Eating Islay

In summer the Islay Cherries ripen on the hillside and I eat them. Sometimes I wonder if I am the only still living human who does.

These days, most Islay Cherries are probably consumed beyond the Western Gate in Similaqsa.  Chumash story tells us that the dead souls go there, across the great pole rising and falling over the ocean from Humqaq (Point Conception) staring ahead with poppy flowers for eyes, trying to ignore the demons that snarl and lunge at them from the waves; but once on the shores of Similaqsa there is rest and forgetting with sweet Islay to eat while thoughts of this life fade into a dim fable.

Islay Cherry, Hollyleaf Cherry, prunus ilicifolia is a large shrub of the California chaparral.  It thrives from Napa down the Coast Ranges into northern Baja but nowhere else in the world.  In my yard it is a downright weed, growing dense and vigorous, sprouting in garden beds and driveway cracks.

It is a close relative of domestic stone fruit -- plums, cherries, peaches, apricots, almonds -- with spiky, dark green, glossy leaves, just like holly, hence the name.   The plant books say it blooms, white, in Spring.  But it doesn’t.  At least around here, the blooms are pale yellow and appear in “California Spring” which occurs anywhere from December on, depending on when it rains.

Like everything else here in Phoenix Land, prunus ilicifolia longs to burn to the ground and grow back lush and gorgeous from the ashes.  It also does this when cleared with a chainsaw. The cut wood is red and dense like domestic cherry and smells almost intoxicatingly of almond-scented cyanide.  After a few weeks the cut stump sprouts and by next fire season the large shrub is back -- a resinous, flammable thing -- wanted or not. 

The Chumash call it axtayuxash.  At least that is what they call the meal that was traditionally made from the seeds, which they ground up, and, according to the plant books, leached before eating.  Between cherry seeds and tannic acorn meal, traditional Chumash were certainly bound to a life of leaching. The books do not say what they leached out of axtayuxash but I have to assume cyanide because prunus species just have cyanide coming and going – leaves, wood and pits -- enough to be worrisome in apricot seeds enough to kill in peach.  It seems no one remembers what the fruit of axtayuxash was called because the people who knew are gone to Similaqsa and they took the word with them.

I don’t eat axtayuxash.  I eat the the fruit, which the books describe as “a drupe”, which I feel is an unfairly unappetizing name for it, and as “very thin fleshed” which is, if anything, overly generous. The books say it is purple-black in color but it isn’t.  Around here the fruit ranges in color from maroon to a raspberry-blushed yellow. I began to eat it because the books describe it as “edible” and because, well, there it was – everywhere.

My initial foray into Islay consumption was not very promising.  Popping one in my mouth and biting down, my first sensation was “Yikes, bitter!” followed by “Good Lord, they weren’t kidding about the thin flesh.” The flesh surrounding the rock-like pit on a plump Islay Cherry is maybe 1/10 of an inch thick and the skin is bitter enough to roll your eyes back in the sockets.  My cumulative impression was “Gee, these are not very good.”

My son, who was joining me in this experiment, immediately spit his out, his cumulative impression being “Yuck!” and this coming from a kid who forages for pithy, flavorless elderberries, and lemonade berries which taste like extremely sour turpentine.

 This unpromising fruit, then, was what the dead souls in the Chumash Elysian Fields were savoring through eternity? I could only begin to understand this when I understood that Islay is something a person learns to eat.  I learned to detect the vague plumpness that indicates ripeness and to prefer lighter colored fruit.  I learned to slip the skin off with my teeth and spit it out, suffering only a tiny jolt of bitterness. And with the skin gone, I learned that so-thin flesh has a kind of dazzling sweetness that is never cloying, maybe because there is so little of it
 
If they are eaten far away from a kitchen counter laden with mangoes and peaches, preferably sitting on the ground under the bush, Isaly Cherries become addictive.  I roll the pit around in my mouth and strip off bits of flesh and juice with my teeth while I strip life down to the sweet taste, the August sun and the color of berries and leaves.  Islay is a fruit from a world where the only experience of red was woodpecker heads and Islay cherries, where a poppy flower was the brightest and most glorious object a person would ever behold, and where, in a land without honey or any fruit beyond tart, bland berries, Islay was the only taste of sweetness a person would ever know.

Perhaps the Islay cherry is just the food to remind the soul adrift in eternity of what it felt like to be alive. The hard pit containing the core of bland sustenance from which the poison must be painstakingly removed, then the meager flesh, so hopelessly, almost sadly, sweet that it is worth biting through bitter skin again and again to savor it.