Not Bad

Rain started before dawn, or at least the dripping started. Continued all day. An interesting phone call from a builder in Utah, wanting to know where I'm gotten the lumber to build a specific staircase. I explained that the wood had come from Mississippi and had been hauled out by a friend who wanted to hunt elk. The staircase in question was mostly 3x12 white oak and I had gotten it for a couple of hundred bucks, which is what made the project possible. I gave him the name of a sawmill and advised how to cure/dry the stuff when he got it out west. With the difference in relative humidity, it's difficult to prevent warping: you have to sticker it in layers (stacking the layers with sticks between, to hold them apart) and band the stack with those awful metal bands that are bloody dangerous when you cut them. A lot of scars on a lot of carpenters and masons. Then another phone call (two in one day is almost a record) from a former student. She wanted to talk about punctuation. I told her to get the Norris book, and we talked about the serial comma for what must have been an hour. Between calls I was reading Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic, then some McGuane short stories. The sardine on toast with mozzarella and tomato in balsamic lunch. Large slice of sweet onion. If I had any meetings, for the rest of the day, I'd have to cancel them; filthy, from working in newly exposed dirt, and a garlic/ sardine/onion breath that would stop a charging rhino. It was Mac who taught me to eat anchovy paste on crackers. Most everything I know I learned from someone else or read in a book. There's a dish in Iceland, where they ferment a shark for several years in a hole in the ground. For whatever reason, rotting fish seems to have established itself fairly early. I have no idea what makes this sterile enough to eat. Salt? The shark tastes like a very ripe cheese, it certainly doesn't taste like chicken. Garum, of course, the juice of rotted fish, was a Roman favorite. I've made this a few times, and it can be quite good, more a flavor enhancer than anything. I make another list, all the ingredients I'd need to make a few soups, some cans of navy beans and garbanzos, some dried cured smoked ham trimmings, freeze some chorizo, buy some roasted red peppers in oil. When I can't get to town I reconstitute onion flakes in wine. I can always cook a pot of something. I love rice and polenta, so I'm a cheap date. One time, trapped in several feet of snow, I fried everything, tempura as a way of life, in peanut oil. It's all about the dipping sauce. As it happens I have a sauce confit, that pushes the envelope. Baby rib juice mixed with papaya nectar. Ten years old, and the additives are now without number, green chilies, and dried mushrooms, left-over bits of wine and beer, various green herbs, shallots, smoked peppers. Light rain all night but it slacked off in the morning and I went to town to get back-up whiskey and tobacco. The hills were smoking, moisture rising out of the hollows, and cooler. I had to pull up a flannel sheet this morning, and it felt wonderful to snuggle down. Read more...

Observable Phenomena

Two young deer, yearling does, early morning. I'd just sat down with coffee and I heard them running. Slipped over to the back door and watched them, running around the newly clearly area, then they'd stop and nuzzle necks, then off again like young goats. The fox is pissed that Danny leveled the compost pile. He leveled everything. I give her an apple and go out with clippers to cut enough small brush to start another pile. I'll get Loren to save food waste at the pub for a few days, I need to dump the composting toilet before winter, I have plenty of leaves, and I saved a bucket of stove ash. The produce guy at Kroger said he'd save a couple of boxes of cabbage leaves for me. My pigs in Mississippi were crazy for these; even when I had a lot of pigs 25-40, probably 30% of their food was supermarket waste, and the supermarket loved that I took it, because it didn't fill their dumpster. I had to run to town, the library had called, I needed whiskey and tobacco, I hadn't spoken to anyone for several days. Rooster trail of leaves, window down, a crunch under wheel; and that almost burnt smell of late summer. I'm sucked away, every time, by beautiful vegetables. I've starting not skinning almost anything, eggplant, acorn squash, cucumbers for sure; bitter is usually a warning, but it's an interesting taste You should never think I hadn't thought through the consequence. I roasted some eggplant, which I'd never done before, with some tomatoes, sprinkled everything with olive oil, salt and pepper. I have to do this in the toaster oven because it's too warm for a fire. Warm, god, then cool then cold, then too cold. I try not to get that far ahead. Looking through an old book today, a Tacitus from 1715, it's difficult to read, but I had a modern translation I could reference, which led, I don't remember why, to reading Chaucer. A few of the hickory trees, the leaves, are turning orange. Lovely against the green and yellow. All this color, in the grand grinding cycle, before we go back to black and white and the gray shadow. A long day, by my standards, I had driven, walked, read, and spent a few hours writing, slept a few hours, then got back up to pursue a thought. If then why not that. Then napped again before dawn broke. It's better to not break this down, yourself for instance, madly pursuing what that was.

Chopping brush all day,
tired and covered with dirt,
then a sweet apple.
Read more...

Salt Water

Beside that. One sliding foot at a time. I always kept an old pot, hidden in the bushes, so I could cook barnacles in sea water, clams and mussels, oysters. I'd carry a couple of potatoes in my pocket, and an old army blanket, a knife, a Bic lighter. In the butt of the knife was thirty feet of monofilament and several small hooks. I always have a book, since I was five (family stories), and my kit got larger when I started camping out of my truck, growing to include an unabridged dictionary. A great walk today, down into the hollow behind B's cabin. Collected watercress and several different mushrooms; salad later, bitter greens and ripe cheese, with mushrooms on toast. I was reading recipes that cooked things in sea water. Dubious anymore, but they made good reading. Then I read a long piece about the Lockerbie bombing. I truly never know what I'll be reading tomorrow. I'm skirting around a book on field amputation, Civil war period, that Judy sent me years ago, a horrific text; a shattered foot, cut it off, infected hand, cut it off, medical treatment tended toward the brutal. Illustrations and some of those early photographs. Instead I pulled an old Time-Life book out of the stack of books-waiting-to-be-read, Good Will and library sales, Canyons And Mesas, excellent pictures and decent text. Some of the area discussed I know quite well, I lived there, hiked around, knew some of the same watering holes. And the San Juan mountains, god, it was beautiful. Cut-Throat trout cooked on willow twigs, by then I carried a lemon in my pocket. And a baby food jar of bacon fat. Baby food jars, early on, were more or less resealable, bacon fat is usually a solid, a safe method of transport. In Utah I sometimes kept bacon fat in those very large hypodermic needles you use on cows. It was kind of flashy, actually, to whip out a syringe, and lubricate a skillet before you fried an egg. My system is so crude now, I have a ten-inch skillet that I fry the bacon in, and I keep the skillet in the oven, the fucking mice keep me ever alert, and use a spoonful or fry more, depending on my needs. Now that I have to start using the stove again I need to address the bacon fat issue. The brine for salted beef or pork, after curing, was 12 or 13 percent; four years at sea, the biscuit was mostly meal worms. The good news is that worms are 50% protein. Read more...

Up Here

Fall fog rolling into the hollows. It's an amazing phenomenon, watching the fog rise like a tide. There's a point, which I've actually experienced a few times, when you can actually feel the layer of more condensed moisture. Fog Whisperer. I've noticed a pattern recently, that I turn off the radio and kill the breaker for the refrigerator, sometimes I take a walk, I've never taken a walk on the ridge-top logging roads that I didn't notice something; Komma, I thought, the dark goddess of punctuation. It was immediately apparent, to a type-setter, that you had to break the phrases apart. Ancient Greek, and who ever thought leaving out the vowels was a good idea? Printing codified language. On a break from anything serious (string theory, the heat-death of the universe) I was reading a totally captivating novel by Thomas Perry. He's a good writer. I don't have the exact numbers on this, but I was doing a tofu study, there was a scale of some sort, one to ten, a mouth-feel study. I was at the island with several bowls of tofu and mozzarella in various balsamic reductions, reading the latest Perry novel. It was raining, a lovely patter on the roof, and I had the radio on, turned down low. An old Grateful Dead song came on, and I cranked up the volume. China Cat Sunflower from the "Europe, '72" album, a favorite tune from the distant past. It was all so perfect, cheese and fried bean curd in a blackberry balsamic sauce with late-season vine-ripened tomatoes, a glass of whiskey, the patter on the roof, great music. Lulled into a reverie. A visit to the middle distance. I used to listen to this Dead album often, when I was printing or binding books; and all of the other sensations, the smell of the rain, my addiction to balsamic vinegar, the patter on the roof. I remember so many things, all at once, that I'm overwhelmed. I certainly don't mind sitting back with a drink and a smoke, probably I was designed for this task, just reviewing some events with nothing much in mind. I enjoy watching and listening, slicing open oak-galls to see exactly which insect is represented. For a year or so, living in a rented room, I bicycled everywhere, I lived on wild seafood and potatoes. Then cooking once a week became my rent, then cooking might have become more than that, but I really wasn't interested in cooking for more than six or eight people. I lose interest in proportion to the quantity necessary to prepare. There are exceptions, I can do ribs for twelve, B and I once cooked pork loin for seventy, but in both cases someone else handled the side-dishes. I was thinking about patois, the way language develops. Starts with nouns and simple verbs. I mostly use two dictionaries, both American, Random House 2, and Webster 2, and I spent several hours today, checking words from Anglo-Saxon translated into modern American English. Fuck and such. I'm easily amused, so it's an entertainment for me. I talk to myself and chuckle occasionally. Realized that there was form involved in referencing a word. If I'm merely looking up a word I stand at the dictionary table (a three foot by six foot slab of sandstone lab counter) but if I'm going to research a word I have to sit on the sofa, where I have good light, and read the book open, with reading glasses, across my knees. Big heavy books, some of these dictionaries weigh more than a fat raccoon. You can't hold them like you hold a novel. I don't want any domestic animals, I'd rather just trap mice, and feed them to the crows. Dogs and cats scare all the other animals away. Read more...

Small Dramas

Life is too much. Rodney shows up then disappears until after one, and brings back a guy, Danny, with a small tractor. I have no idea what I'm paying for this and it bothers me that R brought someone else to my place. An ex-prison guard who smokes copious amounts of ganja. A small tractor with a small rear blade and they rip up the brush. It's an ugly sight but it's needed to be done for several years. It's brutal, and it's going to be a very muddy winter and spring because bare ground has been exposed for the first time in 15 years. Still, I'll have a fire-break, and be able to drive to the back door which will be handy for trading out refrigerators and laying in supplies. The driveway bifurcation, that allows access to the back of the woodshed, would have taken me a day to clear, is done in fifteen minutes. The back porch is clear, the side yard is clear. They got rid of the dirt-pile, dug out for the cistern, and I had never thought that would be gone. Then spend an hour clearing in front of the house. Ryan walks over, to see what's happening. Chaos. I had forgotten the electric line to the print-shop and it gets severed. Danny and Rodney leave, after coming inside for a drink. Kinsey comes over, to find Ryan. Everyone gone, the quiet was shocking; I ate an omelet and took a nap. Only actually four hours of intense activity, but I find it taxing. Rodney wants to get the floor insulated, which I want too, but I don't need this whole best buddy thing. I'd like his help, sure, and I'd pay for that, but I don't need someone making demands on my time. If I pay someone to clear brush for me, it is specifically so that I don't have to clear the brush, it doesn't signify that we're comrades-in-arms. Devin is beginning to show, she's six months pregnant, I've been talking about the benefits of vaginal birth with her. The way that last layer of protection was slathered in secretions. Trans-dermal. It's certainly true that I could never be pope, or even a justice on the Supreme Court (I'd be a very good Supreme Court Justice), but I did think about running for a local judge-ship. I'd be a good judge because I'm an excellent listener. Up early, made salsa, then scrambled eggs with loose Chorizo sausage and a huge scoop of salsa on top, toast and bitter marmalade. As soon as it was light I took my travel mug of coffee outside, to survey the changes in scenery. Work to do, cleaning up the oddments, but I need to run to town for tobacco and whiskey, get some things to eat. An artichoke, some oysters, greens and salt-pork. There are four staff at the pub, I get my usual draft, given a sample of the new mushroom soup (which is quite good); and three of the four confide that the new changes the owner wants to make happen are ill-considered. It's interesting that I get pretty much the same story from all three of them. You don't usually get that kind of consensus on anything. I told them all to compromise in the short term, but look for other work. I learned from Joel: first you quit, then you think about the consequences. But it's good to know where you might ply your trade. I can make books, I can make paper, I can make ink, I do restoration binding; I've been told I'm a pretty good carpenter ( I think that's an exaggeration) but I am a very good cook. Read more...

Synesthesia

A form of grace, the fox slips out of the woods like a apparition. She's come for her apple, early today. I roll it to her, and she eats it on the spot, about fifteen feet away. Dainty, and cute as a button: all possible connotations of foxy. When she leaves, trotting down the driveway, she looks back over her shoulder, a young lady at court in a romance novel. The phone rings and I've won a cruise to the Bahamas, which I politely refuse. Two black squirrels today, and it's a treat to watch them, industrious and agile as they are. One does fall, leaping onto a branch that won't support him, scampers up a tree trunk, looking around in embarrassment. It would have made the highlight reel for "Not Top Ten" things that happened during the week. One poplar tree has lost all of its leaves. It's an odd phenomena, on back country roads, the way a specific tree will lose all of its leaves all at once. It's like a small lake in the road, you can't even see the road. A further note, this happens when there isn't any wind, or they wouldn't collect the way they do. Sudden Leaf-Drop Syndrome. It can actually be a problem if you don't know where the road-bed is. I've sometimes pulled off and waited, to let another vehicle go through first, to see where the verge was. Switch-backs in the mountains, and those damned Cottonwood trees. Late last night, or early this morning, Tuesday, right? I was listening to Bach, an organ piece, a chance find on West Virginia Public Radio. I got a drink and smoked. It was quite dark, coal-mine dark, and the music was washing over me in these dark waves, colors, in the darker, somber reaches of the palette. I don't like yellow, and at some point Mozart is always yellow. Read Nabokov, Speak, Memory. I meant to go down and see B today. If you'd have asked me last night, I would have that said that going down to see B was a priority. I wanted to know, still want to know, how he's handling the teaching load, and what he was reading. He has a true eye on what's worth reading. I was distracted by a salamander, the fox, and the fact that I knew nothing about rabies, and just threw in the towel. Truth be known, I'd rather be distracted. I can see B next time I'm off the ridge, which may be tomorrow because Rodney called and said he's coming to clear brush and I'll need cash to pay him because he's chronically short of cash. One of the first orders of business is clearing the trail to the back of the woodshed. If he comes I could be on schedule for the vague outline I cobbed together last Sunday, what I need to get done before winter. I keep forgetting to pick up back-up batteries for my headlamp and the flashlights, and I need a few quarts of lamp oil, but anymore, when the power's out, I just wear my headlamp and go about my business. People that read a lot, especially at meals, all have an object they use to hold a book open, I use a particular rock, B prefers a swage, I've known people that used small sandbags, little muslin tubes filled with bird-shot, in one case a bronze tee-shaped thing that had been cast for that specific purpose. Hands-Free-Reading we call this. You need napkins, because you have to turn the page. A book I've read several times will have a slight smear, upper right, every three or four pages, when I went back to get a bite of fried chicken. No small achievement, that I can fry great chicken; Aunt Pearl, was a master, the only thing she did different was that she weighted the chicken with a foundry mold. If you splay a chicken part, with the skin attached, and put a weight on top, it fries differently. Chicken skin is somewhat like bacon, in that regard. Later, I can't remember the argument. Does it actually matter who was on top? Read more...

Scatology

A game warden found his way to the ridge. Came up to tell me bow-season opens next week, for deer, and that I should get a posted sign for the bottom on the driveway. I tell him about the bear and he looks around, when he comes back inside he's excited, you have a bear, he says, living under your house. He was a little perplexed that I didn't seem to care, I explained that both of us were careful and I carried firecrackers with a Bic lighter in my hand; and that I felt the bear would be safer there, during hunting season. The ranger and I had a good conversation about black squirrels and yellow timber-rattlers. He noted that I must read a lot and I told him that he had no idea. He finally left, though I sense I haven't seen the last of him, and I can get back to what I was doing, which was dissecting scat on butcher-paper (it's very white, and everything shows) to see what various animals were eating. I salvaged a great large poop from a Pileated Woodpecker and it was fascinating. Pieces of shell. There's a word for that. Most of these insects are 50% protein. Insects and rice, a few wild vegetables, you could get along fine. Elderberry wine, and maybe some botanicals. The possum scat is filled with grass seed, as is the coon scat. The fox scat is full of hair and small teeth. After I reread Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf, I ate a few mice, just to see what they were like, and they're not bad, like with small birds, you can eat the bones. Sometimes I chew the shells of boiled peanuts as if I had several stomachs, wash the cud in several changes of water, then make paper. Papyrus lasts for three or four hundred years, parchment for a thousand years, vellum (unborn calf) maybe for twice that; and oak-gall ink fails, releases from the paper. True staining only comes in with aniline dyes. Something that penetrates. I think again that I might have spent an entire contented lifetime repairing damaged books. I'm sure I could have made a living at it. Which leads to a thought about fiber. Several thoughts actually. Skins, first, used for clothing and shelter, then plant and animal fiber. Rotting flax to produce linen. A process involved. Making tapioca. Bacon. Eating a few mice is not a big deal, nor is eating a cat; imprisoned, you'd probably eat Frank, if he happened to die. If one of you had to die, so that the others could live, how would kill him? I'm thinking about the Essex here. Probably knock him on the head because you'd want to save the blood because you were probably thirsty too. I'm pretty sure it's Tuesday, from a careful study of the clock and last year's calendar, and I was trying to remember B's schedule so I might stop down and check on his well being. I should worry about him, he's older than me (than I am) and in much better shape, but we talk as equals, in whatever strange algorithm time and space has transpired to produce. Read more...

Komma

"Something cut off." Reading about The Oxford Comma, the serial comma, used before a conjunction. I go back and read a few pages carefully, and, of course, delete a few and add a couple. At the level of extreme nuance. There's so much in play that I get deeply engaged. Work and play. I spent most of the day thinking about separation and inclusion. What did you call your father? Dad, Pop, Father, Daddy? Couch to couch. I like listening to the Moth Radio Hour, more or less true stories, and I've always been around stories. I don't know what to believe anymore. When the blue-fish were running off Cape Cod I made a crude lure that could best be described as a piece of shit. A five inch piece of broom stick, with a small screw-eye, a swivel, and a treble hook. I'd tie on a feather. It looked exactly like a piece of broom stick with a feather tied on for effect. When the herring are flowing out to sea, the bluefish will strike at anything, I've caught them on gum wrappers. A ten pound bluefish, on medium tackle is a good test. Oily fucking fish, I like to smoke it, then revive it in Spanish wines. You can laugh, but I make these little fish balls that are absolutely superb. I like mackerel, for god's sake, I eat mullet. Large sardines, three to a can in oil, I eat with a very stinky cheese, a few pickles, a very coarse bread, and a wine that is aggressive and harsh but quite pleasant considering the meal. I love America's Test Kitchen on the radio. Sunday afternoon. Always a chuckle and usually a tip. I'll be cooking on the Stanley Waterford soon, when the nights cool off just a little bit more. Sad to see the end of great tomatoes, but I'm ready for beans and cornbread. I talked to the local pig guy, and he's willing to sell me raw fat back and a pig head quite cheaply. Curing salt-pork is incredibly easy, you bury the pork in salt, barrel it in a brine (12%) and it keeps for a long time. I have an old packing crate I use for curing salt-pork, completely salt-soaked. I take it to a car wash once a year and hose it out. You can't be too careful. But I've never disinfected anything, I was going to say, but I do disinfect almost everything. For one thing I try and stay away from kids because they are fucking vectors for disease; also I don't like going into public places, I'm claustrophobic, and elevators give me the willies. I've been trapped a few times, weather, generally, and you just do what you have to. Hiking slot-canyons is stupid, the flood that carries you away is not even on the radar. If you're a very good climber you might get to a ledge. But the slots are very beautiful. I watched one of these floods, from a safe vantage, and it was savage for about fifteen minutes, a raging three or four feet of water, and the canyon was dry again in an hour. You hear them before you see them. It sounds like a train, and you can feel it in your feet. The last day of summer and I am all over the check list. The mice are migrating, they want to move inside for the winter. I have a flat stone I keep in the freezer, maybe four by six inches, three/quarters of an inch thick. I freeze the mice, for the crows, and it makes perfect sense. You have a rock in the freezer on which you freeze mice for the crows. There. A perfectly good sentence without a comma. Mozzarella is a lot like tofu. Sun Gold Tomatoes, my god, and that hybrid apple, the Honeycrisp, I made a tart, and as a rule I don't make desserts. Read more...

Crossing Shot

I've never shot skeet, and I wouldn't be very good. I'm decent shooting something in the head at a hundred feet with a .22 rifle, and I can plink cans at twenty-five feet with an accurate pistol. But I'm not really a very good shot, I know people who can drill a bulls-eye at 600 yards with iron sights. I can't even see that far. I assume a skunk, running around in circles, and foaming at the mouth is rabid. I have a twelve gauge shotgun, a pump, that I had sawn down to barely legal, which I keep in the umbrella stand, number 4 shot, with the chamber empty. It only takes a second to pump and it's a menacing sound. The problem is I have to get closer to the animal because of the sawed off barrel. It's not a problem and I kill it, then have to bury the remains. I find that I know almost nothing about rabies, and make a note. The crows were bitching about something and I never did find out what it was. I've observed crows for a great many years and I think they sometimes bitch just to hear themselves. Last night I thought I might go to town today, but I sat around and finished reading a couple of library books, looked up the word "grace" in several dictionaries, had beans on toast for the first time in a while, and suddenly the day was gone. I need something to cook for the weekend, lamb shanks or pork neck bones, maybe some greens with fat-back, something. At the peak of my free-ranging pig days I had more pig heads than I could give away. Roy and I would make head-cheese and scrapple, pre-sold and in demand, late into the night, if either of us needed cash money. I had a five-year note on the farm, with a single annual payment. I'd raise livestock all year, beef, pigs, goats, then sell everything at auction (the auction was the big weekly event in rural Mississippi) to make my nut. Sausage, headcheese, scrapple, and homebrew, provided all the rest of the cash-flow. I built a few barns for other people, a couple of houses. Building came natural. You build a set, you build a house, there isn't that much space between. One of the last big sets I built, an outdoor production of Peter Grimes, in Maine; fucking maritime climate, fog rolling in, nothing was actually ever dry. I started thinking about houses, and ever since, I design houses in my head, staircases, showers; very few drawings, what I enjoy is just constructing things in my head. Took the Jeep into the dealer, for a factory recall, took a book in case I had to wait but they just had to replace two bolts in the dealer installed trailer hitch, and I was gone in twenty minutes. Stopped at the pub and Cory brought me a Scotch Egg, which is a boiled egg wrapped in sausage and deep-fried, he had baked these (no fryer) and they were wonderful; sliced, served with a mustard sauce. Read more...

Modern Times

Self-indulgent. On the other hand I do no harm and don't pose a threat. Shelled out what acorns I'd gathered and broke them into pieces using the great kitchen implement Kim brought me. A tenderizing hammer, whatever they call those. After I shell them out I let them dry for a day or two, so that they'll break apart and not just smash. Actually smashing is fine, but you have to flush them in cheese-cloth, or, as I do, through those filter bags you buy in a paint store for filtering paint, and the tannins flush out quicker, but it's messier to deal with. The creek was running clear, Low Gap Creek, headwaters of the infamous Upper Twin. They still make whiskey on Upper Twin, a dram in front of me now, to which I'd added a squirt of grape juice. An enzyme in grape skins kills the diesel taste. Remember your chemistry: there are two kinds of alcohol. You need a very good thermometer, or, as Ronny said, you waste a good bit more than you should. Better safe than sorry. And it tastes better. I set up a grazing run on the island, sliced olives, some gherkins, tomatoes and cheese in balsamic, a very good salami, some excellent crackers; it's like a great cocktail party except you're the only one there. I thought about translating the bible into Redneck Vulgate, then thought about a particular email. A paragraph of mine had been translated into Chinese then back into English. It was absolutely impossible to figure out what I was saying. Maybe all language is untranslatable. Everything is patois. Almost but seldom completely isolated. Emerson complained about Thoreau talking about fucking turtles. I might have been there, a fly on the wall, but I would never, you know, stir the water. It's difficult enough to understand a bare minimum, a blast on the horn, two ships passing in the night, right, I get it, your ankles are not the most important thing in the world. Excuse me, I was drying mushrooms and toasting chicory root, and your concern was what exactly? That the cat would be out of the bag? What does that mean? Almost anything, right? I heat some water and wash some dishes, fry potatoes in bacon fat, settle down, reading at the island. I've been anxious recently, no specific event or anything, just generally anxious. So, as it happened, the walk today had somewhat cleared my brain, I was thinking about the color blue and Vermeer, wanted get home and look at some pictures. I was just at the last curve, maybe a hundred feet from the ridge, when the fox trotted across the top. Something in her mouth, a grouse probably, she stopped and watched me watching her, then she slipped off into the underbrush. It's always a treat to see her. The last time I was over at the graveyard I thought I saw her, being leery and watchful. I know her den is over there somewhere, but I don't care to know exactly where. Privacy issues. Back in the day, before cameras were everywhere, you might get away with something. Now everyone sees everything. You can almost see my place, if you Google me, you can actually see part of the driveway, if you know what you're looking for. In the fall I stand out like a sore thumb, but once everything is covered with snow, you couldn't find me if your life depended on it. An iridescent flash, sap on the head of a woodpecker. I've seen this bird before, a large Pileated, and I can clearly see the matted head feathers. Must be awkward, but in a shaft of sunlight it's quite beautiful. There have been a great many woodpeckers the last week. Peak season for tree bugs. I love watching them, cocking their heads, listening for sounds under the bark, hopping up and down the trunks. Just my view, it doesn't signify. Read more...

Semi-Prepared

Not many acorns this year, at least in this hollow. The squirrels are working hard, and a few of them, from last year, have moved away. Requests for copies of The Cistern have been coming in, and it's a little strange, still, for me, and wonderful, when people come up and tell me I that I had written that book. Mailed a few today. There're so few copies out there, that they've gotten expensive. Joel wanted to buy another copy and the only one he could find was $65. He called and gave me a raft of shit. It was very funny. Cory was friendly at the pub. He wants me to take the job. He knows I won't. They had a nice soup today, Chicken Pot Pie, and it was just that. I love pot pies, and the idea of making a soup from them had never occurred to me. Every time I go to town now, I buy a couple of cans of something, mostly staples, but sometimes I buy a can of eel filets or something odd so that midwinter I might have a chuckle. Candied honeysuckle pistils, or ground dried ants. It's nice to have something surprise you, midwinter, when you're skulking around, with a blanket over your shoulders, looking for something to eat. I usually make an omelet, mushroom and cheese, with a piece of toast, lavishly buttered and dressed with local honey, or slurp noodles, or make a hot drink. I was reading, and looked up, out the window. I'm sensitive to local sound, it's a habit, and I knew there was a deer. Several small saplings of sassafras nearby had been stripped completely of their bark, and the surrounding ground was trampled in splayed hoof-prints. Here he was. A big guy with a big rack, ten or more points, and completely royal, majestic, words fail me. Proud, heroic, and rippling with muscle just under the skin. I watched him for fifteen or twenty minutes, until he disappeared into the underbrush. What a rush. He's so beautiful. He's here to breed the doe who lives between me and the driveway, they have an arrangement, I spoil the fawns with snacks and toys. I don't like cats and I don't like dogs, they interfere with whatever connection I might have with the natural world. This buck knows more about me than I know about him. But I'm prepared to learn. At first I thought a buck in the woods didn't signify, just a buck in the woods. Like that fox you meet on the driveway. There was a landslide on the river road a few years ago, and they hauled away hundreds of cubic yards of overburden. What was left, exposed, were these sandstone layers. I could do a power-point presentation here, The Formation Of Wet-Weather Springs, but it would probably be pretty boring. In the light of day, it's pretty obvious. I only call attention, because when I climbed them today, they seemed like giant steps; to the way each stratified division, a few million years, weeped. Channels of lower density material washed away and water found a way out, which is what water does. Follow the water. Read more...

Peculiar Skepticism

The year I made donuts, night shift, at an independent Donut Shoppe near campus, I met a great many police persons. They got free coffee and donuts and we never got robbed. A nice bunch of people that I got to know fairly well, one of them became a friend. A couple of the older cops were great at reading tells and I became a much better poker player after knowing them. Running on fumes and those various forms of speed that were being prescribed for weight loss. Rehearsing Shakespeare at night and taking a full course-load during the day. As was to be case for years, I slept in the aisles of theaters, or, if there was a bedroom in the set, on stage. There's a fair amount of sex, on stage, after hours; and for years I was the guy who locked up. A couple of times I got a few free drinks at our local bar (The Playhouse owned a bar) while an assignation transpired. For several years a few of us would stay on, after the season, living in the dressing rooms, and building scenery to be trucked in off Broadway (non-union), or fucking around with recording incredibly discordant music. A steady diet of free seafood, and already then, some great homebrew. Fritz was a master brewer. I seem to remember him malting barley on a tarp, after season, living in the bar. I mistrust most of what I remember. Not just cops in uniforms, but detectives and such, undercover guys and snitches, that FBI agent that carries his gun, openly displayed, when we should be eating seafood. Leviticus. One of those Popes, there were two or three then, said it was ok to eat fetal rabbits. One thing you learn, hoeing beans, is to never trust people in embroidered white outfits. Not even a guayabera. Leaf fall continues, a rain of them when the last little storm moved through. Clear, severe clear, this morning, and I walked out to the graveyard. Most of the graves are just marked with two rocks, but there have been a plat down at the old church (gone now) because a few of the graves have cheap concrete headstones (recent) with names and dates. I found a couple of nice ginseng plants, but I don't harvest them, I already have my year's supply, I do pick the seeds and poke them into the ground nearby. Later I walked down to get the mail and there is quite a bit of blue along the road, chicory, and I make a note to self to harvest some, to roast and grind. Several hours today reading about chocolate. It's a complex process, involving fermentation, drying, and roasting, and it's like the complex process of turning cassava into tapioca. Not to mention living on acorn meal and oysters. One thing that's brought us to the odd position we find ourselves, is that protein isn't water soluble, which means you can wash off a lot of crap and still retain some food value. Farming, domestication, is all about getting through next winter. I've been working on a skillet cornbread that I can make with powdered eggs and milk powder. I figured with the beans and canned tuna I'd be ok. Raising sprouts in a jar near the woodstove. If I can get out, I can always buy some greens, pigweed is fairly hardy. In the forties last night, and the thirties tomorrow night occasioned the most wonderful sensory event in recent history. I was at the Goodwill, buying some books and I noticed a couple of sweaters and bought one that was cashmere and a bit too small for me. Think of it as long underwear. It feels quite nice on a cool morning. Two bucks. Made another creamed sweet corn and seafood stew. Chunks of cod. Better with oysters. Fall, and I don't quite panic. I have a lot to do, but it can be done. I mucked out the outhouse, turned over the compost heap, knocked down the crap in the stovepipe and spent an hour cleaning ash from the smoke-chase that heats the oven in the stove. I'm looking forward to having an oven again, cornbread cake as opposed to pone, certain meals that require cooking forever in a cast iron Dutch-oven, and I bake macaroni-and-cheese, with breadcrumbs and butter, that is so good it should be criminal. Read more...

Paw Paws

Lake Snowdon, 17th annual Paw Paw festival. It's tempting. More rain, so I take a sponge bath and wash my hair. I make a list and head to town, whiskey for the weekend and a back-up bag of tobacco. Get a few food items for the larder, a steak, some frog legs. I always feel great about buying the one pound plastic tubes of Yoder's Cornmeal Mush. It's a buck forty-nine for a pound, which is at least four servings. Through the winter I make my own polenta, but Yoder's is just fine, with a fried egg and sliced tomato, and I love it with fried eggplant and a marinara sauce. And the fact that they call it mush, which isn't a very flattering name. Re-fried grits. On the subject of food, I was sitting alone at the bar, except for talking to Lindsey and Justin. Catching up with Justin because he'd been living in Columbus for a couple of years and he wants to come out and cook; eat, drink, and talk. When they got busy, Cory came over and took a seat, he usually does, nothing unusual, we talked about the Jeep Liberty, which I think is a decent vehicle. Out of the blue, he asked me if I wanted to be the food service guy for the pub (and another cafe owned by the same person). The head food guy. He was asking me if I would be the head food guy. It's a flattering offer. Change my name to Tomas and wear a different hat. I can't do it, of course, for so many reasons, but it's nice that Cory asked. I spent a pleasant few hours just thinking about the concept, getting a place in town, being around people, cooking, the feeling of being part of a team, making good money. The truth is that if the offer had come, years ago, I probably would have done it. I'm a good cook, but I'm not suited for the public eye. And though the ridge doesn't care whether I'm there or not, we've struck a bargain. She'll kill me if she can, but allow me to watch if I keep my place. I do my best not to impose myself. It's not even Fall yet, so I feel pretty confident. Winter is finite, but in many ways all of the year is in preparation for winter. Corn, squash, beans, a pile of books, some firewood, a path to the outhouse; and those winter phone calls from people that have central heat and hot water. Of course, it's the triumph of civilization that you could clean yourself. I actually attempt to be non-offensive. I can't pull it off, I'm offensive no matter what; but what's revealed, underneath all the surface crap, is that we all lie, fabricate, all the time. All of our fact is fiction. Well, not quite, but you get my point. TR called, from the museum, no one there, and he had various news updates for me. I'd been, as he knew, totally involved in my own little research projects, and had been paying no attention to what was going on in the world. Here I am, essentially holed-up, reading about making fly-line from horse-tail hair. I was reading the history of particular dry-flies and the transition from wet-flies to dry-flies, which I found fascinating because my uncle Fred (the shot of whiskey in his morning coffee guy, Dad's sister's husband) tied flies, and I used to watch him, amazed that he could tie two flies that looked even remotely similar. Tying flies is one of the few things that might be compared to surgery. Trying to imitate what a specific bug looked like at a specific phase of its life. It occurs to me that being around Uncle Fred was probably where I developed a taste for road kill. We'd be on our way to fish, the White River in Arkansas, or an ox-bow of the Mississippi, and he'd stop to cut out the urine-stained belly hair of a dead fox, because it was exactly the color of a male caddis fly. His wife, Aunt Pearl, fried the best chicken I've ever eaten in my life, and he was the one who pointed out that if a dead animal was still warm on a cold day it was fresh, freshly dead, and could be eaten without danger. Pearl fried squirrel and wood chuck with equal abandon. He was a shooter too, quail and dove, and eating at their house was always a treat. She made the best gravy in the history of the universe, a pan-dripping butter sauce from cooking squirrel livers, thickened with cream, one of the two or three best things I've ever eaten. Pearl was ornery and Fred was quiet and looked mean. The looking mean was just a war injury. They both drank a lot and were the very best husband-wife fishing team you could imagine. Fred could actually smell when and where fish were on the bed, he could scull a boat silently and cast a fly with his off hand. Pearl was nearly as good and could lay a fly into a pool the size of a dinner plate from thirty feet. Needless to say, I was in awe. Dad was almost that good, so I was raised in rarefied company. Good form, but certainly not elitist, anti-elitist, actually. Fred was a postman, and Pearl was a manicurist. My first fly rod was a bamboo pole with a line tied on the end. What made me think about that, was that I made some fish balls (catfish, a bit of mashed potato) rolled in cornmeal, fried, and had them with a horseradish sauce with hush-puppies cooked in the fish grease. I've eaten this meal so many times, on the banks of so many creeks, in so many variations, that it's second nature; and the smell of it, fish, cornmeal, and bacon fat, I swear, it just transports me into memory. No mediation, which I suspect is the point. That I don't have a clue. Listen, I may or not have taken more drugs than Oliver Sachs, we both started taking LSD before it was illegal and there was a lot of it around, if you knew strange people. To my credit, I've always known strange people. I think it just goes with being slow, you tend to listen, and the next thing you know everyone's confiding something. But TR thought I could slip below the radar. Tomas, the asshole, I believe he sailed away. Read more...

Leaf Fall

The ridge is starting to look a little ragged. Some color beginning to show. Whenever I glance outside, or glance up if I'm outside, there's a leaf or two falling. Still gorging on vine-ripened tomatoes. Grilled tomato sandwiches with goat cheese. Cold tomato sandwiches with slices of sweet onion and mayo. In my head I'm already making the transition to a post tomato diet, essentially beans and rice, with enough fried salt-pork to keep me in cooking fat, cornbread and biscuits. I make my own loose sausage, from discounted packages of ground pork, to make sawmill gravy. Rain coming, so I waste a few gallons of water soaping twice and rinsing, and throw away the last tee-shirt, not to be laundered again, a horribly stained and thread-bare thing that not longer resembles an article of clothing. I wear it (them) at the end mostly as a place to wipe my hands. I can usually buy used laundered white tee shirts for fifty cents but on the one day a month they do the bag sale I can usually get a year's supply for two bucks. These are not only my filters but actual tee-shirts. I can wear them, until they disintegrate, then compost them (I only wear cotton) or cut them into sizes that fit the various devices I've developed to filter one thing or another. I'm not kidding, of course, which means I must be crazier than a June Bug. But, of course, I'm not. I ring bells on the sanity levels, but everyone is texting with their thumbs in a way that I can't approximate, and I wonder if collecting dead butterflies is really the way to go. I'd go along with it, for the color and shape, the disinformation, butterflies are master of misinformation. The rear is often the front. I meant to get some more work done outside, but last trip to the library I'd picked a copy of Murakami's first two little novels. Spent most of the day with them. Billy Bragg singing "Ingrid Bergman" then Patsy Cline. Left-overs for dinner, reading recipes, sitting at the island, not quite wallowing. One passage in the Murakami that strikes me is a piece of dialogue between a pinball machine and the narrator. I talk to my espresso maker every morning, when I'm planning my day. Make cryptic post-it notes. It can't hurt to think you exert some control. Despite the fact that you don't, actually. Stay in one place long enough you just become "post-hole #4284". Twenty-one, three times seven. Probably doesn't mean anything, but I couldn't help noticing. Rain started before dawn, a lovely sound, and I stayed awake but fell into a dream-like state. Mind wandering. Remembered several things that I had been trying to remember, where a quote had come from (Jim Harrison), where I had read a certain recipe (for pig ears); the state of wandering continued until I got up to make a cup of coffee, when I had to engage the 'specific task' elements of thought. I let my mind wander quite a lot of the time. In many ways it's what I do, what I enjoy doing. Watching trees stress under wind, I think about boat-building, which leads to thinking about how fundamentally different Viking long boats are from the USS Constitution. Leads to outside-in versa inside-out, leads to nature versa nurture; which leads to hauling out many books and pretty much wraps up the day. The weight of the rain was enough to release a great many leaves, and a small percentage of my view is a bit more open. In a couple of places I can again see the opposite side of the hollow. The fact that it is a hollow at all brings up the concept of drainage, and I think Glenn's theory, that it's ALL about drainage, is probably correct. I don't know where the Romans got their lead. I need to look that up. Electron Tunneling has come up a few times recently, and I have no idea what that is. I don't understand String Theory either, but I do get that analogy of different slices from a loaf of bread. I hesitate on the question of infinite. The same old argument, if you take infinite far enough it becomes finite. I doubt that's true, I have a realty in which the finite and the infinite can graze peacefully, like sheep on a verdant slope, it's unlikely I'll get a grant to listen to birds after a rain storm. We're so arrogant. As the dominate life form, we call all the shots. I don't want to know what I could make happen, I want to know what happens. The entire argument of finite versa infinite involves a concept of God and mediation, a pope or some tablets; the commissioner of the NFL, making 40 million dollars a year (a good job), making pronouncements as if he knew what he was saying. All of this crap-talk, people in very expensive suits directing what we should believe, I find to be unbearable bull-shit. A walk at dusk, an attempt to calm my rather rabid response to some poor soul asking money for the Police Benevolent Fund. I had read about this particular fund, in, of all things, some right-wing garbage I had picked up at the recycling bin. It was printed on newsprint, which I needed to start fires, and I love nothing more than reading something that gets me irate when I'm starting a fire. Get a start on the day. But I followed up by reading about funding and telemarketing. The Police Benevolent Fund spends ninety two and a half percent of it's income on raising money and salaries. I'm curious about The Red Cross and Haiti. Almost everything is corrupt. Everyone cheats and steals. Read Melville's The Confidence Man, or Conrad. Listen to Robert Johnson. Even Emily was flipping events to suit her fancy. I called Joel, to get his address because he wanted a copy of The Cistern, and the only copy he found on line was $65 and I had dozens of copies. His memory is better than mine and we laughed about that whole sick crew, Cape Cod, 1969. The only time I was ever questioned by the FBI. I think we were working on the M O Bates house, Les would ring out with the submerging submarine klaxon, when the owner drove onto the premises, and everyone would yell Master Bates, Master Bates. Ralph, who seemed to be in charge, was the funniest person I've ever known, and I've known the funniest minds of my generation. No one holds a candle. Fucking language is fucking idiom. Nothing means exactly what is said. A red herring for instance, or three sheets to the wind. Read more...

The Blues

Missed the name of the show on the radio, three in the morning, early blues. A good selection. Ten years in Mississippi, a show, Sunday night, a couple of hours, from The University Of Mississippi. BB King had given his collection of blues records to The Center For The Study Of Southern Culture. A wee dram in a dark house, John Lee Hooker, one of the great voices of all time. I have to take some paperwork into Child And Family Services, get my vouchers for firewood. Rodney said he'd be back from Tennessee by next weekend and clear brush, so they could take the wood to the back of the woodshed. Progress. Waste paper bothers me, and I've kept all of my cash register receipts from Kroger, for the past year, all of my butter wrappers, and those waxed boxes. Enough to start maybe fifty fires. The London Review doesn't burn well, and the time has come, so as not to be labeled a 'hoarder' I need to get rid of stacks of New Yorkers and various book review journals. Recycle. Buy some twine and tie them into manageable piles. There's a bin behind the library. I need some batteries, my headlamp (I've been on the same battery for two years) and the little flashlight I carry when it gets dark early. And candles. The best candles are sold as Utility Candles, five to a box, either one or two dollars for a box, an inch in diameter and five inches long. These burn for four hours, at least, and I can read with two of them, with a couple of well-placed mirrors. A trick I learned from Harlan Hubbard. Survival is a succession of tricks. I'd better go take a nap. Got back up, wrote for a couple of hours, read until dawn, the cleaned up for a run to town. Lunch with TR at the pub, then I ran my usual medley of stops. The hardware store (Chuck, who has gained 150 pounds since I've known him there) suggested I start drinking a milkshake every day. I sat in a heat-induced coma, with a fan blowing right on me through the afternoon, reading Donald Ray Pollack's The Devil All The Time. A good read. I met him, a few years ago, and he's a nice guy. As a writer he's quite good, he's colloquial, and accurate. Driving down the driveway, creeping along, I was looking at the ground on the bank side and slammed on the brakes. Two lovely ginseng plants. The season is open, it's my own property and I don't even need a permit. I dug them out carefully (I carry a modified trowel) and replanted several seeds. They're both at least seven years old. Lovely. It's my year's supply, but I might dig enough extra (now that I can see them) to buy a case of wine for the winter. You can know what something looks like in illustration: ginseng, ground hugging, red seeds; but until you actually find one in the wild, you never really see them. Like finding arrowheads. Shark teeth on the beaches south of Jacksonville. Stopped on the way home, at the Diary Bar, and had a chocolate shake with some jalapeno poppers. It's amazing how long molten cheese holds heat. I drove all the way home, 11 miles, and put away groceries, before I finished the shake and ate the poppers, and they were still hot. A heat-sink of fat. They were very good. Read more...

Letting Go

One advantage of living alone in isolation is that you can allow yourself to get very dirty. I knew by noon that I was going to get filthy. Splitting wood, doing a little trimming, going for little walks; it was over 90 degrees and I was wet with sweat and everything was sticking: pollen, dust, sawdust. My hair was greasy, my nails needed cleaning, but I knew I was going to be doing the same things tomorrow, so I just washed my hands and face. It's going to take three gallons of water to get clean, and I can't see doing that two days in a row. If anyone saw me now, they would certainly take me as the village idiot, ragged dirty formerly white tee-shirt with the sleeves and neck band cut off, formerly tan Dockers that would get me arrested if there was a village. But comfortable, a whiskey, a smoke, some Skip James on the player. Rodney didn't show up to clear brush today, which was fine, I didn't feel like conversation, and I'll give him another chance, but Ryan, of Kinsey and Ryan in B's old place, needs some billable hours, and he's young and strong. Even for the impossibly remote there are options. I was thinking about cast iron today, cleaning a six inch pan I use exclusively for omelets, a little kosher salt and a paper towel. I seem to keep four skillets at hand, two sixes, an eight, and a ten; I have a twelve but it's too heavy, it has an off-handle handle but if you use two hands to hold the fucking pot, how the hell do you scrape it out. Some sort of Chuck Close spatula held in your teeth? I have a system that involves eating out of the skillet, letting it cool overnight, then scraping in into a bowl from which I can just spoonj it out as needed. A pot of jasmine rice, and a stir-fry: onion, red pepper, cauliflower, and hot Italian sausage. Excellent, and at least four meals for seven dollars. I held out some of the caramelized vegetables for an omelet, and the rice is wonderful, nuked, with a pat of butter and honey. So many greens are cleaned and pre-packaged, there's always something on sale, and I just dump a can of good tuna (in oil) on top and squeeze on some lemon juice, some fresh ground pepper, one of the best meals ever. A grilled tuna steak kicks this up a couple of notches, I do a tuna steak, glazed in a mustard sauce that is very good. I'm being modest, it's actually sublime. And I do a tuna tartar, that really, if you're expecting anything rather than raw fish, you'll probably be disappointed. I cut a nice fillet of tuna with a very sharp knife, a fine dice, with shallots, some salt and pepper, lime juice just before serving, and serve it with my favorite crackers, buttered saltines. I'd forgotten it was a holiday, not having a calendar, but the radio reminded me, and I immediately decided to not go out and to read all day. You can't be too careful. Wish I'd cleaned up yesterday. I have one five-gallon bucket that's black, it contained road salt, and it heats water nicely on a sunny day, ninety degrees. I have a bath mat I put on the deck, the bucket of water, and my new dipper, which I fashioned from a one-gallon Arizona Green Tea jug. I get pretty clean, put on clean clothes, still need a soak in a motel tub, with bubble bath or lye. I used to care so much more about this, now I don't give a shit. I listen to Neil Young when I'm feeling angry, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, sometimes Mississippi John Hurt. Greg Brown is a great song writer, James McMurtry, and that fucking kid in Australia. There is no way he should be able to play the blues that well. Neil Young, just to be your country man, sings just off key enough. Who else does that, Willie Nelson? Read more...

Reading Matter

Needed some books. Reading matter. New Yorker in the mailbox, but it's the weekend and I needed a couple of books. They were having a book sale at the library, so I bought several for the "Winter Reading" pile, and check out a couple of things. At the pub, Cory had a package for me, from Sara, a wonderful book on grammar and punctuation by a long-time copy editor at the New Yorker, Between You & Me, Mary Norris. Sara and I have talked for many hours about punctuation. I highly recommend this book, funny and instructive. I think about punctuation a lot. I'll finish a sentence and go off to cook dinner; or to do something, and I'll (that's the serial comma) go back over and change a word while I'm cooking onions. Later, I'll read a sentence a tenth time and drop the comma. It's all about explication, right? We have these marks, and we can use them freely in the Scrabble of language. I use question marks in clusters, which is the way they occur to me. Why, where, when. Then, finally, a period. Female farmer is not supposed to be incorrect, but it's always a lady rancher. I've pretty much dropped all of them, and I call males and females that act actors; composers, artists, heavy machinery operators and all the rest of us. He and she have become a little more problematic, you works pretty well. I get distracted by Norman Blake playing on the radio, my god he is a great guitarist, I have to listen to some Doc Watson. I have a piece of left-over steak and some steamed potato, so I make a very nice hash, with shallots. I have a friend in Georgia that raises shallots and he sends me a box every year, I buy cheap pantyhose and tie them off in the legs. Keep them separate and they don't rot. I hang them from a beam over near the cookstove, and they look like the remains of a cruel ritual. I've perfected the art of shirring eggs in a ring of hash. I serve this with ripe tomatoes drizzled with one of the vinegars. TR warns me that I don't want a bear birthing under my house, looking toward spring, after a bear had wintered under my house, but I assured him we accessed the place from different directions, and that I thought it was cool that a bear would choose my crawlspace. I do stop, on the back deck, to look around. The entire construct seems like fiction. I carry firecrackers when I walk to the Jeep. The comma, according to Mary Norris, flourished during the Renaissance. I love the image, and I love the writing. It's great when someone knows what they're talking about. Next winter I need to read all of Steven Pinker. I've hired Rodney, on a trial basis, to do some work around the place, clear some brush, open a vehicle path to the back door (to trade out the refrigerator), and to the back of the woodshed. It's a risk, hiring a depressed alcoholic to do anything, but I want to reach out, AND I need the work done, and I don't want to do it. I'm done with digging ditches and post holes. But I have dug hundreds of feet of ditches and hundreds of post holes in the past, I'm tired now, and want to rest. I don't need a friend, and I certainly can do without stupid conversation. What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, Cedar Mesa, I have to laugh, comma, comma, semi-colon. Read more...

The Point Of

Out early, for a saunter, stuck to the logging roads. No avoiding the ticks this year. When I got back home I stripped on the back porch, bagged my dockers and tee-shirt in a plastic bag for the laundromat, then wiped down with alcohol. No mushrooms on the walk. I didn't bring anything home, which is strange for me. I did sample the liquid in several oak galls, drilling a small hole with the tip of my knife and tasting the juice. The amniotic fluid for whatever particular bug, the sugars acting as anti-freeze. Had the thought that I could make a jelly, shade grown, organic, and oh so mysterious, that we'd market in beautiful hand-blown glass vials, making no claims but maybe starting a few rumors, and it would be very expensive. Ginseng season just opened and there are new regulations. Impossible to enforce, but regulations nonetheless. A root must be five years old, at least three prongs, and you have to replant seed where the plant came out. The buyers are state licensed, but this is a largely cash industry, in a place where there are few cash crops. Most everything is under the table. Early September and the squirrels are particularly stupid, Mackletree is covered with failed attempts to cross the road. I make a great squirrel hash with potatoes and mushroom gravy; toast, with red onion jam. Amusing myself, as much as anything. I'm a cheap date, a couple of hours walking the beach, harvesting some mussels, some home brew, I'm a happy camper. There were some very large green crickets tonight, attacking the window where my writing light shines. They were making terrible guttural sounds. I went out with my butterfly net and caught eight of them (if a number is below ten, you spell it out) and followed the usual preparation: take off the wings, snap off the feet, break the head backwards and the guts pull out. When the carcass is dried (a day in the sun or fifteen minutes in the toaster oven) then fried or grilled, it's 50 percent protein and .05 percent fat, unless you, as I do, dress them with butter. A nasty habit, but for years Marilyn made great goat butter and I ate a lot of it, I'm not ashamed to say that a pat of butter, on a saltine cracker, with a spoonful of tomato soup, might well be one of the cornerstones of life. Still, being a liberal, I wonder if I might not be part of an experiment. I couldn't actually open the photograph, but sent it to someone who could. It was a pile of bear shit with a Number 2 yellow pencil used as a size marker. A large pile of shit. I rest my case against bears, they just can't retract their claws, even a love-tap is serious. This particular bear is female I think, but she came across the river; usually only males swim across the river, looking to establish new domains. I reread all the information I have on black bears, then a bunch of bear recipes. They're supposed to have foul breath. A favorite way of storing them was to kill one in the late fall, skin it, eat the innards, then just hang it in a tree and cut off what you needed during the winter. I knew people that did this with elk in Colorado. I made great sugar-cured smoked elk hams for Jewish friends while I was there. And smoked trout, and a few smoked cheeses. I could have done that forever; I was good and turned a profit. Marilyn wanted something other, a different situation; I offered her free range, with an expense account, but she wanted the girls and everything that had been ours. I gave her all of it, even her lawyer was surprised. Fuck me for making such a mistake, I could be living in Detroit. A landlord. Read more...

Marrow Bones

Got up around two in the morning and started a fire in the cookstove. I rarely do this in August, but it's cool outdoors and I have these bones I need to cook. One fire, venting most of the heat, should allow me to simmer them for a couple of hours. A bed of sliced onions and turnips, some cranberries, a decent wine white and chicken stock (I hate beef stock), damp down the stove and go back to sleep. Later, I poke out the marrow and spread it on toast, mash the vegetables, resist the temptation to put butter on anything. The richness of marrow is difficult to describe. It melts and explodes on the tongue, wonderful dissolving grains of animal fat. The mashed vegetables are excellent, and the cranberries were a nice touch. A bag of cranberries keep forever and I throw a handful in almost anything. I love the way they burst in a stir-fry. The sauce I make for game is more sour than sweet, cranberries, some tamarind paste, and a little sorghum molasses. Another quiet day. I started reading about food taboos, one book to another, Levi-Strauss, the bible. Finally had to stop and read some light fiction. Auditory mirages. I've been hearing things all day, voices, whistling, even part of Sibelius' Second. The light breeze blowing on the season hardened leaves today is not the gentle breeze of June. Different voices. I sat out on the back stoop, drank a gin and tonic, and listened for a while. Even the frogs sound different, as though the acoustics had changed. Which they have. The light has certainly changed, slanting, breaking through the forest in shafts. The sumac are the first to lose leaves, actually they lose small branches because they grow so goddamn fast that the new branches can't carry a full load of wet leaves. The walnuts will be the next to go, capping their 90 day growing season. I have to make wood arrangements in September, and stock the larder, new used fridge, take the Jeep in for its recall, use that $100 pre-paid card (they must have had some serious liability claims) to buy a case of whiskey, a back-up bag of tobacco and plenty of papers. Powdered milk and powdered eggs assure me that I can at least make a cornmeal johnny-cake to put beans on top of. Ten cans of cooked beans, ten cans of tuna fish, ten cans of Mandarin orange segments, ten cans of tomato soup, twenty packages of Roasted Chicken ramen, and I like those Knorr rice/pasta packages, they make a hot meal very quickly. Ten packages of instant mashed potatoes, ten pounds of rice, ten pounds of cornmeal; a pound of dehydrated onions, a gallon of olive oil; salt-pork, dried mushrooms, and winter squash that I store near the back door. A new pile of 30 books that I want to read. Started splitting starter sticks for winter fires, from dry oak left over from last year; the stove pipe is clean, I have good gloves, I need to get the maul ground down. I want to rotate the wash-water buckets and bleach them. Long underwear is all clean. I need to get a baby crock-pot for cooking my grits, a snow shovel, and a plastic restaurant water pitcher I can use for transferring water. I've been using the same cut-off gallon water jug for several years and it's dying. I think an actual water pitcher would make things look more professional. I'm sure I can find one at Good-Will and I have a bunch of stuff to take there anyway. I'm giving away half of my clothes, I mean really, if you haven't worn it in two years, it's history. I have no sense of fashion, a selection of black jeans and black tee-shirts, then denim shirts. I wear my newest denim shirt to events. If I need pockets, I just wear a jacket over a tee-shirt, or over a denim shirt if it's cool outside, and I'd have a lot of pockets. I had to go to town, the library had called, and I could pick up a few things for the larder. The pub was filled with ladies, dozens of them, and they were very loud. Even screeching, which I hadn't heard in a while. The help wanted to go home with me. I drank a quick beer and disappeared. I'm confused by all the trappings. Some of my friends say I'm being paranoid, but, you know, I actually saw Momma fucking Santa Claus. Read more...