Oyster Beds

If anyone had found my mother-beds, and it isn't really possible that they could, I can't even find them, there are my layers of obfuscation. By the time I left New England, I had three oyster beds and all of them were on someone else's property. This was probably illegal, but they weren't using the space. These were all originally Wellfleet oysters, a decent sized rock would carry 10,000 spat, and I seeded all the ox-bows on Quivet Creek. I could pole the pirogue over just a couple of inches of tide, and in a very few minutes collect a meal. Kroger gets their seafood on Thursday, so if I get to town late Thursday of Friday morning I can get a dozen oysters for $5.88, and not only that, but because I take the seafood guy (Harley) the occasional treat, I get the pick of the litter. A once a week extravagance. If I have these roasted (either on the grill, or steamed) it's a good meal, with slaw and bread, but if I have them fried, on a salad of bitter greens with goat cheese it's two meals. I steam them open, then roll in a seasoned masa and fry in peanut oil. I'm using a lot more masa, now that so many people are gluten-free. Save all the liquid, reduce it with a minced shallot, add a little shot of balsamic and a shot of olive oil and dress the salad with that. Maybe a garlic mayo. I miss being out in the woods but the ticks are terrible, the worst I've ever seen, and since I live in western Nile county, I feel it's not worth the risk. The deer are thick, they've discovered that my hollow is a safe place and there are two families I watch almost every day. The western family (my ridge, separated by the creek from the eastern family) uses a trail I blazed a few years ago. B had chain-sawed a large old wolf Red Maple for me, and I must have made a hundred trips, hauling out wood. If you carry clippers, which I do, after five or ten passes you've clipped out all the tripping green-briar, and the blackberry canes that are likely to smack you in the face, and it becomes an established path. The deer love it, they can smell that I haven't been there for a while, so they use it. The bobcat uses it. The grouse. The bear. Down lower, where the driveway cuts in above the creek, the banks are fairly steep, but there are a few places where drainage has provided access, and the game trails always converge there. The old chicken crossing the road. Three guys go into a bar. A Muslim, a Jew, and a Baptist. There's a scuffle. They all remember it differently. The Baptist left in a huff, a pink cardiac or a red Cadillac, and our hero, the anemic Irish intellectual, is left wandering the streets of Chicago. Or Boston, or Mexico City for gods sake. If elected to the post of president of FIFA, I would hope you know I would steal several million dollars, or, that awarding the winter Olympics to a place where is no snow is a good idea. Good fortune without a trace of regret. Several people are now multi-millionaires and the rest of us are eating weeds and nursing broken bones. I can't believe the arrogance of Achilles. The Nepalese continue to die, building a soccer stadium in the desert. No more useless than Las Vegas. Oh, wait. I love the southwest and spend most of the day reading early Edward Abbey fiction. Not for the plots, or even the characters, all of which are transparent, but for that sense of place. Slot canyons and hidden springs. When I lived in Moab, I walked deep into Arches quite often, gathered a small fire and heated a can of beans, slept through many a cool evening on sun-warmed rock and found many of the very formations that Abbey had described. I remember one night, I hiked in below Bluff, Utah, to examine some dwellings, I'd been told about some rock art, and I got there just at dark, made a small fire and heated some dinner. I was exhausted, from the hike, and I was asleep within minutes. When I awoke, I had no idea where I was, but it came back to me, slowly, that I was under an overhang where a lot of people had camped for many thousands of years. The sandstone walls were inscribed with images of animals that no longer existed. Miniature elephants and hippos. If you look closely at these drawings, you see the plants, and they determine the season. Elk here, at this time of year, and salmon too, vinegar was an early discovery, and salt. Smoke and low heat must have been a revelation. Preserve food? Surely you must be joking. But a bag of pemmican could see me through, a bladder of water and some trail mix.