In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, we ate ‘com,’ which is rice. There were different varieties to be bought at the wet markets, maybe ‘com huong,’ meaning in my translation ‘perfumed rice’ as in the Perfume River (‘Song Huong’) that moved through the ancient capital of Hue, or ‘com Thai,’ which is obviously Thai rice.
Sometimes if we had the extra cash, which we often did in those days, my girlfriend and I would go to a Thai restaurant in District 1 and have Jasmine rice, which was basically Thai rice but of superior quality.
In the mornings on the streets we ate a breakfast of ‘com tam,’ meaning broken rice or the broken bits of rice left after the winnowing, and it was very small but delicious with sizzled beef or barbecued pork chops and sunny-side up eggs, all together for 10,000 dong a plate, or just under half a dollar U.S.
I especially liked the lunches on the streets of ‘com binh dan,’ meaning common or commoners’ or ‘the people’s’ rice, a plate and many sides coming to around 20,000 dong.
All of this is, of course, white rice, or ‘com trang,’ but of better quality, if smaller, than the Texas or Louisiana or Arkansas white rice of America.
Wild rice (genus Zizania) is not a true rice (genus Oryza). That is, it is not related to white rice. Wild rice is a finicky grass, which needs unpolluted, very clean, shallow water with a slight current, the current being the mechanism that washes away the silt and muck. I think of my father, who was a duck hunter, scouting in August and September for healthy and thick wild rice in the Mississippi Flyway of Minnesota and Wisconsin. In August, the fields of wild rice are a brilliant green, with ribbons (the leaves) laying flat and broad on top of the current first, then the stalks standing straight during maturation in September. We hunted Canadian geese in the early mornings in the wild rice blinds and we push-poled the paddies and shot bluebills on Lake Lizzie as the morning wore on, and shot mallards on Phantom Slough in Crex Meadows. Crex stood for ‘carex,’ which is not a grass (genus Gramineae) but a sedge (genus Cyperaceae).
In Cook County, Minnesota, I have found good paddies of wild rice on the Swamp River where the coots and swans and honkers swim away from us and the ringnecks and redheads fly away. Also on the Brule River upstream of Northern Light Lake. Also on the Cascade River up and downstream of the Grade bridge. And on John Lake and the Kadunce River and, today, a dozen ribbons on the Flute Reed River at the new beaver ponds.
Cutgrass, on the other hand, is very closely related to white rice. I remember my father ever warning me of grass twice, once in my youth and once in my middle age. Many years ago along the pond he warned me against going forward into a patch of cutgrass, as he so often did with poison ivy. On that occasion I followed his advice but many times later when I was alone I went forward into the cutgrass stands in either my jeans or rubber hip boots or chest waders. That’s when I was a muskrat and mink trapper and duck hunter, too, and as a boy and in the fields and woods I was afraid of almost nothing, unlike how I was in school and our neighborhood and the suburbs.
The other time my father warned me of grass was very recent when grasses became a hobby of mine, and I started gathering and sowing grass seeds like reed Canary grass. “Don’t plant that crap, It’ll take over everything,” he said. I sow it every year anyway because it speaks to me as an iconic grass: tall and thick and of no value, but beautiful and green and yellowish-tan.
Wood reedgrass, I suppose, is the most ubiquitous on my property, which is largely canopied by giant poplars and mature balsam and spruce.
This time of year, I walk the property and gather the drying seeds of the various late summer grasses. Smooth brome, which took up the fallow field behind the barns on my father’s hobby farm, and which bends at the top with fat, heavy seeds. Orchard grass, flowering in bunches, just outside my porch. Thin grass. The corn-like (but unrelated) manna grass. Timothy, promoted for hay by Timothy Hanson in 1720. Bottlebrush grass, with its splaying seeds and long sideways bristles. Even wild rye. And volunteering barley, oats and wheat dropped from the straw I use for various purposes around our place.
Closely related to wheat is the commonest quack grass, which can – and will – take over everything. In our black raspberry and potato patches all those years ago my father and I would pull the quack grass, being careful to get all the white roots up, and lay the white roots on the sandy loam in the sun to dry and to kill them.
The white roots of the quack grass and the white rice of Vietnam. So many grasses, and so little time. Meteorological autumn is here. I see the bad moon rising.
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