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The grove at the Northeast Portland park already has been picked over at 9 a.m. on a weekday in mid-October.
Each “thwop!” – the sound of a chestnut falling from its spiky husk and striking the grass below – sends a head turning.
“Where is it? Where is it?” said Phuong Christiaan, before homing in on the spot where a jumbo-sized nut landed.
Moments later, she looks across the park and sees a man with a plastic bag approaching, then half-jokingly exclaims, “Oh no. Look, competition!”
Though overlooked by many, chestnuts are a celebrated part of many Asian and European cultures — and a culinary treasure to all of those in the know. As with Southeast Portland’s Laurelhurst Park, where more than half a dozen chestnut trees line one edge of the park, the five grand chestnut trees that populate Northeast Portland’s Frazer Park have become a popular hunting ground every September and October.
The competition can be fierce. The demand intense. (It’s also something this reporter can relate to from personal experience, but I’ll get to that later.)
On this particular morning, the serious hunters – the ones who got out of bed before dawn to be the first to pick up the bounty that fell to the ground overnight – have already come and gone. But Christiaan’s goal isn’t only to gather a bagful of nuts, she’s here for the exercise and experience.
She jokes about how she used to run marathons. Now she collects chestnuts.
“It’s like walking on a treadmill, you can do a mile without knowing it,” Christiaan said. “You see a couple people, maybe they’re nice, they’re friendly, you talk a little. It’s very peaceful. It’s stress relief.”
Over the course of the next two hours, more than half a dozen people show up to the tidy, four-acre neighborhood park. All are of Asian descent – Japanese, Chinese, Mien and, like Christiaan, Vietnamese.
As other gatherers come and go, they tell me how they like to prepare the low fat, high antioxidant nuts: Boil them. Or steam them into rice. Peel them and eat them raw. Or roast them, like vendors do on the streets of many countries in Asia and Europe. (Always peel off the outer and inner skins before eating.)
A woman collecting nuts told me she immigrated to Oregon decades ago from Hong Kong, where she had to buy the nuts because they didn’t grow in the dense, urban environment. To her delight, she discovered a massive grove on a patch of land near the newly built Mall 205 in Southeast Portland.
The trees, however, were in the path of the planned Interstate 205 and were mowed down in the 1970s, she said. She remembers the spot by the aptly named motel that sprung up soon after, the Chestnut Tree Inn, which is currently serving as a shelter for women facing homelessness.
Now that she’s uncovered a new hunting ground, she can spend a few hours there at a time, gathering the nuts by the bagful for herself and friends.
*
The nuts used to be an American staple along the East Coast and were brought over on the Oregon Trail and planted throughout the Northwest. But they largely disappeared from 1904 to 1950, when chestnut blight killed billions of American chestnut trees.
A few have been rumored to survive in Oregon. One of the last – an 85-foot tall, 4.5-foot diameter giant that towered over a Sellwood neighborhood street – toppled after a wind and rain storm hit Portland shortly before Thanksgiving last year, distressing many who’d admired its enormous canopy. But arborists say the century-old tree actually turned out to be an American chestnut hybrid, and it hadn’t produced edible chestnuts for the last several years of its life, after another nearby chestnut tree died. The trees need to cross-pollinate in order to produce edible fruit.
In the American chestnut trees’ absence, other varieties have sprung up across the Portland area over the past century. Their locations are sometimes revealed on share-the-wealth websites like www.fallingfruit.org.
Portland Street Tree Inventory, which cataloged more than 220,000 trees lining Portland’s roads, counted just over 250 chestnut trees with edible nuts. They are not to be mistaken for the poisonous horse chestnut trees, which outnumber the edible chestnut trees 5 to 1, according to the inventory.
Horse chestnut trees, which produce squat, smooth-bottomed nuts, are one of 15 trees listed by the city of Portland as a “nuisance,” in part because they easily spread and their husks and nuts litter roadways, making a slushy, slippery mess as cars drive over them.
Edible chestnuts, produced by the genus Castanea, are distinguished by their especially spiky husks, with every square millimeter packed with razor-sharp needles. The insides bear nuts with tassels or tails at their ends.
The Portland-area season lasts no more than several weeks – beginning in September and ending by late October.
Due to today’s scarcity of trees with edible chestnuts, some aficionados choose simply to buy them, with prices for fresh nuts ranging from $3 to $15 per pound at Asian food and other grocery stores. Demand has been significant enough that even Costco sells roasted and shelled 21-ounce boxes, imported from China, for $6.49.
Chris Foster has been running a commercial orchard, Cascadia Chestnuts, for close to 30 years on land a few miles north of Portland’s Skyline Road. In addition to delivering them at local restaurants and markets such as New Seasons, he will start selling his organic nuts at the Portland Farmers Market at Portland State University this Saturday for $10 a pound.
After six consecutive weeks, the autumn harvest sells out by mid-November. He said he’s chosen to list his business as “temporarily closed” on Google to enjoy some peace from people seeking fresh nuts.
“If I say I’m open, people come knocking at all hours wanting to buy chestnuts,” Foster said.
*
Before setting out to write this story, I sought my mother’s blessing.
Born in Korea, she grew up enjoying chestnuts, and it is because of her I am well acquainted with them, as well as the disappointment of arriving at a cherished chestnut tree only to find that all of the nuts are gone. As a young child, I so clearly recall waking early on fall weekend mornings to arrive before the competition.
I tell my mom that writing about chestnuts will only increase demand. And she may encounter an extra chestnut hunter or two the next time she sets out. She gave me the OK, anyway.
Chestnuts stir particularly happy memories for my mom, who remembers as a child going to the mountains outside Seoul to collect them. Or waking up to a bagful of nuts beside her bed to celebrate the first full moon of the lunar new year. At school, all of her classmates would feast on the nuts that they’d received, too.
After immigrating to Oregon as an adult, my mom learned that chestnut gathering in the United States has not always been an accepted pursuit. While picking nuts off of the street one autumn in Milwaukie, my mom recalls the irked neighbor who stepped outside her house to scold my mom for taking nuts that should be left for the squirrels.
My polite but firm mother responded: “Humans are more important than squirrels.”
A Beaverton real estate agent who frequents the region’s lesser traveled roads, my mom has chanced across many “undiscovered” trees. Feeling sad that the nuts were going to waste, she has often spread the word. Her friends tell their friends, and soon, the trees are not so secret anymore.
And so it is this history that my mom and her inner circle kept in mind when she encountered a new tree with especially sweet chestnuts along a street in Lake Oswego. She gave bags full to her sister and close friend, who asked her for the tree’s location and made her promise not to tell anyone else.
She gave a bag, as well, to yet another friend. And he, in turn, wanted to know the source of these particularly tasty nuts. When my mom declined to say, that friend meticulously drove the streets of the city until he found the tree, where he started each day before dawn gathering the nuts that had fallen to the ground overnight. Or so the story goes.
Miffed that there were never any nuts left by the time she arrived during daylight hours, my mom’s close friend showed up before sunrise one morning – flashlight in hand – to see the man already there, scooping up the night’s windfall. The man had worked out a deal with the homeowners to keep them happy, too. He entered their yard to gather the nuts but cleaned up the spiky husks in the process.
My mom said her close friend simply gave up and went home, utterly defeated.
Back at Frazer Park, Sonny Saechao says he lives in Fairview but drives to Portland for a reliable source of nuts to give to his wife.
“What do they say? ‘Happy spouse, happy life,’” Saechao said.
Saechao grew up half a mile away. He recalls heading over to the park to play one day and making the delectable find: The grove of five healthy, mature chestnut trees. It was the first of many trips in which he’d pick up nuts and bring them home to his pleased parents.
These days, as an adult, he could buy the nuts. But he still returns to these well worn hunting grounds.
“Like a fisherman when you catch something,” Saechao said, “it’s a better feeling when you get it yourself.”
Southeast Portland resident Grace Pae Henricks, whom I met through the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, tells me she gained an appreciation for chestnuts from her mom. And her children, now adults, did, too.
Pae Henricks’ mother, who emigrated from Korea to California in her early 20s, used to roast chestnuts in her fireplace. It was a highly anticipated activity each autumn.
“It was better than going out to get ice cream,” Pae Henricks recalled. “My kids were like ‘It’s my turn! It’s my turn!’ Because she would peel them one at a time for them.”
When Pae Henricks’ mother died in 2017 and she was going through her mother’s things, she asked her daughter if she wanted anything. Her daughter’s answer?
Her grandmother’s chestnut paring knife.
— Aimee Green; agreen@oregonian.com; @o_aimee
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