Top Culture
Oplopanax Horridus and Me
My love affair with devil’s club began, as so many affairs do, by getting hurt. Not a really really big hurt but, because I am quite the wimp, it still brought tears to my eyes.
I suppose I should say devil’s clubs (plural) because it was a beautiful stand of about 25 thick stalks. With bright berries and wide, splayed-out tropical leaves, it was a wondrous sight, glowing in a riverbed glade. I was a wide-eyed prairie bumpkin staring up at the firs and pointing in surprise at bulbous mushrooms. Such an enchanting grove of lush friendly plants. BC opening its green arms to my embrace…
Ow! Hey! I waded in with prairie-boy aplomb and was greeted with a BC butt-kicking.
Now this is not to say I am a masochist—a love affair involving a butt-kicking? I really am a peace-loving and sensitive person, but that rather rude awakening was my first real indication that I was someplace new. I was not in Kansas anymore, Toto. No Manitoba landscape would do that to you.
Musician Raghu Lokanathan has a great song that personifies Prince George as a tough woman named Caledonia. She is rough and sometimes mean but honest and free-spirited. While devil’s club does not stand for northern BC, it certainly seems to embody much of its physical and spiritual sensibilities.
For me this toughness is not an invitation to a macho conquering impulse, but calls for nothing less than respect. This place can kill you. The fast, tough rivers, the challenging landscape, the difficult highways, the bad drivers, the large carnivores: they all can hurt you. It is humbling more than anything. A Cree elder taught me that the first relationship with the land and its creatures has to be one of piteousness—I am subject to this place, not it subject to me.
So devil’s club came to represent something for me; it became a symbol for my discovery of a new place, a new ecosystem, a new history, and a new way to relate to land.
Upon reading more about the plant (book knowledge is one way to know something), I became more and more enamoured. Not only was the plant the anti-adamic apple of my eye, but it had played its part in defending countless wet valleys from the invading colonials. Many explorer and surveyors’ journals have lengthy curses aimed at the devil’s club they encountered. Not only are the thorny spines long and tough, but they cause all sorts of lingering irritations and infections. Expedition stoppers. It’s a bit like botanical guerilla warfare to prevent invaders from just waltzing across the mountains.
And then there’s the name. ‘Devil’s club’ is certainly an eye-catcher—especially so for me since I had, in my younger days, a fascination with the devil. This was not devil-worship, of course, but a curiosity that led me to extensive research into the origins of the ubiquitous figure. He (and she sometimes) is quite cross-cultural (thought certainly not universal). My research led me to write Catch as Catch, my first book, which is the story of the devil appearing in a small prairie town and causing good-natured trouble (he also learns how to skate).
So there’s the common name, and then there’s the Latin name: Oplopanax horridus. The ‘horridus’ is just perfect: horrible, of course, but also descriptive of the rough and sharp qualities of the plant. ‘Oplopanax’ is more complicated, consisting of oplo-, ‘armour,’ and panax, meaning ‘heal-all’—which is also related to panacea (from the Greek goddess Panacea). So we have a well-guarded, powerful healing plant. One more layer of colonial naming has come recently, as American companies have misleadingly marketed the plant as “Alaskan ginseng.”
The traditional First Nations’ uses of the plant are many and varied, and it is among the most important healing plants (medicinally and/or spiritually) that there is here in the mountains. It has been a mainstay for healers from Alaska to Montana, used in a variety of ways from a simple antibacterial to protection from spiritual harm.
Learning more will, I suppose, be the next stage in my relationship with this plant—to learn its pre-contact character before all the English and Latin names were applied to it.
For now, though, I am watching and respectfully noticing its different forms through the growing seasons, the kind of soil and topography it likes; the way it smells and takes on light. How I fall under its spell.
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