Saturday morning we climbed Little Si, which a guidebook has the nerve to call a “hill.” Little Si stands beside Mount Si, in North Bend, Wa., and both are named for the homesteader Josiah “Uncle Si” Merritt. Round trip, the trail measures only five miles but most of it is vertical, a series of rocky switchbacks. When you reach the summit you’ve gained 1,500 feet in elevation. Our 5- and 8-year-olds accompanied us.
The lower trail is flanked by wildflowers, and that’s where I unexpectedly spied a memento mori – St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforate). The plant is raggedy and worthy of notice only for its bright yellow, five-petalled flowers. The common name comes from its traditional day of flowering – June 24, Midsummer and St. John the Baptist’s Day. In folklore, the plant is used to ward off evil, depression and other ailments, and today it’s on the “alternative medicine” shelf in the drugstore. In England: The Four Seasons, Ronald Blythe calls the herb “an all-purpose remedy for sickness, body and soul.”
I know a little about St. John’s wort because I spent much of the summer of 1995 harvesting it in upstate New York. I worked with a woman, a fellow reporter, whose husband had an accelerating case of multiple sclerosis. I never saw Mark walk, though a year before I met him he was still able to crawl up the stairs to the living room in his house. He used a high-tech wheel chair and had grown almost entirely dependent on others for the mundane tasks of living.
Mark looked for hope in the least likely places. He ordered a device that delivered electric shocks, the idea being to kill the parasitic flukes reputed to cause M.S. His kitchen counter was a cluttered pharmacy. He bought an expensive German food processor for making herbal remedies – among them, a tincture composed largely of St. John’s wort and 100-proof vodka. He bought the latter in one-gallon, plastic jugs and I collected the former in fields around Albany and Schenectady, stuffed it in plastic trash bags and stored it in the refrigerator in Mark’s garage.
I assumed these strategies were Mark’s way of boosting morale. I never took them seriously as medicine but neither did I try to dissuade him. Hope is for the hopeless. Mark, not yet 50 years old, died in 2001. His memory returns when I see the homely yellow flower. Here’s what Thoreau noted in his journal on Aug. 19, 1856:
“The small hypericums have a peculiar, smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like.”
3 comments:
Hooray! I clambered up Little Mount Si on many occasions when I lived in Seattle. The last time, there were not only entire families and household pets on the summit, but an actual nursing mother. Next time, be sure to try Mount Si, the bigger sibling--probably not for kids, though. There's fantastic knob at the top, where you'll find many climbers talking to their friends in Seattle on their cell phones. Alas.
I haven't been following your adventures recently. Have you gone up Mt. Constitution yet?
On the most picturesque mountains in Georgia, you'll find people talking on their cellphones AND smoking cigars.
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