Originally written in summer 1996
My fourth grade teacher gave me a B on the essay “What I did on my Easter Vacation.” She marked coon and wrote it should have been raccoon. She marked Jon and wrote it should have been J-O-H-N. She marked ramps and put a question mark.
Granted, one might study raccoons in science class, but it’s doubtful whether Papaw’s coon hounds would have recognized a rac-coon. My brother Jonathan will never be a J-O-H-N. And ramps ... well, ramps are a different story.
Ramps are short for rampions for those who find things in dictionaries, but Noah Webster is confused about them being relatives of the turnip. Ramps are wild leeks, but a mere definition does not explain ramps.
My father’s people are from the mountains of West Virginia.They made their living like other mountain people, in the mines or cutting timber or providing services for those who did. They grew gardens and planted fruit trees. They raised animals to slaughter. To supplement their diet and income, they harvested what was available from the forests and streams. Besides hunting, trapping, and fishing, they gathered greens, wild grapes, and berries during the summer. Chestnuts (before the blight), walnuts, and persimmons in the fall. But the early spring was ramp season.
I imagine for those of my father’s generation and earlier, ramps were spring. After a winter of canned, dried, pickled, salted, and root cellar stale food, anything fresh and green was a more than longed for and welcome change.
Another innate yearning was for physical activity. Most of the hunters were through by mid-January, except for those who continued from necessity and for them the unwary and easily taken game was gone. Only a few endured the tedium of nearly empty trap lines until spring. There was snow to be shoveled, wood and coal to be hauled, stock to be tended. The men whose jobs allowed them to work through the winter months still worked, but these mundane exertions only served to aggravate the housebound, cabin fevered, stir-crazy hillbillies. What better cure than a traipse through the woods, ramp hunting?
So the women chased their cranky husbands and sons from the houses for “a mess a ramps.” They waited
too for a chance to roam the hills and would once the ramps were found in sufficient numbers to warrant a full scale harvest. Digging tools (ramp hoes) and burlap sacks were gathered. Travelers saw trucks and cars beside the roads that snaked around the south side of the mountains, parked on those infrequent stretches that had enough shoulder to get most of the vehicle off the road. Snow lay in the shortening patches of all day shade and sometimes still fell but rarely stayed for more than a day or two.
The first places to search were those that yielded ramps in previous years. Of course the men were driven to the woods before the ramps were sprouted, but they needed any excuse to hope for spring and believed their own charade every year. “The buds on this tree are swellin’. I sure woulda figured ramps’d be up.” “Looks like it’ll be a late ramp season. The weather sure has been queer the past few years.”
Then one day, while looking far off ... up or down the hillside for ramps, They’d drop a plug of tobacco or box of matches and find themselves standing in the middle of a ramp patch. They’d holler back their companions if they had any and dig a mess or a bait of ramps (enough for a meal or two).
Dig because the plants are very perishable if the roots aren’t left attached. Of course everyone had to take an immediate taste or two to be sure they weren’t being fooled by any ramp-looking impostors.
The first ramps of the season were eaten raw in a wilted salad - heat up a little bacon or ham grease, pour it over chopped ramps, add an extra dose of salt and you have wilted ramp salad. Nowadays the ramp aficionado must ignore certain principals of good health. Cholesterol was yet to be invented in the thirties.
As the brief season progressed, if the supply were sufficient, cooks used ramps in place of onions. They
aren’t very good cooked, not even to those who cook them, but it was a sin to waste what was available. In a very good season ramps were canned. Obviously many palates were ramped out in a very short time, but such details were not considered in the depression days of my father’s youth. “Eat what you got.”
Schools had ramp feeds to raise money. The avid hunters sold or swapped surplus by the bushel to those who couldn’t get their own. From the highways the shiftless watched the diggers and went back to purge what was left and there were always many left to propagate the next year’s crop.
And then the plants would be too tough, too bitter, and the season ended.
The ramp and the activities surrounding it are customs. Couple the season with the approaching spring equinox, and you may have a minor pagan holiday, but it still doesn’t warrant the weight given it by the
Indiana Spencers and it’s wayward Louisiana faction - the faction that has been in the hills for ramp season only twice in more than forty years - the faction that has tasted ramps in fewer than a half dozen seasons.
More than hunting and digging and eating ramps created this family's fantasies that border on religion.
A ramp hunter need only stand in an open doorway for those inside to know the hunt was successful.
Domesticated leeks have a pungent odor to domesticated noses, but ramps are truly a wild variety. Ed and
Tom Spencer (my father and uncle) broke rules and ate ramps before school. It was an easy way to get sent
home. The teachers couldn’t stand to have the students in the classroom because of the smell. This became a great pleasure to the kids in the community until Mrs.Simmons changed the rules and required ramp eaters to bring ramps. She didn’t notice the smell after a mouthful.
Ed moved from the mountains after high school. Dad lived the rest of his life in Indiana with a yearly trip “up home.” Tom migrated to Indiana too. He spent a few years as an evangelist and school teacher, earned advanced degrees, and became a college professor. He ended contact with his family the year after I was born and named for him.
As he approached retirement, Tom found his guitar in the attic. Within a year he was playing in pizza parlors and bars. He wrote his own mountain music and recorded three albums, often playing all the stringed
instrument parts. One composition is named after Greenbriar County, prime ramp territory, and another is “Ramp Pickin’.” During the same years, Ed dusted off his old fiddle and guitar and began playing again.
Two aging men sat in the same state, separated by years, one living a boyhood dream and the other still dreaming of being the Delmore brothers on the “Grand Ol’ Opry” and both finding great pleasure and peace in the music and the memories it generated. Sometimes Dad would sing “Old Paint” or “Lonesome Trail.” When his fingers got too sore and stiff, which didn’t take very long, he’d tell the stories.
This past Easter all but one of the six Indiana Spencer boys drove the switch back roads of the Yew Mountains, listening to Uncle Tom’s tape of “That Old White Mule of Mine,” “See that Coon,” and “Indian Rock.” We scooted down a mountainside in a light snow and honored my father’s wishes by scattering his ashes across a ramp patch.
I’ve learned since I wrote that fourth grade essay that ramps are not indigenous to only West Virginia. They’re scattered throughout the Ohio River Valley, but it seems they are relished only in the mountains or by those from the mountains. My brother who lives at our family home has learned to propagate them and
does in a garden. He also goes to the creek bottoms off the Ohio River and harvests them. I’ve tasted them. They are good, but not the same as the Greenbriar variety.
I’ve learned other things. I know that blue ticks and red bones and walkers and black n’ tans are all coon hounds and that many an old coon hunter will debate which is the best. I know how to fix venison stew with ramps instead of onions. I can whittle a dead fall trap. I can tan a deer hide with or without the hair on. But maybe the most important thing I’ve learned is that some early spring, before I’m too feeble to slide down a mountain and crawl back up, on an Easter Sunday my son and I need to drive the rollercoaster highways of West Virginia and listen to “The Ol’ Perfesser and his West Virginia (by Way of Indiana) Guitar” and “ Songs - Silly, Sad, and Sentimental.” We need to march through the briars and mountain laurel, off the road, down one mountain and half way up the next one, so far that only the strong willed can reach the spot. We need
to dance a snow dance and hope for just enough to cover the forest floor but let the green twin leaves of the ramps reach through. We’ll pull a handful from that patch fertilized with mountain stone and ashes of a rich and good life and take them to the brook in the bottom to wash and then eat. Maybe just a nip of double run shine for dessert. I’ll have to echo “The Meadow Will Be Green Again in Summer” down the holler, and I bet the bare trees whisper back “Lonesome Trail.”
My fourth grade teacher gave me a B on the essay “What I did on my Easter Vacation.” She marked coon and wrote it should have been raccoon. She marked Jon and wrote it should have been J-O-H-N. She marked ramps and put a question mark.
Granted, one might study raccoons in science class, but it’s doubtful whether Papaw’s coon hounds would have recognized a rac-coon. My brother Jonathan will never be a J-O-H-N. And ramps ... well, ramps are a different story.
Ramps are short for rampions for those who find things in dictionaries, but Noah Webster is confused about them being relatives of the turnip. Ramps are wild leeks, but a mere definition does not explain ramps.
My father’s people are from the mountains of West Virginia.They made their living like other mountain people, in the mines or cutting timber or providing services for those who did. They grew gardens and planted fruit trees. They raised animals to slaughter. To supplement their diet and income, they harvested what was available from the forests and streams. Besides hunting, trapping, and fishing, they gathered greens, wild grapes, and berries during the summer. Chestnuts (before the blight), walnuts, and persimmons in the fall. But the early spring was ramp season.
I imagine for those of my father’s generation and earlier, ramps were spring. After a winter of canned, dried, pickled, salted, and root cellar stale food, anything fresh and green was a more than longed for and welcome change.
Another innate yearning was for physical activity. Most of the hunters were through by mid-January, except for those who continued from necessity and for them the unwary and easily taken game was gone. Only a few endured the tedium of nearly empty trap lines until spring. There was snow to be shoveled, wood and coal to be hauled, stock to be tended. The men whose jobs allowed them to work through the winter months still worked, but these mundane exertions only served to aggravate the housebound, cabin fevered, stir-crazy hillbillies. What better cure than a traipse through the woods, ramp hunting?
So the women chased their cranky husbands and sons from the houses for “a mess a ramps.” They waited
too for a chance to roam the hills and would once the ramps were found in sufficient numbers to warrant a full scale harvest. Digging tools (ramp hoes) and burlap sacks were gathered. Travelers saw trucks and cars beside the roads that snaked around the south side of the mountains, parked on those infrequent stretches that had enough shoulder to get most of the vehicle off the road. Snow lay in the shortening patches of all day shade and sometimes still fell but rarely stayed for more than a day or two.
The first places to search were those that yielded ramps in previous years. Of course the men were driven to the woods before the ramps were sprouted, but they needed any excuse to hope for spring and believed their own charade every year. “The buds on this tree are swellin’. I sure woulda figured ramps’d be up.” “Looks like it’ll be a late ramp season. The weather sure has been queer the past few years.”
Then one day, while looking far off ... up or down the hillside for ramps, They’d drop a plug of tobacco or box of matches and find themselves standing in the middle of a ramp patch. They’d holler back their companions if they had any and dig a mess or a bait of ramps (enough for a meal or two).
Dig because the plants are very perishable if the roots aren’t left attached. Of course everyone had to take an immediate taste or two to be sure they weren’t being fooled by any ramp-looking impostors.
The first ramps of the season were eaten raw in a wilted salad - heat up a little bacon or ham grease, pour it over chopped ramps, add an extra dose of salt and you have wilted ramp salad. Nowadays the ramp aficionado must ignore certain principals of good health. Cholesterol was yet to be invented in the thirties.
As the brief season progressed, if the supply were sufficient, cooks used ramps in place of onions. They
aren’t very good cooked, not even to those who cook them, but it was a sin to waste what was available. In a very good season ramps were canned. Obviously many palates were ramped out in a very short time, but such details were not considered in the depression days of my father’s youth. “Eat what you got.”
Schools had ramp feeds to raise money. The avid hunters sold or swapped surplus by the bushel to those who couldn’t get their own. From the highways the shiftless watched the diggers and went back to purge what was left and there were always many left to propagate the next year’s crop.
And then the plants would be too tough, too bitter, and the season ended.
The ramp and the activities surrounding it are customs. Couple the season with the approaching spring equinox, and you may have a minor pagan holiday, but it still doesn’t warrant the weight given it by the
Indiana Spencers and it’s wayward Louisiana faction - the faction that has been in the hills for ramp season only twice in more than forty years - the faction that has tasted ramps in fewer than a half dozen seasons.
More than hunting and digging and eating ramps created this family's fantasies that border on religion.
A ramp hunter need only stand in an open doorway for those inside to know the hunt was successful.
Domesticated leeks have a pungent odor to domesticated noses, but ramps are truly a wild variety. Ed and
Tom Spencer (my father and uncle) broke rules and ate ramps before school. It was an easy way to get sent
home. The teachers couldn’t stand to have the students in the classroom because of the smell. This became a great pleasure to the kids in the community until Mrs.Simmons changed the rules and required ramp eaters to bring ramps. She didn’t notice the smell after a mouthful.
Ed moved from the mountains after high school. Dad lived the rest of his life in Indiana with a yearly trip “up home.” Tom migrated to Indiana too. He spent a few years as an evangelist and school teacher, earned advanced degrees, and became a college professor. He ended contact with his family the year after I was born and named for him.
As he approached retirement, Tom found his guitar in the attic. Within a year he was playing in pizza parlors and bars. He wrote his own mountain music and recorded three albums, often playing all the stringed
instrument parts. One composition is named after Greenbriar County, prime ramp territory, and another is “Ramp Pickin’.” During the same years, Ed dusted off his old fiddle and guitar and began playing again.
Two aging men sat in the same state, separated by years, one living a boyhood dream and the other still dreaming of being the Delmore brothers on the “Grand Ol’ Opry” and both finding great pleasure and peace in the music and the memories it generated. Sometimes Dad would sing “Old Paint” or “Lonesome Trail.” When his fingers got too sore and stiff, which didn’t take very long, he’d tell the stories.
This past Easter all but one of the six Indiana Spencer boys drove the switch back roads of the Yew Mountains, listening to Uncle Tom’s tape of “That Old White Mule of Mine,” “See that Coon,” and “Indian Rock.” We scooted down a mountainside in a light snow and honored my father’s wishes by scattering his ashes across a ramp patch.
I’ve learned since I wrote that fourth grade essay that ramps are not indigenous to only West Virginia. They’re scattered throughout the Ohio River Valley, but it seems they are relished only in the mountains or by those from the mountains. My brother who lives at our family home has learned to propagate them and
does in a garden. He also goes to the creek bottoms off the Ohio River and harvests them. I’ve tasted them. They are good, but not the same as the Greenbriar variety.
I’ve learned other things. I know that blue ticks and red bones and walkers and black n’ tans are all coon hounds and that many an old coon hunter will debate which is the best. I know how to fix venison stew with ramps instead of onions. I can whittle a dead fall trap. I can tan a deer hide with or without the hair on. But maybe the most important thing I’ve learned is that some early spring, before I’m too feeble to slide down a mountain and crawl back up, on an Easter Sunday my son and I need to drive the rollercoaster highways of West Virginia and listen to “The Ol’ Perfesser and his West Virginia (by Way of Indiana) Guitar” and “ Songs - Silly, Sad, and Sentimental.” We need to march through the briars and mountain laurel, off the road, down one mountain and half way up the next one, so far that only the strong willed can reach the spot. We need
to dance a snow dance and hope for just enough to cover the forest floor but let the green twin leaves of the ramps reach through. We’ll pull a handful from that patch fertilized with mountain stone and ashes of a rich and good life and take them to the brook in the bottom to wash and then eat. Maybe just a nip of double run shine for dessert. I’ll have to echo “The Meadow Will Be Green Again in Summer” down the holler, and I bet the bare trees whisper back “Lonesome Trail.”