Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [108]
“The easiest time to cut is when the bog is frozen,” Bret goes on. “Then we can just come in with a tractor, push mowers, and some hand tools and cut straight down to the level of the ice. Give the berries space and they really thrive.” Because of the surrounding dunes and hard winter winds, there’s not even any need to add sand—more than enough will blow over the vines before spring.
Bret started working the overbrush hard about five years ago—just long enough to be able to see some results, since it takes around four years for a new sprout to bear fruit. He gestures at a small bog, cupped cozily between dunes and high ground thick with oaks. “All this is on the chopping block for winter,” he says. But after they tear out invasives like catbrier and spotted knapweed, hauling off the debris to burn, what will be left will still be visibly wild landscape. Dense beds of cranberries will grow alongside bayberries, beach plums, highbush blueberries, and wild cherries; marsh hawks and bobwhites and toads will live in and on and under the thickets. The tribe harvests from the bog but also protects it, consciously and constantly, as a habitat.
Historically, gathering one plant might have helped others to thrive. Kristine Keese, an organic grower who also consults on bog restoration for the Vineyard Open Land Foundation, says that one of the most common weeds on her Plymouth acreage is wild bean, also called groundnut—an important traditional Wampanoag food. “And it’s more than the wild bean,” Kristine told me. “Once I made a list of all our worst weeds and cross-referenced it with a book about traditional medicines. Almost all were medicinals of one kind or another—St. John’s wort, goldenrod, joe-pye weed, boneset, all of them” (she uses the goldenrod to hold down her own ragweed allergy).
As Linda Coombs, an Aquinnah Wampanoag and director of the Wampanoag Center for Bicultural History at Plimoth Plantation, puts it, that sounds like one-stop shopping—gathering groundnuts for food or joe-pye weed for medicine could also have helped to clear away the cranberries’ competition. Meanwhile, controlled winter burns could have cleared brush right down to the level of the ice, leaving the vines safely frozen below. It wouldn’t have been farming as it’s usually understood—certainly nothing like the all-important cultivation of the Three Sisters of maize, beans, and squash that the Wampanoag agricultural year revolved around. But it would have been a kind of farming nonetheless, tending and encouraging the cranberries based on long years of watching the bogs.15 Henry Hall’s status as the first cranberry farmer may be only a distinction of degree.
Much of the peat here was covered by the storms of ’38 and ’45; when he wants to open up a new area, Bret grades it down with a tractor, letting water flood in over the newly exposed moss. But he also leaves higher hummocks and woody areas to diversify the landscape, shelter the bogs, support wildlife, and—vitally—maintain strong root systems along the dunes. The area has already been transformed by hurricanes; now Bret is careful to maintain the roots, protecting against another major shift when the next big storm hits.
“What I’d like to do is double the available growing area,” he says. But he’s talking about the vines themselves, not necessarily about fruit. A good harvest depends on more factors than anyone can control, especially given the desire of tribal elders to maintain the bogs as a basically natural landscape. There’s no pumping or water control; they’re reluctant to burn. Still, the goal might well be met—there are about twenty acres of good cranberry ground now, about 60 percent more than just five years back (though that’s still well less than half of what there was before the storms).
A commitment to mostly letting things be makes for a huge gap between good and bad harvests. “Last year everyone spent the whole morning working one pothole bog,” Bret says, shaking his head a bit. But this year there’s no chance of that; though my eyes have grown a bit more