a foreword:
As it turns out, I’m not particularly good at writing blog posts. I tell people I just don’t have ideas, but this isn’t the entire truth.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I first thought of this blog post months and months ago. (In that period since, I’ve attempted to write several posts, and they either fizzle out or sit unpublished, waiting. Maybe at some point they will arrive published to this blog, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many never are. That’s how these things go, right? Not even just writing, but any kind of production includes many unpublished, unseen drafts. And, for the most part, they remain in limbo. Schrodinger’s blog post.)
The idea for this blog post and the event that I describe happened long ago at this point. The words and feelings are no longer as fresh in my mind; instead, I feel like I’m trying to capture ghosts, trap water from rushing out of my palms, before the idea slips from my head entirely. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll enjoy what I have left to offer.
On a dreary afternoon, I clambered into my parents’ van to go bamboo-picking.
For those who don’t know, I live in Delaware, a small mid-Atlantic state on the east coast. It’s small enough that you can drive from one end of the state to the other in an hour (and that’s along the long side – hotdog-style state travel, if you will), and it’s nestled beneath Pennsylvania and above Maryland. All this is to say, that for us, for this small, American state, going bamboo-picking meant hopping into a car, stopping along the side of a highway, and walking the short distance across the poorly maintained highway grass greenery to a strange dense bamboo forest, where we would knock down bamboo shoots to shove into garbage bags, to be brought home, washed, peeled, and cooked.
If this sounds strange or alarming to be stopping along the side of the highway to harvest something to eat… yeah, me too. These trips always stand out to me from the otherwise average suburban fabric of my life.
I’m not sure what bamboo forests are like in their native environment, but here at least, they’re an invasive species, a total pest in anybody’s backyard, and in that particular forest, they had clearly been able to grow unfettered. It was maybe the first time that I’ve seen a monoculture in person outside of carefully, deliberately cultivated farms.
It felt strange stepping into that dense wood and seeing nothing but bamboo. There was no underbrush, or ferns, or even the familiar rattle and song of birds – they had choked everything else out. Only dense bamboo, and only the sounds of our feet crunching on bamboo leaves. The loud sounds of the highway were muffled into ghostly echoes, spaceship noises from a sci-fi movie.
Bamboo shoots are stout, purple-gray spikes, maybe half a foot in height, often smaller. If you knock them over, they will split cleanly at the base, leaving you with a dense little cone. These aren’t young bamboo plants, but rather another branch of sorts of an existing bamboo plant, who had sent its roots far and wide underground. These shoots can grow startlingly fast – multiple feet in a single day. Famously, there’s a torture method that involves slowly being impaled by bamboo shoots.
I felt no qualms about knocking down the expansion attempts of such an aggressive plant – partly because, as I stood there, surrounded by bamboo, I felt distinctly like this bamboo forest shouldn’t be here, and also partly because, as I stood there, surrounded by bamboo, what we did felt inconsequential against the everything that surrounded us.