When I was in high school, soon after the last dinosaur had sunk into Lake Hitchcock, there was a wildly (pardon the pun) popular book by Euell Gibbons, “Stalking the Wild Asparagus.” This how-to guide for foraging and preparing wild foods had been out for a while but had recently taken off with the “ecology” movement, as it was then called. My best friend had read it, and on our wanderings in the woods of Ohio, he would seek out things like wild onions, which we would sample. A few years later, as a photojournalism student and wage-earner at my college newspaper (yes, it paid), I was regularly tasked with finding what we now call standalone feature photos, loosely termed “art,” to hold the section front. But back then when the English language was still in flux, and we stereotypical news photographers had stunted linguistic skills, our assignments would simply read “wild art.” Wild, as it was not tied to any story and hence not domesticated by any conforming restrictions on what it needed to illustrate. To us, the task itself — the pursuit — soon became known as “stalking the wild art.” That’s still how my brain is conditioned to think of it — and never more so than on this most recent cold, soaking Monday when I crouched on the slippery hillside of the “Wilson Bulb Bank” at Smith College, setting my trap, as it were, for the next catch.
—Text and photos by KEVIN GUTTING/GAZETTE STAFF