw or cooked, ramps have a unique subtle flavor akin to garlic crossed with onion. Now coveted in high-end restaurants, they’ve long been celebrated and revered in Kentucky and West Virginia, which is where I learned about them. During a weekend roadtrip a few years after our marriage, Forrest and I traveled to Elkins, arriving smack in the middle of their annual Ramps Festival.
A year later, driving home after a hike where we lived in Virginia, Forrest swerved the car to the side of the road and stopped. Staring up at the wooded bank, face illuminated, he said, shaking his head in wonder, slow and sure, “Those are ramps.” Within ten minutes, ignoring my, “Are you sure?” with an eye roll and indignant shrug I’d seen before, he had several bunches in a bag on the backseat and we headed home.
We’d never foraged together, but had many conversations about it, meaning him telling me how dangerous it is and even people who think they know a plant should probably just leave it, the risk of misidentification too great. A cautionary naturalist and “leave no trace” believer, Forrest wouldn’t leave fruit peels in the woods, especially near roadways, because hungry animals venturing for food became roadkill.
Forrest was a Virginia suburban kid who took trips with family and free roamed across his grandfather’s estate on the James River. A Boy Scout, then an Eagle Scout leader, he later became a professional wilderness guide and employee of an outdoor gear store. I grew up poor in rural Ohio without parental supervision, roaming fields, picking wild berries, and smoking cigarettes. Nature was neither a fun family vacation, nor an extracurricular club to learn life lessons—it was all I had. Later my family moved to a nearby city, and I went everywhere on my bike, afraid of nothing, working for others from the age of nine, ironing clothes and mowing lawns. Before Forrest, I didn’t know what a bear bag was and had never operated a miniature stove that could fold into my palm. I thought most gear was unnecessary and expensive, yet trekked all over the world, including the Himalayas, with an old pair of sneakers and a garbage bag when it rained. We both loved nature, and while we were both competent and prepared, he had the know-how and I had the grit.
We met at the outdoor store where he worked when I came in looking for a job, just back from years of solo travel abroad. He took my number off my application and called me. A week later we hiked the Appalachian trail to famous McAfee Knob just a half-mile from the house I’d recently moved into outside Roanoke. I didn’t think it was a date until, walking down the mountain trail after a long day that started over green tea and toast, light almost gone, looking over at him and laughing, I touched his arm and knew. Later we cooked dinner to blues music, and he danced across my kitchen floor. He was charming, sweet, and funny, and I was attracted to his love of nature and adventuresome spirit. Being together felt easy and familiar. We married nine months later.
The primary danger with foraging is eating the wrong plant. This is what I learned from Samuel Thayer’s The Forager’s Harvest, which I picked up to verify the unexpected ramps behind my house. To avoid being wrong, you take steps to identify, confirm, and double and triple check the method before declaring certainty. Thayer says that in the final step, identifying the plant should be without doubt or effort.
I wish there was guide like this for choosing lovers.
In the months before our wedding, I broke down crying alone in the bathroom. I didn’t know why, but figured it would pass, maybe the normal worries over getting married. I didn’t tell Forrest or anyone.
We’d moved in together, him still working at the outdoor store, me now waitressing. Around the same time, his ex-girlfriend started calling the house, and I learned they’d been secretly meeting. I suggested she come over for dinner, offered to be friends. But he refused, and the calls continued until I asked him to stop contact altogether. Was it before or after, that my body started to rebel? Suddenly, I reacted to foods, chemicals, cleaners, and crowds. I was exhausted, got into bed right after my shift, even during the day. Waitressing thirty hours a week is hard, but I’d never felt this way, even when working four jobs, eighty hours a week. I went to a doctor. My immune system had crashed, my system a light switch, now turned off. Always petite, size 3/4, by the wedding I wore size one and had to have my dress taken in at the waist.
Whatever my body’s misgivings then, I never acknowledged the doubts, nor connected my sudden inability to digest food and life to what I was about to do: marry this man.
When we got to Forrest’s grandfather’s house with our wild greens, Anna May, the long-time house staff, was almost finished with the pork loin, vegetables, and potatoes. Forrest jumped in next to her with a skillet, a large butter pat melting over the heat. Next to the stove, he chopped the greens and stems and tossed them in.
Anna May was curious about the leafy greens pulled straight from the ground, now in Forrest’s capable cooking hands, and asked if she could try some. In minutes, the greens were wilted and piled onto a plate. I put a leaf in my mouth. Instantly, my tongue tingled and I felt an electric shock. The taste was terrible. I gagged and spit it into the garbage.
“That’s not right. Don’t eat it,” I warned. Anna May already had it in her mouth, chewing. Her mouth puckered, frowned, and swallowed. “Seriously,” I said, now imploring Forrest, “don’t eat it.”
“I’m not wasting it,” Forrest said, and took the plate, wilted greens piled high with butter and salt, to the table.
His mother and grandfather passed, but Forrest dug in, adding a small cut of pork. After clearing his plate, the rest of us still eating, he disappeared to the bathroom. Finally, after what seemed like a long absence, I excused myself to check on him.
When I walked in, Forrest was naked, lying on the floor gripping the toilet and vomiting, red-faced, sweating and shivering. “Call an ambulance.” He took a long breath. “Get the leaf out of the garbage. Put it in a baggie. Give it to them when they come.” And then he dropped to the floor.
I shouted to Anna May and his mother to call an ambulance, ran into the bedroom across the hall, yanked off the quilt, and draped it over Forrest. They looked at me from the kitchen doorway, but no response. Finally I ran down to them. “Forrest is having a reaction. Call an ambulance now, it’s an emergency,” I said pulling the leaf from the garbage, the one I’d spit out, and handing it to Anna May. “And put this in a baggie.”
I knew two things: that Forrest was dying and that we were at least twenty minutes from a hospital.
I remember little from that long wait until the ambulance came. I remember wanting to say every I love you imaginable, but instead focused on keeping him alive, rushing back and forth to the sink with a cool cloth for his head and talking him through: stay calm, don’t use up your energy, you’re going to be okay, stay with me, breathe. Then, the ambulance arrived and he’s on a stretcher, IV started, me not allowed to stay with him, forced to the passenger seat, all of it coming into view: Two paramedics who looked like brother and sister, maybe nineteen, seemed like interns with new certificates, not moving fast enough. Forrest was nearly unconscious.
At the ER, Forrest was wheeled into a swarm of medical staff and a white curtain was pulled around his bed. I told the doctor what I knew: we’d stopped at the side of the road, picked what we thought were ramps, he ate a whole plate of them, leaves, stems, and all, I spit mine out, and Anna May ate a leaf but seemed fine when we left the house.
A few minutes later, standing next to Forrest inside his curtained area, the doctor walked in, behind him a man in street clothes, perhaps a local botanist. Handed the baggie with the wilted leaf, he turned it over once and said, “That’s not ramps,” and walked out.
They kept Forrest overnight to monitor his heart and make sure there was no permanent damage. Three more leaves, the doctor said, and he would have died. And if he wasn’t young, healthy and athletic, he wouldn’t have made it. Close call, but no damage done.
At the fifth and final stage of edible plant safety, Thayer says that you should be so certain of your plant’s correct identification, eating it should hold as little doubt as eating a banana. Thayer coins it “contradictory confidence,” a level of certainty that when reached, “will immediately contradict anybody who tells you otherwise, despite his rank and title.” So certain you’d proclaim it in front of a group of botanists, he says.
Or your wife. Either Forrest was completely sure, having jumped from the first step of Thayer’s foraging safety to the fifth in one leap, believing with certainty he was right, enough to ignore me, my burning tongue, bad taste, and plea. Or he decided that his debt to the plant and desire not to waste it tipped the scale. I thought then it was both, that he believed he was right and felt indebted. But now I wonder, did he simply not want to admit to being wrong?
I met Forrest at the door as he left work. One look and I knew his girlfriend had alerted him. “You’ve come for me, have you?,” he said, as he pitched his bike onto the car rack with more force than needed.
“I thought we could go to the park to talk. Neutral territory.” He didn’t respond and neither of us spoke again until seated on the grassy hill overlooking the city, Mount Hood in the distance. He was angry and defensive and didn’t want to talk about what happened. Every question was a dead end.
Do you love her? I don’t know.
Are you willing to work through this with me? Maybe. I don’t know.
When did this become okay?
I stopped asking questions and we sat in silence until the long evening’s summer light left the sky. Then I drove us home.
The next day we went on with our lives. He continued making extra oatmeal in the morning for me and we kept on with dinners together in the evening. He refused to stop seeing her but said he wouldn’t have sex. I didn’t believe him but wanted to know if something was salvageable. I booked couples’ counseling and over the next month, we went three times before he quit.
I was surprised that I wanted to have sex with him, given that he’d cheated on me, was still cheating on me. I’d thought about a cheater scenario in the abstract. That it would be dramatic. I’d throw all his clothes on the front lawn and tell him to get out. It would be like a light switch, all the love and tenderness instantly turned off. That I would be angry and disgusted and he, clearly wrong, would be repentant. But somehow the self-righteousness and indignation I thought I’d throw in the face of a cheater never materialized. Only a few hisses through gritted teeth, How could you do this to me? Once over dinner, I told him he was a real motherfucker, nothing more. And one time he came home early from school and found me sobbing on the dining room floor. Those three months that I stayed to figure things out felt like watching a show about a couple who falls apart. They realize they don’t know each other at all, and so then, who precisely is this person they thought they loved and desired, has it all been false, that’s the basis of the show. And this show plays alongside a life that goes on.
Despite my feminism, I see now that my bar was low: more than anything, I wanted him to say he was sorry. Not that it would have kept us together, but I would have known that he cared, that maybe I didn’t waste eight years of my life and the health of my uterus. Instead, he told me I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And, that my boobs were better than hers. My whole body, in fact. You’re lucky, he said.
I didn’t feel lucky sitting alone at my second ultrasound. I don’t recall why Forrest wasn’t there. Six months later I’d find out about the affair, but right then, waiting among couples and pregnant bellies, I thought the worst of my problems was growing inside of me.
The fibroid moved and pulsed, as if incubating a life. Even more disconcerting, the way I looked: pregnant. It seemed like, not just in the waiting room, but all around me were proud bellies nestled into soft, expandable front-paneled pants. I didn’t resent the women their babies, even though I wanted one; I resented the mockery of my body creating a fake one that I had to hide. I worried someone would congratulate me or ask when I was due. Or think I was fat. I felt ugly and self-conscious. Wore extra layers and loose tops. Found three one-size-fits-all skirts at a local market, each designed with a waistline of snaps spaced an inch apart.
Worse, my efforts to shrink the fibroid with acupuncture and herbs wasn’t working and I’d started experiencing unbearable pain. Many nights, I woke myself with my own tormented gasp. The pain in my lower back so severe, I couldn’t sit up and would instead shimmy to the side of the bed and drop to the floor, sometimes heaving myself to standing, other times crawling to the bathroom to pee. Soon, pain arrived at all hours, ranging from manageable cramps to doubling over from what I imagined as a medieval spear piercing through my abdomen to the other side.
All day long at work in a fast-paced management position, I sucked in my gut, held it together, and hid the not-pregnancy, the pain and misery, and my marriage issues. And when unbearable, slipped into the bathroom to let my belly out, and exhale.
Thayer says there’s no look-alikes, there’s only look-similars. But after we found out that Forrest ate false hellebore, an extremely poisonous plant used commercially as insecticide and when ingested slows the heart, lowers blood pressure, and can lead to death, I looked it up online. This was look-nothing-alike. The leaves of both plants are green but diverge in leaf pattern, form, and size, and of course the unmistakable difference that a ramp bulb looks and smells like an onion, and false hellebore does not.
It seemed out of character for Forrest to impulsively pluck a plant from the woods and take it home to eat, without even a moment’s pause to verify it. A cautious and methodical rule follower, he had no experience with this plant. He ignored the signs, his own judgment, and my warning, and must have ignored the foul taste and burning sensation while eating it.
Not unlike myself, before the wedding, ignoring the signs to wait, and throughout my marriage, ignoring my body’s alarms.
I found a small cottage and the rent was cheap. I had boxes and two chairs, and a beaten-up dresser I found on the street the day of the move. The rest I left behind, feeling it was tainted. Easy job, I only needed one person to help, and asked an older friend at work with whom I’d shared a few details. Late morning he arrived with two other guys. Forrest had agreed not to be there but went back on his word and refused to leave, standing guard at the door, making it all the harder for me. None of the men spoke; there were no introductions.
I hadn’t yet decided on divorce, but knew I had to leave. Now finally alone, I could breathe. It didn’t look grand, a foam bedroll and blanket on the floor, which I would eventually add my sleeping bag to, became my bed for the next year, but I experienced bliss. Not the lighthearted frolic-through-the-field kind, rather the kind after tragedy, heartbroken but free, amazed to be alive, infused with feelings of luck and grandeur, speed and euphoria surging through my veins.
One of the first things I noticed was that most of the fibroid pain disappeared, and I had twice the physical energy. While I still had a bulging tumor, the immediacy of solving my health issues shifted to healing my heart.
I went to therapy every week and went on long walks. Started hanging out with the moving guys, all of whom had been through their own divorces, one who’d married and divorced the same woman twice. Eventually I felt strong enough to go through the letters, cards, photos, and wedding keepsakes I’d brought over from our apartment, untouched. Pausing with each item, I sorted into four piles: keep, recycle, give back to Forrest, and burn, the largest of all. Later, I took a glass of wine and burn bags outside and sat on the ground in front of a small fire pit. Reached my hand into one of the bags, pulled out a love note, took one last look, and felt a rush of heat as I threw it into the burning flames.
He called five months later, divorce in process but not yet final, and asked me to meet at a park we’d gone to as a couple. When I arrived, Forrest was sitting on top of our picnic table, slumped forward in a fetal position. He barely looked up, and got right to the point: pregnant with twins, to which he added, “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I just wanted to date.”
I’d learn later that she gave birth in our soaker tub just two months before my surgery, a vertical incision made into my abdomen to reach the fibroid lodged in the muscle of the uterine lining, removed without entering the cavity. The five-inch scar from my navel to my pubic bone, the telltale C-section, would appear forever more like I’d birthed a baby.
After everything, one of the moving guys asked when I was finally going to get angry. “I’m not sure,” I told him. “Maybe that’s what I had cut out of me.”
Lovers aren’t plants. It’s not that easy identifying the right one, with no specific taxonomy to follow like Thayer’s guidebook. And when we do get some reliable information, sometimes we ignore the Thayer warning: do not mentally force your plant to fit the description.
Sometimes we get it wrong. We misidentify. Ignore our body’s warnings, the bad taste on the tongue. We eat it anyway. The truth burning our throats, bulging our bellies, but we’d rather be wrong than give up.
All my ramps preparation done, pesto in the freezer and jars of pickled ramps in the pantry, I gather the rootlets in a bag. The sun lowers, but even as it grows dark, I know the curves of the trail like my own body. I cut through the field behind the house and head into twenty-five wooded acres. Cross the bridge at the creek and hike up the hill, veering off the path to the left. I find the ramps easily, nested deep in the shadows. I drop to my knees, take out the rootlets, and look for the bare spots where I need to replant.
