Terry Nichols

My friend Kristie was on her annual quest for firewood. Her reason for having me along, she said, was to make sure she didn’t slice her leg off. With two chainsaws loaded in the back of her ’86 Toyota pickup, we rattled down the gravel road into the sandy mesas of northwest New Mexico.

We searched for piñon trees—dead ones to cut and live ones to pick. I’d never collected piñon nuts, instead paying big dollars for the baggies of nuts gathered by Diné families who sold them from the roadside each fall. But today I was the primary picker. We pulled off to the side within feet of a tree laden with cones.

“We’ve got nuts!” Kristie said as she cracked one open.

“Oh boy, this’ll be great.” I dug a fat nut out of a cone and cracked it with my teeth, then bit into the sweetest, chewiest piñon nut, savoring its faint piney aroma. “Oh, wow, they’re here for the taking.” The morning was mild and clear, perfect for my debut piñon-picking experience, certainly the first of many picking journeys. I was determined to become a full-fledged New Mexican.

“Uh-oh. Forgot my collecting bucket.” Kristie’s statement sent my dream into a tailspin. I’d imagined going home with at least a quart of tasty nuts.

“Oh no. And what about a sheet to put on the ground to capture the nuts raining down as we shake the tree?” At least that’s how I thought Diné people did it. That way, you could easily separate nuts from rabbit poops on the ground.

Kristie grimaced. She rummaged behind the driver’s seat and salvaged a ratty, dog-hair-laden blanket. “This’ll do. I’ve got this dog bowl we can put the nuts into.”

We spread the blanket beneath the outer limbs. Demonstrating proper collection technique, Kristie found a hefty stick and beat on the tree branches. Dead needles, whole pinecones, twigs, and limbs fell. A few nuts sprinkled down, but most danced and rolled off the blanket.

“This isn’t working,” I said.

“Yeah, forget the blanket. We’ll shake the nuts to the ground and then pick them up.” We each collected half a dozen nuts and plonked them into the metal dog bowl. That big dish for her big dog swallowed our dozen nuts, which looked like forlorn petrified raisins in the bottom. Kristie grabbed one and cracked it, chewing thoughtfully. Then she left for her chainsaw so she could get some actual work done while I figured out how to gather nuts.

I pounded more branches with a stick and listened to the plopping of tiny nuts and dead twigs. I scanned the ground for the released morsels but couldn’t find them. It was better to remove them directly from the cones. I held a cone with one hand and pried with the other. Two nuts! Yay! I worked hard for those two nuts, though, and my fingers were a little sticky from the pitch dripping from the cone like honey.

“Isn’t pine pitch a good healing salve?” I yelled to Kristie, who was wrestling with her uncooperative chainsaw.

“Yeah, helps heal wounds.”

Glad of the confirmation, I continued prying nuts as my fingers grew stickier. No worries, the pitch had to be good for my skin. Plink. Plink. One by one, into the dog dish. I didn’t dare eat any of the bounty. At this rate, I’d gather maybe a quarter cup of nuts in an hour. I moved to another tree, where I tried the beat-branches-over-blanket method. Hardly a nut hit the blanket. I was feeling the sun’s heat. My enthusiasm was waning.

Where were all the dang nuts, anyway? I figured we were about one week too late for easy picking. The insects, rodents, and birds had already high-graded the crop, leaving us with the dregs.

Meanwhile, Kristie’s frustration with her finicky chainsaw was growing. She came to supervise me. She looked at my pathetic haul and started tossing nuts out of the bowl.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“These are empty. Look for the dark-colored, shiny ones.”

She was right. I’d spent the last 30 minutes collecting duds. Had I sampled my haul, I would have discovered that for myself. Kristie bent over and plucked the dark specks from the ground and stuffed them into her pockets. Not to be outdone, I bent over and searched for the good ones that animals had missed. After ten minutes, Kristie emptied her pockets into the bowl. I tossed a few nuts on top.

“Whoops. These light-colored ones are empty.” She plucked shells out of the bowl. “You’ll get the hang of it.” She went back to her dud chainsaw. She hadn’t sliced a single piece of wood.

I crossed the road in search of a more fruitful tree, resuming my mining tactic of extracting nuts out of the cone with my fingers. Soon goo coated my digging tools—fingers—and welded them to the metal dog bowl. Trying to avoid resin, I tried rapping the branch tipped by the cone on the bowl, occasionally freeing the nuts inside. Encouraged, I continued, overlooking the many light-colored, nutless shells.

The sun was high and shade was scarce. Kristie had cajoled and babied her chainsaw all this time and had cut only four small logs. She joined me, determined to get a decent haul of nuts if she couldn’t get firewood.

“If I were lost out here and had to depend on these nuts to keep me alive,” I said, “I would die.”

“Maybe.” She ignored my drama. “This tree here is pretty good.” She rapped a branch and deftly scooped up nuts from the ground. I searched for my own tree, resorting to the finger-pry method. A swarm of flies seemed bent on crawling into my mouth as I worked.

“Someone dumped some garbage here.” Kristie motioned to a pile of packaged bacon, hot dogs, and cheese rotting and stinking in the sun as insects hovered. I spat a creature off my lips. Some jerk had defiled the public land where I was trying to have a pleasant experience gathering piñon nuts.

Kristie returned to her truck, where she gave up on her first chainsaw. She got her smaller one going while I half-heartedly wandered around, gazing at cones empty of nuts and carrying the metal dish stuck to my fingers. Inside the bowl, nuts covered the bottom, or at least shells that used to contain nuts covered the bottom. I cursed the last fly off my lip and went back to the truck to sit in the shaded front seat. The chainsaw whined. I rubbed my sticky hands in the dirt and tried to roll the dirt and pitch off my fingers. It had worked into my cuticles, underneath my fingernails, and into the creases of my finger wrinkles.

I’d had enough piñon picking and was ready to go home. It was going on 2:00 pm and I was digging into my companion’s cherry tomato snacks. No way would I eat piñon nuts. When I last looked in the bowl, at least five big harvester ants and two spiders were crawling around the shells and globs of pine pitch.

“You good for another 45 minutes?” Kristie asked as she refueled her saw. She hadn’t collected nearly enough wood, not to mention nuts.

 “Sure.” I said. I lied.

“You just relax,” she said. “I can haul it.”

Time to speed up the operation. I put on my heavy insulated gloves and hauled piñon logs from Kristie’s cut pile to the bed of the truck. I discouraged her from cutting the nearby dead juniper by pointing out that we were tired, and she sure didn’t want to make a mistake with a chainsaw. We hauled the last of the wood.

As Kristie packed up her saw, I noticed my gloved hands felt a little tingly. By the time we started for home, they had me squirming. My skin was stuck to the glove lining, and I could barely peel the gloves off.

“It’s the pitch. My hands sweated in the gloves, and now they’re itching something fierce.” They were splotchy red. I wanted to dip them in ice water. I waved them in the air with no relief. So much for the healing properties of pine pitch.

As Kristie poured the nuts into a yoghurt container, she commented that half were probably empty. She insisted I take the entire haul, which amounted to about one and a half cups.

“No thanks, I can’t deal with these nuts. You take ‘em.” I meant it. I poured most of them back into the dog dish, along with the ants and spiders, and placed the dish on the passenger seat. “Enjoy them. Thanks for my first and last piñon picking experience.” I meant that, too.

So much for becoming a real New Mexican. From now on, I’ll gladly pay big bucks for a baggie of Diné-collected piñon nuts.