Summary: Jobless coal miners and others scour the forests for the plant that brings them upward of $525 a pound for use as an aphrodisiac. Forget the deer tongue leaf. Walk right past the figwort. Don't even bother bending for the skunk cabbage. " 'Cause, buddy," as folks in these hills are fond of saying, "there's only one plant more precious than gold."
Ginseng 's roots fetch upward of $525 a pound, and it's got forests crawling with herbal bounty hunters. For them, ginseng is the perfect creation, a nubby wonder that the Chinese grind into an aphrodisiac.
As the price soars, many Appalachians, who quietly dug it for medicinal remedies, are racing one another to the mountain underbrush.
When they discover a shady swale thick with wild ginseng , they'll swear their mothers to secrecy.
"You can use my name," said Frank O'Brien, who digs roots with a sword-sharp hoe made from a car spring. "But don't write about where we went. Don't identify it. Heck, it'd be like a man announcing to the world where he's found gold."
This region, rich in coal and timber, always has relied on the land for a prosperity that has come in short-lived bursts.
Few believe think a plant's root will change the fortune in a swath of counties where 20,000 coal miners are jobless and where as much as up to 40 percent of the people are poor. But Appalachia is the nation's leading producer of wild ginseng , producer, and it and other herbs mined from black mountain dirt help keep many checking accounts alive.
With fertile soils in hollows of tightly creased mountains, where shafts of sunlight spear through branches of hickory and sassafras, Kentucky's $11 million ginseng industry yielded more than 26,000 pounds of the root in 1995.
- Appetite grows
In recent years, the appetite for ginseng has grown on the Asian and American markets, has grown, pushing prices from $42 a pound in 1970 to possibly $600 this summer. Last year alone, the price jumped nearly $350 beetween August and December.
"Lord, yea, yeah, people do it for the money," said Tim Brown, the bearded, mercurial manager for Wilcox Natural Products.
"There's no doubt in my mind that people are doing it to feed their kids." Sheila Hall knows all about turning herbs into cash.
"My husband was a coal miner," said Hall said from behind the wheel of a pickup headed for Wilcox, loaded with $648 worth of bloodroot, golden seal and slippery elm bark.
"But he had black lung and had to have surgery and can't go back into the mines." "He used to dig ginseng and herbs as a hobby, for Christmas money. Now he's doing it for a living. He can make $700 a month. That's a house payment."
A lot of these coal miners can't read or write; they don't have much education. So they leave the mines and go into the woods and dig roots and herbs.
"My husband chews a lot of plants he digs. They're good for doctoring yourself. Golden seal is for ulcers. Sassafras for arthritis. But he's got to watch how much he takes. I bought an herb book." She laughed. "I'd hate to have my source of income OD on me. He's in the woods every day at 6 a.m." He's not alone.
The bounty hunters are trampling the herbalists, who believe that ginseng is a magical elixir that rejuvenates and cleanses the body. Nature's pick-me-up. A recent study on rats by Southern Illinois University suggests ginseng is potent: Male rats given a diet of ginseng took an average of 14 seconds to mount females in heat. Rats given none took an average of 100 seconds.
- Chinese cleaned out crop
That's no revelation to the Chinese, who harvested their wild ginseng centuries ago and now rely on Kentucky and other foreign markets.
"Now it may sound funny," said Brown, standing in side the corrugated warehouse alive with the scents of ginger and white willow bark, "but ginseng 's supposed to increase the sperm count. And when you think about it, it makes sense. Thhere are more Chinese than any
...
O'Brien put it, "you gotta be real religious if you have a heart attack 'cause an ambulance ain't coming no time soon."
O'Brien has been in nearly every shadowed indentation, into every thicket where he says God has laid a finger. He learned some of his trade from an old man who won't give his name because he has a sea of ginseng growing on the slope behind his home.
"It's really the perfect plant," said O'Brien, a 63-year-old retired autoworker. , who Last season he dug picked almost $2,000 worth of ginseng , enough for a few bills and some vacation money.
"The true ginsenger doesn't do it for the money," he said.
"There's a challenge to it, a magic. Every ginsenger thinks he's the best. It lets you roam these mountains. I lose 15 pounds every season."
He covered the plant with light underbrush, hiding it from other herbal prospectors. He zigzagged up the mountain, ice rattling in his Thermos, dirt and sweat staining his forearms, his blue eyes watchful for copperheads and sawbrier thorns. "Uh-oh," he said, spotting a scrape in the dirt as dark as peat.
"Someone's been here, digging. Either a coon hunter or a ginsenger. It makes me mad when they dig 'em that early. To me, it's greed and strip mining that's killing out the ginseng ."
He sat in the underbrush, poplar trees swaying and creaking above him. "I'll tell you a story.
"A relative of mine asked me to go ginsenging with him. So there I am going along, and we hit this hill, and I said, `Here's a little two-pronger. Too small to dig.' I moved on, but when I turned around, he was digging it up. He said if he didn't do it, someone else would. I got mad. Now his health is bad, and he can't go into the woods."
O'Brien smiled, happy with what he considered to be nature's justice. "I feel bad for him, but good for the ginseng ," he said. "Ginsenging like that'll ruin the future."
- BY : Jeffrey Fleishman - Knight-Riddder News Service
- SOURCE : Portland Oregonian1996.06.16
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