14 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
life,” she said. A couple of years later, she
studied with “an incredibly knowledge-
able guy who goes by the name of Dan
De Lion, who drives around the coun-
try by the season,” teaching people from
his Foragemobile. “He has an apothe-
cary, and he’s constantly making tinc-
tures and salves.” Kempson considers
herself a foraging enthusiast, not an ex-
pert: “I never would have presumed to
teach it, except for these extraordinary
circumstances that we are in.”
Kempson’s foraging pupils, likely in
extraordinary circumstances of their own,
get a dose of thrifty survivalist scrappi-
ness alongside their medicinal-plant iden-
tification: foraging can yield not just tinc-
ture ingredients but food. “The other
day, I ran out of greens, and it’s, like, wait
a minute. There’s a supermarket right
outside,” she said. She held up some
roughage: curly dock, then prime for har-
vesting, when it was “more like spinach,
less like collard greens, and delicious sau-
téed with olive oil and salt, and a little
garlic, if you have it.” Daylilies have ed-
ible tubers; Kempson dug into the earth
and exposed a gnarled mass of bulbous-
ness and roots. “I just wash them off, and
I cook them like a little potato,” she said.
“Last night, I put them in a cast-iron
frying pan with olive oil. And it was won-
derful.” Kempson loves potatoes: “I wrote
a whole play about them.” “Potatoes of
August” was part of a trio of Kempson’s
“vegetable plays,” in which potatoes,
pumpkins (“Ich, Kürbisgeist”), and as-
paragus (“Spargel Time!”) gain conscious-
ness, and occasionally wreak havoc. In a
1
DEPT.OFVERSIFYING
MEMORANDA
N
ot long ago, as the world was half-
way into week whatever of sus-
pended animation, a man who lives with
his wife and children in the Midwest
arrived in New York City. He is a writer
and a musician in his early fifties. His
age means that he grew up listening to
the Violent Femmes and Jim Carroll,
reading poems by C. K. Williams and
Galway Kinnell, and writing songs about
the limited options available in a small
city where the interstate keeps people
flowing through without stopping. He
became a career military man, medically
trained, who did tours in Afghanistan
and other unenviable places. His latest
deployment was to New York, where his
expertise could be put to use saving lives
and alleviating suffering in a temporary
facility for coronavirus patients.
In the days after his arrival, he began
documenting what he saw. Walt Whit-
man, nursing the sick, wounded, and
dying in the Civil War hospitals of
Washington, D.C., famously wrote that
“the real war will never get in the books.”
The military man’s notes, jotted down
between fourteen-hour shifts, are
glimpses into the real war currently
being fought in hospitals around theworld. (He has not been authorized by
the military to speak to the press.)
“I am double gloved at all times and
wear a gown,” he wrote, of his routine.
“After I get home, every time I cough
I think I have caught the virus. When
I am floor leader, I have to carry a radio
in case I need to call security. I always
want to call just to tell them I am feel-
ing insecure.” He is bivouacking in a
high-rise hotel, the kind of place that
is normally packed with tourists and
honeymooners. He and his colleagues
are permitted to roam no more than a
few blocks in any direction. He often
records his observations in verse:New York
is a
ghost town
where
even the
birds took
the last
train
to Jersey
and
the night
rises blue
black as
an alley
cat and
my combat
boots echo
across
Broadway
like gun
shots or
a heartbeat
fading into
a silence
so complete
you can
hear the
crying
voice of
each and
every star.He wrote about the constant threat
of losing a patient:He was
too tall
for the
Army
hospital bed
and had
an eagle
tattooed on
his arm
he was
older than
60 and
looked
like a
biker the
kind ofsimilar vein, the Ibsen adaptation that
she’d planned to stage in Austria takes
a Symbolist approach to “A Doll’s House,”
among other plays, exploring “Nora’s or-
igins as a wooden doll that Ibsen carved,”
she said. “And before that she was a block
of wood. And before that she was a tree,
and she had tree consciousness.”
Consciousness, in both Kempson’s life
and work, is expansive. She’s been eating
curly-dock seeds—“I’ll just grind them
up and put them in my oatmeal”—which,
she explained, are “said to bring prosper-
ity.” She looked thoughtful. “I have found
that, when I eat them regularly, I am less
worried about money, for whatever rea-
son.” She smiled. “Maybe it’s my imagi-
nation. But whatever’s in our imagina-
tion, I think, is part of reality.”
—Sarah LarsonSibyl Kempson