Ten thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon hunters etched hearts in stone. Eight thousand years later, Egyptians would revere the heart as the cradle of intelligence, wisdom and memory, an organ that guarded or revealed moral shortcomings: After the deceased had crossed the dangerous country between the land of the living and the land of the dead, he or she entered the Hall of Two Truths, where the jackal god Anubis weighed the hearts of the dead. Anubis placed a heart on one side of a scale and an ostrich feather on the other. The feather symbolized truth, and only a heart of the same weight was worthy of the fields of heaven. (The jackal god tossed unworthy hearts to "the gobbler," a crocodilian monster that waited at the base of the scales.)

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I spent my teenage years deeply unhappy, but when I was 20 my dad's sudden death snapped me out of it. I realized that wallowing in the doldrums was a narcissistic waste of my time. Most days it's easy for me to remember that lesson: I haven't felt this familiar weight on my chest in a long time. I think about calling my friend Becky, my go-to person in moments of duress, but my listlessness is too severe. As I stand by the phone, it rings. I wait for the answering machine to pick up.

"Hey babylove, it's Michelle. I just wanted to call because I have my feet in a bucket of cherries and I'm stomping them, and I'm going to hold the phone down so you can hear the sound effects."

I laugh. The sound is exaggerated cartoonish squelching. She's making cherry wine. I pick up the receiver.

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I'm happy thimbleberry bushes are so pretty, because they grow around my house in drifts, crowding my hydrangeas, obscuring our spindly roses, and popping up through the tops of the mammoth rhododendrons. In the spring, I put up a fight. I tore up root systems and amassed a brush pile the size of a car. My glory was short lived. Like their evil cousin, the thorny salmonberry, thimbleberry bushes spread from rhizomes deep underground. In the blink of an eye the bushes had returned, full-size and already sporting white flowers.

"We'll have to go after those things again," Rich said. He spoke too late. By this time in our lives, foraging was taking up a sizable chunk of my mind. When I looked at the white blossoms I saw food. "Let's wait till after they fruit," I said. Rich (the Bert to my Ernie, the Felix to my Oscar) sighed, no doubt mourning another battle lost to the combined creeping chaos of his wife and the Oregon woods.

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Abigail has straight brown hair and a slight British accent, but somehow she still reminds me a little of Dolly Parton. It's not just her rack (which is nice, but not quite of Dolly proportions), but her attitude. She calls everyone darlin' and honey, and she has a magpie's penchant for sparkly objects. The fuzzy pink seat cover of her '94 Honda Civic says "Princess," and somehow when Abigail's behind the wheel, the car does take on a regal air. In Abigail's mind her airstream trailer is a small palace and her Honda is actually a pristine pink Cadillac limousine.

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My parents weren't the only ones around who stole their cues from the furry freak brothers: By 1975, Deadwood, Ore., was flooded with hippies. Like bra burning and eschewing marriage, moving to the woods was a statement of dissatisfaction with societal norms. Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Deadwood has seen a lot of idealists come and go. The ones who hung on are a far cry from the bearded kids at Woodstock. Over the years they've become country people, marked by pragmatism and a keen talent for splitting wood. Your average Deadwoodian has a giant garden, cooks from scratch and is an ace at preserving food. Quite a few hunt or raise livestock.

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Deep-frying a flower seems vaguely wicked, which is perhaps why I like the idea. The table is strewn with summer's finest. I saw these lilies vital and alive in the summer sun, and I plucked the dandelions as they glowed neon in summer dusk. The heliotrope balls of chive flowers are studies in delicate symmetry, and the curving garlic scapes are alien in their allure, like swans. Silk nasturtium petals fan gold and orange on the top of the heap, and upon close inspection, squash blossoms have a beauty that defies description. Nearby, our FryDaddy percolates, and the delicate perfume of blossoms is obscured by the rising aroma of hot oil.

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Our local supermarket was an overpriced yuppie mart with a good selection of local, organic, seasonal produce. I had the opportunity to use my buying dollars to support small local farms, but it was rough to shell out $4 for a bunch of kale. I'd read Michael Pollan's argument: "We [Americans] spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more dollars on it in a week." As much as I admire Pollan, there is something cavalier in his dismissal of the problem of price. Does Pollan really remember what it was like to struggle financially? I came back to this thought to make myself feel better every time I chose Mexican zucchinis for 99 cents a pound over their more expensive locally grown, seasonally correct alternative. I told myself that if I were rich it would be easy to be good. I'd only eat organic, local, seasonal produce. Really. It never occurred to me that in fact the opposite was true, that poverty would enable me to finally evade the temptation of the cheap Chilean asparagus.

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After I quit teaching, I continued reading at a feverish pace. I read ancient Roman historians, dictionaries of Mexican slang and Chinese cookbooks. I haunted the upper floors of the Seattle public library and learned the history of the city by reading old letters and police reports. It got to the point where I felt anxious when an unplumbed subject appeared on my radar. (Why don't you know anything about Paraguay, dummy?, I'd asked myself reproachfully.)

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While job and house hunting, I paid rent to sleep on a friend's couch, which I shared with her reprehensible golden retriever. As the weeks passed, my budget dwindled. I set my sights lower and broadened my job search. I whittled my diet down to three items: protein cereal, broccoli and eggs.

I'd always hated eggs, but they were the cheapest source of protein that came to mind. For breakfast, cereal. For lunch, scrambled eggs. For dinner, scrambled eggs and broccoli. I learned to eat eggs without gagging, but it was a long three months. I'm guessing the reason I lost weight was because my normal obsession with food dwindled in the light of unceasing monotony.

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You love fat. As a child you ate margarine by the spoonful. You didn't know any better. Now you've moved on to more delicious pastures. As a cook you can never resist sneaking in that extra bit of butter, that tablespoonful of olive oil, that dab of bacon grease. You believe that cake is a vessel for frosting, that salad dressing should be two parts oil to one part vinegar, and that packaged low-fat foods are a symptom of the decline of Western civilization. Fat makes food taste good.

Under the best of circumstances, you have eight or nine varieties of fat on hand. In ascending order of importance: chicken drippings, vegetable oil, chili oil, peanut oil, light olive oil, coconut oil, bacon grease, butter and, of course, extra virgin olive oil. (You would sell your first-born child to be the sort of person who could afford to use truffle oil on a regular basis.)

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I was a freshman at the Evergreen State College, an experimental university with a focus on interdisciplinary learning. "So you're going to spend an entire term studying, um, your sense of place?" I asked, mentally congratulating myself for choosing a straightforward class -- "Telling Stories" couldn't be too hippie-dippy. Clearly, it was a routine writing workshop. (As it happens, I hadn't read the course description too carefully. In true Evergreen fashion, "Telling Stories: Old and New Images" required us to study equal parts Japanese history, performance art, multicultural appropriation and traditional Indian dance -- a reactionary 18-year-old's nightmare.)

In retrospect, "Telling Stories" at least gave me a basis for understanding what people were talking about at cocktail parties (which can come in handy). I don't know if the class "Sense of Place" was any more useful than "Telling Stories," but now that I'm older and slightly more open-minded, it occurs to me that it was not such a bad idea to encourage a group of American teenagers to contemplate their sense of place.

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Why do I love oyster mushrooms? Although the oyster in the name supposedly comes not from the flavor, but rather for the shell-like appearance of the fruiting body, there is something in the texture of the oyster mushroom that reminds me of good seafood: When properly prepared, the mushroom has the succulent tenderness of a fresh mollusk. That said, oyster mushrooms aren't at all slimy and their flavor is delicate, with the faintest touch of sweet anise.

Since the evening I first supplemented a meager dinner by foraging for wild ingredients, oyster mushrooms have been on my mind. The idea that this luscious treat grows wild in the woods near my house is almost improbable: a bit like being told you might find a case of fine champagne sprouting from a rotten log.

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"My parents are crazy. My dad grew up during the Depression and he hoards food," Frank said as he lifted the lid from a bin, which was stuffed to the brim with dry pasta. "I guess he wants to be sure he never goes hungry again." At age 17, the incident struck me as strange: Frank's dad was a successful psychiatrist and the family never seemed to want for money. I walked away with an unsettling truth: No matter how far into the affluent hills you traveled, you might never escape the specter of wolves at your door.

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Carl Franz and Lorena Havens are the type of people who have perfected a system for every aspect of their lives, and baking is no exception. Carl approaches the process with maniacal precision: He uses a scale to measure his grain, which he grinds in a Nutramill, a device that looks a little like a headless R2D2. Once the grain is ground into flour, Carl leavens the dough with carefully tended sourdough starter. The loaves bake in his outdoor oven, which he built from scavenged materials, including the remains of an old chimney and clay he dug from his pond, then dried and pulverized by hand. (He estimates the total cost of the oven was about $100.)

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"Lunchtime," my dad says, slapping a gray slice on my plate. I grimace. My dad looks amused, then stern. It's his "there are starving people in China" look.

I close my eyes and shove the slice in my mouth -- the tongue is rubbery, yet the flavor and texture is reminiscent of firm liverwurst. Swallowing is a struggle. I manage, and stare balefully at my dad. He takes a bite and chews. He is silent. To my amazement he puts down his fork and concedes culinary defeat, one of only two or three in his illustrious kitchen reign. He dutifully eats the rest of the tongue, but he never inflicts it upon us again.

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Mizu is taking me to a patch of wild ginger she's been visiting since she was a kid. We are accompanied by two of her three daughters. Helen, who is 4 and the middle child, stomps ahead, brandishing a stick. Mizu and I follow behind with Lucy, who seems remarkably sanguine about the steep hill. Seeing the little girls in the woods brings back memories. Like me, Mizu spent a long stint in the city but eventually chose to return home to the Oregon Coast Range. It's good to be neighbors again. When we were children, Mizu, her brother Japhy and I used to play together on this same land -- Mizu the ringleader and Japhy the daredevil forever nudging at my timid nature. With them, I climbed higher, jumped to the farthest slippery creek rock, and vowed I'd learn to skip a stone more than 20 bounces. The same spark of adventure still flickers in Helen's wolf-blue eyes.

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My own childhood was colored by a deep devotion to "The Oregon Trail," a ubiquitous computer game in 1980s classrooms. I believe an edition of "The Oregon Trail" is now available as an iPhone app, but I'm sure it bears little resemblance to the game I remember from my childhood. In the fifth grade, we lived for computer time, which consisted of playing "The Oregon Trail" on buzzing putty-colored monitors. The graphics weren't much: A tiny pixilated covered wagon crawled across a black background. The fun part was buying supplies for the trail. You had a set budget and you got to make the decisions. "Which do I need more -- a kerosene lantern or a 50-pound bag of beef jerky?" I'd muse with a seriousness I normally reserved for selecting candy at our local general store.

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I'm visiting my former urban home (Seattle) for a brief vacation from the wilds of rural Oregon, so it seems appropriate to celebrate my wayward past and my hillbilly future with a drink that incorporates elements of both -- fine gin with a foraged garnish.

The liquor cabinet I'll be scavenging belongs to Chef Robin Leventhal, best known from her appearance on season six of "Top Chef." I know from past experience that, like the rest of her artistically cluttered house, it brims with interesting items. Today is no exception.

"Smell this," Robin commands, handing me an attractive bottle of Ebb and Flow gin. Ebb and Flow is from a new Ballard distillery, Sound Spirits. Thanks to a recent change in Washington's liquor laws, Sound Spirits is the first distillery to open in Seattle since prohibition, and it smells like they might be on to something. The gin's aroma has a tinge of coriander and an echo of absinthe. Robin thinks it'll be the perfect complement to her latest prize -- pickled ramps and wild fiddleheads from nearby Enumclaw.

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Gallons of ink have been spilled in the debate on the politics of buying local and/or organic. At the moment, I'm more interested in the practical mechanics of eating local. How far out of my way will I have to go to cook an entirely local meal? How will using all local ingredients inhibit or enhance my cooking experience? Will it taste better?

Figuring out how to cook with locally/seasonally available food has been part of the human experience since the dawn of time -- it's only in the last 60 years or so that sourcing your dinner ingredients from your immediate vicinity has taken on the patina of the unusual. But one person's exotic is another's bread and butter.

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