SASSAFRAS TEA

As a kid growing up on a 360 acre farm about 25 miles from nowhere, there wasn’t a lot of things we could do to get into much trouble. Naturally we had the usual brother-bickering back and forth but brothers do that, you know. Three of us grew up together, stair-stepped 2 years apart, so we had plenty of opportunity to scuffle with each other. But other than that, we stayed pretty mellow; not having much free time to get into mischief; unless, of course, you consider that my older brother by 6 years found ways to make it hard on the rest of us. For instance, him and his hoodlum buddies bringing in cigarettes and teaching me how to smoke ‘em. I definitely got into trouble with Mom on that one! I don’t know if she ever told Dad or not, but I do remember pleading with her not to tell him! I promised I would never do it again……..and I didn’t until I turned 19.

I do remember a lot of things about the hot summer days; the way we used to play in the grown-up thickets and pastures. I recall the times we would take a roll of Binder Twine and use it to make a fort in the Sassafras thickets. Now, Binder Twine was a fuzzy cord of sisal rope material that was used in the process of baling hay. Later, Baling Wire was more common due to its increased strength over the twine. Apparently, we had a few rolls of the twine left over from Grandpa’s hay baling days, or perhaps it just found its way home from someone else’s farm. At any rate, we found a use for it.

Sassafras was a plant/bush/tree depending upon when you saw it. It could grow as high as 70 or 80 feet. The trees would send out root runners along the ground and occasionally send a small shoot upward to form a new tree. These plants grew wild and thrived in the Arkansas climate. We would find 4 or 5 growing in an area and that’s what we used for the 4 corner posts of our Fort. As we encircled the posts several times, similar to building a fence, we created a support for our “poles”. We would cut small bushes and limbs and weave them vertically in the twine fence and thus, give us an enclosure that kept us “safe” and free from being seen by the “enemy”. Ironically, our nearest neighbor was over a mile away. Their son, Paul, was my age. He wasn’t really the kind of kid who would hike over a mile to “spy” on me in the hot Arkansas sunshine.

We didn’t know much about Sassafras, except that the older folks made Tea from its root bark after a drying process. Sassafras Tea was popular, although I can’t recall Mom making it. She was always making Lipton tea. It sure tasted good in those days. It wasn’t the tea bags like we have today. It came in a box with the Lipton label; inside were sealed dried tea leaves, chopped and crumpled, waiting on a boiling tea pot of hot water to bring out the smell and flavor we remember.

But little did we know about Sassafras. Who would have thought that all that time we played amongst the bushes of death? The FDA banned Sassafras oil because it was a high cause of cancer in certain tests they performed.

In the 16th Century, Tobacco and sassafras (two cancer causing death plants) were the most important early medicinal plants in America. The plant takes a while to fruit, but when it does dark blue, pea-size berries rest atop a bright red peduncle. From the profile, the fruit and peduncle looks like a small ice cream cone.
Sassafras is aromatic, giving off a fragrance somewhere between that of oranges and vanilla. The fragrance comes from safrole. Safrole is highly concentrated in the roots. The Cherokee Indians used it to cure anything from VD to being overweight. In 1963 it was determined that it caused cancer in rats. They claimed that just a few drops of the Safrole oil could kill a child. I guess we shouldn’t have been sniffing and chewing on the dried roots!
I find it ironic that living on a remote chunk of land in Arkansas, assuming that we were out of harms way, except for an occasional deadly snake encounter, that what we thought to be harmless, was just as deadly, yet provided hours of peaceful entertainment for 3 boys with imagination.