The yellow poplar canopy is still mostly gray bone, though the topmost twigs have begun to blur with the first copper-green of late April. Down in the hollow, where the north slope drops toward a creek that stays cold enough to numb a hand by midday, the light is clear and flat. It reaches all the way to the ground, unobstructed by the shade that will close over this bench three weeks from now.
A hand clears the matted layer of last year's beech and chestnut oak leaves, slick from three days of steady rain. Beneath them the green is sudden. A wide, smooth leaf shaped like a spearhead, two or three growing together from a single base, held up by a stem that flushes deep burgundy where it enters the dirt. There are forty of them, fifty, running down the wet bench in a loose mat that thins toward the drier ground upslope.
The thumb works into the mud, following the stem to the neck of the bulb. The soil here is black loam, loose from centuries of rotting wood, but it holds the roots tight. A dull pocketknife slides into the earth an inch from the stalk and tilts back to prize the bulb upward. The roots give way with a wet, tearing sound.
The air fills with it at once — damp earth and rotting logs and a sharp, oily skunk-musk that catches at the back of the throat. It gets under the fingernails. It stays in the creases of the knuckles after three washings with lye soap, and it stays on the breath long after the plant is eaten. It is the smell that names the plant before anyone has to.
Allium tricoccum, the wild leek, does not wait for warm weather. It is a spring ephemeral, one of the first green things up through the leaf litter in the high coves, and it lives its whole year in the brief window between the thaw and the closing of the forest canopy. It takes the full early sun and spends it fast. By June, when the buckeyes and maples have leafed out and the hollow has gone dark, the leaves yellow and slump and dissolve back into the ground. Later in the summer a single bare stalk rises where the leaves were and opens a small cluster of white flowers, and then three black seeds, and then nothing. The work of the plant is finished before the hemlocks have put on their bright spring tips.
One of those black seeds takes five to seven years to grow into a plant large enough to be worth the digging. A patch left alone widens at the pace of a thing that has all the time in the world — the bulb throwing off offsets at its base, the offsets settling in beside it, the colony spreading by inches across the wet benches until the leaves run unbroken for thirty or forty feet and the ground under the poplars is more green than brown for a few weeks each spring. The mountains are full of these benches, or were. Every cove that holds water and faces away from the afternoon sun holds the conditions the plant wants. The plant found them a long time before anyone came up the branch with a basket.
For generations the dig was a small thing, a matter of necessity and habit. In the mountain economy the ramp was the first fresh green available after a winter of salt pork, dried beans, and shriveled potatoes, and it was treated as a tonic — the thing that cleaned the blood and woke the body up after the cold months. People took a basket and a digging fork up the branch behind the house and worked a patch they had worked before. They thinned the largest plants and left the rest. They took the leaves, or they cut the bulbs clean above the root plate and left the bottom of the plant in the dirt to come back the following spring. A patch was a known thing, tended at the pace it could stand, and it was understood to belong to the family whose branch ran through it the same way the spring and the timber did.
The festivals grew out of that. In Cocke County, on the Tennessee side of the line, the Cosby Ramp Festival began in the 1950s as a homecoming — a reason for several thousand people to stand in the spring air on the first warm Sunday, eat fried trout and scrambled eggs cooked with bushels of wild leeks in iron skillets the size of wagon wheels, and hear bluegrass. The amount taken for a festival was not small. But it came out of deep country, dug by people who knew the particular ridges, who had gone back to the same coves for thirty years and would go back for thirty more, and who took it as given that you did not clean out a patch you intended to dig again. The pressure came once a year, stayed in the county, and ended when the festival ended. The coves carried it the way they had always carried it.
By the middle 2000s the geography of the plant changed. The smell that had been a marker of mountain poverty — the smell that got children sent home from school in April for carrying it on their clothes — turned into a line on menus in Atlanta and Nashville and New York. Chefs wanted the first green thing of the Appalachian spring, and they wanted it by the case, and they wanted it for as many weeks as the thaw could be chased north up the spine of the mountains. The demand stopped being a three-week window in one county and became a market that ran from Georgia to Quebec, following the latitudes as they warmed, paying cash by the pound at the truck.
When a market pays by the pound, the old logic of thinning a patch and cutting the tops loses its sense. Leaves are light. Bulbs are heavy, and the heaviest part of the bulb is the part that lives in the ground. Commercial diggers came into the coves with five-gallon buckets and long-handled garden spades, and the spade does not thin. A spade lifts a ten-foot square of forest floor in a few minutes — the whole mat of leaves and bulbs and roots and black dirt turned out at once, the bulbs shaken free into the bucket, the rest left where it falls.
A bench that a commercial crew has worked looks like an old hog lot. The leaf litter is churned into muck. The trillium and cohosh and bloodroot that shared the ground have their root systems torn open to the air. And because the plant builds itself back so slowly, the cove does not reset the next spring the way it reset after a family thinned it. The May rains take the loosened soil down into the creek. The light, now that nothing holds the bench, brings up nettle and stiltgrass where the leeks were. A patch dug to the stone can go fifteen years before it shows a dozen leaves again, and a patch dug hard enough often does not come back to that hollow at all. The colony that took a century to spread across the bench leaves in a single April.
In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where the green once ran unbroken under the old poplars and the digging had gone on as a tolerated tradition for as long as there had been a park, the monitoring plots began to show it. The population density inside the harvested coves fell year over year until the curve could not be read any other way. The park service closed it — a total ban on taking ramps inside the boundary, the tradition ended by the numbers it had run up against. The ban stopped the legal buckets inside the line. It did not stop the demand. The pressure stepped across the ridge crests onto the Cherokee National Forest and the private tracts beyond, where the boundaries are marked by rusted wire and old paint blazes weathering off the trees, where no one runs monitoring plots, and where a cove is protected by nothing but how far it sits from the nearest road and whether the family that owns it is still up the branch to notice.
Those are the coves carrying it now. A digger with a truck and a topographic map can read the country for north slopes and seeps the same way a hunter reads it for sign, and a good cove an hour's walk from a logging road is worth the walk when the buyer is paying by the pound. The wire does not stop it. The blazes do not stop it. The only thing that has ever set the pace the plant can stand is a person who means to come back to the same ground in twenty years and wants something there when they do.
The knife goes back into the dirt at the edge of the patch. The work is slow, done one plant at a time — the thumb finding the stem, the blade tilting under the bulb, the wet tear of the roots, the next one. The rain has stopped, but water keeps dropping from the bare branches overhead and landing on the shoulders of a canvas jacket in heavy, irregular thuds.
A single bulb, wiped clean of mud against a wet thumb, shows a skin like white silk darkening to purple at the neck, and below it the roots branch out thick and white like a small beard. Split with a fingernail, the bulb runs cold and strong enough to bring water to the eyes.
Fifty yards up the draw, where the creek narrows to a trickle between two moss-covered boulders of sandstone, the hillside is brown leaf litter all the way to the ridge crest. A few mayapples have started to push up their green umbrellas. But the broad flat leaf of the wild leek is gone from benches that carried it five springs ago — the old holes where the dirt was turned have silted in and filled with dead twigs, leaving shallow bowls in the ground that hold standing water and grow nothing. The cove looks like any other north slope in April until you know what used to be on it.
The basket holds two dozen plants — enough for one skillet, enough to smell the house up for three days, enough to keep the calendar. The leaves are laid back down over the small holes where the earth was broken, and the matted gray oak leaves are smoothed back into place until the black dirt is covered again and the bench looks the way it looked before the hand came to it, minus two dozen plants it can spare.
The light is dropping behind the western ridge and the cold in the bottom of the hollow comes up through the soles of the boots. The creek keeps its sound against the rock. In three weeks the maple leaves will be the size of a squirrel's ear, the light on the forest floor will go green and dim, and whatever is left under the leaves will be shut away in the dark until next April.
