Eating Central Park

By Timothy C. Greenleaf

Passers-by frequently hear the rustle of little feet scurrying through the underbrush as they run, jog, or roller blade past the wooded areas in Central Park. When a closer inspection is made, observant individuals are often treated to a strange sight: nearly 30 enthusiastic first graders, each wearing a pair of latex surgical gloves and clutching a plastic ziploc bag, all flock around a man who easily could be the basis for a cartoon caricature of an explorer of the African jungle-pith helmet, full beard, thick glasses, and soiled pants. As they run amuck, they frequently scream, "WILDMAN! What's this?"

The leader, "Wildman" Steve Brill, not only answers every question in reference to the natural world, but also tells stories, plays his own brand of music, and most notably, teaches his followers how to forage for food in the city's parks. "Don't walk over your lunch," he warns, "it won't taste as good!" He leads weekend excursions of adults to many parks in the New York City metro area, in addition to a busy schedule of schoolchildren during the spring and autumn.

Although his nature walks date back to 1982, Brill is best known for his arrest in 1986 for eating a dandelion in Central Park. "It was a big turning point," he said. "They had been after me for years, so I was very wary, but I had no idea that there were undercover agents."

Disguised as naturalists, the park police came along for the tour and made Brill's suggested donation of $10 with marked bills. When he ate a dandelion, the uniformed rangers popped out from behind the trees, handcuffed him and placed him under arrest.

"I was charged with criminal mischief for removing vegetation from the park," said Brill, smiling. "I knew not to have plants on my person, so when I picked them for personal use, I discreetly passed them to my girlfriend. The rangers hadn't noticed this-and they were gleefully telling the police 'Look in his backpack! He's got all these plants that he's been picking!' When they couldn't find anything, I told the press that I had eaten all the evidence! I spent days on the phone with the media and managed to get more press than Ross Perot's money could buy. When they took me to court, I served "Wildman's Five Borough Salad" on the steps of the Manhattan criminal courthouse. And subsequently, it was such an embarrassment to the city that they dropped the charges and hired me to lead the same tours that I was leading when I was arrested!"

Brill's defiance of the city authorities seems natural, given his background as a student protester during the Vietnam War. His sense of civil disobedience sharpened after dodging tear gas canisters as a student at George Washington University. Later on, he led tours even after being told not to, because he felt people should be allowed to understand the world around them. Brill also resigned his naturalist position in protest when Mayor Dinkins took office because the new parks commissioner, Betsy Gotbaum, implemented a parks management strategy that, in Brill's opinion, was not in the best interest of the environment.

Brill's interest in foraging came about because of an interest in gourmet cooking. After graduating from school, Brill taught himself to cook by reading recipes from the sides of food boxes. Moving on to the library, Brill then taught himself how to cook ethnic and nutritional foods. Then, one day while riding his bike past Cunningham Park in his native Queens, he observed some Greek women picking grape leaves and stopped to see why. "I asked them what they were doing," he said. "I didn't understand a word of it-it was all Greek to me. But I made this great stuffed grape leaves recipe. Later on, I checked out nature guides to learn more. I became a professional and it turned out that I was the only person who knew any of this stuff. It was a hobby and I turned it into a business."

Although Brill feels rewarded when children recognize him a year or two after having been on a nature walk, he wants people to appreciate the environment by being closer to nature. "And one of the traditional ways people related to the environment," said Brill, "was by trying to find food. People are detached from the environment, so this is a logical place to teach them. Nature is everywhere."

Brill loves foraged food, yet, he is not a survivalist and has never subsisted entirely on it. "I don't have the time to collect as much of my food as I would like to because I am continually busy," he says, as he sinks his teeth into a sandwich consisting of wild chickweed on a whole grain millet bread. "That is probably the only downside to being successful."

Brill integrates wholesome vegetarian foods into a healthy modern lifestyle. "I eat whole foods, exercise, do yoga, meditate, try to do creative and enjoyable things in my life, and try to keep an altruistic attitude and behavior toward others," he said.

A central pillar of Brill's philosophy is that education is an accumulative process. Thus, he reads whenever possible, and also makes use of every opportunity to gain knowledge from others. During a recent trip to suburban Connecticut, an astute child pointed out that the Beech trees were bearing nuts, not just empty husks like those farther south. "I had read that the Beech trees in New England bear nuts," said Brill. "After eight years of simply ignoring this fact, this kid convinced me to pick one up. And according to what I had remembered, but had disregarded, there were nuts in the beechnuts! And every class that I took out on the grounds of the school from then on ate beechnuts."

On Thursday evenings Brill co-hosts a public access television show sponsored by the Queens Green Party. He also enjoys collecting high quality reel-to-reel audio tapes of prominent jazz musicians.

He brings his love of jazz into his nature walks by incorporating the spontaneity and improvisation of jazz music into his tours. Occasionally, he creates his own music by cupping his hands in front of his mouth, clapping, and using his mouth as a reverberation chamber with which he can control the pitch of the popping sound. "Does everyone know that plants come in families?" he excitedly asks the kids, as they are foraging for spearmint leaves. "Who knows what family this is?" he asks as he pops out the theme from "The Addams Family."

"He is like a little boy who wants to play," says Evelyn Dean, a friend who co-wrote and illustrated Brill's new book, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places. "I know a lot of people who say he is a complicated person, but to me, he is fascinated by ideas, by learning, and by trying to excite other people about those ideas."

Dean's father, who wrote the index for the book, has proclaimed on occasion, "If you listen to Steve long enough, you'd think that without him, there wouldn't be any environment!" Giving people a reason to care about the environment is one of Brill's primary goals. "We're living in it, for one thing," said the self-proclaimed 'Wildman.' "Despite our predilection to only look at cultural aspects of our existence, every molecule of oxygen we make comes from a plant. We're burying ourselves in our own waste. And if we're not completely selfish, we may care about future generations who will be living on a more polluted, degraded, and globally warmed planet. We have a bigger brain than other creatures with the ability to look further ahead. Why not use it?"

Link: Visit Wildman Steve Brill's Website:
http://www.bigfoot.com/~wildmansteve