An abridged extract from A Forager’s Life by Helen Lehndorf, a memoir of parenting, foraging, marriage and community.
In the spring of 2016, I nearly lost Fraser. I’d been absent from the family for a few weekends, away at permaculture Saturdays and locked in my study finishing my book, so I told Fraser to take a weekend for himself, to have some time to refresh. He decided to go into the Ruahine Range for the night. It was Fraser’s first trip out with his new gun. He’d recently bought a rifle for hunting. Obtaining a rifle in New Zealand is quite a process. Before you can buy the gun you have to get a gun licence and a gun safe, and pass an interview with a gun-licensing officer. They come to your home, check the safe and interview your family. The officer was an older man, with a long grey ponytail and nicotine-stained fingers. He looked more like an ageing country and western musician than a police official. He was kind, although he told me several times to relax, which had the effect of making me more tense. It was an odd experience sitting across from this stranger, answering intimate questions about Fraser’s habits, intentions and mental wellbeing. It wasn’t until this interview that the gravity of having a gun in the house truly dawned on me. Fraser had always been a keen tramper, but he’d become interested in extending the purpose of his walks from leisure to food-sourcing. Like my father, Fraser was motivated by the chance to find food for our family. But he hadn’t grown up hunting. I had mixed feelings about having a gun in the house but couldn’t think of a rational reason, apart from some fear, to object. If anything, it made sense as a next step for us greenie locavores. It was just another version of what I got up to in the wilds but hunting beasts rather than plants.
One factor fuelling my unease, however, was that Fraser preferred to tramp alone. While tramping alone has some risks, hunting alone has more. When Fraser tramps, he always leaves me a plan of his route. This is tramping common sense, but it can seem a little less vital since the advent of smartphones. Since having a smartphone, Fraser would send me cheerful texts and photographs of where he’d got to as he weaved in and out of range. Sometimes he’d record snippets of bird song and send those. He likes to travel light and he hadn’t packed enough food in the past. I quizzed him about his rations and he assured me he had plenty, in our usual delicate dance between my concerns and his autonomy. I wanted to nosy in his pack to see for myself but I squashed the urge. The forecast was for cold weather but, for Fraser, this just added to the attraction. He’s a man who likes being in a storm.
The next day I kept glancing at my phone in anticipation of a good-morning text from Fraser. None came. I made myself a coffee, feeling his absence; he usually brought me coffee in bed. I sat with a book in my lap, trying to enjoy it, but tendrils of concern crept into my mind. Rather than indulging these thoughts, I got up and had breakfast with the boys, filled the washing machine. Kept busy. He’d said he’d be walking back out after breakfast and should be home just after noon. As the morning wore on, grindingly slow, tendrils turned into brambles of worry. My texts to him increased in urgency. Nothing came back. I stopped hearing the boys when they spoke to me. They had to tug my arm to get a response. I decided to wait until 1pm and then I would call the police, figuring they probably wouldn’t accept he was missing if he wasn’t even technically late, despite his lack of phone contact. One pm came. Still no replies from Fraser to my barrage of texts. I steeled myself and rang the police, ready to persuade them that it was very out of character for him to be out of contact, to not meet the terms of his going. But I didn’t need to persuade them. They immediately took it seriously. That he was carrying a firearm seemed to add to the gravity. The policeman spoke to me very gently and slowly, as if talking to a lost child. He was firm that I shouldn’t rush to the track. The best place for me was home, he said, looking after the boys.
He told me Search and Rescue would be on the track to look for Fraser within a few hours. A few hours seemed a good response time, especially considering Search and Rescue is made up of volunteers, but because it was Fraser who was missing, a few hours of more waiting was a unique torture. While I waited, I called a friend who lived in the Pohangina Valley, on the same road Fraser had driven up to access the ranges. She drove up to the car park to check that our car was still there. It was. There was no sign of him around the car. She walked a little way up the track but it was very cold and raining heavily, so she turned back. I rang Search and Rescue with this update. The man asked me if I could email him a recent photograph of Fraser. I could barely stand to think about what this might mean. It was hard to find a photograph of him by himself. Most of the recent photographs were selfies of the two of us grinning into the camera, our heads pressed together, on beaches or bush walks. Eventually I found one. My panic grew by the hour. I knew I had to allow my worst thoughts in so I could try to be present to what was happening. I went to the thing I was trying hardest to push away, What if he’s dead?, and worked backwards from there. If he was dead, I reasoned, trying to breathe, I would still be alive. I would still be here for our children. It would be unfathomably awful. I would grieve and suffer but live on. Life as I knew it would stop, but life would not stop.
The very fact of life’s ongoingness gave me a tiny chink of comfort. You can survive this, I told myself. Even if he is dead, you can carry on. My mind seemed to detach from my body, expanding out to the past, future and awful present all at once. We fool ourselves into thinking the people we love won’t die because we love them, as if love is a protective veil. The possibility of Fraser’s death clattered around my skull like a marble, making my head ache. Time took on a fractured, grainy quality. I cooked food for the children, but at one stage I put onions on to sauté and then suddenly the room was full of dark smoke and the fire alarm was going off. I had completely zoned out, my mind on repeat. What if he’s dead what if he’s dead what if he’s dead? I called a friend, Miribai, who lived nearby and asked her to come and sit with me. I was finding it hard to stay calm for the boys and thought it would help if I had another adult around. I held off calling our parents. I figured they didn’t need the stress and anxiety until there was something substantial to tell them. He might be found soon and then I could call them. I called our old friend Maria. She was steady and calm, helpful. “Look, Helen, Fraser is the most sensible person I know,” she said. “They will find him.” Hearing her voice helped ground me a little. After years of looking for things, in the wilds, at the edges, this heralded the most urgent search of my life.
Fraser going missing woke me up like a bucket of ice water being poured over my head. In the window of his potential absence, I felt how huge his presence was in my life, and how bereft I’d be without it. Search and Rescue called to report that one of their volunteers had been in the area earlier that day and said that, with the sudden rain dump during the night, many of the streams and rivers in the valley had risen considerably. They might struggle to make some of the crossings in the terrain of the search area. I thought about Fraser losing his wedding ring in the Pohangina River, how I’d joked that he was married to the river. This long-standing joke soured on me. I closed my eyes and brought the river to mind. “You can’t have him. He’s mine,” I pleaded with it. “You give him back to me.” I paced the living room. I couldn’t stop myself firing off texts to him. Are you okay? Where are you? Please reply asap.
Bargaining is a stage of grief. It’s also a big part of worry. I tried to hold the possibility of Fraser’s death in one hand, and with the other hand I made desperate offerings. If he is okay, I will be a better person. A better partner. I will try harder. I will be so, so grateful every single day. I won’t ever forget how lucky I am. I curled into a knot under a blanket on the sofa, clutching my phone. Miribai had turned on the TV as a distraction from the weight of our waiting. I stared at the screen, taking nothing in. Staying at home made sense but was also maddening. I wanted to drive to the track right away so that, whatever happened next, I would be close to him.
When he was six, Willoughby went through a phase where he liked to add ‘of doom’ to things for fun, to make them sound ominous. Cake of doom. Pillow of doom. It was uncanny and cute coming from a small child. This came back to me as we waited. Household objects were attracting doom as my eyes rested on them. Teacups of doom. The pyjamas Fraser had taken off on Friday morning, coiled under his pillow … doom. Phone of doom. Death was suddenly not just an abstraction to contemplate; it was in dark proximity and filling my house. Then my phone dinged: comfortable. I replied immediately. What do you mean comfortable? Are you okay? Where are you? But nothing came back. That was it: comfortable He was alive! But comfortable? What could that mean?
I sat and stared at that one word on the phone’s screen until it burned into my brain. I rang Search and Rescue with the update. An hour after the inscrutable comfortable text, Search and Rescue called to say they’d found him. He was okay, wet and cold but not hypothermic, and he had a broken ankle. He’d need to be helicoptered out. Just like that, death retreated. He was alive. Exhausted, in pain, hungry … but alive. His glasses, first-aid kit and food had washed downriver when he’d broken his ankle crossing a stream and fallen in. It’d happened on Friday night. He’d managed to pull himself to the bank and burrow into his sleeping bag under a tarp. He was out of phone range (apart from that stray, contextless comfortable – one of a string of texts he’d sent to me but the only one that had arrived) and he didn’t have a personal locator beacon. Because the rain had been so relentless, the river had kept rising and Fraser kept having to drag his camp higher above the water through the night. His gear was coated in mud. He hadn’t slept at all, in pain and vigilant about the rising waters. I felt guilty that he’d hurt himself fairly early on the Friday night. I hadn’t called for help until lunchtime on Saturday. The helicopter was needed for a more urgent rescue, so the rescue team had to half-carry him out, his arms slung around the shoulders of two of the younger men, his good leg hopping. Soon, Search and Rescue called to tell me that they were on their way home with him so that I could take him to A & E. I was grateful Miribai was there to stay with our boys.
Half an hour later a car pulled up. There he was on the back seat, shivering, wet and ashen. I dumped his filthy pack in the laundry then ran inside and gave the gun to Miribai. It was covered in mud. I didn’t have time to linger to put it away. ‘Can you give this a wipe and put it somewhere safe out of reach?’ I said as I ran back out the door towards a long night in A & E. A vegetarian and life-long pacifist, she sat on the living-room floor blinking in shock at finding herself suddenly holding a rifle.
Afterwards, when the accident came up in conversation, Fraser was at pains to point out he hadn’t been lost. He had just been stuck. He knew exactly where he was. His ankle was badly broken and needed metal plates. He spent a week in hospital, but over the spring and summer he healed. Fraser is a keen cyclist and has always biked to work in all weathers. Over the months he was recovering, I noticed how much I missed the sound of his bike leaving in the morning, returning in the afternoon, its tinny rattle. The sound of it had bookended my days for years, since I’d been at home with children. If I was standing in the garden when he got home, he always startled me, flying up the driveway on his bike, quick as a flash. It’s the sort of little, particular thing there’s no predicting you might miss until it’s gone. One of a string of small rituals that become part of life’s daily rhythm. Once he was back on his bicycle, a natural order was restored. Things were different between us after his accident. Nearly losing him to the river put him back front and middle of my life, and it reversed the drift of overwhelm that many parents of children with special needs fall prey to. Not dramatically different, just more tender, as though the day I thought he might have died now dwells between us, the glimpse of death’s door a third entity in our relationship.
Wild first aid
Here’s a brief list of some ‘wild first aid’: common plants that can help in emergency situations. They’re useful to know for times you find yourself away from home without access to your usual first-aid kit, like when you’re tramping or travelling. I’ve only included plants commonly found in New Zealand that are relatively easy to identify, but of course there are hundreds more medicinal plants. Once you begin learning the medicinal properties of plants, it can easily turn into a lifelong quest. I’ve left some medicinal superstars off the list because they are easily confused with other plants, such as yarrow, which looks very similar to the highly poisonous hemlock to the uninitiated.
Chamomiles (Matricaria recutita, Matricaria discoidea and Chamaemelum nobile): as a tea, can act as an antihistamine for seasonal allergies and hay fever; apply crushed flowers topically to mosquito bites.
Chickweed (Stellaria media): apply topically to soothe eczema, heat rash and sunburn; can draw out prickles.
Common lawn daisy (Bellis perennis): the bruised leaves can be applied topically to staunch bleeding and prevent swelling of bruises and sprains.
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale): the white juice from the stalk is said to cure warts if applied daily for a few weeks; drink as a bitters tonic to assist with headache, mild cystitis and liver function.
Dock (Rumex obtusifolius and Rumex crispus): apply the leaves topically to treat abrasions and bruises; can also help staunch bleeding.
Eucalyptus leaves: use topically as a poultice for wounds and inflammation; can be brewed as a tea to help a sore throat or mouth infection, like dental pain or mouth ulcers.
Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium): apply topically to soothe insect bites; eating some feverfew leaves can help with migraines. Kawakawa (Piper excelsum): as a tea, can assist with upset stomachs, coughs and colds; apply topically to wounds, abrasions and nettle stings.
Mullein (Verbascum thapsus): as a tea, can help with coughs; a tea made from the flowers can help bring on sleep.
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus): as a tea, can boost circulation (if someone is on the edge of exposure, for example); can assist with mild cystitis; can help soothe colds and coughs.
Pine (Pinus) tip tea: strengthens digestion and can help stomach upsets; can help recovery from colds and flus; can help soothe mild cases of cystitis; can soothe headaches and toothaches; can cleanse the mouth if you forgot your toothbrush and toothpaste!
Plantain (Plantago major): chew the leaves to make a topical poultice for bruises, bites, grazes and stings.
Red clover (Trifolium pratense) flower tea: can help headaches; can help asthma and bronchial issues; can relieve heavy periods.
St John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum): apply topically for nerve pain; as a tea, can be a mild sedative (useful while travelling, for example); as a tea, can be a mood booster.
Willow (Salix): willow bark can act as an aspirin replacement; willow-bark tea can help treat diarrhoea; also good for sore throats and mouth infections.
You can read Fraser’s account of this accident online at Up Country.
A Forager’s Life by Helen Lehndorf: finding my heart and home in nature (HarperCollins New Zealand, $39.99) is available for purchase at Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.