Rain. Wind. Cold. None of this bothers John Kallas much. “Once you get moving, you won’t even feel the cold anymore!� he chirps. “Just make sure to take your watches and jewelry off.�

The eight students who’ve signed up to spend a Saturday in November harvesting cattails with Kallas have obediently followed him out to a marsh near Scappoose, picking their way through clumps of green sedges and disappearing into tall, waving fronds of brown cattails. Grass gives way to mud and then to chilly water.

“There go the boots,� says one young woman with a sigh, stepping into a pond halfway up her calves.

“Argh,� groans another attendee, as the brown sludge wicks its way up his blue jeans. “Can I have my money back?� he jokes.

In truth, everybody knew what they were getting into: an expedition into the semiwild, getting their hands and feet dirty in a quest to pluck and prepare edible local plants.

As their forearms plunge into the cold marsh muck, fingers scrabbling to pull up cattail rhizomes, the participants might long for a little less nature, at least until their fingers warm up again. But, as Kallas says, “Nature’s not here for our convenience.�

A researcher and writer with a string of degrees (in nutrition, education, biology and zoology), Kallas lives to teach. Since he moved to Portland in 1989, Kallas has been leading workshops on the region’s edible, untamed bounty.

In 1993, he created Wild Foods Adventures, a one-man educational company, and spring through fall he leads the adventurous in search of nuts and berries, seaweed and clams, ferns and ginger.

And cattails, which, he says, have edible parts year-round but feature tasty stems in the fall. “By the end of the workshop,� promises the class description on his Web site, “we’ll have gone from swamp roots to hearty ash cakes and pancakes that any normal human would enjoy.�

Rhizomes are the reason

The normal humans today are slinging footlong sections of cattail rhizome around the marsh, tossing the good (firm, pale, straight) into a different floating pile from the bad (mushy, dark, gnarled). “Watch out for your neighbor,� Kallas reminds, as a mud-covered rhizome sails past his fedora-covered head.

“I’m into this for the teaching,� says Morgan Emrich, a burly guy hauling yards of cattails from beneath the water. “I teach seventh-grade social studies near a wetlands, and I want to take the kids out there.�

Emrich hadn’t realized that kids are welcome on Kallas’ expeditions; next spring, he says, he’ll definitely bring his own kids on a trip. “Kids just don’t spend any time outside now,� he says. “My students don’t even know where corn comes from.�

John Halsell, a naturalist who describes himself as “a part-time educator and full-time dad,� agrees with Emrich, saying that although he doesn’t think his kids have the patience to stick their arms in cold water for an hour, they enjoy the stories he tells afterward.

“It becomes part of their worldview,� Halsell says. “Not just, ‘Oh, that’s a marsh,’ but, ‘Let me tell you about the time I went into that marsh and we ate the cattails from there.’ �

Kallas, whose canvas-shod feet are just as sodden as everyone else’s, is thrilled about the standing water. Usually, he teaches the cattail-rhizome class at the end of October, when the marsh is drier; the resulting work is less damp, but also much dirtier. “This is great!� he exults. “We can wash them off here, not at home!�

Midwest boy sought wild life

Growing up in suburban Detroit, Kallas says his parents found the outdoors unsanitary and their foraging son baffling. “I was self-taught, in the school of hard knocks,� he says. “I had a lot of failures.�

His childhood imaginings – “I fashioned myself a Native American, building fire with two sticks and all that� – led to his adult interest in harvesting and preparing the wild foods that once sustained local tribes.

“The idea that you can sustain yourself off your own wits is a beautiful thought,� Kallas says. “But I’m not a survivalist guy; I’m not interested in trying to live only off wild foods.�

Kallas never met Euell Gibbons, the 1960s wild-foods guru, but his bookshelves are crammed with faded paperback editions of such Gibbons classics as “Stalking the Wild Asparagus� and his newsletters are filled with references to Gibbons.

“More than anyone else in North American history,� writes Kallas, on his Web site, Gibbons “got people thinking, talking and eating wild foods.�

It’s six hours to a short stack

Back in Portland, Kallas puts the students to work stripping and then preparing the rhizomes: pressing the dull edge of a knife along the cattail cores, gradually separating the starch from the fiber.

“You can eat the fiber, but it’s pretty much like dental floss,� says Kallas, pulling strings out of a student-collected bowl of white goop.

He blends the cattail flour with conventional pancake ingredients – milk, eggs, sugar – and pours the resulting liquid onto a griddle. “Look,� he says, admiring the glossy texture of the batter. “The perfect pancake!�

Doused in maple syrup, the pancakes taste a bit like potato, a bit like banana and a bit like, well, ordinary pancakes. One diner claims they taste like pancake mix. Another can’t believe how long it took – six hours – to produce a dozen pancakes.

“My neighbor has huckleberries, and he doesn’t even know it,� Kallas says. “I bet they would taste really good on these pancakes.�

Berries, lettuces, mushrooms – plenty of cultivated foods from the grocery store have wild cousins ignored in the backyard. Kallas wants his students to enjoy themselves, but also to reflect on where their food comes from.

“People used to forage all the time,� he says. “Now, we just go to the supermarket. Really, the only reason people do this now is for fun. It’s a hoot.�