Batten Down

A winter blow. I knew when I rolled over and went back to sleep that the house would be cold when I woke again. Sure enough. I remember camping near Mt. Washington one January. Zero degrees. One of the Hayden brothers actually shaved. Coffee and oatmeal. Taking a shit is difficult. All of the serious hikers or climbers I know squat to defecate, faster and neater, important factors when it's very cold. Not much mention of bodily functions in literature, but there is a goodly amount of food in the O'Brian novels. Pease porridge hot. And some of the Captain's meals are quite interesting, pickled penguin? various brined pig parts, plenty of grease, greenstuff and lime juice. They knew what caused scurvy at this point, stopped for citrus, ate kale. Salt-pork, salt-beef, and peas; there was a dish called "sea-pie" that was anything that had been caught, and they kept a lot of animals on board ship. One man-of-war had a designated chicken guy. In the heat of battle he would be quieting the flock. Pigs and goats were not uncommon, always sheep, when leaving a port, mutton seems to have been a favorite. There might be three hundred men on a man-of-war, at sea for six months, imagine the logistics of that. Everything in barrels, which amuses me for a while. Cheese with the port, which would have been a hard cheddar. Possibly a goat milk blue cheese. I have my reading nest arranged and it's quite comfortable, and an enormous pile of books. Moved a chair over to the entryway, so I could slip in and out of crampons, repaired the tire on the wheel-barrow, and made a cute cover for it from a tarp and fishing weights, split some kindling, Not much and routine. It's a great relief to come inside, take off my boots, put on my house slippers, get rid of the outerwear and put on my robe. Stoke up the stove, get a drink and roll a smoke. It's almost sinful, how good it feels. Read more...

Cold Wind

Brutal outside, my eyes tear up almost immediately. I thought to walk down to the mail-box, but I feared for getting back. A bit of broken blue, a few shafts of sunlight, and I think the chance of snow is gone. For the while. I had to laugh, sunlight through bare trees was blinding me and I remembered my sword-fishing cap, which has a long bill, and dig it out. Perfect, I can tilt it one way or the other and block the light. It's difficult to imagine a gallery in which there's a portrait of Trump on black velvet, or maybe not so difficult. The halls of justice. I think I'd be good judge, actually, I listen well. There are cases I'd like wade in on, but really, I'm just a fucking outrigger. I had intended to save some pate for B, and Cory at the pub, they're both serious fans, but it doesn't work out. I have a Jones for a thick layer of pate on toast, a sandwich which is about 24% fat and perfect for the season, like eating two avocados a day, or a pint of Ben and Jerry's. No intention of reading Dante again, but it's interesting to read about his life and times. He probably had a daughter, she probably died in a convent, and he did codify Italian, no mean feat, reaching for the vernacular. This period, early 1300's, though there were no paper mills, paper was being made, Dante made copies of his work and left it in monasteries. I've read about this period, 1350 to 1450, quite a bit recently, the last few years, the advent of paper and printing in the west. The hold of the church was lost. What is the church, other a crutch? The music is great, glory to god in the highest, but the very idea that there should be some mediation between me and the world is anathema. I have respect for all of this, the pope, Luther, small town preachers with snakes, but I just want to be left alone, A bowl of rice, nothing more, maybe a dash of chili oil. Read more...

Weather Change

Hard to believe but seventy degrees tonight and forty tomorrow with snow tomorrow night. The ground will be too warm for anything to stick. I thought about going to town, but I didn't need anything, so I took a small walk, through leaves that I swear were six inches deep, then read an O'Brian novel and thought about rigging. I'm agog at the number of ropes it takes to run a sailing vessel, and everything has a name. Nothing actually threatens me but the chance stumbles. Read an O'Brian all night, sleet in the morning, slept, and the temperature started dropping, the low last night was higher than the high today, a few flakes of snow. A few puffed birds peck at the sumac, the wind scatters brown leaves. That first taste of isolation. A wee dram of single-malt. The crows come to visit and I take them a mouse. I have to make a pate, to use some remaindered mushrooms and chicken livers I'd picked up, knowing that small game season was open and somebody would leave a rabbit in my mailbox. Most of the day making a mess in the kitchen. The wind is up all day 25 or 30 mph and the leaves rattle against the house. I turned on the radio, then turned that off and put on the Cello Suites, then turned them off and just listened to the wind. Excellent country pate, a forcemeat by any other name, and I'm glad I ventured to make it as it gets darker in the afternoon and I settle in with a history of the fork. Another history of the fork. Grazing at the island on sweet crisp pickles, pate on saltines, and feta, reading about forks. Called Glenn, to thank him for the books, and we talked about the medial caesura. He thought I should consider the form, considering my inclination toward alliteration. By the time I finish the second O'Brian, the night is nearly gone with temps down in the twenties. A few hours sleep and I had to get up to attend the fire. Put on the thick sweater from JC, bathrobe, watch hat and fingerless gloves. As soon as there's light I go out for an armload of wood, and the frost is so thick it's a bit tricky. I need to move the wash water inside, it's already iced-over, so I'll need to turn on the small electric heater I keep in the entry-way to break the thermal shock of frozen water and opening the door. Winter is when the back door is frozen in its jamb. My reading nest is secure, a fleece-lined alcove with a stadium blanket for my bony knees. Read more...

Mental Construct

Looking at photos of these domed huts on the plains of Russia. The framework is intertwined mammoth tusks. Intricate and surprising. An ivory house, covered in hide. Probably hides on the inside too, against the brutal winter, heated with an oil lamp. No trees, no wood. The remnant of a small fire place, probably burned dry mammoth dung to heat the morning gruel. One of the structures used 157 tusks in its framework, 80 mammoths. They must have had a pretty good system. Also a pretty good tool kit. Probably had bear-skin rugs on the floor. If you ever wear rabbit-skin booties, you'll never look back. Linda and I had talked about this, the way we're attracted to comfort. Increasingly, it seems. I'd rather not dwell. Snow in the forecast, so I start planning a last run into town, green bananas, hard avocados, some of those grape tomatoes, which I enjoy at almost every meal, with blue cheese dressing. Back-up eggs. I picked up the O'Brian books at the museum and I've stacked up in a new pile next to my desk. I stacked them in order of composition. I've read many of them, but not in order, so I immediately sit down and read the first one again, to enter that world. I love this world, the food, the rigging. On even a minor ship-of-of -the-line there are hundreds of miles of rope. The French always shot for the rigging, the English shot for the hull. Read more...

House Rules

Especially in Mississippi it was necessary to impose house rules against bigotry and offensive language. Also I don't suffer stupid people lightly. I read late last night, plowing through the Atwood, taking breaks thinking about stage productions I'd been involved in. A large number. I've done things I can't believe now. I never did a Tempest, but I can imagine doing it. Supposed to warm up and be fine weather for a week, which is good, saving wood, and in the last firing, I made a large mac-and-cheese casserole, with bacon bits and chopped hot pickled peppers, which I look forward to eating for several meals. Simple pleasures. I think I'll blow the Thanksgiving budget on a bottle of wine and sushi, maybe an avocado. I make a mean stuffing, corn bread and sausage, but I think of it as a main dish. Stuffing, when it's not stuffed, is dressing, on the side. I sometimes make this with oysters. Sounds good. I have to get to town again soon because the rule, at this time of year, is to take every opportunity. Snow always flies between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm set on my reading, which is a big deal for me, and I have months of food squirreled away. I think I could, starting tomorrow, survive. I have a shovel and some seed. A digging stick, at any rate, and soil I've improved with worm casings and shit. Repaired a couple of books today, had the lovely small binding press out on the table and re-cased an old Tacitus, re-glued a couple of broken paper-backs. Made a couple of small note- books; listened to the radio for a while, until overwhelmed by the politic. I don't even use notebooks anymore, but I like making them. I have several packages of binder board, off cuts, from the last serious binding project I ever did. Twenty-six copies plus two proofs, signed copies from a dead poet. I actually took the binder-board to a serious shop, so that the cut would be exactly perpendicular. Read more...

Extremely Clear

An owl left over from the night, head on a swivel. A lovely small thing, probably a barn owl, but I don't know owls as well as I should. The feathers around the face are perfect. Make a cup of coffee and toasted a couple of left-over biscuits (butter and marmalade), take them over to my desk, and the owl is still there. She (I'm assuming) bates, flairs her wings, a spectacular sight, eventually flies away when I'm not looking. Even watching as close as I can, I miss a lot. First there is a world, then there's not. Read a long essay by Tom Wolfe on the rise and fall of Chomsky, started a book on Dante, but then turned to the library book B had loaned because it had an actual due date. Back to the Anglo-Saxon, my recreation of choice right now. Sitting out back, I was struck again with the volume of leaves. Even around the Jeep, which is not under any trees, the layer is several inches thick. The angle of repose for dry leaves is practically zero. A carpet of leaves. The library book is Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood's retelling of The Tempest, in the Hogarth Press series of retellings of Shakespeare. Several bags of groceries, canned and dried goods, that I need to put into the rotation, so I spend some time looking at expiration dates. Discovered a great crab fried-rice recipe: you cook the crab-meat (one of those small cans of shredded meat) in the omelet and slice it into the rice. With some minced sweet onion this is excellent. A dash of clam juice, a dash of hot sauce. I spend about eight hours with the Atwood and the Yale Shakespeare Tempest, with at least another session to go. I like the Yale edition because it's easily readable, but it's huge and heavy. Mid-afternoon, I looked up and it was a beautiful day, falling leaves, pooling light as the canopy opens, so I walked down to the head of the driveway and stared across the hollow. Walking back to the house, thinking about how good the left-over fried rice was going to be, how wonderful the after dinner nip and smoke, I was grinning the whole way. Read more...

Day Off

I drank a bit yesterday, never got out of my bathrobe. Life doesn't stop and I did get to town, had a tire repaired, today; stopped for a book at the library, then just went to Kroger, didn't stop at the pub. I continue, with every trip to town, to buy a few things for the larder, stopped at B's and exchanged books, picked up some London Reviews. Phone call from TR and Glenn has sent all of the O' Brian books to the museum for me, so I'll pick those up next trip and that should top up my winter reading. I need to do my laundry for the winter, all the socks, the several changes of long underwear. I can, and do, wash these in melted snow mid-winter, but it takes all day to do a load of wash, get it hung to dry over near the stove. First hard freeze Saturday night, and that should help to beat back the bugs; first forecast of snow, I always make a last run for supplies, perishable things, and plan a few meals ahead. Sitting on the back stoop and the crows saw me, settled into the dead poplars out beyond the outhouse and went into a raucous chorus. I nuked a couple of frozen mice and tossed them over. They're so smart they amaze me: if they see me, they go into their routine until I give them a mouse. Clever. Or it seems clever. A station of the day. The book from the library was the new Sanford novel, and I needed a break, so I read it at a sitting. Grazing on anchovies and cheese and crackers. Escaping into the fictional world is such a relief. Much better than imagining the pillow fight in the White House when the Trumps take over. Read more...

Election Day

Swimming in a sea of misinformation. I had to go for a walk to clear my head. I'll stay up for a while tonight, but I won't know results until tomorrow. Election sounds, don't me started. A second cup of coffee and some quiet, it starts to rain, and after a hour, I finally have my breathing and heart rates down. The library called, with another book, and I need to get to town, I have to back up the drinking water and other liquids, and back up the smoked jowl. Samara called, to make sure I'd voted, we talked about sweet potatoes, a subject dear to my heart. In Mississippi we always raised a quarter of an acre of them, not just for the potatoes, but for the dried plants, which were excellent fodder. One shocking thing about moving to Colorado was that hay (alfalfa) could be so high in protein, while the crap we'd been feeding (Timothy) was so low. In Colorado we bought very little high-protein grain dairy feed, just enough to keep their heads down when milking (because they liked the sugar) and it made them easy to handle. One of my greatest memories of this time, the girls would exhaust their energy, racing about a pasture, and they'd go to rest on a goat's belly, and the goat would be just chewing its cud. If you've never done this, you can't imagine how completely satisfying it is to lay down in a green field, with your head on a warm goat's belly. I love the local election results. Most of the people have three names and I find that offensive. Two names is one too many. One suit of clothes, one pair of holey socks, but most of these elections are decided by a few hundred votes, 738 to 559. I knew before I went to sleep, curled up on the sofa, that Trump was going to win. I couldn't believe it, but I knew it was true. When I got up and turned on the radio I heard how bad the loss had been, both houses of congress, the presidency, and certainly that means the supreme court. Thank god, I think, that I'm old, that I've become a recluse, and only go to town once a week, otherwise this would bother me more. Read more...

Grave Goods

Coal is dead. Those jobs are gone. It's heart-wrenching, but there it is. You can put your faith in snakes or speaking in tongues, but you really have to move on. Just step off the bus. It's easy, give up everything, empty your pockets, put on a blindfold and let that old cur take you somewhere. Small game season opened, so there are people in the woods with guns. I wear an orange vest when I walk outside, not to be mistaken for a rabbit. There's a dog (there's always a dog, this time of year), a sleek Blue-Tick that begs the question about having a dog. She's clearly smarter than me, and I spend an hour with her while her owner comes to retrieve her, feed her some cracklings and give her some water. I love the hounds and curs, they're such beautiful animals. They process the world through their noses. And them floppy ears. She (Sister was her name) heard her owner's truck long before I did. Her ass was quivering. I told her to be still, in Anglo-Saxon, and she seemed to understand. Ridiculous that a dog would understand Old English but I was watching her tail, and she did seem to get the point. Tone, right? Language is largely inflection. Old guy and an old pick-up truck, I missed his name because he had a mouth full of chewing tobacco. He came in for a "snoot" of whiskey, and slipped a twenty dollar bill under his glass when he left. Sister, as I suspected, was a valuable dog, he sold her pups for hundreds of dollars each, and she had a beautiful voice. These dog guys don't so much hunt as to listen to the dogs. I used to sit out on the porch, in Mississippi, with Roy, listening to his nephews run dogs along the creeks, and he would know which dog was doing what, just from the sound. I read through a book of Chinese cooking. A couple of the seafood recipes I want to try, so I'd picked up some shrimp paste and fermented black beans. Clear sailing, in my future, I'd say. Read more...

Now Then

Inner voices. A bad dream about falling and I had to get up, to break the narrative, get a drink, roll a smoke. Dark, but I can hear brittle leaves rustling outside, then a voice. Quite distinct. "Don't mess with The Kid", like listening to a Copeland opera. I realized I was imagining, but it took several minutes before I understood I was hearing a train across the river in Kentucky. Enough leaves off the trees that the sound reaches me for the first time in months. Like those monkeys with the typewriters, given world enough and time. I've heard it all, more or less, usually it's the wind, but sometimes a train or a logging truck. In the morning light I see that everything is moving toward an old sepia photograph, an old black and white film, a scratchy recording. I think of myself as border-line normal: my circumstances are different but my concerns are similar. The laundromat, the library, the liquor store, I have to narrow my focus, like blinders on a mule. The last time I plowed with a mule, there is a record of this, the mule was smarter than me. An acre of Pink-Eye Purple Hull peas, a cash crop to sell in Memphis. One good thing about strapping yourself in traces, is that mules are slow, so you can unstrap yourself if need be. What amazed me at the time (I may have been twelve) was that the mule knew more than me. Researching boat-building and traffic on the river, falling leaves, assuming the raft (Tom, after all) and a nudge toward confusion. Read more...

Expressing Anger

Long silences. When I clear my throat it sounds very loud, and I feel like some animal other than human. It's still and quiet after the rain. I open up the house and take a mug of coffee out back, sit on the stoop. The dust is washed away and the last colors of fall sparkle in the morning light. I drift into the middle-distance, where vision blurs. Remembering the past is tricky business. Surprisingly, last time I was with my sister and we were talking about the past, we agreed on many particulars: date, location, the people present, even the general atmosphere. I was shocked that I hadn't made it all up, I was pretty sure that I had, and then my sister, who is steadfast and honest, tells me that something did actually happen. A specific thing, she did step on a moccasin and it only didn't bite her because it had a frog in its mouth. She and my cousin Jackie did humiliate me in every way possible, but it was fun mostly, except for the incident with the frying pan. T H White's The Goshawk in the mail from Jude, and a pair of hand-knit mittens. Mittens are good for reading on a cold night, you slip one off every three minutes (on average, over many years, it takes me three minutes to read a page, it varies wildly, but three minutes is the average) and turn the page. Feeling a bit out of sorts, which usually means I need to eat something. I'd picked up my oysters at Kroger, and a couple of remaindered portibello mushrooms, started a fire in the grill, roasted the mushrooms, roasted the oysters and ate them all with salsa. I've fixed variations of this meal in many places because it's so fast and quite tasty. Just before I left the west, I'd gone up into the mountains, the Little Cimarrons, to catch a last meal of Cutthroat trout, and I'd taken oysters and mushrooms. Set up camp, an oil-skin tarp to sleep under, a ring of river stones for a fire, and a refrigerator rack for a grill. Refrigerator racks are very useful, if you plaster them inside and out they're excellent reinforcement. I had a great bamboo fly-rod then, I don't know what happened to it in the move back east, short and pliable, I could use it in tight situations. I'm not even a "good" flyfisherperson, but I can always catch dinner. These small trout, you just grill them, then open them up and remove the bones in a single deft move, then eat all the rest. I can't understand English, it's so colloquial. I'm left with a language of signs. Burma Shave. Read more...

Dangerous Speech

Rhetorical lines. I have to dip into the flow once in a while, to see if the Cubs won, to check the weather. Trump is horrid. Much more exciting is that the seafood lady at Kroger called to tell me they had Wellfleet oysters AND the library called, saying they were holding a book. It's another leaf day, and they're getting thick on the ground. The driveway is slick with them but I need to get out, maybe tomorrow, though more probably Friday because it's supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow. First passage on wet leaves is almost as bad as snow. Four-wheel low and it's fine except that at the second curve you have to tap the brakes; the back end of the vehicle, because of the chamber graded into the driveway, wants to swing to the left, which puts the driver's side in the ditch and allows correction. Time for correction. You have to be completely focused here. A couple of times I asked B to take my vehicle down, he's better at this than me; now I don't take a vehicle down unless it's clear sailing. A meatloaf is a country pate. I had some time to spare, and was reading recipes for meatloaf, of which I have dozens; meatloaf, with mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, is one of the pillars of wisdom. The oysters are good news too, because of the warm spell and the fact that I can roast them on the grill. I don't remember where I stole it from now, but having a scant spoon-full of lemon ice on a hot oyster (or clam, or mussel) is a fine thing. The mouth-feel is amazing. Smoked mullet makes a good dip. I was feeling flush, having saved a few dollars, so I bought a bag of unsalted corn chips. Pure corn. These are so good I want to become a preacher. Purslane and corn are the way to salvation. Roasted kale and sweet potatoes. Enough rain to keep me inside. Tried to read some fiction, but between not being fact-checked or proof-read, I just can't take it. So a couple more books join the pile (library sales mostly, where I don't do a lot of high grading) that I'm now calling Books To Be Read Only In An Emergency. As a balance to the stupid talk on the radio, I got down a Latin/English Cicero and read a few decent orations. He was a master at calling someone an idiot without ever being offensive. It sometimes actually sounded like a compliment. I couldn't agree with you more than I do. Cicero opened the door to stand-up comedy. Sarcasm and irony. I'm so unplugged, especially recently, that I miss a lot. I'd rather be looking at a small blue flower in the median. Or watching leaves fall. Or making a great mac and cheese with bacon bits and minced peppers. I just enjoy myself, as well as I can. Read more...

Rabid Coon

Ugly sight, first thing in the morning, mangy raccoon slavering on the back steps. Killed it with a shovel because I didn't want to blast it all over my porch. Then dug a hole and buried it, then bleached the area where it had foamed on the steps. I don't know enough about rabies. Last of the cornmeal pudding for breakfast. I'd bought one of those larger cans of tuna, so I'd have a cooking ring of a useful size for something like this and it worked perfectly. The wind picked up, the leaves started falling, and it was mesmerizing, so I gave the rest of the day over to just watching them. The first of November and the leaves fall. A lot of people blow them around, or pay other people to blow them around. I never got the point of that. I rake them into piles and burn them, then rake the ashes out; a button or a bullet, maybe, from the ashes. Occasionally I find something interesting. I was squatting at the top of the driveway, taking in the light across the hollow, when I found a perfect small (bird-point) arrowhead. It startled me in its perfection because the entire driveway is compacted fill, back-hoed from a creek, trucked and dumped, graded three or four times, and here's this perfect small arrowhead. I clean it with spit and my shirt-tail. Chert, I think, or some rust stained quartz, it's a beautiful thing. I have a little wooden box of them, I don't remember where the box came from, 20 or 30 points and a couple of other things, worked stone as they say, and a coin I found, diving in Key West. It isn't gold and it's probably fake, but I like it, dated 1731. Read more...

A Visit

Too early for anyone I know, and I could tell by the laboring engine it was front wheel drive. It's the Highway Patrol investigator, wanting what information I might have about my neighbors. It's pretty funny, because I don't know a damned thing, except that the people 2 miles west must have raised children because the area around their trailer is strewn with plastic toys. Something is going on, and I don't know what it is, a meth lab maybe, and I get the idea that I'm not a suspect. I had Dan in, for a cup of coffee, we talked about life in the boonies, and I explained that I just wanted quiet, didn't pay much attention to what happened off the ridge. I hear the occasional log truck, a train across the river in Kentucky, a medi-vac chopper flying to a Cincy trauma center. Some days I hear nothing at all, other than natural sounds. In cadence, it seems to make sense: a few bugs and song-bird. Dan had difficulty understanding why I live the way I do. I wanted to rap him on the knuckles with a ruler. If only he'd had the Jesuit teacher I wish I'd had. I ran him off, politely, when I realized he was taking up my time. I'd rather be reading a bad novel. Or just sitting on the back porch, listening to Bach, watching the leaves swirl. How many orange days are you allowed? My older daughter seems concerned for my well-being and I can't assuage her sense of loosing control. I have skimpy dreadlocks, a friend told me recently that I looked like shit. I don't know wether to take that as a compliment or not. What opens out, Olson, Creely, Dorn, is different from the inward spiral of all those suicides. Read more...

Crackling Redux

A pleasant Sunday making a cornbread casserole. A side dish, that with the addition of cracklings becomes (for me) a one-dish meal. After two weeks of Anglo-Saxon, I wanted to take the day off with some fiction, but I couldn't find anything to suit me. Rooted around in the library and Goodwill stacks and settled in with a book on earth sheltered housing design. I'm almost always designing a house in my head, it's my recreation, to solve puzzles in my mind. How to achieve elegance by just allowing certain materials to be themselves. When Bear was last over he was looking at a particular joint in the beam-work of this house, four beams meeting at two different heights, the post is a tree trunk: it is a very cool joint, and I can remember several nights thinking about how I could accomplish it. First this then that. What is the push-and-pull, and how do you handle the load? The casserole is simple, my one cup cornmeal mix, with a small can of chopped chilies, a can of creamed corn, a small container of sour cream. I had to laugh, rendering cracklings, I was so ahead of the game. A nap after dinner, then awakened by rain. Quite warm and I lounge around in just a long-sleeve tee shirt and light-weight sweat pants; a pair of socks, destined for the trash, that collect below my ankles. A fashion statement, a close-up of holes in the socks; I buy a bag of a dozen pair because it so neatly limits my time at the laundromat. Any two socks are a pair if you follow my simple system. If all of the socks are the same, any two is a pair. As a recluse, I actually fail, I want to talk with Jude and Joel. I want communication. Read more...

Yellow Orange

Intense color, and I still can't see the other side of the hollow. A hickory tree on the driveway dropped all of its leaves at once, all the same color. Quite a pile, maybe six inches deep, and I couldn't see the driveway. I'd walked down, looking on the exposed bank for ginseng. I didn't want the roots, I have plenty, but I was harvesting seeds. For a dibble I was using a screwdriver, and I'd plant the seeds nearby. The pale yellow poplar leaves are a filter for the sunlight. I gathered a few chicory roots. End of the season tomatoes, I bought some sliced roast beef, so I could make some end-of-the-season sandwiches with blue cheese and hot sauce; with some sweet potato chips, fried in peanut oil. This is so good I want to give out awards. Cleaned the stovepipe, then cleaned up from cleaning the stovepipe, then cleaned myself, and that took most of the day. Reading William Least Heat-Moon, Roads To Quoz, and I'd been over some of the same roads, eaten at some of the same fish-shacks; but I don't want to travel anymore, I just want to stay at home, sit on the back porch with a wee nip and roll a smoke. What was that stuff, not iodine (though it was used also), mercurochrome? that turned your skin orange. The maples are that color now, almost transparent, like an aniline dye. Fucking raccoons got into the pail of compost I'd put outside, to add to stove-ash on the pile tomorrow, and made a mess. I have to clean it up, because it stinks. Jude asked me why I composted at all, since I didn't grow anything, but you have to do something with your waste. The Space Station, for instance, or a submarine. The Poop Deck. Poop is a silly word, but we need various names for things, and 'poop' takes the smell off shit. If you raise kids, you end up using the word. I occasionally say "oh poop" when something doesn't work correctly. I like the cartoon aspect of it, the balloon that appears over a character's head just before his skiff goes over the waterfall. There's a wonderful smokey red in the under story, the sumac, and the poison ivy is beautiful. I try to store color, in the larder, because winter is so black and white. There's a small blue flower, I have no idea what it is, growing in disturbed ground. My first thought is that the seed must be very light, almost weightless. You can draw a straight line between any two points. Read more...

So Strange

"The Season Of The Witch", Donovan, I hadn't heard that in years. Late night radio doing a Halloween set. I have to turn it off. I don't truck with dress-up. In the last 36 years I've had not one trick-or-treater. One house per square mile is not good pickings, especially if you have to walk a half-mile uphill. The crows show up and it's like a car pulling next to you at a stoplight with more sonic blast than a heavy metal concert. I take them a couple of mice to shut them up. Scallops at Kroger, and I got the last package in the discount bin. Two meals, I figure, for eight bucks. Both of them will be with a butter sauce on egg noodles, a side of endive(it was too expensive, I ended up with a wilted spinach salad instead, hot bacon fat for the wilting). After a recent raid on the fall display outside a Tim Horton's, I had several squash, so I made a nice cream soup. This is as easy as cooking gets. There's some clean-up involved, the blender, but this is short work if you whirl some water immediately after with a few drops of soap. Rainwater is very soft, you need very little soap. Tomorrow I'm scheduled for a complete body and hair-wash, maybe the last before I put on long-underwear and retreat to my cave. I always figure that rescuing the squash at Tim Horton's is doing the help a favor as no one has to clean up the slimy mess that results at first freeze-thaw. I only take them when a frost is in the forecast, and I do, actually, have permission. Mostly I just roast them, with sweet potatoes and turnips, though I make a fine risotto with squash cubes and mushrooms. This is always a burn your tongue meal, because squash holds its heat very well, if they didn't rot they'd make a great heat-sink solar collector. Winslow and I once spent an evening designing a house with an aquarium on the roof, with flounder, because they flip their dark and light sides. Impractical, but I did once visit a greenhouse that was heated by rabbits. The Old English gets tiresome when the Christian overlay predominates. The best religious stuff is always the music and the music of the earliest languages, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, is in the alliteration, and in those half-lines, both of which are simply aids to memory. Pound, in his translation of The Seafarer, cuts out 25% of the poem, to take out the Christianity, and it works, you can see what happened, right then, the way one belief system overlays another. Your little god and my little god going to set the world on fire, hey now. Hwert! Read more...

Civility

Nasty talk. Turn off the radio. Build a quick fire and cook a johnny-cake on top of the stove, two eggs on top of that. I spent some time in the woodshed, Rodney's bringing over a load of wood, and I wanted things arranged to my liking. I put a post-it note near the back door, a reminder to get a snow-shovel, last year's is now a walking stick. I take the sling-blade out and clear the paths to the outhouse and woodshed, so I'll be easily able to shovel the path later. I got back-up kitchen matches, back-up on the back-up for coffee (a couple of dented cans of Cafe Bustelo), and an extra tube of toothpaste. You build these little fires in the fall, midge-smudges, Ronnie calls them, to boil water or cook something quickly. Everything is so ephemeral, the king dies, the leaves fall. It's interesting, the way the Norman influence affected Old English, courtly French, them damned monks and their Latin; a patois becomes the vernacular. Then paper and movable type, codification. I had a moment today, brief and passing, where I actually understood what was being said in A-S. One of the riddles (the answer was a woman peeing) and it was only a couple of lines long, but I actually knew what was being said. Blew me away. I don't expect rewards for this, it's nothing, really, but it makes my day. She slipped off the path and squatted. Once I have the nouns and verbs, even without the grammar, I can make sense. If this, then that. Basho:

Not dead yet
at journey's end---
autumn evening.

A good trip into town as I actually got a few things I needed: an extra box of saltines, a couple more cans of the rolled anchovies. The library, the liquor store for back-up whiskey, and I stopped at the pub for a pint. Cory wanted to show me the new kitchen device, a dry fryer (convection, high heat), and this is exciting, fish and chips for one thing, chicken wings, stuffed jalapeno, be still my heart. And I know I'll have samples of everything. We talk about sauces; he prefers a malt vinegar and I love a thicker mayonnaise thing with garlic and sweet relish. Drove back home the long way around, all the way up the creek, so I could clean the undercarriage of the Jeep at the ford. This time of year it's an interesting drive, still lush and green along the Ohio, then gaining a thousand feet of elevation in 7.570 miles, it's fully fall atop the ridge. All along the way, because of the season, I kept noticing little pockets of extremely local climate, pockets of particular plants. Things happen for a reason, mostly, and I'm engaged by the causes. A specific bend of creek, a protected space, the succession of growth when the power company clears an easement. Years ago, Martin, a forager of the first degree, showed me how power easements were a gold-mine for ginseng. Good to know. Read more...

Medial Caesura

My word-hoard grows. I spent the entire night reading Anglo-Saxon, a nap at dawn, then a huge breakfast, and right back to the books. Using a pronunciation guide I read them out loud in A-S, then read the translation (70 different translators for 123 pieces), then check phrases, then look up some words. Mid-day I find myself thinking in alliterative half-sentences and thought about the oral tradition, the mnemonic devices that aid memory. A stick with some carved runes would be the score. I'd taken advantage of an early morning fire to cook some rice, with some refried beans and salsa this makes a fine meal, and every once in a while, I'd have a bowl (a treen in A-S, a wooden implement) using a spoon Kim had carved here, a couple of years ago, when I'd asked him to show me how he put a full twist in the handle. The pause between the half lines (the caesura) is a large pause, more than a comma, more than even a period; a wee dram of whiskey pause. The first word of the second half-sentence would/will alliterate with the stressed syllables in the first half-sentence. This is quite common in transcriptions of oral text. Just pre-literate. These poems I'm reading right now are 550 to 1150 AD, and they actually seem fairly current: a guy going off to sea, a wife left behind, some old apple trees that needed to be pruned, seem absolutely current. Like that strange feeling you get reading Emily Dickinson. The alliteration gets to be rather heavy-handed in the original and most of the translators tone it down a notch. I enjoy the gnomic pieces, as I always have. I've read Hesiod most of my life and collected gnomic works. Something about the plain-speak. And that's the thing about A-S, it's plain-speak. I love the doubled words, adjectives and nouns both, and that thunder-clap caesura. Realized I had a slight headache because I hadn't eaten so I carved a plate of finger food, salami, cheese, grape tomatoes, pickles, kim-chee, and some pecan halves that I'd misted with soy sauce and sprinkled with a tad of sugar. This proved to be a fun interlude, and I even opened the tin of Korean eel that Barnhart had brought out a year ago. I have a bad history with eel. The year I lived at Lucy's Crotch, in Orleans, I gigged eel with Winslow. We filled a freezer. They were inedible, tasted like mud, I fed them to a seal. Usually I eat anything Barnhart brings right away, Polish smoked sausage, stinky cheese, a canned fruit I've never heard of, it's always a treat; but I had this history with eels. Nonetheless I opened the tin, and they were wonderful. Fillet of eel in a wonderful brine. Eels figure into the A-S, as do onions and garlic; a couple of grains, they talk about bread. I look at runes for a while. A couple of the earliest poems incorporate runes, a perfect provenance. The runes reminded me of the Easter Island script, so I looked at that for a while, and thought about making marks. I've been reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which I strongly recommend, his language is so strong. Read more...

Local Flooding

Rain and wind all night. When the power went out I just sat in the dark (absolute) and listened to the storm. No idea how much time passed, eventually I put on a headlamp and read for a while. Temperature dropped thirty degrees so I wrapped up in a blanket and finally slept until the lights came back on. The radio was on and the first thing I heard were reports of flooding. The usual places. Why people settle on the floodplain is a mystery to me. The wind is supposed to keep steady, which should dry surface roads fairly quickly. I haven't been out in a week and I'm beginning to feel like Batty Thomas. Talking to myself and bumbling about. The crows come out, then a few other birds, shaking their feathers, announcing at least a break in the rain. A welcome break, as I need to move some water around. I left the radio on, so I'd remember to listen to Science Friday, which I always enjoy when I remember to listen but I was distracted by sunlight breaking through the cloud cover. It's spectacular. Questions of beauty aside, or maybe not, it does attract my attention. The play of light on a lichen covered stump, a freckled neckline, wild orchids. Recently I made cornbread in my one square skillet and when I sliced it, corner to corner, then cut across the middle, I had six equal segments. I felt like I had uncovered a major mathematical concept. Finally did get out, supplies and a few things for the larder. Huge volume of Anglo-Saxon poetry, modern translations on one side and Anglo-Saxon on the other, from Jude. I once stayed in the library at Marshall University reading through the volumes of Earliest English Texts, must have been a week. My VW Bug had blown up in Nitro, West Virginia, and I ended up taking the bus back to Cape Cod. Not much sign of flooding, a little debris. Left-over cornbread doesn't last that long, Just keep it in the microwave, covered with a cloth. Toasted cornbread, with peanut butter and sliced banana is very good. I talked to Jude, to thank her for the book. Then roasted the week's oysters and had them with salsa, an avocado with lime juice. I picked up another smoked jowl to make cracklings, as the weather has indicated the need for a pot of beans. Fine tuning the winter larder, I found that Hormel still sells pickled pig's feet, in jars, and immediately bought a couple. A festive night in February I'll eat one of these and actually be a happy camper. The usual fish-camp always had a jar of pickled pig's feet and a jar of pickled eggs, crackers on demand. Roy and I thought we could break into the pickled pig's feet market, but we ate all of the product. Gristle, fat, gristle fat. Saltine crackers smeared with chicken grease. Nothing ever was. Read more...

Being Normal

Distraction and interruption. Woke up to a little rain on the roof, rolled over and went back to sleep. It's a lovely thing, to be able to factor your own time. I was up late, finishing two books, both excellent, both by women, and both about worlds beyond my interest. Both very good, great language, and I recommend them: The Argonauts, and A Visit From The Goon Squad. They got me thinking about the perception of what was, and wasn't, important. Of course there's wild divergence, it's a fact of nature. What I might view as important, any given day, would hardly interest anyone else. Who gives a shit about how much Live Oak weighs? Point 95? It barely floats. But it's very strong under compression. The ribs of the USS Constitution are Live Oak, and the planking, at the water-line is sixteen inches of white oak. Hell for stout. A brief lull in light rain. Standing water in the driveway puddles and the ground around them is imprinted with (I love this word) "feetings". In Suffork this is the word for footprints in snow. On closer examination these generic feetings become the tracks of an adult grouse, and at least two yearlings (one of them has a broken nail), the fox, and a raccoon. They must have all come out this morning, because the tracks weren't there yesterday. They knew where the water would be. A striking feature is when the rain is gentle and collects on the spider webs, lovely prismatic droplets caught in the web. A couple of shafts of sunlight penetrate, briefly, and the area around the house explodes into a stunning display. I think about beauty, sitting on my foam pad on the back stoop. Nature is harsh. Thunder drives me inside, to shut down, get the headlamp within reach, get out a legal pad and a pencil. Very dark, rolling thunder, harder rain. The concept of beauty is one we bestow on things or events. One of the most beautiful things I know, that always pops into my head when beauty becomes a subject, is a small flower, quite small, a miniature Iris that actually takes my breath away. A perfect thing. They like disturbed soil and my outhouse sits on the western edge of an old logging road, so I have a nice area of them, between the house and the outhouse. To look at them closely, I have to get down on my knees and use a magnifying glass. I assume everyone carries a foam pad and a magnifying glass. I hardly venture from the house without trail mix and a nip of good Scotch. You never know when you might need to take a break. The chore for the day was to knock down the soot from the top of the stove pipe. This involves leaning out of an upstairs window and tapping the pipe (triple wall stainless steel) with a bamboo pole. I disconnect the stove pipe at the stove and install a collection device, usually quite crude, a paper plate and duct tape, then vacuum afterwards. I want this to be a rainy day, because the first hot fire will throw some cinders. After that, it's clear sailing, I'm incredibly attentive when it comes to fire. And water. Lord knows, I'm attentive to water. I fill my wash-water pot, to clean some dishes tomorrow, also I need to take a sponge bath and wash my hair. This location, the ridge, I'm usually flush with water. It's been several years since I hauled wash water from the museum, just because it was easy; now I boil snow or rain water, add a pinch of salt, and go about my business. Beans and an egg on toast, a can of Mandarin Oranges, is pretty much the world I see, cut-throat trout on a limber pole. Read more...

Quiet Dark

A week of fine weather in the forecast. Eighty high, sixty low. Three in the morning, mustering the consciousness necessary to go outside and pee. Put on my slippers, drape a blanket across my shoulders; a full moon behind overcast, but light enough to see. It's so still I can almost hear the air, I can feel the pull of gravity, climbing the three steps back into the house. Locker-room talk. Spare us all. I've never heard that kind of shit before. In my early days in theater, gay men ran the business (they all died of AIDS) and they might nudge one another and call attention to a waiter's ass, but bragging about assaulting women is beyond the pale. Yet the needle does not waver. Trump has 42% of the vote. They don't seem to care what he says. The consummate asswipe. It's difficult for me to understand how anyone believes his bullshit. I take another aimless walk and stumble on an acorn midden, sure sign of a red squirrel, realize I haven't seen a red squirrel in years. I walked over to the wild rhododendron patch and all of the leaves I'd tagged were still attached. I wonder about holly, that same kind of leaf, and decide to tag some of them. Next spring I want to tag some of the leaves when they first emerge. Beech leaves stay attached for a long time. If you walk in the woods in winter, everything stripped bare, the beeches are holding last year's leaves. The old leaves are pushed off, by new growth in the spring; many beeches, it's fair to say, lose their leaves in the spring. Beech is a climax tree, late-growth forest. I had a lovely grove of them in Mississippi, and it was almost impossible to access, which is why it existed. Beech is beautiful wood, light and figured, but its growth pattern makes it a lousy timber tree, one saw log at the base of the trunk. Basho:

With millet and grass
not a thing wanting:
grass-thatched hut
Read more...

Gnomic Tales

Think small. Look closely. The shorter the walk, the more attentive. Oak galls; in all their variety, caught my attention. I collected a dozen to take back home and examine. First I slit them and squeeze out a few drops of juice, which is often quite sweet, then I cut them open to see what critter caused the gall. Usually one of those small wasps that you almost never see unless you hang around rotting fruit. An almost perfect full moon (tomorrow) rising over the opposite ridge and when It gets above the tree-tops it is stunning; I pull my Selma rocking chair, hand-built, rush-bottomed, into the middle of the room, where the light falls, have a drink and a smoke; once, in Utah, I was able to read by moonlight. My mentor at the time, a very old Navaho, told me we see when we need to, that most of what we processed was garbage. We met at the laundromat, where the sound of our conversation would be drowned out by the dryers, and he drew maps for me. He related that no one else gave a shit, and that my sorry, skinny white ass would have to do. I know it pained him. It would pain me, does in fact, that no one, any longer, cares. But he steered me to a couple of great sites. One, my favorite, was a blind canyon with a spring. There's an artesian spring outside of Moab, a crazy, gravity defying thing, and another just above Desolation Canyon, coming into Utah from the east. I always fill any empty jug. Force of habit. Found a nice stand of chanterelles out near the graveyard, walking about rather aimlessly, and I filled my Key Lime mesh plastic bag. They were a bit dirty, so when I got back to the house, I used a can of compressed air to clean them. This works very well with a relatively dry mushrooms. I put one batch in the dehydrator, rough chop the other batch for a meal. Finely mince an onion, fry them in a mixture of butter and olive oil, sprinkle on some toasted garbanzo flour to thicken, and have them on toast. The fox was back, alone, the kits having moved on, and I rolled her a few apples. She yipped a couple of times and it was almost like having a conversation. Her coat is lovely now, sleek and full, and her tail is quite beautiful. Read more...

Rapt Attention

Bob Dylan? I tripped over my own feet going to make a cup of coffee. Such a strange step for the Nobel committee to take. I kept the radio on all day, to listen to the various commentaries, and heard a great many snippets of songs. A thousand songs in a lifetime. What Dylan does is make the lyric line important, complex, surreal, and with the taste or smell of the actual world. Enough always to know we were on the same page. Also, I've always liked odd voices. Any more though, I just want a very quiet place to pursue my interests. I don't listen to much music, mostly I stare off into space. Or just read, the last couple of days I've been reading Richard Russo's Everybody's Fool, and I enjoyed it. Took a few pages to get into the dead-pan humor, then I was gone, two days reading this book, and doing nothing else. Reading slowly, because I liked the language. I had to get out and make a run to Blue Creek PO for some packages and since I'd be off the ridge I went to town. Portsmouth and Blue Creek are in opposite directions and I enjoyed the outing. A hand- knit sweater from Jude, books; then, at the pub, I got a free beer, a mistake pour, then a second one, another mistake. The dirt race track outside of town is hosting the Dirt Track International Championship, and there are maybe two hundred RV's parked in Boone Coleman's soybean field (post harvest). The liquor store, where I buy tobacco, is right across the bridge, and they're doing landmark business. The track is in the flood plain, across the Scioto River from town, and when they're running it sounds like a young war. I hate the noise. When I got home, after two midday beers and lunch, I took a nap. Mice woke me up, running around. They're moving inside and I get up to prepare my defenses. I set out six spring-traps, baited with peanut butter, but I don't set the traps, to let the mice get the idea that the trap is a feeding station. Since I'm up and moving about, I start a small fire in the cook stove. I'd picked up some remaindered cod fillets, $1.43, and poached them in clam broth, made a small batch of instant mashed potatoes because I needed a binder, minced a small onion, formed a patty. Fried in bacon fat, with an egg on top, this is excellent. A spoonful of salsa, a piece of toast with bitter marmalade, and thou. Not to be flip, but I don't give a shit about the rest of the world. I have my own prefect to advocate. At dawn the crows are back, they know that I have mice for them, warm, fresh, and local; they view me simply as a guilt ridden human. Which, I suppose, is probably true. Read more...

Cold Morning

First time down into the thirties. I woke up reaching for a blanket. Beautiful light, and I take my coffee outside, wrapped in my stadium blanket, and watch. A wonderful daze. Stir, finally, to start a fire, cook bacon, fry potatoes, soft scramble a couple of eggs, country bread with butter and maple syrup. I felt awful, yesterday, a 24 hour thing, no trace of it today, except for being hungry. Didn't feel like doing anything. Ran into a mountaineering term, brocken spectre, which is the magnified shadow of the observer, on mist or fog. I've ever only seen this on a beach. I was reading about some first assents, these people are strange. Two guys climbed Everest up one side and down the other. I have a young friend that's going to be the cook for a year in Antarctica. I wonder about the larder. Freezing isn't a problem, so what will the options be? Three meals a day, many calories, it's a lot of food. In the summer, when they were re-supplying, there would be fresh stuff, but most of the time it would be dry or frozen. They've made great advances in preserving food. You could have corn-dogs and fries one night, and a very good Brussels' Sprout dish the next. I suppose you'd have to make bread nearly every day. How many cooks? How many mouths to feed? An interesting subject. I'd like to see the kitchen. Mine's a wreck right now, transitioning to the wood cookstove. Summer cooking and winter cooking are so different:

A moon in the trees,
the stews and beans of winter,
then asparagus.

Sandstone is actually fairly fragile, when you look at the long picture. A few million years, it's dust. Time is the factor. Time is always the factor. Read more...

Swarf

Losing track as a way of life. It started when I was rereading a passage by Deakin in his book Wildwood, about willows and basket making. Sidetracked by Cricket-Bat willows, then into the making of cricket bats. The word swarf was used for the pile of debris that accumulates around a maker of bats, which is still, usually, a completely by-hand operation. I first met the word in a machine shop, where it was used for the metal shavings that accumulated. Digging a bit, I find an earlier usage relating to the grit that's worn away from a mill-stone. Drifted afield from basket making, which itself had started as a question about eel weirs, creels, and those very expensive hand-bags they make on Nantucket. A further diversion is my habit of scanning the words around the specific word I'm looking up, especially when I'm using one of my dictionaries of lost words. Swarth (variant, swath) is the reach of one stroke with a scythe. Other questions, to further extend the field, are always being held in the unanswered-questions part of my brain. Willow is a fairly soft wood, though we call it a hardwood because it loses its leaves, therefore how can it be made into a bat? The blanks (as we refer to bats that are only crudely formed) are actually hammered and then compressed, then finished. Light and strong. Cricket bats are quite elegant. John, Himself, when he and Barb owned the pub, kept a cricket bat around, for crowd control. Our attempt to start a local league failed. Time accumulates as swarf in the corner. Swarf, the musical, or as "Swarf", a line of personal hygiene products. I needed to visit the outhouse, and the crows had been around for an hour or more, with their yapping, so I nuked a mouse and sliced it open, took a book to read. Always take a book to read, never be in a hurry, always have a list and a pencil. Nothing though, prepares you for Threes Crows Eating A Mouse, one of my best soundscapes ever. Three crows eating a warm mouse on a cold morning. The roof is one layer of reused metal, it doesn't matter if it leaks, and it's right there, just over your head:

Swarf In Dios,
I'm with him,
That guy in Wellies.

TR found me out on this, admiring ankles at a wedding buffet. Read more...

Divided State

The mysteries of consciousness. A loud noise in the night, the bob-cat I'm pretty sure, a scream not unlike a mountain lion in Colorado. She sounds pissed off and I would not like to be the other party. No reason to get up or turn on a light. It's a sequence, a radio program: a coon and a bob-cat at the compost pile. Not my problem. Roll over and go back to sleep. I've grown to love working in the dead of night. It's so tranquil. With the window open, savoring the last of the Japanese scotch Glenn had brought, smoking some local tobacco, I feel content. This morning, after an early and hearty breakfast, I made a list of words that designated moving water, then, as well as I could (it would be nice to have a better connection), I track the words backward through time. For a long time I don't speak other than attempted pronunciation of an Anglo-Saxon word, and the occasional Welsh word, something in Manx. I'm actually comfortable in Gaelic because I published a book of translations, tracked down Gaelic copies of the originals and had the author read them to me. He was an odd duck, a linguist for the CIA. We cooked smelt together, several times, when everyone else had left the house. We'd catch them off the docks at Sesuit Harbor, on bread balls. To clean them, you cut off the head with scissors, then down to the vent, and flick the guts out with the back of an index finger, five seconds; then rolled in seasoned masa and fried in hot pork fat. With hush-puppies. Food for the gods. I love these, dipped in aioli, or any other sauce. I occasionally find them at Kroger, five pounds, cleaned and frozen, and they're good, though nothing like fresh. The French frog legs will come in soon, always a high-point of my year. Big winds, and the acorns are falling on the woodshed like gunshots. Yellow poplar leaves whipping across the ridge. Fall, for sure, and I've got to get some things done, rebuild the back threshold, a couple of days ordering the woodpile, a couple of extra trips into town for supplies. I need an extra battery for my headlamp. I can't find those utility candles anymore, five for a dollar, the market has changed. Jerome mentioned this, when he visited, and Glenn said that data, mega-data, was being filtered in different ways. As an exception to the rule (why that is would be interesting to study) and therefore of little interest, a mere mote. We're talking about selling tee-shirts here, or tennis shoes. I was reading about cricket bats, they're made from a willow (the Cricket-Bat Willow) which only grows in a certain area. I won't bore with details (though it seems all I do), but you should read about the Cricket-Bat Willow if you're interested in wood. The bat Don Bradman used, in his record 334 runs, was about used up. One at-bat. Amazing. Read more...

Footprint

Less is more. When we were installing the permanent collection of Native American artifacts, 10,000 items, I had to wear blinders. There's one little puddle left in the driveway, on the ridge top, and I enjoy looking at the footprints there. Billy Collins interviewed on the radio and he read some poems, what was most interesting was that I heard the line breaks, a different pause than a comma, way different than a period, just a slight hitch, which often allows for an expansion of meaning. I enjoy Fresh Air, until it falls into celebrity worship, but how can it not? It's the coin of the day, the worship aspect, I'm worth a million dollars a game. I can sell a lot of tee-shirts. Several hours reading about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, first published in 1564, the Vatican's list of banned books. This was a boon to early publishers in Protestant countries, as there's no greater publicity for a book than being banned. It was printing, of course, that had opened this door. Paper, in 1350, then printing in 1450, a whole can of worms. Average people learned to read, suddenly there were romance novels. Outside the clergy, every tale was oral tradition. In the depths of this, reading, taking a few notes, staring off into space, I hear the roar of four-wheelers, coming up the drive. It's Bear and a friend. They've brought a six-pack and I'm drinking whiskey, we talk about building stairs, beam work, the bramble and rose of fall. Bear says to call, if I ever need anything. It's good to know that a giant stands by you. A delightful conversation, rough and country. They both wanted to know how I had cut two of the full tree-trunk posts in the house. The posts are seriously cool because they carry the main beam of the house (I call this a pony beam) and a branch off the main trunk carries a tie-beam at 90 degrees. Large mortise and tendon joint. They're both extremely elegant. I look at them, sometimes, and marvel that I made them. First you build an eight-foot long miter-box out of 2x12's, with a perpendicular saw guide, You have to establish a bench mark, the 'top' of the log; completely arbitrary, You just need to make three parallel cuts. I check my numbers, eight or six times. Then scribe a line, go over it a few times, then cut the line, with a utility knife, so that when I make the actual cut, with a chain-saw, there aren't any splinters. I only look intelligent. Read more...

Slant Light

It's always surprising, in the fall, when the light comes in under the canopy. It illuminates particular trees to advantage, particular thickets of green briar. I was up, well before dawn, reading at my desk. And watched as the light overcame the dark, the play of shadow. Yesterday's rain had cleaned all the leaves, so all the surfaces were bright, and the colors were intense, the sumac, the maple, the yellow poplars are spectacular right now; woodpeckers, and three old crows the color of oil on water. I need to store the color, bank it away against the inevitable black and white of winter. The smells too, something today was on the breeze and I never could find the source, slightly sweet and green. A late breakfast, or an early dinner, of potatoes and eggs and toast, I do love butter and jam. I'd prepared a couple of reflecting devices, bottle-caps covered in foil, with a hole in the middle for mounting, and when I saw a strong shaft of light hitting a tree I went out and attached one. Sure enough, for a couple of days I should get a strong signal. Not quite Bach nor Morse Code, but at least a flashing in the trees. It all moves so quickly, the angle, the inclination; you factor all those things in, bodies moving in space, the speeds involved. Working empirically for several mornings, I go out and reposition the reflectors for the next sunrise. I position the reflectors, with shims and a 4 penny finish-nail, to shine on the side of the house where I read and write. Some mornings I get it almost correct, the reflections dimming as the sun rises, dying downward. What happens, that angle of incidence changes so quickly. This morning the witching hour centered on eight o'clock, excellent visual effects. Later, over a mug of coffee, I think about it as an installation. Reject the idea of reproducing the effect, with lasers or whatever, so it would need to be filmed. TR could do a soundtrack. It would be an hour long. There might be a squirrel. Because I have to tag this thought, I start thinking of it as Morning Early Light (MEL, in my mental shorthand), so I can separate those thoughts from the raft of data. The acorns are falling like small bombs, you need a hard-hat to walk in the woods. I think that should be part of the soundtrack, the acorns falling. A flock of turkeys today was flocking the underbrush for acorns, also the deer and the mature jays that seem to hold nuts in the pouches of their cheeks. It's a big day for birds, the first skeins of honkers heading south, a red-tail hawk that just seemed to be flying around, several different woodpeckers, not a bad day by half. I made a hoecake, fried polenta actually, about half-way between a pancake and country bread, and had it with maple syrup. It was so good it made me lose my train of thought. That something so simple could remind you of so much. Corn pone and jelly-roll. I love it, free-range. Read more...

Place Setting

Another morning of mist/fog in the hollow. It laps up and over the ridge, just about waist high. I walked over to the driveway, a couple of hundred yards, and watched it transpirate into the air above. Magical. Working in Colorado, often above weather events, it wasn't unusual to watch very small crystals being sucked upward into extremely dry air. I sat too long though, and my pants were wet, came back home and changed, made a mug of tea. Nosed around in yesterday's books and cryptic notes. A frazzle is a frayed end. Old French, to rub. Got side-tracked by "flay" which led to several hours of gruesome reading; first, saints, then that strange American habit of flaying your enemies and wearing their skin. The scare: I got up to get a drink,, I'd left the back door open, to get the threshold area completely dry, and when I walked over to the kitchen, there was a rattlesnake, right there, in the entry. Young and slender, therefore a two-year old male. I squeaked a kind of stage squeak. I thought the occasion called for it. It was still fairly cool and he wasn't moving fast, so I got a five-gallon bucket, a shovel and a hoe, and I was able to get the snake into the bucket and get him relocated in a couple of completely focused hours. I didn't have any other plans. Relocating snakes is cool, otherwise I'd just be feeding crows, or reading a light fiction. Read more...

Grave Count

Perfect day for the yearly grave count, the correct combination of recent rain and fallen leaves. Before I walk over, I set out a change of clothes, the alcohol and a rag, to deal with the ticks. As expected the shallow depressions of sunken graves are filled with rotted leaves. I count 23, which is within my usual spread (sometimes I count 26, other times 19). I sit on my graveyard stump and smoke, have a nip, recount, come up with 23. I'll come back in the winter, when the graves resemble small skating rinks, and count them again. Home, I strip down, bag the clothes, and wipe down with alcohol. A cup of tea, and I settle down to read. A raft of things I dug out last night to comb through. I'd run across the phrase 'fraying stock' in reference to what I've always called a deer rub (scraping the velvet off horns, getting ready for battle and sex), and I thought it a lovely turn. That use of the word 'fraying' caught my ear, and I remember it from several books on venery. I raised a hawk, one summer at the playhouse on Cape Cod, and I learned a lot about raptors. Fray, also, in the sense of wearing down. I looked forward to a day buried in dictionaries, though I spent most of the morning buried in books on falconry. I had meant to go to town, had a list and the hardware store was holding a threshold part for me, but I had enough of everything to see me through the weekend. When the seasons change, I always read Basho:

in your medicinal garden
which flowers should be
my night's pillow

1644 to 1694, he lived, and that poem is from 1689. He died in Osaka, beginning another hike. The journals of the hikes are wonderful. Like Thoreau, he notices everything, and nothing is beneath his notice, water dancers, skirting across a puddle, the webs of fall spiders, deciphering animal tracks. We're always reconstructing events from scant evidence. What else can we do? I'm pretty sure your cows ate my pea crop. I hope they enjoyed it. Read more...

Earth Tones

Later, the leaves are falling at an appalling rate. Dark morning, thick, low cloud cover. The hollows are filled with a mist that looks like fog. My house is 1380 feet above sea-level and the early morning dew/rain seems to originate at about 1400 feet. I brave an early walk, quickly soaking wet, and it's odd that such a fine rain could get you so wet so quickly; but I had to get outside because it's supposed to get serious this afternoon, "a hard rain gonna fall" as it does, soon after I get home, settled in dry clothes, a cup of tea (smoked black), with my headlamp out in case I lose power. This pursuit of landscape terms has become obsessive. The field mice will be moving inside soon, nighttime temps in the forties tonight, so I get out the traps. The crows are back again and I feed them some left-overs, being temporarily out of dead mice. They seem to enjoy the pork fried-rice. Their easy pickings, down at the picnic areas, are done for the year; now they rely on road-kill and whatever they can scrounge. Late afternoon the sun breaks through in isolated shafts and there's color everywhere. The sumac a lovely red, the orange maple, the yellow poplar, the first Pileated woodpecker in weeks. Black, thinking about black today, is a relative thing. There certainly is the absolute black of a cave or mine with no artificial light, though the eyeless newt might argue; but otherwise even a black crow is hardly black at all. The alpha crow, of the three I know, is mostly green. White, of course, is never completely white, it's usually blue. Pink is just the adolescent stage of oxidation. I like deep purples, but I don't like those violets that seem to drift away. Beckett, Molloy, and his sixteen sucking stones. There's another book that comes to mind, Brian Aldiss, I think, Report On Probability A, I throw a simple frame, a square meter, and I count all the plants within. The average is 137, and I don't think that number means anything. It's just an average number. More rain, like a punch-drunk drummer. Because I hadn't put the Norton Anthology away, I ended up reading some Yeats. Crazy Jane is pretty cool, a comic opera, but the poem that grabs me is Sailing To Byzantium. It's over the top, like so much of Hopkins, but I like the way it sounds.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations-- at their song...

Pound took up that variable foot, then Eliot, then Olson. Dorn, in the love poems especially, is completely transparent. Loki bowling, I'd better go; best to you and yours. Read more...

Ground Fog

A hanging mist in the hollow, rain all day. Read a slightly creepy John Connolly novel. Irish creepy. I had to put away a few books, as the pile on the carpenter chest had gotten too high to see over. I'd gotten out a great many books, when Bear had asked me about the sassafras beam, and they all go back to the construction section, which is difficult of access, being in the tool-room (soon to become my downstairs bedroom) amidst a bunch of dead chainsaws. My sense of order seems to be almost complete chaos. I'm collecting rain-water, so I can wash dishes; and I have to clean and re-season 6 or 8 cast iron skillets. I get awful about the cast iron when I don't use the cook-stove, because I have such a large flat surface and I own so many skillets. When I'm cooking on the wood stove, it's so easy to just wipe out the pan (burn the paper) and wipe on another layer of oil. Roy and I used to laugh about this, using a cured pig's tail to grease a skillet. Magwitching hour, overclap of clouds, tracking oomska through the parlor. Corned beef and gravy on toast. Gravy, in the south, is always an amalgam of fat and toasted flour, except for red-eye gravy which is just ham fat and strong black coffee. Cool morning and much more rain, but the crows are back and I toss a nuked mouse to them on top of the outhouse; then transfer water around until I can clean one of the buckets and bring in a kettle of water to wash some dishes. Another wave of rain moves through, but no thunder, so I turn on Little Dell and search for errant commas. Cold enough to warrant a fire, so I burn what's in the firebox (I stuff crap in there all summer) then add a couple of sticks. No danger of fire from fly-ash because everything outside is saturated. Perfect circumstances. In my bathrobe and slippers, wild beard and filthy hair, I get a nice fire going, and wipe down the stove-top with a lightly oiled towel; it burns off quickly. Sometimes I roast an herb, to scent the house; sage is always good, or juniper berries. I realize it's the perfect opportunity to cook a pot of beans and put on a pound of pintos. Cut up a cured jowl to make cracklings, mince a couple of yellow onions. While the oven is hot, make a pone of cornbread. Let the fire go out, and the beans cook perfectly. I'm reading Beowulf and looking up words all day; eating beans, and cornbread, toasted and drizzled with maple syrup. Rain on the roof, Bach, a dram of Glendronach. I love this life. Roll a cigaret, sit back in the dimness. It was dark today at noon but I have my seven-and-a-half watt LED reading light, my headlamp, to see me through. And just think, at the end of this next winter, I will have read all of Thoreau's Journals. Joel will give me some shit about this, us plumbers; but I defend myself as just someone who reads quickly. It allows me to coast through a lot of fiction, then slow down, and study the history of the fork. Read more...

Leaf-Fall

I found the rolled anchovies (with capers, in olive oil) today, and I was a happy shopper. Mac turned me on to anchovy paste decades ago, it doesn't go bad, or if it does you don't notice. But having rolled anchovies meant I cook a couple of pasta dishes I'd been wanting to try. I put anchovy paste in everything, it deepens flavor. I'd never spent much time in the canned meat and fish aisle, and was surprised to see that they still sell canned mackerel. Vile stuff. But also squid in its own ink, and pig's knuckles. I bought a few things, including several cans of anchovies. Moroccan and wild-caught, nothing but fish, capers, olive oil, and salt. Excellent with butter and olives on egg noodles, also good with ripe cheese on a salad. Visions of sugar-plums dance in my head. Acorns falling on the woodshed so I spread a piece of netting at the drip-edge and harvested a gallon. I want to make some acorn/cat-tail pollen cakes. Stored correctly these would keep for a long time. Temperature and moisture have very little to do with leaf-fall, it's mostly a length of day issue. I've never understood why certain trees (exceptions to the rule) drop all their leaves at once. There's a maple tree on Mackletree, isolated and hanging over the road, that always does this. I've never actually witnessed the event, which must happen fairly quickly (a couple of hours?) but I've seen the evidence several times: a pool of leaves mirroring the diameter of the crown and undisturbed by traffic or wind. Granted, there's not a lot of traffic on Mackletree, but there must be 30 vehicles a day, and the vortex of a passing vehicle is quite strong, leaves collect quickly at the edge of the verge. Twice I've been the first vehicle to view the scene. It's quite a strange sight. Three or four inches of undisturbed leaves in a rough circle. The mechanism of leaf-fall is fairly well understood, the hardening off of the bud for next year is preparing for winter, connection to leaf is severed, the leaf falls. The very idea that all the leaf buds severed connection at the same time is staggering to me. I follow the life cycle of a few trees, maybe a hundred of them, on a regular basis, mostly because they mark certain places; on the driveway, for instance, there are seven trees that I always notice, two of them are dead, which only increases my interest, two of them afford a view of the hollow, and the others are trees I lean against to gain composure. Any of the three ways I drive out are marked by certain trees, the trip into town, in town even, the city trees, the maples along the riverbanks, that survive the worst we can throw at them. At the house, I have to stop and count, there are at least 20 trees that I monitor fairly closely. Two in particular, a poplar out front and a red maple out the window where I write. Both of them are coppiced from the ice-storm, 12 years ago, and they're doing well. I could harvest them as firewood tomorrow, and let them re-grow. I prefer to just watch them, clear the underbrush maybe once a year and let things run wild. I don't want to interfere. Read more...

Saturday Rant

Maybe I slept in the wrong position or something, I don't remember, but I might have had a bad dream. I spill some ground coffee. I'd turned the radio on, but turned it off almost immediately. I was a debate champ, in high school, and my first plane trips were to speech contests, where I usually won, and had room-service meals in actual hotels, This is where my five years of Latin come back to haunt me, I actually know about debate. Tracking coffee on bare feet in my haste to kill the broadcast, I make a further mess, involving cornmeal mush. Completely pissed at my own inability to control simple problems. I have to sit and gather my wits. Watch another amazing battle between a wasp and the large spider that lives outside a window. The acorns have started falling on the roof of the woodshed, an irregular rhythm, that, after the first few surprises, I enjoy, as an alternative method of keeping time. The bell, ringing to start a new round. The rant was a little ragged, I haven't done them much in the last 15 years, but it's like riding a bike. I seemed to be more upset by some things than I thought I had been. I developed my ranting as a rhetorical device, a helpmeet I used to prepare for a debate. After discovering NPR I'd often have a mock-rant, listening to the radio on Sunday morning. These were often funny, sarcastic or ironic. On the Vineyard I'd built a bleacher overlooking the terminal morraine, to watch the sunset. We made the best home-brew on the island, and we'd often make a party of it, roasted oysters and beer, and I'd usually be asked to summarize the week's events. These were great fun. I've never, before or since, been surrounded by so many extremely bright people. Always two or three, as I don't actually live in a vacuum, But the Vineyard (then) was like Iowa City now. The waitress in a breakfast diner working on her thesis. I cooked Basmati rice, a cup of rice makes either two or three servings for me. Canned crab meat in Kroger, where they have a shelf of discontinued items and dented cans. I'd read all night, windows open to the cicada chorus, and I wanted a crab cake with a soft egg on top. I keep a box of dried mashed potatoes around, because they're a perfect binder, mince some onion and add a scant teaspoon of sweet relish, fried in bacon fat. The rice is for a shrimp fried-rice later as B had alerted me to some very inexpensive shrimp. The rice for this is much better if it's a day old, and I make a rice pudding (an egg, vanilla, blueberries) for either dessert, which I rarely eat, or for breakfast. Preparations complete, I sit back with a dram of single malt and survey my kingdom. First, I have to say, no one would aspire to this; sure, I know a lot about bullfrogs, I can make paper from artichokes, I cure elk hams for Jewish friends, but the thread, through it all, is just a spider web that I maintain, to hold my interest. Read more...

Unknown Aetiology

Now, the first day of fall, there's always a leaf falling. The splintered light constantly moving. It's quite dramatic. The fox was back, alone. I rolled her an apple, then as she hung around, another, and watched her eat. Her paw to eye coordination is excellent, and she's quite dainty. Then she perked up her ears, picked up an apple core and disappeared. I knew someone or something was coming, and it was a root digger, wondering where he could dig. The other side of the next ridge east, or this side of the next ridge west I told him, everything between is a Ginseng Wilderness Area. I must have looked a fright, a look I cultivate by not cultivating any look at all. What you see is what you get. He left very quickly, looking back over his shoulder. The legend grows. The ticks are not gone. I'd edged into the woods, after some mushrooms, and when I got home I had to bag my clothes and wipe down with alcohol. Since I had the Norton out I went back and read the intro to the earliest text, Anglo-Saxon, then around 1200 into Middle English. In London they were speaking a Norman-French; there was Manx, there was Jersey, there was Gaelic. I think of Claxton, fairly often, when I think about language. Movable type is one of the great things ever, but you need a codified language, AND you have to assume a reading public. I can't even begin to imagine. I could run a small boat rental business, one of those estuaries in south Georgia, a few crab pots, a trot-line. It's the perfect place to be, to watch lily-pads float on the water. Dark and very still, I can hear two small animals, nosing through the duff. I remember a night in Utah, south and west of Bluff. I'd driven to the end of the road, then hiked in for several hours. I knew there was a spring up the blind canyon that was marked at its entrance by a balanced stone. The Utes had a name for it that meant, roughly, "unhappy mother-in-law", just a couple of more miles, at the end of the canyon, there's a dwelling place. It could have housed and supported maybe eight or ten people. There's a perfect rock shelf, that protects a granary, a fire-pit, and places you might imagine sleeping on pine boughs. This was one of the finest spots I've ever found myself and I camped there maybe a dozen times. I never saw another person. Two rock faces of drawings. Five hundred years of flaked chert. The spring itself came out between two rocks and there was a basin, silted in, that had been carved into the rock. In the dry season it only flowed a gallon an hour, but in the spring it would have flowed enough to raise an early crop of corn. I carry a little piece of plastic pipe in my pack, to direct the stream out and into a pan. A gallon of water an hour is actually quite a lot of water. Glenn had noticed the new devices fitted on the end of guard-rails, they added miles of guard-rails this past year. The ends used to curve back and down, and die into the ground, which was stupid because it provided a ramp for flipping cars over. This new device absorbs impact and peels back. On the trip into town, one of them had been deployed. I stopped and looked, and I think it did exactly what it was supposed to do. I was coming back home on Forest Service roads and I was completely lost, someplace between the Boy Scout camp and the Forest Service horse trails, when I saw an apple tree, heavy with fruit. I stopped to collect a bag for the fox, and they were pretty good, so I collected another bag to make applesauce. Lost is relative, better to say I didn't know where I was. The Forest Service roads always come out on 52 or 125. Back home I had to shelve some books and I pulled out some early Beckett, Molloy in particular because I remembered a section of that [Molloy And His Sucking Stones] that I wanted to read again. It's a very funny passage. Another book from JC, Wildwood, by Roger Deakin, who's one of the people Macfarlane references in Landmarks. Deep clover. The library called and they were holding a book for me, in the interest of making every trip count, I picked up a few things for the larder, another cured smoked jowl, some charred red peppers in olive oil. Read more...

As Expected

Ate early, Mac and Cheese, with bacon and chopped jalapenos, sitting at the island reading the new Ian McEwan, Nutshell, and there's a ruckus outside. I can hear it's the bobcat and a couple of dogs. Ran them off with the back porch light and a couple of marbles from the sling-shot because I had arranged the entire day to be awake when "World Cafe" came on the radio. Bonny Raitt. I love her voice and she do play a mean guitar. An entertainment event. I think I could build a crude composting bin with five pallets, four strips of that perforated metal strapping called 'plumber's tape', and eight screws. I need a compost heap, although need may be too strong a word, because the system I've used for 15 years actually just involves putting my waste in a designated area and letting animals deal with it. They spread it around and dig it in. I can't believe I get the timing correct, but midnight, and listening to Bonny with her slide guitar, It doesn't get much better than that. She interprets songs. I saw her once in New Hampshire, with John Lee Hooker, and it blew me away. An interview and four or five songs in an hour, about all the excitement I can bear. I was back at the island, close to the radio, eating grape tomatoes with an avocado cream dressing, and repeated generous grinds of black pepper. I bought an extra of those self-grinder black pepper units, because there are few things worse than running out of black pepper mid-winter. This latest McEwan is very good, he's a great writer, told from the point of view of a very self-aware fetus in the womb. He hears everything, passed down through the skeleton through the amniotic fluid. It's a great conceit, and carried off perfectly. I love when the narrator discovers a shrimp between his legs and realizes he's male, and when he's finally born, at the end, and sees blue for the first time. After all the excitement (Bonny on the radio) I knew I wouldn't get to sleep. Coming across the word shadowtackle I wished I had picked up some Hopkins at the library, then remembered I had the Norton Anthology; a concise little bio, a decent discussion of the poetry, then a dozen or so poems. A wee dram and I read Hopkins until dawn. I think it's a bit over-the-top, but I enjoy a few hours of immersion, the creation and/or resurrection of words is quite wonderful. Sets the tone of the day, and I go on to read some Eliot and some Auden, then some Pound, then some Olson, then some Dorn. I have piles of manuscripts and books of poets I've known from my publishing days onward, so I read more poetry than most people. Shadowtackle is the shifting pattern of light caused by the stirring of the canopy. We know what some of his words mean because in letters he often explained them. I love the precise explication. Don't remember if I mentioned, but I had the thought, and continue thinking about the fact, that I could write a short story, in English, that anyone would be hard-pressed to understand. I might call it Logan Stone, which is one rock atop another that looks like it could rocked. You see this a lot in Utah. Is Dell just the feminine of Dale? Della? Clearly I have my work cut out for me. The opening of Logan Stone is: "A barf to the beam, and over the bedding plane, bequeen an old oak, hearing the bell of a stag. Keelbam on a kesh, all the luck, the ruts filled with ice. The llvybr, those fucking Welsh, canted and impossible." Reread Beckett's little book on Proust. Bought and read the first time on Nantucket. I always found Nantucket to be beautiful but rather boring, the Vineyard was still country, we lived in a 25 acre woodlot, and I had my own oyster beds. Still, if we had stayed there, life would be very different; I'd probably be making lovely books and selling them for a lot of money, but it was impossible, with the visitors and guests. No time to work. Mississippi was better, but Colorado was close to perfect, we had a guest house, a trout stream, and we raised everything. I actually traded cured pork for fresh game because I loved elk and everyone loved my hams; a very good lawyer once traded an entire antelope for a side of bacon. His family, he said, hated the gamy taste of antelope, but they loved my bacon. God bless them. Read more...

Broken

I don't know how I got to this place. AOL wasn't working correctly and I couldn't get to my working file because the toolbar was covered with an error display warning. I finally found my way around the problem, but I don't remember how because I tried a dozen ways. It took most of the day. Finally, just as it started raining, I found my Write Mail file, which is mostly where I work. With it being a weekend I got an early dram, rolled a smoke, and toasted my success. I missed the farmer's market, though, and I needed tomatoes, so I could continue the run of BLTs. I can always beg a few tomatoes, down the creek. Skipped lunch, reading a Peter Robinson novel and fiddling with Little Dell, Took time out to search through all the new material for words that related to dell. Turned into quite the chore and I ended up with over 50. B wrote a nice poem, a few years ago, nailing down various degrees of dellness. I was thrilled when I found Write Mail, the other end of the thread, and I immediately put it in my favorite file, Mail Waiting To Be Sent, where I now let a paragraph sit for a few hours, then go back, delete the last line, and Send. I should start saving the deleted last lines in another file, a manuscript called Deleted Last Lines. Such a realist. I had left-over shellfish, so I made a simple stew, minced onion, clam broth, a few oysters, some mussels, a diced potato, in a shallow bowl, on toast. This was quite good. Finished the Robinson novel, looked at some pictures, I'm outside during the gloaming, the low clouds underlit, text book alpenglow. Two times in two days, I swear, Hopkins has come up in a major way. B was looking at the ruts in his driveway, holloways I said they were called, and he quoted Hopkins. It's not that often, in your life, that you have Hopkins quoted at you, then he quoted Chaucer, and I knew what he was referring to was that last sentence in the prologue. The holloways. Still raining when I got up to pee, and it was so peaceful I stayed up to read. Dawn brought a breeze and the leaf-fall increased. First cool morning and I hadn't put on any clothes, other than my boxer-briefs and a tee-shirt, so when I went out to drink a cup of coffee and have a smoke on the back porch, I took my stadium blanket, to cover my legs. Soon I'll be wearing trousers. A sure sign the seasons are changing. I love sitting on the back porch with a morning cup of coffee, looking in the opposite direction of the rising sun. The slants of light. It has many names. Tree-rain in the afternoon. Aunt Sadie fixed the best sweet potatoes you've ever eaten, boiled until almost done, then fried in bacon fat, drizzled with sorghum molasses, until they caramelize, served with Jersey butter and fresh-ground black pepper. Sweet potatoes are cheap, right now, so I make some of those, and a fried cream corn from sweet corn sold out of a farm wagon on the side of the river road, a sliced tomato on the side, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Eating high on the hog. I go for days without eating anything not raised between me and town, a 17 mile Venn circle. Almost every possible edible plant within that circle. Bitter greens you cook with salted pork; day-lily pods, raw, with a sharp vinaigrette. Something dead nearby, I can smell it when I go outside. Back inside, I was staring out the window when a shadow swept across and it was the sanitation detail: two buzzards. Thank god. Whatever it is it's to the north of the house, so I'm downwind. A nasty smell (and smells rarely bother me) and I'm pleased that the professionals are on the job. When I send this paragraph, I'll have to take Little Dell in to the professionals, and have them remove the display from in front of my toolbar. To the radio, for the first time in days (I did stay up to listen to a blues show the other night) and I was surprised to hear the phrase "faith-based" so many times within an hour. The news, such as it is, is all terrible, and it's depressing. Sat outside; life lesson, when perplexed take a cup of coffee or a drink and sit outside. There's a invasive tree, in the hardwood forest, the Royal Pawlonia, with very large leaves, their survival characteristic is that they shade everything else out completely. Black Walnut roots exude a subtle poison, a pesticide. A squid and its ink. I don't comb my hair and wear tattered clothes, and it's a good disguise, most people leave me alone. The people that know me value my conversation, and I don't care about anyone else. Fuck a bunch of profiling. Read more...

Fact Fiction

Got up in the dark, as I've been doing of late, to finish reading a fiction, so I could return it to the library when I took B to town. He called, as planned, and I finally got dressed and brushed out my matted hair. B and his dog (a very handsome hound with a nice voice) seem comfortable with each other. A nice chat on the way in. Because of the detour, B gets mileage now (over 20 miles) days he teaches, and he's as busy as I am, getting ready for winter. His truck had a short somewhere and the battery drained, also a fluid leak; I need to get my oil changed, and check the strength of the radiator liquid. But the next thing on my list is the refrigerator. Now that B has his truck back we should be able to get the new-used smaller fridge up here in the next couple of weeks. The trip to town was interesting. Cory had a new beer on tap he wanted me to try, and they had a new dish planned for the menu, a squash ravioli, and he wanted my opinion on a sauce. It's pretty good, and I told him I'd just use an herbed butter/olive oil drizzled on top, with a salad side and bread. I immediately came home and made a creamed Butter-Nut squash soup, minced onion, chicken broth and put it to chill. I'll eat it cold, with roasted oysters. The new batch of oysters are from New England, they're sweet and tangy and I love them with just a squeeze of citrus, and they had beautiful mussels, from Prince Edward Island. I should have ended up on the shore somewhere, I love shellfish so much, but I take what I can get on a ridge in southern Ohio. I'll just steam the mussels in white wine and minced onion and eat until I fall over. The library was holding a book for me, on early English cutlery, and I do enjoy looking at pictures after a day of questioning commas. B had loaned (lent) me a book of Chuck Close photographs. I like these, but I'm not crazy about them, I just wanted visual stimulation. When I look at pictures my brain works differently. I was thinking about this recently, the difference between hearing books and reading them. Then thinking about visualizing the main beam in the clear-span room Bear was building for Jenny. He called again, thanking me for my advice. I had told him up front, because he's a large strong guy with a temper, that I did not want to be held accountable, I'm just reading some tables here, looking at weight-stress analysis, and I'm only assuming that sassafras is as strong as white pine. Dried peat, did I mention this? is about the density of white pine. Burns hot but quick. I'm currently working on an algorithm that translates turves to cords Compressed horse-shit might be a good way to store energy. Some work to do in the woodshed, last year's collection of pieces that are just too long for the stove and I need to cut them in half, burn a fire of chunks. If you're hanging around the house, drinking hot-toddies, reading Swedish mysteries, in a rocking chair near the stove, burning small burls is a perfectly acceptable course of action. Knocks for knock. Late at night, quiet as a tomb. Read more...

Soodle

To walk in a leisurely manner (John Clare), to saunter. Three deer outside my window, nosing through the ferns, sleek and lovely. Reading Gerard Hopkins, a writer very much in touch with the natural world. His name keeps popping up in researching landscape terms. He made up a great many of them: goldfoil (a kind of lightning), boarlight (the burnished quality of light at the end of a beautifully clear day, bright-borough (a night sky filled with stars), and they're so specific, especially about the nature of light. I need to read a biography of him. Forgot to eat, setting up Little Dell, so I made a pot of rice and had a bowl with soy sauce and chopped peppers, then spent some time writing, learning the ins-and-outs of the undated AOL service. I can't get over how quiet Little Dell is, she sounds, as we used to say about our Servel gas refrigerator, like a puppy sleeping. I hadn't realized how loud Black Dell had gotten at the end, but I had written 5,000 pages on her, five modems, two keyboards, and hundreds of brown and black outages. At the finish she was suffering shortness of breath and bad circulation. I held her hand until the very end, writing an eulogy I knew I could never send. I'm capable of emotional dross, anything to mitigate the erosion of memory. Joel called, wondering if I'd died, no, I told him, but the poplars are turning yellow on the ridge. And it's true, every time I go to town now, I add food for the larder, a couple of cans of hash, a few cans of beans; the Kroger brand of vegetables are two for a dollar, so I buy some butter beans and some turnip greens. I haven't been able to find dried eggs, which would turn hoecake into cornbread (in my extensive research, it's the addition of egg, and cooking in the oven, that makes a hoecake cornbread), but I can usually keep eggs through the winter;I also have powdered milk and bacon bits, that allow for a superior Mac-and-Cheese, if you're camping way off the beaten track. Sway is the word that designates animal tracks that deviate from a straight line, perfectly descriptive, Manx or Gaelic, and I think of my fox. When I follow her trail, I'm amazed and always interested in why she veered off the path. She also eats oak galls. B calls and I talk his ear off because I'm so excited by this rookie, Little Dell; she shows great promise, as a helpmeet for my dotage. He needs a ride to town and I'm certainly available, I tell him to call and remind me, because I don't keep track of time, but that I already had another list of things I needed, and a trip to town would be fine. Cory is holding a beer in abeyance, an oatmeal stout, and I want to connect. Read more...

Wrong Font

Took a little longer than it might have if I knew what I was doing, and the font size is wrong, but everything is connected. It took forever because I had to clean cables and the space behind Old Black Dell, she was messy in her final years. Fly litter, dead bugs, spider webs. I only had to go underneath the work desk once and I wore a mask. Jerome was here the very day she died and we went to town immediately, to the pub, for an early lunch and to question Cory about where to go, Adkins Computers, so we did. Jerome knew what I needed and talked the talk, the guy there was very quick. She's lovely and quite small, very quiet, and reconfigured in a black, sleek Dell housing. I thought for sure I was going to have to remove the now almost useless carcase, may she rest in peace, of Old Black Dell, and I was concerned, because the lamp, which sits atop, is perfect, or at least excellent for me, writing at night. Very cool, also, because their are a few pages I'd like to retrieve, from when I was still writing there, even though I knew OBD was dying. The Lost Pages. An extra trip to town, to take them my external modem, and the new unit will come preloaded, upgraded, all that. As it happens I could have gotten the damned thing on Saturday, but I assumed they'd be closed; on the modem trip I'd stopped at the library and got a couple of Scandinavian mysteries. Picked up a couple of pounded pork steaks that I breaded and fried, served with pan gravy, apple slices cooked in butter and maple syrup. The lych-way is the corpse way, the path the dead take to burial. I knew where the church used to be, two hollows over, and I finally found trace of the wagon path that leads up to the cemetery, a holloway, where the grooves are cut by the wheels. A raised path, in the fens, is called a cawnie. I'd noticed the rhododendron, across the road, on the opposite slope, was still bright green and glossy, like holly, and I wondered how long it held its leaves, so I tagged a few, to be able to follow the process. They must exude a toxin, because nothing grows under them; Black Walnut do this, an enzyme from the roots that discourages competition. There's a rain storm, which I need, being short on wash water, and I had clean buckets set out for water . I can get by on five gallons of wash water a week, two gallons of drinking water, I can boil rain or snow as drinking water. Read more...