May News Update

So, I have a new roommate. Sylvia, a nice girl from Michigan is moving in tomorrow. Thanks for everyone who responded to my ads. Summer weather has hit Portland, and as a result my mood, energy level, and outdoors time has hit an all-time high (for the city). Mornings I can be found drinking chicory coffee and sunbathing by the pool at my apartment complex overlooking the Willamette. Here you can see herons, geese families, and cormorants doing their thing. How great is that? I am still doing some teaching here and there, and always interested in more opportunities. We had an excellent women’s medicine making class set up as part of a series by my friend Kirsten through PSU and I also taught at the TrackersNW Women’s Wilderness Weekend in Sandy. It was a super time. We had workshops on bowdrill fires (I learned clematis stalk is a great spindle, never made a fire so easy!) belly dancing (gotta strengthen those core muscles), massage, scout games, martial arts, and more! I taught salve making, intuitive plant meditation, and DIY herbal tarot reading. This is the closest I’ve ever come to living my dream of a civilization rehabilitation center.

Photo by Adelaide Brown

I also now have a professional website to promote my herbal and ethnobotanical skills. Actually I have had it for months and it is still not quite done, but feel free to take a look: www.wildheartshealing.com. Eli helped me make this great shingle to hang on my door:

In mid-may Jana, Becky and I went to check out the camas bloom in Molalla. The biggest camas field I know of is in a horse pasture. The horses were ambivalent until I bent over and started digging at a bulb and then they came right up started nudging and teasing me. We did not eat any camas. Ideally it is harvested in fall after the flowers die and the seeds harden, although that alone is not enough to dissuade me from giving it a go now, it must also be cooked in a steam pit for a couple days to break down the indigestible inulin fiber into fructose and I don’t even have a yard.

Photo by Becky Lerner

The other day I felt like I needed to burn off some nervous energy so I walked the entire length of the 30 mile Wildwood Trail in Forest Park…on an empty stomach. It took about 9 hours. Now I’m limping a bit cause my left foot is sore, and have a blister on my right heel but am otherwise no worse for the wear. I don’t really exercise either. Imagine if I actually trained!

The biggest news is that I have been helping my friend Becky Lerner, who also has a primitive skills blog, www.FirstWays.com, with a wild food project. She signed up to eat only wild foods for a week and write about it on CultureChange.org. I’ve been serving to help identify wild foods, and places to find them, and give suggestions on how to prepare them.  Turns out the project was a bit too ambitious and Becky only  lasted until day 5 on the 100% wild diet, but we are still gathering. Check out her articles:

Living on Foraged Wild Foods for a Solid Week in the City

Week of Wild Food-Day One

Week of Wild Food-Day Two

Week ofWild Food-Day Three

Week of Wild Food-Day Four

Week of Wild Food-Day Five

Week of Wild Food-Day Six

The project has been getting a lot of outside press. We appeared on KATU news, I didn’t get any “lines” in the one minute segment, but you can see me tagging  along in my “herbalists rock” tank top, and, no, I did not know we were going to be filmed when I put that on.

Roommate Wanted!

Thinking about delving in to the Portland rewilding scene? Or just need a place to stay? I need a roommate ASAP for my 2 bedroom apartment in Sellwood, a pretty, safe, quiet Portland, OR neighborhood on the SE side of town. I live in a cute retro apartment complex that includes a fireplace,  outdoor pool, and dock access to the Willamette River. Build your own kayak with TrackersNW and you’re all set! It is a short walk to the library, coffeeshops, and New Seasons market. Near Oaks Bottom Park and Springwater corridor bike trail, connecting all the way to Boring, OR.  Rent is $462/mo plus electric and internet. I have too real-life lolcats that sometimes fall asleep hugging eachother. Open to couples & single parents. Interested? Email trackerofplants (at) gmail (dot) com.

Butchering a Buffalo

Here is a video from a little something I did in February. I have one line!

Ant Cupcakes

a picture worth a thousand words

Penny Scout’s Hot New Man!

Approximately 12 weeks after her unforeseen and admittedly devastating Christmastime breakup with celebrity green anarchist Urban Scout, Penny Scout has been spotted canoodling with former club security agent Eli Baseler, but “They didn’t meet while she was out partying,” states one source. “She doesn’t do the whole Paris-Lilo thing. It’s just not her scene. They were introduced by a mutual friend.” The pair was first seen in public several weeks ago holding hands and looking starry-eyed over the orange blossom dessert at Belmont St. eatery, Hoda’s Middle Eastern Cuisine.

Then, Penny took a two-week trip back east to visit friends and family in Pittsburgh where her younger sister Jennifer, 22, is a first-grade student teacher, and to her rural hometown of Russell, PA where her parents Gregory and Elizabeth Porter, are long-time employees of the US Forest Service.

Did things cool off in her absence? Apparently not. Scout and Baseler are rumored to have recently taken a romantic weekend getaway to the Oregon coast starting with Astoria, and the quaint towns of Seaside and Cannon Beach, all sites where the classic 1985 adventure-comedy, The Goonies, was filmed. Oddly enough, no one is telling where they spent night. Travel agent, Meghan Crane, who has booked rooms for Miss Scout in the past speculates, “Probably an off-beat eco-friendly resort…the kind of place without heat or running water in the room, but the opportunity to hear the frogs chorusing as you fall asleep…I just don’t see [Penny] in a 5 star spa-hotel right up on the beach.”

Fans wonder, will the relationship last? A friend assures, “Oh no, this isn’t a rebound thing. She adores him, and he’s really good to her. I’ve heard he does more than his fair share of cleaning and cooking and gives her plenty of back rubs. They have even talked about getting a dog together. Next thing you know they could be adopting a child from a foreign country!”

Wild Plant Tuesdays March Series: Botany for Wildcrafters @ TrackersNW

Each Tuesday night in March from 6:30-8:30 we will be covering a different topic in botany geared toward helping you, the novice wildcrafter, identify useful wild plants. Basic edible and medicinal properties of examples covered in class will also be briefly discussed.

Tuesday, March 3rd: The seasonal harvest cycle. What to harvest when and why.
Tuesday, March 10th: Tree identification. Buds & bark. How to identify a “naked” tree. Leaf ID.
Tuesday, March 17th: Flower identification. Flower parts and terms. How to use popular field guides. Keeping a plant notebook.
Tuesday, March 24th: Common plant families. Recognizing patterns.
Tuesday, March 31st: Using simple and advanced dichotomous keys.

See you there!

IUD…IUDidn’t!

An oft-asked question is: Post-apocalyptic birth control, other than stock up on economy-size boxes of Trojans, what do we do? Well, obviously there was pre-civilization birth control. Plants, such as wild carrot, being the major contraceptives, along with prolonged breastfeeding, herbal abortion, infanticide and other happy-go-lucky methods of family planning. But in a collapse scenario things are going to be a little bit different. Much of this woman specific plant knowledge was lost during the witch hunts and, well you know, just due to civilization in general. I personally don’t believe anything gets lost forever, but it might take awhile to resurface.

When I got my intrauterine device (IUD) inserted in August, they gave me a little card saying it was good until at least the year 2020, and I can’t deny that was part of the appeal, as thoughts of collapse are always running though my mind. Scout thought it was a bad idea for me to go on birth control pills, since in his experience the side effects made the women he knew act “crazy”. I disagreed, since I had taken them before and only enjoyed the hormonal side effects: less acne, bigger boobs. Who can argue with that? Still I’m wary of anything I take into my body, especially Western drugs, and especially after reading all those alarming natural health books that connect birth control pills with Candida yeast overgrowth. So I was attracted to the IUD for those reasons, and in Oregon birth control for qualifying women is free under the Family Planning Extension Project so cost was never an issue.

I’d never known anyone with an IUD. Though apparently, it is not an entirely unpopular method of birth control, I still don’t think it has recovered from the bad rap of the poorly designed Dalkon Shield in the 70’s which caused the deaths of several women. The concept is actually very bizarre. You stick a little bit of copper wrapped around some plastic up in your uterus and somehow that works to prevent pregnancy. They still don’t really know how. I’ve heard it is Egyptian in origin but I see no evidence of that from my gods of google, so it must be untrue.

In the states you only have two to choose from. I got the Paragard which is the classic style. They also have one now called the Mirena, which doesn’t last as long but releases hormones which work to balance out those nasty side effects. Obviously I didn’t get that one since hormones were exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Well, I thought that because it didn’t involve synthetic drugs this would be a more natural approach than the pill, but now I’m not so sure. My uterus didn’t seem so much to like having that little piece of junk in it. What with all the heavy bleeding and cramping each month, seems it actually wanted to get rid of it pretty bad. I waited six months to have it removed because they said things often get better over time, but they didn’t really, and it felt draining to my general health. I admire the stalwart Chinese women who make the IUD the world’s most popular method of reversible birth control.

They tell you the removal has to be done by a qualified medical doctor, but seriously all they do is stick a little pair of pliers up your who-ha and tell you to cough as they yank on the strings to pull it out. I think it would be pretty easy to remove by yourself if for some reason (god forbid!) there were no gynecologists around. So, I’m not telling anyone to get an IUD, or not get one, but that’s my experience, and I wanted to share it with you.

Slideshow: Vision 2009!

When my psychic Hollee (yeah I’ve got a psychic, so what?) suggested I make a vision board, basically a collage of what I want to happen in my life, I thought, well that’s dorky, and doesn’t sound like something I would do. I’m not really into that law of attraction stuff. But then I came across the idea of a vision slide show. It presents more opportunity for humor, and THAT is something I can get behind:

| View Show | Create Your Own

Wild Plant Tuesdays in January

Spring is not yet here, so we will continue to harness the darkness of January for still, inner work. The remaining Tuesdays will consist of continued intuitive experimentation with common and local herbs. For example, we might meditate with the three different immune support herbs in one night and compare their similarities and differences, or we might spend one night working with tinctures of different parts of the same plant. As always I will reveal the identity of the plants at the end of class, along with their growth habitats and traditional uses. This is a lot of fun and I hope you can make it! The cost is $15/ class. Discount cards for multiple classes are available online. Oh, and we are no longer in the “scout pit”. Classes are now upstairs in the same building. Look out front for the TrackersNW banner.
–Penny Scout

Surprise Quinzee!!

I once built my friend a legendary surprise birthday quinzee in the middle of the forest complete with a slide down entrance, ice votive holders and a bed of hemlock boughs and animal furs. I carefully constructed a fire outside that would blaze up as we approached with just one touch of a match and carried a thermos of hot spiced cider. Come to think of it, I even drove an hour to the Seneca Antiques Mall to buy an old-fashioned cauldron on chains I had spied there, but it was already gone. I used to live by this ideal which I called the re-enchantment of everyday life, the title of a book I’ve never read. Considering the complete dearth of spirit in our culture, I applied this mostly to seducing guys.

I’m the queen of quinzees. I’ve only slept in one, at the top of Smugglers Notch in Vermont. Tried to sleep in a second over at Wright Rocks, but it was negative degrees and we were like. “Dude, this sucks. Want to get some waffles at Perkins?”
“Yeah let’s jet.”

Despite the fact that I don’t really go in them after the sweaty labor of shoveling the snow into a pile and the ice-in-your-face, bruises-on-your-knees work of hollowing them out, I just can’t stop building! During the big surprise snowstorm in Portland we were able to knock out this child-sized quinzee in about two hours: