The more daring the foraging adventure, the more fun Cook seems to have. He catches steelhead trout on the Rogue River (mostly hatchery grown, but wild enough after months or years in the Pacific), and, early on a June morning, he gets in line at Bonneville Dam to await the starting gun for shad season. He keeps an eye out for bears while picking huckleberries in the Blue Mountains and eastern Cascades. He camps on the Washington coast in winter and wanders the beach at night with hundreds of strangers, all hoping to nab a few precious razor clams with their PVC suction guns. He casts for silver salmon from a Seattle beach, day after day until he lands one.Ĭook forages farther afield, too: He drives hundreds of miles to a fire-blackened forest to gather morels, avoiding crowds of recreational mushroom hunters and dodging potentially dangerous pros. He “jigs” for squid off a Seattle pier, along with Nicaraguans, Cambodians, and Ukrainians (a jig is “like a miniature cigar” with a circle of hooks at the end, meant to entangle rather than impale a squid).

In and near Seattle, where he lives, Cook gathers weeds that Gibbons also loved–watercress, fiddleheads, stinging nettle, and dandelions. Cook likes to write, and he writes well, but he most likes outdoor adventure. He returned a few years later to study creative writing and then took an editorial job with Amazon, but he couldn’t stay tethered to a desk for long. Cook first came to the Northwest to sailboard on the Columbia River. Although Cook grew up on factory food in suburban Connecticut, he certainly has a streak of the primitive. The Pacific Northwest now has its own modern Euell Gibbons in Langdon Cook, author of Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21 st Century Forager (Skipstone). In books and magazine articles, Gibbons told how to identify and harvest dozens, perhaps hundreds, of wild species, and how best to cook them up. Fence rows, stream sides, and even vacant lots could provide the raw material for tasty, nutritious, and unusual table fare. You didn’t have to go to the mountains or virgin forest to gather wild foods you could just walk out your door and take a stroll. Hunting was as popular a sport then as now, but foraging was easier and cheaper and ought to be practiced more, Gibbons believed. “There is a saving streak of the primitive in all of us,” wrote Euell Gibbons, who introduced the art of foraging to the citified masses in the 1960s and 1970s.

Upstream langdon cook