Anecdote from Academia--Botany

Al Wiedemann, PhD, in about 1972.

Poison Oak

 One day in the spring, we hunted for slime molds.

     I did it to fulfill a science requirement at Oregon State University, for botany class. I enjoyed the class, and since much of it involved nomenclature, it came to me easily. I had drilled with my “ex” for his tree identification class the year before, and I had learned to say quercus garryana, arctostaphylos Columbiana, and pseudotsuga menziesii for Oregon white oak, hairy manzanita, and Douglas fir, respectively, probably as quickly as he.

   In May, when the forest was warm, but still damp, we took a field trip into Mac Forest, a tract that had been ruined for most forestry purposes, it was said, by silvicultural experiments that hadn’t worked. Few of us students had cars to get there, but one classmate came from a farm in eastern Oregon. His family had a contract to deliver about a ton of potatoes to OSU every week, so he drove home every weekend to refill the truck. Whoever couldn’t find a ride in a car rode to the site in his potato truck.

    The tract sported sunny patches of grasses and wild flowers, wild irises, and rare lady-slipper orchids in bloom, but was overrun with huge tangles of poison oak. I danced around the site wearing low-cut sneakers, no socks, and high-water Capri pants. My professor, Dr. Al Wiedemann, just shook his head, astonished at me. He was dressed to the teeth in tall boots and taller socks that completely covered his legs to part way up his tucked-in pants. His arms were covered in long sleeves, and he was buttoned up to the neck.  And of course, he told me, he caught a rash through his shoes from poison oak. I wasn't affected.

     We did find slime molds. They looked like nothing so much as  gobs of snot on the ground, but they were the weirdest of creatures I ever met. When their environment became hostile (or perhaps when they were mature), they drew themselves up into a stalk and blew away, to start over in another place.

     We devoted all of spring term  to the study of non-vascular “plants,” like fungi (which are now considered to be neither plant nor animal, but their own kingdom). Dr. Wiedemann told us that he had harvested puffballs from his lawn, and fried them up in butter to eat. Everybody knew that puffballs were the one fungus that were universally safe. He tossed one to his dog, and both he and the dog got violently sick.

     One  answer on his final exam was simple. It was a multiple choice question: Q. How can you be sure that a mushroom is safe to eat? A. You buy it in a can at Safeway.
     P.S. I didn't know then how newly minted a PhD he was. Dr. Wiedemann had just gotten his PhD by studying the plants of the coastal ecology in Oregon . He went on to be a member of the founding faculty at the Evergreen College in Olympia, WA, and an international traveler, emphasizing southeast Asia. He was one of those warm-hearted educators whom you don't forget. He died in 2006. His senior was Dr. Chester Peek, also a great teacher, but older and more business-like, and whose name still appears on botany texts. Dr. Peek told us that he had come from a family in Missouri that was so poor that they had actually used horsetail plants for scrubbing pots and pans. They called them "Scouring rushes."