A mysterious man sold me an elixir he said would make my stringy beard as thick and silky as an otter’s pelt. However, he did not mention the side effects.
I drank the stuff and went for my regular beach walk. It wasn’t the hallucinations that produced a perfectly roasted Thanksgiving turkey on the beach — it really did look like one. But it was the hallucinations that made me try to eat it.
The “turkey” turned out to be the very stout root of a plant called yellow sand verbena (Abronia latifolia).
Over the years, I’ve occasionally seen these big bulbous roots washed up. I always assumed that they were from some plant that eroded out of the dunes during large storm surf. And sometimes they have tumbled in the surf long enough that their toasty looking skin has eroded off, which makes them look more like a huge peeled potato.
If you aren’t chomping on a raw one while out of your mind on beard elixir, the sand verbena root — cooked properly — is actually edible. Supposedly they are similar to other root vegetables, and have a peppery flavor when roasted or fried.
But because Washed Up’s readership numbers in the billions, I have to ask you all to please not dig up yellow sand verbenas to eat. Some other sand verbena species are endangered and we don’t want the yellow sand verbena to follow them toward extinction.
Yellow sand verbena has a defensive trick called “psammophory.” (Which is pronounced however you like.) Their heart-shaped succulent leaves have sticky hairs that hold onto wind-blown sand, which makes them difficult for browsers to eat. There may be several grains of sand stuck to each hair and the sand is arranged in a pattern that corresponds to the positions of the hairs, which seem to be concentrated around the leaf’s edge.
The sticky hairs also appear to be highly concentrated on the backside of the flower and its stem. So maybe these parts are particularly yummy to browsers. Anyway, the bright yellow flower heads are almost spherical and are made up of up to dozens of small individual flowers. I read a description of the structure of the flowers but it was too boring to repeat here. Let’s just say that they are not like your stereotypical flowers with petals and stuff.
A single plant spreads out from the central root via horizontal stems and it forms a low-lying mat that’s only a few inches high, but can be 10 or more feet across. When conditions are favorable, the plant can support dozens of flower clusters throughout most of the year. And insects, such as click beetles and bumblebees, and arachnids like our relatively large red mites, seem to like the flowers and probably provide pollination services.
Yellow sand verbena lives in windswept coastal dunes with well-drained sand because it does not tolerate prolonged exposure to fresh water, and it is adapted for salt spray. When conditions are poor, the branches can die back to the root, which stores energy to feed regrowth when favorable conditions return.
Later that day, as the hallucinations peaked, the ocean turned into giblet gravy, a washed-up jellyfish turned into cranberry sauce and the sand turned into stuffing. I tried to eat all of it.
I woke up in the hospital with damaged teeth and a tummy ache. At first, I didn’t mind because my beard was indeed as lush as an otter’s pelt. But apparently another side effect of the beard elixir is psammophory, so now when I go to the beach my beard gets full of sand.
Traditional and Sport Fishing on the Niger River, Mali, West Africa, available at Amazon or everywhere e-books are sold.
This article appears in ‘God Looking Back at You’.