In the western mountains of Greece, near the Albanian border, exists a small village that is slowly being repatriated by blackberries, pigweed and the incessant creep of Mother Nature undeterred by the silly idea of man's "progress."
She knows she will outlive such naïve vocabulary and the immediate gratification of a population who seems to prefer the sound of automatic glass doors over trickling streams. Here, she has crept over a hilltop to reclaim a church and overgrown with bramble the path to the schoolhouse, which has not echoed with the voices of children for decades. It houses bats and scorpions and spiders now. Even the memories have left, only the stories of them still leave the tongues of the children's children.
In this village, there are only two children left, making up 20% of the population. But they go to school in the city and are already wearing the Nikes and track suits of city kids, not the Muck boots and wool of their shepherd father, who is no doubt a great embarrassment at each morning delivery, and especially so when he actually has goats in the truck bed.
There are houses here in two forms: the gentrified inheritance and the ruin. Both are overvalued and underused. The village square has a swing set with more options than residents available to use them, and the streetlamp-to-human ratio is at least 4 to 1.
The lamps burn bright and wide all night long, casting their milky glare into abandoned streets and gardens and doorways. No dogs bark, except the sheepdogs down in the valleys who never stop. The cats have grown even more arrogant than usual, for their only predator is cars, and those are few and far between.
In a museum nearby, used primarily to legitimize the historical importance of a place for the people still inhabiting it, are the trinkets of a woman who died 4,500 years ago. Her grave is not far from here, found by winding a half mile up a dirt track, past a place spread with trash by wind and sloth, and past a sheepdog or two bellowing at the single trespassers of the week.
My friend has named the woman Selpo, because archaeologists lack the imagination to do so. In her resting place, now disturbed for science and the pursuit of "knowledge," they found a bronze headband, rings and the pins that held clothing together. All of them are encased in glass now, temperature controlled, just a few feet away from the iron weapons that signified the progress of the next era.
Wandering through the nearby wood beneath a canopy of oaks, I am struck by the Age of Information in which we find ourselves - information being inferior to knowledge being inferior to wisdom. Yet here we are, informing ourselves to oblivion. Did it begin when Selpo's kinfolk decided things ought not only to be acquired, but also buried in the ground in the first of our landfills, in our earliest examples of believing our earthly importance extends into the afterlife?
As I tread across the leaves, and perhaps over other unmarked graves, I turn the ground with the toe of my boot. I think Greece must be the most wildly edible place I have been. On this day, we are in search of Chanterelle mushrooms rather than archaeological digs. The weather is mild, but the rain has come, and the patient mycelium mingling with tree roots and soil must be ready to burst forth.
Today, information will keep us alive, but it feels somehow vapid - a blind trust in the data pushing through our phones to say this is edible and that is not. The information does nothing to improve my knowledge, though perhaps the experience will. I mentally add experience somewhere between knowledge and wisdom on my spectrum of value.
A primal thing comes alive in me when I am foraging, as if maybe some of that spectrum is woven into the strands of my DNA, like migrating animals and the spider who knows how to build a web without ever once looking it up on the world-wide one. There is satisfaction in the fortune of finding sustenance, an amalgamation of luck and self-efficacy that (perhaps falsely) suggests we are going to be alright in an apocalypse. Supposing that apocalypse is not resulting in Chernobyl-flavored strawberries.
The woods here smell rich of animal smells. The wild boar have turned every stone and the sheep have urinated indiscriminately. There is a place on a hillside where a wooden electrical pole has been carved so thoroughly away by the boar tusks, it is most likely the wires keeping it standing.
A note on the stupidity of men: Directly next to the whittled pole are two more which have already been felled by the beasts and replaced by men who schlepped a new pole deep into the forest, dug a hole, and raised the thing. So far, no one has thought to wrap the base in something that might deter the damage.
And so the boars continue their persistent protest, all the while wondering if the people might ever wisen. When I look around to see if the creatures have carved into any nearby trees, I see not a single scar. This must be wisdom.
We find countless mushrooms in all varieties. Some like to grow in the moss on logs, others prefer the downhill slope of a tree well. There are ones moist with slime, bright pink on their caps. Others form venous bulbs that nestle like eggs into a bed of leaves. We cut the stems of a nameless kind that looks like a giant saucer, and wonder at their miraculous respiratory system, this perfect circle of gills in ghost-thin sheets. If I were a vegan, I am not sure I could eat these things.
But I am not, and so we climb a ridge to a stony road and head toward the neighboring village. There are tiny white crocus with stigmas that resemble saffron, but the information highway tells me only one variety of purple crocus has an edible stigma. Though I am glad to live to see another day, I wish this knowledge was passed to me through cook-fire song or some now-lost ability to smell the difference between that which sustains from that which sickens.
Our boots tromp down the track until it turns to weather-addled concrete that resembles organized pebbles. The forest is replaced with stone hut walls, leaning cottages and restored homes, though they all seem to be in a constant state of repair. I have yet to see one that does not have a ladder leaning upon it or some half-finished or half-begun pile of masonry.
There is a single tavern here. The owner raises her eyebrows at our fungal bounty, rattling in a plastic bag we present with pride. She disappears with it into the kitchen. Tsipouro appears on the table with bread and feta, because it is Greece after all. Later, a plate of sautéed mushrooms that saturate my palette with a thousand years of a thousand plants, as if I were eating evolution itself and all the wisdom of the wood in its delightful tang and buttery comfort.
For a moment, I am back in that simple time, when discerning what was good for us from what was not required no information at all, but something more ancient and honest altogether.