Pride in Piñon
by Birdie Jaworski
Juanita Herrera sifts piñon.
If you can't pick who you want for President, you can always pick piñon.
An old woman squats close to the ground next to a short, squat pine. She wears a thick cabled sweater to protect her from the wind cascading across Starvation Peak. Her hands scurry through fallen needles, sifting for tiny elongated seed pods, dumping them by small handful into an antique five-gallon bucket made of tin.
"I shake the branches to collect the piñon," explains Mrs. Jane Yazzie, 83, of Bernal. "This is the way I learned from my Navajo grandmother. She learned how from her grandmother. Our family has picked piñon for centuries."
Mrs. Yazzie picks nearly fifty pounds of piñon each fall in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving when the threat of icy roads keeps her tucked into her warm trailer home. She roasts her piñon the old-fashioned way, in an oiled cast-iron skillet stuffed inside a fiery horno.
"I grind the pinon after they cool off," Mrs. Yazzie says, her hands mimicking the motion of a pestle against mortar. "I grind them by hand, the way you should. It helps press out the natural oils in the nutmeat. This is how you make the very best biscochitos," she continued, referring to New Mexico's state cookie, "with a flour made from freshly ground piñon."
The piñon trees that dot our landscape live modest, long lives. They don't attain great height like California's giant sequoias. They don't shed a multicolored garment of jewel-toned leaves in the fall like New England's stately maples. Piñon - at first glance - appear to be lowly, humble, simple scrub conifers whose home between the desert and the high places speaks of solitude, whose gnarled limbs speak of nature's mercy. But the little trees have produced fuel, building materials, food, and medicines that enabled pre-historic Native Americans to establish their cultures on the Colorado Plateau and to survive into the present as the Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo, and Navajo.
"My grandmother told me stories about how our people on the reservation would pick piñon and store them in clay jars. They would dig pits in the ground and bury the jars to keep the piñon cool and safe. It's what got them through winter." Mrs. Yazzie breaks into a large smile and lifts a flecked brown pod to her mouth. She crunches into the shell, pulverizing both meat and protective coat. "I eat the whole thing. The shell has minerals and keeps you regular," she laughs.
Piñon seeds have sustained the people of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona for thousands of years, through rainless summers, through harsh snow-laden winters. The Northern Paiutes stored piñon in grass-lined pits, saving them for days when fresh grains and meat were scarce. The Navajo mashed the meat into a rich, oily spread like peanut butter to be eaten on hot corncakes. And local, Northeastern New Mexican tradition, holds stories of whole families and villages living on piñon alone during the dusty, drought-laden days of the dust bowl.
"I was a tiny girl, maybe five years old," reminisces Mrs. Yazzie. "I remember eating piñon for days. For weeks. It was all we had. We kept these big sacks filled with the last piñon harvest. My mother used to tell me that we were like piñon. We sometimes have a hard shell around us when times are difficult, but our insides are always sweet."
Mrs. Yazzie moves to another tree, this one at least a foot in diameter. She spreads a worn baby's receiving blanket under a promising bough and, standing as tall as she can on the tips of her toes, begins to shake. A cascade of nuts and needles rains onto the blanket, pelting the thin pink fabric with nature's morse code, with the sound of hail across the grasslands, the flail of hooves against canyon floor.
"Nature makes the same sounds over and over," Mrs. Yazzie sighs. "To me, the sound of piñon hitting the ground is one of the sweetest sounds in the world."
She drops her arms to her sidesm eying the piñon's trunk. Short white hair stands out in tufts around her wide face. "You can tell the age of a piñon by the width of her belly. One foot across means that she is over 200 years old. Some of the piñon in this valley are nearly 1,000 years old. They have seen many, many things. I would not like to see everything these piñon have seen," she says, glancing at Starvation Peak, a thin, towering mesa where the Apache once tricked a group of Mexicans in 1837, leaving them to starve to death just out of reach of the piñon.
It takes three growing seasons to produce one piñon seed, twenty-six full months of work for the tree to sprout a new branch and grow the complicated prickly cones that house the seeds. Even though most people call them nuts, the protein-rich treats are the mature seeds of the piñon tree. Experienced pickers understand the cycle of good and bad seed years. 2008 has shaped up to be a bumper crop, with rich groves of piñon bursting with nutty promise across the forests of Northeastern New Mexico. Bumper crops rarely follow bumper crops according to scientists who study the species. The reasons why one year is great and another is slim are mysterious, and may have something to do with weather patterns as well as the tree's need for a solid carbohydrate base in order to create the cones.
Juanita and George Herrera of Las Vegas understand what it's like to follow the whim of the piñon tree. They sell seeds sealed in clear plastic baggies underneath a blue and orange Denver Broncos tent set up at the intersection of Mills and Grand Avenues.
"We pick at Rowe Mesa and at Mineral Hill," George, who works in the forensic department at the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute, explains. "There's a ton of people picking this year. It's a good, solid crop this year."
The Herreras began selling pinon as a side business in 1998, and now have customers who drive from Raton, Tucumcari, and even out-of-state to buy their piñon in the fall. Rows of packaged piñon wait for hungry buyers, each labeled with a dollar amount written in black marker.
"I love being in the mountains," Juanita, a health worker who cares for the disabled, raves. "I just love it. It's my favorite part of picking piñon."
"I love being in the peace and quiet," adds George. "I love seeing and hearing the jets that fly overhead. That really tells you how quiet it is in the mountains, when one of those jets flies by."
Juanita and George pick piñon from morning 'til mid-afternoon on off-work days, from the beginning of the season in early October through November, until the first heavy snowfall cradles remaining pinecones in winter's blanket. Lifelong residents of Las Vegas, they both remember the traditions surrounding piñon from childhood, remember entire families carrying picnic hampers filled with good things to eat into the forest, running from tree to tree with child's pails, filling them with carfully collected seeds.
"It's still the same today," says George. "Families still pick together. It's an important piece of our life here. What's funny is how the technology hasn't changed. There's still no perfect way to pick piñon. You either have to shake the tree, pick by hand, use a dustpan and brush, or vacuum the branches. Nobody has a good method. You always get the piñon dirty," he continues, describing the bits of plant detritis and needles that come with the pods.
"We use a big screen to sift it," Juanita demonstrates, hauling a two-foot-by-two-foot handmade wooden frame with an inset mesh screen. "You pour the piñon in and shake to sort the nuts from the dirt."
George pours a bag of piñon into the shaker and points while Juanita uses both arms to shake the load. Needles and tiny bits of bark and dirt collect at the bottom of the tilted screen, while the larger nuts remain toward the top end.
"It builds big muscles," she laughs.
Juanita roasts her piñon in a microwave, the modern version of the horno. "It makes it easier to watch. They never burn this way," she says. "The stove takes too long and you risk burning it. But in the microwave, it always comes out perfect."
Piñon adds a delightful crunch to biscochitos and other cookies, to salads, cereal, granola, and provides a thick, oily base for pesto. One of the rare foods that can be used in most salty, sweet, and savory dishes, it is a well-rounded addition to every pantry. One serving of shelled piñon offers 14% of your daily fiber needs, 6% of your iron needs, and 6 grams of protein. In fact, piñon contains the most protein of any other seed or nut. To protect the nutritive value of the nuts, they should be kept in-the-shell in a cool, dark location. Shelled nuts should be stored in the freezer to keep the natural oils from going rancid.
A crowd of customers leans over the Herrera's piñon. A gust of wind crosses Mills Avenue, carries dust and bits of stray paper, but the seeds stay protected by the heavy canvas tent. A tall blonde woman from Texas selects two large pound bags of roasted seeds. She pats them lovingly as she reaches for her wallet.
"The best piñon comes from right here. I try to buy it every year from George and Juanita. I'm from New Mexico but live in Texas now, and you know what the two things I miss most are? Green chile and good roasted piñon."
