After our first day of foraging, I put these berries in a bowl and crushed them.  We found a few oregon grape berries and mixed them in. I added salt, honey, and olive oil and mixed the berries with lettuce leaves. 

This, my first task, is a simple act of picking dinner from the undergrowth.  Somehow, it is enthralling. 

In Oregon, the coastal strip and its coastal mountain range run the entire length of the state; and coastal Indians in Oregon; regardless of tribe, were interconnected by common ancestry, custom, lifestyle and geography.  Some of these tribe names: the Tillamook or the Siuslaw, are familiar to many of us.  The Siletz, the Alsea, the Coos and the Coquille tribes may be less familiar.

Fruits like salal and huckleberry would not have been foreign to Indians paddling south from Alaska, British Columbia and Washington.  I was surprised to learn that the flora of the Pacific Northwest coast is almost identical along its long spine north – Oregon coastal Indians’ foraging habits, then, may be representative of the habits of the Americas’ first inhabitants.

I was thinking about this a few years ago, when I was hiking on the Oregon Coast.

Millions of by-the-wind sailors (Vellela vellela) had washed up on that lonely Pacific shore in Southern Oregon. 

It was no phenomenon; these blue and purple jellyfish evolved sails, which they use to ride the high seas.  Most by-the-wind jellyfish on this part of the Pacific have right-leaning sails because of the prevailing northerly winds of the Pacific coast.  They ride constantly on-tack at sea, except for days like that, when their fixed sails spell their doom by the millions.

Their carcasses crunch under my feet.  Beaches in this part of the country are often empty – if you don’t count the by-the-wind sailors.  And the dead whale.

Well actually, there is a lot more here than just me and the dead jellyfish, and this giant dead whale.  There is breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For at least 11,000 years before Spanish ships and French fur traders, this coast was both home and kitchen. 

I circled the dead whale, whose blubber has bronzed with time.  I could not tell for sure what this huge animal was, but I guessed it was a juvenile gray whale.  Having been born in Baja a few years ago, it was en route on its sophomore foray to the Arctic.