MINING CABBAGE

Last night when we got back home from shopping in the big village up the Lake road, Echo decided that we should have a nabe for dinner, so asked me to go out into the garden of darkness to get some greens, i.e., shungiku, shirona, horenso (spinach), kabu (turnip) etc. But it was too dark to see any of these, especially the darker greens, so I had to put on my headlamp to go deep into the vegetable mine, where the rich veins of green life thread the reaches of the night.

It's not a task for any man, just as the miles-deep gold mines of South Africa are no place for the depth- or darkophobic-- to say nothing of vegephobic. Following the small tunnel of light into a mountain of darkness higher than Everest and deeper than the Philippine Trench, I worked my way to the mine entrance, opened the garden door and stepped inside where, stretched out before me, lay the mother lode.

Following standard mining procedure, I worked my way from the spinach vein to the cabbage vein to the turnip vein and deeper toward the shungiku and shirona veins, slowly filling my gathering basket with rich takings. We Vegetable miners have no need for explosives or special tools; we mine with our bare hands. We also maintain a careful relation with the environment, since we eat what we mine.

After a time, my work done and my miner's basket full, I found my way back to the vegetable mine entrance, which I closed behind me before heading back toward mine headquarters, arriving there at around dinnertime.

Like my grandfather (who, like his father before him was a Vegetable miner) never said, Vegetable miners are a special breed of men.