Chokecherries Almost Choked out my Brother's Life

As a person of humble and crude roots, I was immersed in the natural world long before I could walk. As a child born of summer, I slept and crawled in July's emerald grass, often times unattended, and became intimately involved in the doings of the little clovers and ants and toads.

One of the oldest memories is being bombarded by a swarm of bumblebees, as I had unknowingly besieged their nest when I dug my way into a pile of decaying grass clippings. I was stung all over the place, and thankfully, I could walk by then, and "ran" away as fast as my little legs would take me. I was both upset and intrigued--did all grass piles harbor a furious army of buzzing within them? Or had I stumbled upon something entirely unique?

So began my close examinations of the natural world. I wanted--no needed to--know how the ecosystem of things worked, because I so desperately wanted to not just be an observer of it, I wanted to be an integral part of it. I didn't want to upset bumblebees by accidentally destroying their homes--I wanted to know how I could help them be the happiest bees around.

Soon enough, when I was rummaging through my grandfather and fathers piles of old books and magazines in the garage, a few Peterson Field Guides on plants and animals found my hands. I'm not sure which came first, my thirst for knowledge, or my love of reading, but the two have become so entwined I'm not sure that it matters. 

I spent hours of my life walking around my parents little parcel of land plopped down between corn and wheat fields as far you could see, and I began to discover things. I learned that if I could look at a picture in my field guide, and if I could match it to the plant in the real world, then I could obtain "hidden" knowledge not available by observation alone. Someone else had done the work, and all I had to do was play a game of matching the picture to the plant. 

It was an incredible way to "pass the time" even though as a child I don't think time really exists, much beyond the time you wake up and the time you go to sleep, everything in between those two events has no inherent temporal value. As soon as my brother was old enough to walk and keep up with me, we spent most of our time outside, no matter the weather, investigating the wild world.

As a consequence of generational trauma and poverty, much my youth was unmonitored. While the reasons for the neglect don't matter anymore, it did happen, and it did lead to some uncomfortable, and almost deadly situations quite frequently. Just like my encounter with an army of bumblebees, I often experienced many life lessons the hardest way--by accident.

At my parents homestead, there is an old stand of mulberry trees. The trees were planted long, long ago as a means to supplement pigs' appetites. My great-grandparents had fenced in a large portion of the yard, and when the mulberries were ripe, they corralled off the pigs beneath the trees. 

Half a century later, the mulberry trees no longer fed livestock, but they did make a tasty snack for me and my younger brother. I had learned from my books and from my father that the berries were best when they were a deep purple (side note, the white or green ones may induce a bit of hallucinogenic euphoria). I'd venture to say that a third of my calories were from mulberries during the months they fell from the trees.

My brother was not only my best friend, but I was his babysitter. Before I was sent off to kindergarten, I was often in charge of entertaining and keeping him occupied. Of course at that time a barely 7 year old and an almost 4 year old, were not quite mature enough to be left alone for hours at a time outside, but we were. 

On one of these types of days, we had set up our "camp" beneath the mulberry trees. There was a bit of wild underbrush at the time, and we would build a little in it fort, tucked between the brambles and the sandy burrows of an ancient groundhog city. We'd gather berries, and dig in the sand, and my brother would talk to me in his blossoming and mumbly sort of baby-toddler English, and I'd tell him stories about how the groundhog tunnels were actually a secret underground city for miniature people. If I could choose a moment to live in on repeat in the afterlife, those moments with my brother would be it. In an otherwise chaotic and tumultuous young life, I had some moments of true peace beneath that tree. But also, some moments where death came too close too.

My brother was happily digging in the sand when I left so go use the restroom. I was gone, maybe, five minutes (but again, as a child, time is kind of inconsequential, so it could have been longer). When I got back to our hangout spot, I noticed that my brother had an unusual looking plant in his hand, and was putting round berries in his mouth. I knew they weren't mulberries (which at the time, were the only berry I knew was safe to eat). 

I grabbed the plant from him, and forced his mouth open to attempt to remove whatever he had just put in it. But it was too late, the berries were already gone, his lips purpled from the fruit's juice, and he had started coughing.

I don't remember if I had my guidebook with me, or if I just knew he had eaten something bad. But I picked him up and ran to the house as fast as I could. I handed over the specimen of the plant and my brother to my mother, whom at the time was busy with post-partum depression (and taking care of my brand new baby sister. She looked at the plant and her eyes went wide.

"How many did he eat?"

"I don't know, I had to pee." 

While the internet didn't quite exist in rural Ohio at that time, it was country hand-me-down knowledge that chokecherries were poisonous and my brother had chewed quite a few. When I looked up the plant later in my book, I had to ask an adult how to say, hydrocyanic acid--otherwise known as cyanide.

The poison control helpline told my mom that she needed to induce vomiting. But, one of the side effects of eating chokecherries is that it causes your mouth and throat to become so dry you start to "choke" even though you have nothing blocking your throat. 

After frantic and unsuccessful moments of fingers down his throat and no vomit, my mother resigned to letting him "wait it out". My mother was in no condition to get us all in the car and drive to the hospital, and dad was a busy maintenance manager in the times before cellphones...so when my mom tried to get a hold of him, she was met with his work voicemail inbox message. While much of my mother's woes were not known to me fully then, and only later in my teenager years did I know she was weighed down by invisible maladies. 

So I sat by my brother's side and held his had as he choked on each breath. For how long? I don't know. As I said earlier, children don't really have a sense of time. But I knew my brother was suffering, and I even though I didn't really know what death was quite yet, I did know the he was the person I cared about most and I wanted him to feel better. My already stressed out and incapacitated mother had resigned herself to the recliner to breastfeed my sister. 

I did the only thing I knew, and I held his had and sat with him and breathed for him. 

"Like this," I said and inhaled deeply and then pushed it out slowly. "You can do it, I know you can. Here, feel it." I took his hand in mine and put it to my chest as it rose and fell.

And he did it--each dry inhale lead to a coughing exhale. And by the time Dad got home from work, my brother was nearly back to normal. He did have a sore throat for a few days, but he was alive. There is no way to know how close he was to death, but he was too close, and I never wanted him to visit that threshold again. So I became hyper-vigilante and began to learn every plant and its purpose and if it was poisonous, because lives depended upon it.

I'm not sure how my parents privately handled that incident, and I've never had reason to ask them, as they seem to have some big blank spots in their memory when it comes to my preteen childhood. I think they were so desperately trying to survive and take care of three children on blue collar poverty wages. that they blanked out the bad times in order to keep moving forward.

I don't blame them. But I do blame situations like that as to why I have this yearning to understand the natural world. That little bit of knowledge I had acquired by my 7th year might have played a part in saving my brother's life. Now, I hope that with plant wisdom, I can use my knowledge not just to "save" lives, but to bring vitality back into people's lives.