Why I Hate Asparagus

Why I Hate Asparagus

I hate asparagus.

Asparagus season came during May in Wenatchee, when the days warmed quickly to 70 degrees, then chilled off like butter in a draft when the sun disappeared behind Dormaier’s Hill. We were four kids: Cheryl, the oldest, then down four years to me, then another three to our brother Lisle, and eighteen months to sister Toren, set forth into this rotten apple Eden to share the hunt with rattlesnakes. Daddy always said, “Just remember, rattlesnakes are wherever you want to be, to cool off or warm up; semper vigilent; never stop looking or listening.”

On this particular May morning, our mission was to fill a fifty-pound box with asparagus, which Mom would blanch and freeze, and Daddy would drive over the hump—across the Cascades—to relatives on the western slope, who had foraged blueberries for this annual exchange. We stood at the edge of the orchard while blonde and capable 16-year old Cheryl divvied up the territories. “Okay, I’m the oldest, so I’ll go the farthest away. I’ll go up to the plowed field between Dormaier’s Hill and the orchard. I’ll be following the fence line if you run into any trouble. Sandy, you hunt in the orchard from the culvert up both sides of the creek to the bus stop. Lisle and Toren, you do the road along the tracks.”

Picking asparagus made me sleepy. I hated the sticky stems, that distinctive pungent odor mixing on the air with the scent of spring sage.

To rouse myself on this “asper-grass” hunt, I climbed down into the creek cut by the culvert, counting on the cooler air by the water to clear my head. From where I squatted rinsing asparagus slime off my hands like a fastidious raccoon, I spotted a good stand of twenty or more spears on the warm south slope by the culvert mouth. Leaping on mid-stream rocks, I crossed over and bent down to snap the stems below soil level. I spotted the rattlesnake coming out of the culvert about the same time it saw me. It put its blunt, heavy head to the ground, slipped into the water and slipslid fast upstream. The thick, heavily patterned skin almost disappeared against the dappled light on the running water. At the curve, it hauled its four-foot length out into a sunny patch of dust surrounded by prime asparagus, curled lazily as a cat around itself and gave itself over to the dubious pleasure of watching me.

When I see snakes, I either run or freeze, often both. I have my mother’s fear and my father’s fascination with them. My mother tells a story that demonstrates this dichotomy: She and Daddy took a childfree field trip one Sunday afternoon up to Moses Coulee. Five hundred foot basalt cliffs, talus slopes, side canyons, rolling hills, fresh and alkali springs and flood deposits on the coulee floor are all prime rattlesnake habitats. At one end of the coulee is Jameson Lake, excellent rainbow fishing in the spring, and on this particular spring day, two men were hauling out their boat having caught their morning limit.

“Nice day,” went the initial exchanges, then Mom asked, “Seen any snakes?”

One fisherman propped a knee-high booted leg up on the trailer hitch and considered. “Well, now that you mention it, we did see one itty-bitty momma snake up the hill behind the outhouse,” he shook his head, “but that’s about it.”

“Yep,” confirmed his partner, “that’s about it for snakes.”

Reassured, the parents continued their hike around the lake, following the trail between the black bulks of the basalt cliffs. In the picnic area, Daddy was excited to spot a sleeping rattlesnake under a table, but the shade was too deep to get a good photograph. Daddy pointed out wild flowers as they went, stopping to photograph a sego lily, a shooting star or sagebrush buttercup. Mom had the binoculars up spotting the bright flash of a lazuli bunting, observing a loggerhead shrike impaling insects on a mock orange thorn.

Then, “Hold it,” Daddy said, but Mom, guided by a preternatural sixth snake sense instinct, had already more than held it. She shrieked, leapt straight up into the air, landing four feet back on the trail. The beautiful snake stretched languorously across the path looked startled at the sound, then wrapped itself in loose, alert coils, head up, rattle buzzing quietly.

“Crotalus viridis,” Daddy breathed in appreciation, then his camera was out; he was switching lenses, getting out the polarizer, looking for that unusual angle, the ultimate close-up. I inherited his slides, and I can tell you he all but climbed down the snake’s throat. He was certainly well within striking distance. That mouth is open, listening with the glistening, black, forked tongue the way snakes do, and the camera is right in there. You can see the complicated cotton batting of the red mouth, the place where the jaw unhinges to encase its prey, the side bulges where all the extra sets of fangs reside in their various stages of development, the listening black tongue, forked and flickering. You can bet Mom was in the background, holding the camera bag or a reflector umbrella and her breath.

Eventually, the bored snake slid off the path, and they continued their hike, Daddy eager for another Kodak moment, which wasn’t long in coming. A slender young rattler challenged the camera from the top of a rock pile. “That’s a young one. Stay back, Mildred, they’re the most dangerous when they’re young or when they’re shedding,” he said, climbing up on a boulder to shoot down at the furiously buzzing youngster.

Mom never needed to be told to stay back. At this point, she was torn between the romance of a rare hike alone with Daddy and the desire to run screaming from the coulee.

The next group of slides is a rare collection of Kodachrome IIs of a hunting snake. It is weaving down the path, head held high, almost cobra-like above the ground. The head turns left and right, aiming the heat seeking pits on either side of its head into the brush. The body moves along in a mesmerizing interaction of muscle, vertebrae and interlocked scales.

This turned out to be a seven-rattlesnake walk, which made my Dad cheerful and horny over lunch by the spring. Pointing out a shady patch of grass under a serviceberry bush, he suggested a spot of outdoor lovemaking. Mom said she turned icy cold at the very thought and perhaps for the only time in their married life, refused to even consider the idea. “Warren Brown, this place is infested with rattlesnakes!”

He gave her the puzzled, oblivious, 1960s equivalent of, “Yeah? And your point is?”

She says on the way out they saw the two fishermen again and pointed out that they were both wearing knee-high snake boots.

So I ended up with my mother’s primordial snake fear right along with Daddy’s scientific curiosity. Although I crouched down in the culvert, frozen with asparagus in one hand and a bucket in the other, a detached part of my mind admired the remarkable length of the snake in the asparagus patch, its hand-painted beauty and anguine curving as it had pushed against the current, head held high, rattles up out of the water. As it coiled, I could clearly see those heat-sensing facial pits. Daddy had shown us cross-section illustrations of the head and pointed out the reserve fangs that replace any that might break off in a victim. We also knew from first-hand experience with horse and dog that the venom caused extensive tissue damage, bleeding and swelling. So when I released from my spell of admiration, I shot up the creek bank and came out on the long drive that connected our house and the lower orchards to Horse Lake Road.

I stood in the road sweating, freezing.

Slowly, my heartbeat returned to normal. I heard sustained barking down across the railroad tracks. I followed the racket across the tracks to the frontage road. I could see Lisle with his hair so short that our uncles called him Burrhead poised in a skinny kid silhouette with a long stick. The neighbor’s black spaniel Caesar was barking at something cornered against the creosote crossties.

As I broke into a run, the little dog charged again and again, insane with excitement. The dark shape of a raised rattlesnake head swayed high above its pile of coils. There really are not many things more terrifyingly ugly than a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake head with its alien triangularity. This one was distinguished by two dark stripes, one on each side of its face, which ran diagonally, like a thief’s mask, from its eyes back to its jaws. Its back was lined with dark diamond-shaped blotches outlined by lighter-colored scales, the tail circled by several alternating black and white bands, like a ring-tailed cat.  For the first time I noticed the elliptical shape of the eyes, preternaturally intelligent as it faced off against the little cocker spaniel.

This snake was backed into a corner, so it had turned on Caesar. Caesar would dart forward to nip at the reptile, which would strike at him, lunging a quarter, a third, or more of its length. Caesar danced away, black paws kicking up dust and asparagus stems where Lisle’s bucket had fallen in the fracas. Toren had climbed up on an apple bin; Lisle had a big stick and stood over the action, ready to charge if he had an opening, but more respectful of the lethal fang and venom system of the snake than the excited dog.

As I reached the action, Caesar made one heroic dash in to grab the snake behind the head. The tail flung into the air and came down across the spaniel’s body, attempting to get a grip. But rattlers aren’t pythons; their deepest instinct is not to coil and squeeze but to strike and poison. Fearless Caesar began shaking the rattler violently back and forth.

“Get back!” Lisle shouted, and both of us moved back out of range of the flying snakehead to join Toren up on the apple bins. Two or three times Caesar let go long enough to get a better grip and the rattlesnake would coil furiously or strike from where it had been forcibly thrown, but the spaniel was not only fast but beside himself with hysteria, barking. The flinging and shaking of the snake went on and on, dust flying, the reek of mashed asparagus mixing with the hot smells of snake blood and dust.

After a while, it became obvious Caesar had subdued the snake and would be here dealing with it for another hour, so Lisle, Toren and I turned back to the problem of picking our share of fifty pounds of asparagus.

“Let’s go along the orchard road. I’ll rustle the grass with my stick for snakes and you guys pick,” Lisle suggested.

We made our way along the orchard road toward the river. I was jumpy and spooked at the least rustle Lisle made in the grass. By the time we reached the river, my hands and forearms itched with asparagus juice. I wanted to rinse them in the river, but I was afraid of the huge piles of slash we had to pass to get down to the water. We spent the late afternoon beating the brush piles for snakes, then clearing sticks away to get at the crop of slender, pale green spears. The smell of asparagus slime rising from our buckets mingled with the smell of snake fear rising from my own body.

About the time the sun slipped behind the hills, we saw Ralph Dormaier riding toward us on his orchard tractor. “You kids look like you could use a lift,” he said, helping us load our buckets of asparagus on to the flatbed. Toren and I wedged ourselves in, feet pulled up, but Lisle left his legs dangling, stick still on the alert. Out by the railroad tracks, Caesar lay crouched down guarding his very dead and mauled snake. He growled when Ralph poked at it with Lisle’s stick and whistled admiringly. “I didn’t know a cocker spaniel could take down a five-foot rattler. Good dog,” he told Caesar,  “Good dog. You go home now.”

Caesar grabbed the carcass in the middle and headed for home, head held high, practically on his tiptoes, but the snake still dragged along on either side of him, leaving a trail of blood on the shiny silver rails.

Ralph turned back toward his place. “Your Mom said Cheryl was picking up on the hill. Let’s go find her.” The little John Deere turned into the upper orchard that lined the edge of the sagebrush and juniper wilderness.

Under a large Golden Delicious, Cheryl’s blonde head bent in a close conversational angle to Daddy’s. They were clearly discussing something of interest, so we four sprang down to join them. They were regarding an unusually thick, heavy, five-foot long snake coiled in a sunny patch, tongue flicking in their direction, tail up. This was easily the largest snake I had ever seen, and I felt that cold sweat collecting behind my ears again, the smell of asparagus coming from Cheryl’s full apple box heightened as I went on full alert. But Daddy was pointing calmly for all of us to look at the upraised tail. Ralph squatted down on his heels and regarded the snake thoughtfully. “No rattles,” he said.

“That’s right. No rattles.”

“But,” I objected,” it looks like a diamondback.”

“But only rattlesnakes have rattles.”

“So this is a bullsnake,” Lisle said.

“Like the one Mom and I saw in the cellar,” Toren added, hanging far back, and Daddy nodded. We all remembered the autumn afternoon when the lights went out. Mom had grabbed a flashlight, and she and Toren had gone down the cold cement stairs to the fuse box in the cellar. The box was on the open-stud wall between a couple of two by fours. Mom concentrated the beam of light on the box, looking intently for the correct fuse switch to flip. It was Toren who said in a shaky voice, “M-m-mom. Sn-nake.”

Mom really doesn’t like to be teased about snakes. She doesn’t like fluffy blue and pink toy snakes or pictures of snakes or stuffed snakes of interest in natural history museums. She particularly would not like to be teased about a snake in a dark basement, so reasonably she scolded Toren: “Don’t try to scare me like that. I don’t appreciate it.”

Little tow-headed Toren just pointed and stuttered, “Ssn-nake.”

Then Mom saw the snake coiled around the fuse box, hanging over it, looking her right in the eye just inside the circle of light thrown by the torch. She let out a high decibel scream, and they both scrambled up the cellar stairs.

They assumed it was a rattlesnake with that ugly head and the strong diamond markings. Daddy went in after the snake and came out with it wrapped around a rake handle. He dispatched it with a shovel. He dissected it to reveal an undigested mouse in its belly.

“Bullsnake,” Daddy said. “It was down in the cellar doing its job.”

“I hired Sojah the cat to keep the mice down,” said Mom, “no snakes bull or otherwise need apply. But,” she added as an after thought, “ that reminds me of a snake I heard buzzing in the orchard when you kids were little. I walked over where two crows were mobbing a snake. Its tail was waving. The neck was bulging where it was holding air in and forcing it out of its mouth in an imitation rattle.”

“Non-venomous,” Ralph said, moving away as the bullsnake moved its head in our direction, listening with its tongue. “Orchard-friendly? Eats rats and gophers, right?”

“Right.”

“The snake lives,” Ralph announced.

For two days following the asper-grass hunt, the smell of blanching asparagus stank up the house with oxalic acid. Mom tried serving some for dinner, but not one of us would eat the stinking green mass. She had a charming, Depression-era custom I’m glad to say she’s since left behind, of making sure we tried a little of everything served, and that we ate everything on our plate.

We stared at the slimy, disgusting stuff. “What’s the matter?” Daddy asked. “You haven’t touched your vegetables. Don’t you know asparagus is a rich man’s treat in most parts of the world? A delicacy.”

“Mom says we have to eat all of it.”

“Try it with ketchup,” he advised, and all four of us dove for the ketchup bottle. Well-doused, we gagged it down.

“If it comes up three times, you don’t have to eat it,” Mom said cheerfully. Mine was close at two point five.

In the years since our rattlesnake days, not one of us kids has developed a taste for asparagus. That goes for rattlesnake meat, too. I had it once at a smorgasbord, pickled, in one vertebra cross sections. I looked around for the ketchup.

Many years later when I lived at Glen Ivy in California, Vic Summers killed a four-footer one spring. He roasted it on his Weber outdoor barbecue in one-foot lengths. “Yep,” he said, offering me a bite, “tastes just like chicken.”

But rattlesnake meat tastes like asparagus and fear and hot, dusty spring days, and makes my hands itch with remembered slime. The taste made me recall those springs in the 1960s when my siblings and I slipped out of the house and went out in the pre-dawn to jump on as much new asparagus as we could, so we wouldn’t have to pick it. I wore knee-high snake boots and loved the jumping up, the smashing down, the snap and splat of freshly ruined asparagus.