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Sweetness from the Thinnest Soil
The muscadine is a kind of wild grape native to North America. It’s not the kind prized by connoisseurs, but here in the South it has become somewhat emblematic of regional foodways, being transformed into jellies and wine (often very sweet) or just eaten by the handful. Back when I was teaching a fall graduate class, I would take muscadines to my students—some of whom came from out of state and some of whom came from out of country—just to share and to watch their reactions as they bit through those leathery skins and then encountered those large and bitter seeds. The muscadine might strike you as a bit too wild if you are accustomed to store-bought table grapes.
The fruit has been cultivated on a large scale here in the South, but my favorite ones are those I find in the wild. Several miles outside Little Rock is a place called Rattlesnake Ridge, where I found some vines growing on a rocky crag, looping among some of the lower limbs of various trees. And so every few years, around the time when they will be ripe, my wife and I go hiking there just so I can pick muscadines. I’ve never gotten more than two or three handfuls from that spot, for these wild vines don’t produce their fruit in great bunches but just isolated purple orbs, but I still look forward to these hikes each year. Most other hikers just pass them by.
A few years ago, I decided to save some of my muscadine seeds and attempt growing a vine or two at my house. My seeds did sprout come spring, and I planted a few of the seedlings along a back fence. I had more than expected and so gave some to my mother in Jonesboro. Mine continue to grow, but she called me a week after I had given some to her to report that all of hers had died.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I planted them in the best potting soil I had and made sure they got full sunlight and watered them every day, and they just shriveled up. Did I do something wrong?”
“Yes, yes, you did,” I told her. “Mom, I got these seeds from a plant growing on a rocky outcropping among a whole lot of taller trees. They don’t need rich soil and sunlight. They need crap soil and more shade than you think is healthy for a plant. That’s what it has adapted to.”
Arkansas is changing. The northwestern corner is undergoing a building boom, and the often overlooked southern Arkansas hills may see a similar influx of wealth if much comes of the lithium extraction down there. Maybe one day, ambitious natives won’t feel compelled to shuffle off to places with a greater culture of enlightenment and a richer topsoil of freedoms. Maybe all of that will be here. However, across the centuries, numerous others have sought out this humble territory because of what it lacked. They knew that they were like muscadines, doing their best work, making their sweetest fruit, in a land of little opportunity—making do with what sunlight filters through the canopy in a place little noticed and poorly regarded by the outside world. Or as Albert Camus wrote in his essay “The Minotaur, or The Stop in Oran”:
The desert itself has assumed significance; it has been glutted with poetry. For all the world’s sorrows, it is a hallowed spot. But at certain moments the heart wants nothing so much as spots devoid of poetry. Descartes, planning to meditate, chose his desert: the most mercantile city of his era. There he found his solitude and the occasion for perhaps the greatest of our virile poems: “The first [precept] was never to accept anything as true unless I knew it to be obviously so.” It is possible to have less ambition and the same nostalgia. But during the last three centuries Amsterdam has spawned museums. In order to flee poetry and yet recapture the peace of stones, other deserts are needed, other spots without soul and without reprieve.”
It might seem a backhanded compliment to praise a place’s lack of soul, but too much of anything can do a body wrong—even culture and enlightenment. Sometimes, like Camus, we need to flee poetry in order to find truth. Sometimes, a certain flavor of sweetness can only emerge from the thinnest soil (the merest soul) this world has to offer.
By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
