The Myth of Wile E

San Francisco's Lombard Street

To my good fortune, who should happen by just then? No, not late President Millard Fillmore, but close. No, not Beaker from The Muppets, but getting warmer. Okay, fine—it was the hedgehog hunters.

On this particular day it was the dog I spotted first—or more accurately, his tail. The dog was sniffing his way through the woods, nose to the ground. He was almost completely hidden in the underbrush, except for his wagging tail that rose up above the ferns, swatting the fronds aside. Suddenly he burst through the underbrush and seemed surprised to find himself at my feet.

He was soon followed by the hunting party, who were a bit winded from trying to keep up with him. This time, in addition to their knives and buckets, the hunting party carried these strange little forked hand tools. Imagine if the Lollipop Guild were incited to riot against the Wicked Witch. Their hand tools could be the munchkins' pitchforks.

The hunting party wasn't running from me anymore, and at this point we'd struck up a nodding acquaintance of sorts, although the parents didn't seem to speak any English, and I didn't even know what language they were speaking, to not-know how to speak it. (I asked the older girl once and I thought she said "Roman-y," but when I tried throwing around a few Latin-y phrases like "QED" and "carpe diem" and "et cetera," she just stared like she didn't know what I was talking about.)

They all put down their buckets and helped me roll the wheel up the hill in a wide zigzag fashion, as if we were driving it up San Francisco's Lombard Street, "the crookedest street in the world." We surely couldn't have done it without the dog, who barked at us like a motivational coach the whole way up.

Once the spool table was in place, I asked the hunting party what they'd been looking for. The girl answered. I thought she said, "Morals."

"Hmm," I said, wanting to be supportive, but secretly hoping they didn't find religion. From my observations, that could be a real mixed bag.

With great enthusiasm, the girl tried to hand me some sort of fungus that was brownish-black and kind of phallic, and, frankly, looked like it was in an advanced stage of syphilis. I politely declined. She shrugged and put a little pile of them on the edge of the spool table.

I sliced up the last of the Royal Caribbean pears and the remaining mini wheels of cheese, and shared them with the hunting party.

Then the girl asked me, "True fools . . . ?"

"True fools!" I agreed, as if in response to a toast.

The girl sighed, put her hand on the dog, and said slowly, as if I were hard of hearing, "Pesha . . . true fool . . . dog."

"Aww." I smiled and patted the panting, drooling dog on the head. "Aren't we all?"

So, then. Maybe I didn't have any sugar, or cups. I'm pretty sure I'd even lost my little juicer sombrero. But I did have fiddlehead ferns, which tasted a little bit like asparagus. And I had wintergreen leaves, which made a refreshing tea. And squash blossoms, which were delicious fried to a crisp, or raw as a salad of nutty golden stars.

I arranged everything on the spool table and called it the Wild Food Farm Stand.