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The key to her heart? A humble pawpaw, grown over 1,500 miles away.

2023-09-26 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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Hours before his flight back home from D.C. was scheduled to take off, Chris Schaaf was in the middle of a Virginia forest, shaking a tall, leggy tree, hoping it would relent.

It had taken a group of strangers to help him get there.

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“Come on,” he cajoled, peering into the lacy canopy where he hoped his prize would be.

The 33-year-old scientist had been in D.C. all week for a conference on stem cell research. But he found himself in the woods on a quest for a very unscientific reason: love.

This is a wholesome story of romance, y’all. And I followed Schaaf on his journey to bring back the ultimate D.C. souvenir for the woman back in Denver who has him totally besotted.

“So I’ve been seeing this woman for a while now and she’s literally amazing,” Schaaf had written on Reddit earlier in the week, asking folks in D.C. for help. “… Before I headed out here on a work trip, we were talking about pawpaws and how badly she has always wanted to try some.”

Pawpaws are the largest fruit native to North America — a creamy, tropical offering similar to a soursop, cherimoya or custard apple. They have a little bit of a weirdo cult status in these parts, and they’re in peak season right now. There are pawpaw festivals and group foragings. Crafty mixologists present seasonal pawpaw cocktails. There’s even a pawpaw daiquiri.

Native Americans cultivated them. George Washington loved a custardy cup of chilled pawpaw. The fruits are abundant in forests from Ohio to Maryland and down to the Carolinas. The Lewis and Clark expeditions lived on them. Daniel Boone gobbled them up.

But they’re not commercially viable. They have a tiny window of ripeness and bruise easily, and their shelf life is no more than a day.

And thus, America has largely ignored them.

They are like some of D.C.’s other ephemeral delights — cherry blossoms or the optimism and innocence of freshman members of Congress.

Filled with optimism as he hatched his plans, Schaaf quickly learned procuring the fruit wouldn’t be easy.

They’ve become a novelty at weekend farmers markets, but Schaaf’s trip was Monday to Friday.

“I’ve come to realize that you can’t buy them in stores. So it sounds like I basically need to find a fresh one the day I fly back out, and give it to her when I land,” he wrote. “This is where hopefully someone out there can do me an absolute solid.”

He didn’t have a car, was in the middle of the city and at first hoped to just pay someone for a few of the foraged fruits.

“It would be super awesome if anyone would be willing to help out this swooning fool,” he wrote.

And dozens of people responded, giving him advice on woody patches and pawpaw groves.

“There are pawpaws in the vast majority of forested areas along the river here,” one Redditor wrote. “I’d go to Roosevelt Island (easy Uber), have a nice walk, shake a few trees, and get yourself some fruit. They’re ripe and ready to eat if they fall from the tree.”

Schaaf took an Uber to Roosevelt Island on Friday morning, and I asked to meet him there.

“So how long have you been together?” I asked, as we headed into the woods.

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“About three weeks,” he said.

Whoa.

“It’s just so right,” he said. “I don’t know, I keep waiting to see what the catch is. And there isn’t one.”

They met online. He’s tired of first dates and online dating. But this woman intrigued him, and he decided to give it a try.

Their first date in Boulder, Colo., lasted for hours. Their second date was a hike, and when they got to the end of the trail, they couldn’t stop talking.

She’s a forager and has impressed him with her mushrooming skills. So he hoped this insane journey to find a strange fruit he’d never heard of might impress her — or at least show how much he cares.

The scientists he came with thought he was bananas. “The rest of the group went to see the monuments and other D.C. things,” he said. “No one really wanted to come with me.”

We did half the loop on Roosevelt Island. He tried to explain the kind of research he is doing. It’s about “the transcriptional regulation of cell fate decisions in developing endocrine cells in human stem cell lines.”

Basically, he’s trying to find a cure for Type 1 diabetes. Nice.

We identified dozens of pawpaw groves, but not a fruit in sight. Not even on the ground.

His flight was in three hours.

I remember stories from hardcore journalists about restraining themselves from participating in stories, lest we change the outcome.

“You’re an observer,” Schaaf said, as I struggled with whether to help him out.

“Like that famous photo, the starving child with the vulture,” he said, invoking a 1993 photo of a child who had collapsed in the Sudanese desert, struggling to get to a U.N. feeding center.

Photographer Kevin Carter, who said he chased the vulture away after shooting the photo, won a Pulitzer Prize for it and launched a worldwide discussion on ethics. The child survived, but Carter took his own life four months after getting the award.

Rooting for love, I threw journalistic distance out the window.

“Let’s go,” I told Schaaf, and we jumped into my car for the next place on his list — Potomac Overlook Regional Park in nearby Arlington.

There, amid a grove of pawpaw trees, were a few with the bulbous, lumpy fruits still clinging on. Schaaf shook the trees.

Plop! Pla-pla-pla-ploop! Half a dozen fell.

He was all smiles, holding the pile in both hands. I’m not sure they were ripe, but that’s not really the point that far into this, right?

His feet — Jesus-like in Birkenstocks — were a scratched, bloody mess. “I forgot that there are vines out here. We don’t have that in Colorado,” he said. “I’ll just wash them up; no big deal.”

He gently put the fruit in a plastic baggie and loaded them into his messenger bag.

By Friday evening, they had found their way to Arielle Powers, who said the gesture “was possibly the kindest and simultaneously one of the most entertaining things anyone has ever done for me.”

“The pawpaws were delicious,” she said. And Schaaf’s quest? “Epic.”

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