Indigenous Possibilities

VAN NUYS — As is well-known, the end of civilization in the San Fernando Valley could come without warning at almost any moment.

A grand earthquake, an all-out gang war, a final paroxysm of bad taste--any of these might empty our supermarket shelves and make our roadways undrivable. Our neighborhoods would become uninhabitable. Our most prized possessions would become unusable. Our days would seem seriously numbered.

Or am I being alarmist here?

In any case, not to worry. Though reduced to primitive conditions, we could still survive, and maybe even restore Valley civilization to its pre-catastrophe splendor, eventually.

For the Valley isn’t just a sprawling mass of concrete and tract houses. It’s also a natural habitat where people and wildlife can, push come to shove, subsist off the bounty of the land.

On a recent hot morning, Christopher Nyerges set out to prove this. With nothing but the clothes on his back (and the battered black hat on his head and the ratchet cutter in his back pocket), he traipsed the Sepulveda Basin in search of the naturally occurring food and tools that could see a canny Valleyite through the bleakest days of millennial breakdown.

A naturalist and teacher of primitive skills, the 42-year-old Nyerges spotted the day’s first bit of plenty along a chain-link fence at Hjelte Sports Center. He knelt before a small green plant and plucked off one of its leaves, which he then put into his mouth.

“It’s lamb’s quarter, wild spinach,” he said. “You can just eat the stuff raw. The seed heads are especially high in protein. This was almost a grain crop 500 years ago in South America. Here it’s a weed.”

Lamb’s quarter, he said, would prove especially useful if Valley cataclysm came in dry summer. It’s one of the few wild greens that grow far from water sources.

A few feet away, Nyerges found a spreading, tendrilly weed familiar to anyone who’s ever tended a lawn.

“Purslane,” he said. “Thoreau wrote about making meals of this. It’s very succulent, and the richest plant source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are said to lower cholesterol. Its stems are so moist you can chew them to quench your thirst on the trail.”

Working his way along the fence toward the stream that parallels Burbank Boulevard, Nyerges sampled sow thistle and mallow, wild lettuce and tumbleweed (“very good when cooked, assuming you pick only the tender tips”). He chewed the little yellow heads of wild mustard (“it tastes just like broccoli”) and rubbed the dried stalks to free mustard seed, tiny brown dots that can flavor just about anything.

Along the water’s edge, he stopped at a stand of one of the most useful and versatile plants a catastrophe-driven Valley forager is likely to encounter, cattail.

He pointed to the spongy brown top of the plant. “When this is green, it’s edible,” he said. “It tastes like corn on the cob. And if you peel off the top layer of the stock, it looks like a leek--but tastes like a cucumber.”

Nyerges pulled a cattail up by its underwater roots and tore away the sheathing from its bulbous bottom to reveal a fibrous, golf-ball-size core. The core, which can be boiled in water, is rich in starch. The body converts the starch to necessary sugar--a disaster-resistant Valley hunter-gatherer couldn’t survive on leafy green things alone. In addition, the insides of the plant’s rhizomes, its horizontal underwater roots, are sweet with sugar.

Cattails aren’t just about food, either. “The fluff on the flower is insulating--that ancient Ice Man they found in the Alps had it stuffed in his boots,” he said. “It’s also good to apply to wounds because it’s mildly styptic. The stalks can be woven together to make a mattress. And the stem that supports the flower?” . . . (He snipped a rigid, pencil-thick stem in two.) . . . “There’s your chopsticks.”

Willow, too, would prove multiply useful. A thick, straight length of it makes a perfect walking stick-cum-weapon for killing snakes and whacking protein-rich grasshoppers, not to mention for holding off aggressively desperate humans.

Willow makes terrific bows for starting fires through friction (with straight members called “drills”) and for hunting. Plus, its bark is rich in salicin, which, after the bark is brewed as tea and drunk, is turned by the human body into salicylic acid--aspirin.

Food-spicing epazote, tinder-making mugwort, and mosquito-bite-soothing plantain are similarly helpful, but the Valley cataclysm outlaster would be wise to be on the lookout also for utilizable human-made refuse.

Nyerges pointed to an empty beer bottle alongside the stream. “See that? That’s a solar water heater. The brown glass absorbs heat. Fill it with water and put it in the sun and you get warm water.”

He picked up a V-shaped rung discarded from a supermarket shopping cart. “This could be a cooling rack, or a cooking grid. Or I could sharpen it for a spear.”

He lifted a punctured soccer ball from a pile of brush. “This is a good water container--better than what the Indians had in the desert.”

Clearly, to survive in the post-disaster Valley environment, a person would have to start seeing ordinary things in unaccustomed ways.

Modern consumer society, in which, for a price, virtually everything is done for us by others, induces a kind of perceptional sleep. People not only lose sight of the possibilities inherent in things, but of those inherent in other people and themselves.

Nyerges hasn’t developed his cactus eating and his self-described “caveman-like” skills so he can live apart from civilization or endure some reductionist future. His house in Highland Park has a wild yard and a sweat lodge, but also a computer and a large-screen television.

He’s subsisted in the wild for as long as two weeks with little more than the clothes on his back, but, he said, “I got bored. This stuff is not an end in itself. It’s a window on life, something that helps you appreciate it more.”

Really valuing existence--maybe that’s the ultimate survival skill. What’s more, it’s usable even now, before the definitive catastrophe descends.