Counting the Days by Craig B. Smith

Author:Craig B. Smith [Smith, Craig B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-356-7
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2012-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

HOUSES IN THE JUNGLE

SIMON: During those last desperate years of the war, Lydia and I had a succession of homes in the jungle. We left the Hugheses’ place in early 1944, feeling that we could no longer burden them with our care, because Mrs. Hughes was struggling just to feed her family. We moved nearer the coast, thinking maybe life would be a little easier there, closer to the sea, away from the guerrillas who were harassing the Japanese. Unfortunately, many others had the same idea, and food was just as hard to come by there as anywhere. We jumped from one spot to the next to avoid either the Japanese or the guerrillas. We alternated from day to day, trying to decide whether the Japanese were preferable to the guerrillas or the guerrillas to the Japanese.

As food got scarcer, people ate anything. I tried snake, all kinds of seafood—even insects. Lydia wouldn’t eat some of these things. We learned to do things we never imagined we’d be able to do. For example, our neighbors near the Hughes plantation grew corn. We helped them care for it, and they shared some with us. Then one day we heard about another farm where locusts came and started eating the crop.

“Never mind,” I said, “We’ll do something.” So we watched carefully for the locusts, while I thought about ditches filled with water, burning green grass to make smoke, or some kind of herbs to poison them. Before long, the locusts were at our place eating everything in sight. We tried the measures I’d planned, but nothing worked well.

My best idea was to burn old tires, which seemed to slow them down a little—maybe the sulfur bothered them. But more and more came, and they laid eggs, and small ones hatched out and then moved across the ground until it looked like a wave, like the ground was moving. They were unstoppable. Before we knew it, the plants were stripped bare, down to straight stalks with no leaves, so we picked the corn—even though it wasn’t ripe yet—and got what we could from it. The only way we could collect the rest of our corn was by eating the locusts! The Filipinos showed us how to “French fry” them, and they weren’t bad, especially after they’d been fattened on our corn.

Lydia became an expert at preparing cassava, a starchy root we dug up. She’d slice it, dry the slices, and then grind them. Eventually she made a white flour, somewhat like tapioca—which in turn could be baked, made into pudding, or cooked like porridge. Lydia was clever at cooking and once baked me a beautiful sponge cake in an old gasoline can. She rigged up a stove using two bricks and a few pieces of reinforcing steel. We ate using sections of banana leaves as dishes just like the Filipinos. From the locals, Lydia learned which wild plants and fruits were edible. One wild plant that we ate was a spinach-like leaf that grew wild, called “tankum.

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