My father is a man of many enthusiasms. Once we move from Pittsburgh back to his rural hometown of Kane, Pennsylvania, most of those enthusiasms take us even deeper into the woods than the dark hollow where our sturdy, dull clapboard house sits. We fish for elusive brook trout in the spring, pick blackberries in summer, identify vibrant leaves in fall, and cross-country ski in winter from one car left near the top of the mountain to the other left at a backwoods tavern at the bottom. 

Most of Dad’s enthusiasms involve food in one way or another. This leads to a few culinary mishaps along the way, like the time he is inspired by natural food guru Euell Gibbons to experiment with edible wildflowers. The violets he adds to the fancy omelet have little effect on the flavor but turn the eggs an electric purple. When a suicidal pheasant flies smack into the window above the kitchen sink, Dad says he will make us pheasant under glass, but by the time he meticulously plucks the healthy-sized bird, it’s so small, he tells us we will be having pheasant under martini glass. 

Then there is the winter of 1975, when Dad invests in all the equipment needed to tap maple trees, including an antique gas stove so we can slowly boil down the sap in the dark basement. After weeks of plodding through muddy melting snow to collect our harvest each day, and then after days and days of watching the sap boil, we learn that the maples on our property are not in fact proper sugar maples and that we kids much prefer the smooth blandness of Aunt Jemima or Mrs. Butterworth.

But that isn’t the point. The point is for my dad to spend some time with his three sons, working and playing together in the muddy wilds that surround our old clapboard house in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest.

My father announces his plans for the “Leek Weekend” a few days in advance. (Characteristically, he gives the event a formal title.) An old high school friend has lent Dad his “camp,” a tiny, run-down house even deeper in the woods than our house is. The event is to be boys only; we will be leaving my mom at home. Since it is the height of wild leek season, we will be picking leeks and incorporating them into all kinds of recipes, the most important of which will be my dad’s famous potato-leek soup.

I’m not sure what my mother will do with that rare weekend of peace and quiet. Knowing her, she’ll probably spend the whole time accomplishing things on her long to-do list, which is a lot easier to do without three muddy kids and one muddy dog constantly interrupting. She packs us off in Dad’s beat-up International Harvester Scout, and we tumble down our dirt road to the highway, drive about 15 miles, and then turn off on another dirt road that is even muddier and bumpier than ours — we are roughing it!

The moment of crisis comes when we get to the camp. My dad had explained in advance that eating wild leeks gives you unbearably bad breath, but that there’s an out: If all the people you are with have also eaten leeks (even just a tiny bit), nobody can smell it. We’re not sure about the science behind this theory, but we have no encyclopedia with us to look it up, so my brothers and I take our dad’s word for it.

The problem is that my brother Pete and I hate onions, or anything even remotely related to onions. And leeks are onions’ smelliest first cousins. Pete’s hatred of anything oniony is relatively mild, but mine is absolute. In fact, I don’t even really know what onions taste like, since I have always refused to eat them, finding their slimy texture simply unbearable.

My father stands firm, though, in his insistence that each of us take at least one bite of leek so that we can bear to be with the other three, whose very pores will be exuding the toxic scent of wild leeks. This stance is in line with his lifelong insistence that we must try at least one bite of each new food we encounter in our lives. If we don’t like it, fine; we don’t need to take a second bite. But we must always, always give something new a try.

To tell the truth, I never learn how the leek tastes, since I use the side of my tongue to quickly glide it completely unchewed down my throat. I shudder and take a quick drink from the glass of red Kool-Aid I have ready and waiting. I survived the horrible experience and never take another bite of leek all weekend, but I have inoculated myself with that one bite and can now enjoy the rest of the weekend undisturbed by the noxious fumes escaping from the bodies of my father and brothers.

The rest of the weekend is a pleasant blur. We catch tadpoles in a small pond as a rare gash of sunlight breaks through the steel-gray clouds. We are comforted by the smell of a freshly lit dusty kerosene heater cutting through the dank mustiness of the old camp. Some of us sleep on the bed, and others sleep on the ratty couch. My brothers relish the luxury of going a whole muddy weekend without taking a bath, while I wash my face each morning and put on a fresh pair of plaid pants.

Maybe I do cheat a bit by bypassing my taste buds as I slide the dreaded leek beside my tongue and down my throat, but you know what: I don’t die from consuming that leek. And I realize that the Leek Weekend is emblematic of some of the most important lessons my ever-present dad teaches my brothers and me, lessons that will inform the decisions we make over the rest of our lives. 

On the one hand, Dad teaches us that we should always be willing to try new things — that we shouldn’t let fear, or our own prejudice, keep us from learning what something new is about. On the other hand, he also teaches us to make our own decisions about new things, and he honors whatever decision we make. All three of us have learned to be open to new experiences and new ideas, even scary ones. And we have learned to trust our own judgment about what we do with these new experiences and ideas, even if that means ending up right back where we started, our disdain for wild leeks fully intact.