Two good reasons to touch grass

One Sunday night in March, we got stuck behind a crash on the Beltway just north of Washington. As we inched along in the slow lane, the headlights illuminated a small hand-painted sign in the weeds to our right. EPSTEIN, it said, in neat white letters. Quick, take a picture! I shouted, suddenly wide awake. 

That week, I hadn’t been thinking a lot about notorious child sex trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein, and what we don’t yet know about our president’s involvement with his activities. Sure, Epstein is still in the news. To take this week alone: Will Ferrell played him as a goofy Dickensian ghost haunting Donald Trump’s dreams in the cold open to Saturday Night Live. The prison guard who was apparently the last person to see him alive testified on Monday before a House committee. Coverage continued for the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, a pop-up art project in New York City ending today, where visitors have been able to see bound editions of the 3.5 million pages of the Epstein documents released so far.  

And yet, because nothing lately seems to budge Trump or his government on the Epstein case, and because so much else is happening (an on-again, off again war; a Trump “deal” with himself to put 1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars into an unmonitored slush fund; the Supreme Court acting to reduce the clout of Black and Democratic voters; an Ebola outbreak in Congo; presidential plans to turn the White House roof into “the greatest drone empire you’ve ever seen” (?)), it can seem both impossible and pointless to think about Epstein. Unless you are one of the people who survived his crimes, in which case he’s probably not so easy to back-burner.

I had seen one of these handmade Epstein signs in Maryland before, on a smaller road in Bethesda, where it sent my brain spiraling. The sign didn’t exhort you to any particular action. No one was claiming credit; I thought Reddit might have some idea who was responsible, but my searches there came up blank. It was cheap, local, and analog, unattended by search optimization or ad dollars or a pitch to the media—just seven letters, spelling out a relatively common last name. If you didn’t follow the news, or were a kid, say, it might slip by you without meaning anything at all. 

But if you did follow the news, the roadside sign was a startling portal to a set of information. With apologies to unrelated Epsteins (hi to my aunt), the name is now such a powerful stand-in for the case as a whole, and for Trump’s evident corruption in covering it up, that this sign likely sent the minds of thousands of local drivers spiraling like mine. Per ounce of effort, it was about the most effective reminder you could put in a public space. 

Of course, a sign like this could refer to any urgent news or conspiracy. At another moment, it might equally have said BENGHAZI or LAB LEAK. How you feel about a sign like this depends on what you think of the beliefs it telegraphs—the unfinished business, in the mind of the painter—and maybe on how that business eventually winds up. You can still buy a shirt from Walmart that says “ROBERT MUELLER IS MY HOMEBOY,” after all, but it’s hard to picture wearing it. 

Yet I still feel oddly moved by the Epstein sign. We are in a dark and confusing moment in terms of trust. American faith in the media, experts, and politicians is at a low ebb, with people rightly observing that bias, incentives, self-interest, and generative AI are working at cross-purposes to delivery of the facts we need. And yet humans find a way to tell each other what they think matters. These weird little hand-painted signs remind me that touching grass, as people on the internet love to tell each other to do (somewhere between “hey, friend, let’s take a step back here” and “go jump in a lake”), is not just about pulling out of doomscroll mode, but about tangible transmissions from one human to another. A single word painted on a sign may not be efficient or scalable, but it is somehow mammalian, like someone physically tapping you on the shoulder. “Epstein,” they say significantly, and you’re like, Damn! Yeah. Epstein.

Anyway, enough about that guy. This week in Washington, my touching-grass hours have filled up with something far sweeter and more inspiring: a cascade of ripe serviceberries. And I would be remiss in not mentioning it to you while they’re in season, starting here and spreading north with the summer weather all the way to Canada.

What is the serviceberry? Also known as a juneberry, saskatoon, or shadblow, the serviceberry tree is a multibranched tree native to North America. It’s planted around DC frequently for its delicate white flowers in spring and bright orange-red foliage in fall. But right now is its true time to shine, because if you can find the right tree, it will be loaded with berries, from green to bright red and deepening to a plummy, ripe purple. Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of a wonderful little book called “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World,” describes their appeal thus: “Imagine a fruit that tastes like a blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an apple, a touch of rosewater, and a minuscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds.” To me, they are a little like cherries as well, as if compensating for the ornamental cherry trees that are so stunning here in the spring but then bear disappointingly tiny, bitter fruit.

I first read Kimmerer’s book last year, and it induced me to plant a serviceberry tree myself. That tree’s fruit is just starting to ripen. But in the meantime I stumbled on three heavily laden trees at a playground my kids frequent on weekends. No one seemed interested but the birds dipping in and out of the highest branches. So I came back with a Ziploc bag and some reasonably willing small helpers, who scaled a nearby chain-link fence and started helping me pick in the time-honored one-for-me, one-for-the-pail tradition.

The berries were incredible. I wanted more. The next day, I saw another tree that looked like a serviceberry from a distance, in the tree lawn on a busy street. I parked around the corner and walked over: jackpot. Then I stopped by another street tree I remembered from last year. This one had few reachable ripe berries, but I picked a couple.

As I did, a driver stopped for a red light rolled down his window. “What are you picking?” he called. “Serviceberries!” I yelled back. “Are they good?” “Yes! Delicious,” I said. And then, realizing I was holding a large metal container of them, I said, “Want to try one?” I ran out in the street—it was a long light—and held out the container. “These are great!” he said. Then the light turned green, and we waved goodbye.

This interaction was not an accident. For Kimmerer, a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, the serviceberry tree is a central symbol of reciprocity, of a gift economy, of abundance—“enoughness,” she calls it. Because they are not grown or sold commercially, at least in this area, serviceberries generally change hands as a present. Finding them feels like a present as well. “This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. And yet here they are,” Kimmerer writes. Somehow the minute I started foraging around town for serviceberries, which almost no one I talked to had heard of, and finding pints of them for the taking, I got drawn immediately into this other model of society, offering fruit to curious strangers who trusted me enough to accept. 

Try to picture Donald Trump foraging for berries. Right now our leaders seem so locked into a rapacious, yield-maximizing vision of what we are to each other that it is almost inconceivable that the same city soon to be home to the world’s most incredible roof-mounted drone empire is also home to copious free fruit, available to humans and cedar waxwings alike. The gift economy is robust, Kimmerer reminds us, but also fragile, with implicit rules: take no more than you need, leaving at least half for someone else. Trump, with his single-handed appropriation of nearly $2 billion from our coffers, would find this logic deeply foolish. “This is the inherent problem with gift economies,” Kimmerer writes; “they can’t function well when there are cheaters who violate the trust.” 

They can’t, it’s true. But, in the long term, it’s not so easy to crush people into submission to the logic of pure dominance. People have a way of slipping off to the side, helping one another when they should be transacting, patiently painting each other reminders about a sex-trafficking scandal that their would-be emperor would prefer they forget. When I think about the serviceberries, I feel a rush of relief that another way is possible, one that precedes Trump and one that, I believe, will survive him.

And I can almost taste the berries, too. The trees around me still have some green fruit. Another wave of juneberries, to eat and freeze and share, is on its way.

For the Bay Area media collective Coyote, Nicole Wong writes about the complicated relationship between the divergent Chinese and American mahjong communities, now that both forms of play are having a trendy moment. For Asian Americans, she notes, “To see a game we consider so central to our culture embraced so fully by the mainstream is disorienting.” (She also notes a that a large multistyle mahjong tournament is coming to DC in August, in case that’s your jam!)

Also, speaking of jam, if you do happen to end up with serviceberries on your hands, you can’t go wrong with a variation on this muffin recipe. I’m embarrassed to tell you how many mini crunchy serviceberry muffins I have eaten in the last 24 hours.

If you’ve read this far: thank you. And if you haven’t done so already, consider upgrading to become a paid member, which will allow you to expound in the comments on whether you are finding any serviceberries in your neighborhood. Share the fruit! See you next time.