I crunch up the driveway of Vickie Shufer’s rented farmhouse outside Virginia Beach, I’m pretty sure my gut feeling about her was completely wrong. I’d met the wild-edible-plant expert, naturalist, and teacher once before, at a half-day workshop in a state park near my home in Arlington, Virginia. She struck me then as extroverted, knowledgeable, and welcoming. I am here now as a result of a dinner invitation of sorts from Shufer. But it’s hard to square her bubbly personality with what’s before me: a dim and slightly down-at-the-heels house by the road. The house is silent and, despite a muggy July day, has all its windows open. The porch is uninvitingly bare except for a Beware of Guard Dog placard. And the screen door frame has been extensively reinforced. Lots of places have Beware of Dog signs, but that bit of carpentry speaks volumes. For all I know, she might have a hyena guarding the place.

I emerge from my vehicle, and a squad of mosquitoes descends. These are coastal skeeters, hungrier and more determined than the ones where I live, two hundred miles inland. As welts rise on my neck, arms, and head, I note the acrid smell of smoke and a grayish tinge to the air. At this point, I recall hearing something on the radio about peat fires that have been smoldering for months in the Great Dismal Swamp, just to the south. So far, so good: forbidding house, bloodthirsty insects, and a burning landscape not far away. I’m about to set foot on the porch when there comes a roaring so ungodly I can feel my liver being massaged. Suddenly, a military fighter, its landing gear not yet retracted, swoops out of the tree line and disappears into the low-hanging sky. I’m about to pivot on my heel and bag the whole thing when Shufer’s smiling face appears at the door. She makes a wait-until-the-sound-dies-down-enough-that-you-can-hear-me gesture, then chirps, “Hey, Bill! I was wondering when you’d get here. C’mon in and have some tea!”

Wild Woman
I follow her into the house, through a living room crammed with hundreds of volumes on plants and natural history, Indian spear points, several guitars, and the shed skin of a canebrake rattler longer than Shufer is tall tacked to a board. We sit at her kitchen table, and she pours me some iced tea. The tea is made from yaupon, the only wild plant in North America that contains caffeine. It’s flavored with cardamom seeds and ginger slices—all sweetened with maple sugar. And it’s got a kick I appreciate after the long drive down from D.C.

She goes on to explain the deafening noise. Apparently, Navy F-18s show up unannounced several times a month to practice touch-and-go landings on an auxiliary airfield up the road that has an aircraft carrier deck painted on it. “It’s part of why the rent’s so cheap,” she says. “I’ve always thought a house is just a place to sleep anyway.” The cheap rent has enabled her and her husband, Paul, to buy sixteen acres of mixed forest where she propagates wild plants, which she sells to customers ranging from individuals to state agencies. She keeps the house windows open because air-conditioning makes her feel cut off from the outside world.

I begin to relax, relieved to discover that my first impression of her is the correct one. Then I ask about the dog. “Oh, Ranger died a couple of years ago.” I mention that the dog must have been on the large side. “Oh, she was. A hundred and ten pounds. She was forty percent wolf, actually.” The look on my face prompts an explanation. Shufer had heard that wolf-dog hybrids were smart and extremely loyal. “I just didn’t realize how loyal. She thought the two of us were a pack, and Paul couldn’t even put his arm around me if she was in the room.” The screen door had to be strengthened after she took it off its hinges in an effort to get at a deliveryman. “I think she just wanted to make friends,” Shufer says. “She wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

This woman, I decide, is charmingly, delightfully nuts. I count this as a bonus. But I need information and cut to the chase. I ask how much of her diet is wild food. She says, “Oh, maybe twenty or thirty percent.” This is a major disappointment. “Foraging’s hard work,” she tells me. (I’d certainly found it so, but I’d hoped this was just because I was a beginner.) “I like to include wild edibles in other foods,” she says. “Some wild greens in a salad. Some herbs and roots in a stew. And any time the fridge gets full, I know it’s time to call up some friends and put together a wild dinner.” She likes wild food both because it’s better for you and because it’s “more fun.” But she’s no crusader. “Butter and maple syrup go a long way toward making things taste good, so I figure why not use ’em?”

I help myself to some more tea and take the opportunity to check out her refrigerator, which has enough pricey goods to warm a foodie’s heart: organic yogurt with acidophilus and bifidus, organic breads and juices, a quart of Coombs Family Farms maple syrup, unhydrogenated coconut oil, which she says is her latest enthusiasm. “It’s full of the fats that are good for your heart. And lauric acid, which is antiviral and antibacterial.” But there are also labeled containers of foraged things: amaranth leaves, figs, a bundle of greens, cherries from her own tree, and stinging nettles. In her pantry are dried foods to be added to meals: pumpkin seeds, redbud pods, sea rocket, yucca flowers, wild carrot. There is an absence of whiskey bottles in the house, but Shufer is not averse. “Oh, I do like my tinctures,” she says. She says elderberry works better than vaccines to prevent the flu, and she keeps a store on hand preserved in vodka. She has bottles of a ginger-lemon-honey elixir that requires a fair amount of applejack brandy to keep it stable. “Ginger’s good for coughs, colds, and general circulation. And mixing it with applejack makes for a nice toddy.” In her freezer are more figs, acorns from a live oak to be made into flour, muscadine grapes, and pawpaw. “Pulp ’em, mash ’em, put ’em in yogurt. Very good.”

She tells me I should have been here when Hurricane Isabel hit in 2003 and the power went out for eight days. She and Paul couldn’t leave the house and had to cook or dispose of everything in the freezer. This included, besides a great deal of food, frozen specimens of animals she had hoped to have stuffed for use in her teaching: a prothonotary warbler, a red-bellied water snake, and a cottonmouth moccasin in a coiled-and-ready-to-strike attitude. “We used to have fun with him at parties,” she says wistfully.