Ramps

On the drive to work, down near the river, there is a place that always smells of onions. No room to pull over so I've never stopped and looked. Speaking of nowhere to park, there's a ring of wrack, like a huge bathtub, several hundred feet long and maybe twenty feet wide, against the berm for the bridge approach going over to Kentucky. There is no place even a goodly hike away, to park. I'd rather get down there than go to New Zealand, go anywhere, I'm tired of going, I'm in more of a being phase. There's a traffic light, where I approach the 2nd St. Bridge, that has me looking at right down at the wrack, I can identify some things. It's at the edge of a Boone Coleman field, a flood plain where he gets paid for crop failure. A neat trick. Probably some sort of farm access. Must get the Deputy to get me permission to get in there from below. Need several trucks. This could be the motherlode. Pollen on the lake is thick enough to form large swirling masses. The ducks leave trails. I fed them the last of the turkey sandwiches. Found just enough morels, in thirty minutes before dinner, to saute in butter and have with a lovely little remaindered Rib-Eye steak, a salad, heaven. Drank part of a bottle of Ramey Chardonnay, 2002, that they wine guy said was over the hill and to just pour it out. I think not, brought it home. Must have been aged in oak because the high fruit notes are turning to sherry, but I like it a lot, much better than young fruity insipid, excuse me, whites. I don't really like white wine. It's ok for deglazing a pan. Kitchen Duty was part of the rotation at Janitor School and wild foods were popular, roadkill reigned supreme, a lot of us hunted. Several times a year a bunch of us would go over into the UP, not that far, and collect mushrooms, one spring we came back with over 400 morels. There were a couple of great cooks at the College, Marie Freshet and George Kill, married, who taught the cooking course-work. We catered events for the descendents of the logger barons who had raped this region and there was a great seminar, held sporadically, "Large Amounts of Left-Over Food", for which distinguished alumnae would fly in; I met the Head Janitor for MOMA at one of these, talk about a cushy job, he had 14 assistants and a four thousand foot shop. It's time well wasted when you just stop and look at something. Second sighting of the yellow-spotted salamander and I knew to just hunker down, how often you likely to see one of these? Fucker is huge. He thinks he is invisible, but I caught him, in the corner of my eye, and never shifted my attention. These last ten years, I've learned, let go when necessary, stop what you're doing and watch. Trust the corner of your eye. What you thought you smelled. Phantom smells. If imagined they are real, I assume Kim is being honest, D, the world I drive down into, of a morning; we stop at STOP signs, amazing to me, really, that we do, but we do, and traffic flows freely, more or less. They're burning the wrack, I should have known, plastic and wood, I could have predicted they would. It's not rocket science.