Meeting Barrel Cactus
I first noticed the fruit about half a kilometer away in the near distance. I was walking with my father in the desert behind a housing subdivision where he stays. A short cactus with a small bright yellow crown winked at me in the distance, the yellow standing out among the greens, browns, tans, and ocher of the desert. The winter sun was bright and the air cold and refreshing. I told my dad, I want to check that cactus out. On our way back we veered towards it. On closer inspection it was a barrel cactus, round and stout with straight thorns in small regular clumps with a longer curved spine curving out of each clump.
Barrel cactus bodies have vertical accordion folded ridges. On the top of the cactus there was a circle dense with yellow fruits about as big as figs. Each fruit has a brown dried tuft flower remnant sticking out the top. The fruit have smooth yellow skin, slightly glossy, with some shade variation greener toward the bottom and more saturated on top. The skin also has a regular scale looking pattern almost smooth against the background outlined in a thin dark line. This faint dragon scale pattern looks like the patching where some other cactus fruits have thorns. Surprisingly, the fruits have no thorns or spines not even the little irritating hairs that grace delicious prickly pear fruits.
I briefly wondered if thousands of years of interactions with human people might have effected this evolution. I pulled a fruit out of the crown by the dried flower tuft. The yellow fruit almost look like something between a tiny smooth pineapple and a giant glossy yellow pomegranate cell/nodule. At the bottom it had a small pithy concave dip where the fruit had been attached. The fruit widens tapering out towards the crown. I split the fruit open gently with my thumbs. Inside it was filled with a multitude of small black seeds like sesame seeds but a little bigger and gorgeously asymmetrical but nearly identical, like tiny black boulders. Around the seeds was a bit of mucilaginous goo. The fruit around seeds is about half a centimeter thick, the flesh inside also yellowish but with a touch of orange and green and a little translucent. It looks juicy.
I nibbled the edge of the fruit. It tasted sour and not bad. I tasted a few of the seeds. They were crunchy and plain with a slightly nutty flavor promising nutrition. Feeling assured by my little nibbles, I took a bite of the whole fruit holding the dried flower top between my thumb and forefinger. The seeds and fruit mixed together. It tasted a little sweet and somewhat sour and very crunchy. Not bad, I might like it. As I chewed the texture became a bit slimy and gel-like – sort of like chia seeds or holy basil seeds when emulsified in water. “Not bad,” I said. “I think this is food.”
I ate a couple more finding the top of the fruit to be woody and hard to chew. So I tossed away the tops stripped of lower flesh and seeds. After three or four, I decided to wait and see if I would get sick or an uncomfortable belly. I doubted i would. I even felt compelled to pick a handful more and carry them in my blue wool hat like a little bag.
Growing up in the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest, I have always been curious about desert food especially cactus. My curiosity has been nurtured by my times in the deserts, especially the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. And by Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels Ceremony and Garden in the Dunes with their rich descriptions of the floral and edible sustenance of the North American deserts. Some descriptions and stories I would not believe except I have seen the desert bloom after the rains and I have seen the flocks of birds, the herds of wild pigs, the seed hordes of the wood rats, and heard howls of coyotes and seen their footprints, pricked ears and smelled their pungent scat. From Silko and desert peoples, I learn slowly. The desert speaks of millennia of human inhabitation, relations, and involvement shaping the ecology. The small town I am visiting is just outside the Ndeh Nation (San Carlos Apache).
We walked on for another hour looking at stones and traces of an old sand and stone quarry. We discussed the irregular heights of chaparral and the distributions of different plants speculating about water distribution. We were curving back toward the 20th century housing development. My father mentioned the hills and valleys were historically canalized for seasonal water catchment and distribution. I like this story and disagreement with mainstream thought. I was told the desert here was rich and filled with pastures when the Mormons and other settlers first established their farms and ranches. I wondered aloud if the richness, now said to have dried from drought, was from landscape alterations and maintenance of original people. The settlers could not recognize the work. It was too integrated into the land. Land they could only see and describe as wild. Lacking even recognition of craft and artifact, they could not maintain the eden they found. Drought might be an easy alibi for ignorance. The newcomers failed to maintain and upkeep the cryptic canals and waterways. The desert slowly impoverishing in terms of human possibility.
In a hundred years, the setters exhaust thousands of years of cultivated involuted relations from this dry rocky place. Imagine camping in your living room, kitchen, and garden. Now simply imagine your living room, kitchen and garden is a big as two deserts.
Behind us the sacred mountain, a “sky island” with five distinct climatic zones. Here there are bears. I wonder, every crevasse and valley I see in the distance is a possible place of wealth and desert habitation like the titular Garden in the Dunes. Silko’s haunting novel is about peoples so small and autonomous, as not to appear in history as warring tribes and nations. When I stayed in the 29 Palms area, I was surprised to learn dry seeming water courses often hid oases tucked away invisible among the serene yellow and brown hills.
We reached another couple of fruit filled barrel cactus crowns. Feeling quite good, I picked a few more. After an hour without vomiting or shitting my pants, I figured, this is good food. I did not even feel a touch of indigestion. Heck, I get more gas from cheese. So I picked a handful more to take back to the kitchen to experiment with. I always took less then half from each crown leaving the rest for others, and perhaps the possibility of seeds growing into future cactus. We also pulled out the mobile smart phone and read a few webpages about eating barrel cactus fruit. Lots of information available. It struck me that the information always veered toward preservation and further cooking rather than expressing the yummy delight of eating the fresh fruit in the desert.
Already after only a few hours encounter, I wondered if the cactus had been selected by humans over the millennia. And I fantasize about trying to grow them from the beautiful asymmetrical shiny black seeds. The cactus communicates with me ~ interacting through color, form, and taste collaborating with strange un-censoring aspects of non-individual self, with Silko’s literary possession, with Robin Kimmerer’s entreatment to listen to plants, with Cat Anderson’s account of indigenous cultivation of California, and with my problematic romanticism of pre-columbian / decolonial land ethics and subsistence.
Later in the evening, I blended the fruit and seeds with a touch of sugar. It turned bright white with black flecks and frothed up like mousse, meringue, or chiffon. It tasted like lemon meringue before I added the sugar and after fluffy and gooey with a light banana flavor. It was like a fluffy, gooey light airy banana custard. Pretty good. It’s texture and pre-sugar flavor reminded me of a traditional foamy desert made from berries by Wet’suwet’en friends but much less of a delicious bitter flavor. It was foamy and frothy with a mouth feel simultaneously like a gel and a froth just a bit like chia or holy basil seeds. Quite nice and slightly odd. Without the sugar it might make an amazing glaze for fish (or iguana?). With sugar it might make an excellent chiffon filling for pie. I wonder what would happen if I added some egg white?
The next day, I toasted some air dried seeds. They were delicious with a rich nutty flavor.
I dreamt of black trays of soil with small tiny cactus popping out in uneven social groups or constellations like dark green stars. Imagine giant red clay storage jars filled with black seeds standing in the cool shade of an earthen building in the distance faint muffled sounds of singing, rattles, drums, and bone whistles.
It was good to be back in the desert for a few days.