Free Lunch

Gold star trip to town except the library was closed (whatever an in-service day is) but I have a mammoth book by Bolano "2666" to read. Got to the pub, the beer rep was there, and he bought me a beer. Cory was photographing a lunch item for the new menu, so I got a free lunch, an excellent humus wrap. At the liquor store in Kroger Jesse slipped a nip of single malt in my bag, Glendronach, one of my favorites. Now that winter is mostly over, I need to change out the fridge. I need to start freezing things for next winter, and I can't store left-overs on the porch anymore. Asparagus, again, 99 cents a pound, sliced in a long diagonal, fried in brown butter. I have enough stems now for a soup. Thunder storms for a couple of days. Darren calls with the news that the barrel-stave factory has dry off-cuts very cheap, straight grain white oak, log butts and rejects, and promises to bring me a load. Timely, as I'd started thinking about next winter's wood. Ahead of the curve. I need to fabricate a new grid for the firebox in the cookstove, so I need to go to the welding shop and talk with the guys there. I know them pretty well, we've been designing the perfect grill for years, I usually show up at five with a twelve pack of Bud. Ike is anxious to show me the plasma cutter, which is so hot, it leaves no sharp edges. Full gale, I'd better go. Violent wind, at the front end of the first rain; came sweeping in from the northwest and had the trees bending 45 degrees. Dead branches crashing around, one hits the woodshed like a gunshot; and a roaring like trains coming from all directions. Quite spectacular. I made some thin corn cakes on a griddle, but they were too tender to roll up (I might have to invest in a tortilla press) so I just ate them as open-face sandwiches, with tuna, chopped onions, and peppers. Drink a couple of mugs of chicken broth with a lot of black pepper. The sky is a mottled combination of grays, and I read hundreds of pages of this Bolano novel. It's completely engrossing. It's actually five short novels, and the fifth one is extraordinary writing. He juggles the writer persona right in front of us, and it's so beautifully done. Basho:

heat waves
shimmering from the shoulders
of my paper robe

Reading a writer writing at the top of their form is a treat. Pound in his cage. I had a friend they shocked seventeen times, and he still made sense. Between showers I walked down to where several springs form the headwaters of Upper Twin Creek. A lovely spot, you can see the sandstone layers. Everything is exposed. The path I use to get there is a deer trail, wends down through the scrub, arrives at a small pool I dug, where I can fill a water bottle. Within half-a-mile there are five springs that go in four different directions. Watershed Estates. I expect to find first morels tomorrow or Saturday, so I had picked up an extra dozen eggs, as a morel omelet is very close to god, and made a marmalade of red onions and tangerines. The Boy Scout motto comes to mind. I just want to be ready. I made an herb and cheese omelet just to make sure the skillet was properly cured, bought an extra pound of butter. I've a whole pork loin I cured and smoked, and I have to say that a couple of slices of that, with red-eye gravy, is a fine way to start the day. I applaud that cowhand who first discovered that pan-drippings and black coffee was actually a very good combination. Mom made a white sauce, pan-drippings, flour and water, salt and pepper, sometimes cream, that was incredible. Listen, I make good gravy, in one case a Baroness committed suicide, I was never sure of the connection, but the timing was right. Later, the narrator, who was probably me, complained that he didn't like his role, a minor character told him to shut up, that any work was better than no work, sing in the chorus, you stupid motherfucker, at least you get potatoes. Right, I get that, nothing succeeds like resistance. Read more...

Private Vulgate

The flat ur-stone skidded on calm water. I had forgotten about butterflies, but suddenly there is one. Blue, lovely, flitting around. Some honeysuckle is almost blooming, and the green-briar is leafing, which makes it at least visible, if not avoidable. This time of year, I sacrifice shirts to green-briar, and still bleed. I got interested in the attachment of those few leaves that last all winter, despite the winds and snow. Beech trees do this most of the time, but there are other isolated examples. The odd leaf. In most cases last year's leaf is separated from next tear's bud, the attachment withers and the leaf blows away. But in some cases (the Beech generally) there's a sheath that connects the old leaf to the new bud, and the new bud has to expand and push the leaf away. I suppose it provides a degree of protection. There's a nice stand of young beech down in the forest, hardwood forest is Beech climax, so the next time I go out I'll have to stop and take a look. I always carry a knife and a magnifying glass. In full sun, the hollow is beautiful; the maple are glorious after months without color. Asparagus was suddenly available, and cheap. I snap off the stems, to make a cream soup later, caramelize an onion, and fry the rest in butter with the heads thrown in only at the last moment. I made a simple country-fried steak with a pounded pork slice, made a nice pan-gravy. I keep my head above water. That's the test. Not drowning. B was over this morning, hunting a piece of plastic to repair a window on a house his former son-in-law wants to buy down the road. We talked about books for thirty minutes. We share a great many books in common, and talk with a mutual knowledge of book-making. A patois that must not make sense to anyone outside the trade. The former son-in-law, also it seems, would be very interested in buying my place, which I had only ever thought about selling a few times when it was ten below with two feet of snow, but it does give me pause for thought. Truth be, it would be difficult to imagine setting myself up, as well as I'm set here, and it would be so difficult to physically move. Too much paper. Proved to myself that I'm good for a couple more years, though it was an easy winter, just wrapping up in a blanket and reading. If I can get this whole data/computer/printer thing worked out it could be a very good year. By my standards, which are sloppy, I've done pretty well (a) not stuck in the driveway, (b) not arrested for any reason, and (c) bathing one last time in a watering trough before putting on some pants. I know those little dance steps are mice on the stove-top. A page out of the old play-book. Distract him with trivia, and when he isn't looking eat his eyeballs. I know my demons, they wear inappropriate spandex. It's not even tempting, but at least entertaining, to imagine just selling everything, the staircase, the first editions, the briar patch, and hitting the road. Paying cash for everything, staying off the grid, living in my truck, fishing the head-waters, and only eating native trout. There's a place, off Comb Wash, in Utah, where I could live undetected, or an apartment in Portland; live light, a foam pad and a magnifying glass. Everything else either falls into place or misses the mark entirely. It was cold, so I built a fire, butter wrappers and oak splits, I'm a savant at this, I can build a fire out of nothing, a pile of wet dung and one match. Butter wrappers and oak splits is a piece of cake. Half a moon waning, not that I'm worried, 27 or 52 years later the cycle repeats. Not even prime numbers. It doesn't mean anything. Read more...

Uncertain Feeling

Rain all night, but I got back up when it had slacked off and wrote for a couple of hours. I'd heard the phrase 'objective truth' on the radio, and I was trying to wrap my head around that. It started raining quite hard again, so I shut everything down and sat in the dark, thinking about truth. Degrees of truth, exaggeration for effect, fiction, non-fiction. In my line of work, these things could be considerations, so I tease them out and examine the strands. Dreary morning, scudding clouds, slate gray backdrop; I just stayed in my bathrobe, and acted as though I were a character in a Pinter play. By the end of the day it was more like a Beckett play, and I have to say that if The Sanity Police had come by, they would have carted me off. One aspect of my privacy is that I can be a bit eccentric, and it can pay dividends; you show up at the back door, in your bathrobe, with a sawn-off shotgun, and people don't bother you much anymore. My walls are almost completely covered with push-pinned articles and post-cards, and some framed things, a few very nice pieces, a Klee etching of a line drawing portrait of Cocteau, the provenance is impeccable, the original label is attached. This could be faked, but I can't imagine why anyone would bother, it's only worth a few thousand dollars. Value is relative, and the sliding scale by which things are judged. And the judging goes on, we're always holding one thing up against another. A lone dog, maybe a coyote, calling in the night, and it wakes me from a shallow sleep; then I realize it's a coon dog, hot on trail. Get up and get a drink, roll a smoke, and turn on the back-porch light. I should catch this dog and call the owner. This happens about once a year and I get tipped pretty well, buy a wild-salmon fillet, and cook a serious meal. Crab-meat stuffed mushrooms and cream of asparagus soup, a rare fillet of salmon, with shallots and white wine. It's not even a big deal, that I can fabricate a great meal in the middle of the night. Mica, shale, it all breaks away, when you're reaching for purchase. I was reading about a female Sherpa that climbed Everest four times last year. I can't imagine what that have been like, I cover up my head, and kiss the rest good buy. The crow just waits for a mouse. Read more...

Black Squirrels

The Shad is in bloom and the countryside is white. Down in the bottoms, the pears have dropped their blossoms, soon the redbuds, and in the forest, the dogwoods. No dogwoods on the ridge, all killed in a succession of ice storms; I still find the occasional dead one, and carry it home for firewood. It's among the very best firewood. Saw one of the black squirrels, and it's always such a shock, a split second when you don't know what something is. It must be a recessive gene, so I don't know why it continues to exist, but I know two families of them. Spent all morning wandering about. The end of this week could see the first morels, the conditions have been very good for an early season. I made a new collection bag for this year's foraging, a yellow woven lemon bag, with a draw-string and a small clip that attaches to a belt loop. One of the rules of foraging is to keep both hands free. I usually have a walking stick in one hand, which I can drop or use as a defensive weapon as the case may be. Watching Ronnie pick blackberries is a lesson in efficiency. He keeps a gallon pail, tied around his neck, and picks with both hands, using fingers that are calloused against the minor pricks of mere thorns. I constantly caution myself against adjectives, but I often do mean to refer to a particular sub-set. My three crows come back, and I have mice for them, they love me when I give them what they want. I could be cynical, if I gave it any thought. Ryan said yesterday that he had already noticed, after one winter, that when his friends came out, taken a walk, had dinner, that they almost immediately over-romanticized 'life in the woods', having no idea of what the challenges actually were. Still, the rewards are high, I saw a Flicker, for the first time in years, then a Woodcock, flushed from the bottom; I was over near the graveyard when I flushed a Grouse and I thought my heart would stop. It waited until I was about five feet away, then drummed up and out, under the tree branches, downhill. Not very good flyers. A bowling ball with stubby wings. There's no other sound like it. Easter, so I put on "St. Matthew's Passion" while I made pate with the deer liver and store-bought mushrooms. It was small deer, the yearling, and the liver was small, so it was a small batch. Took an hour to clean up afterwards, but the country pate was good, and I ate it all, during the course of the day, with gherkins and olives, and a British double-cheddar. When I enjoy one of these grazing days, I sometimes imagine I'm at a cocktail party, and have conversations with imaginary guests. Early on, I got called on to mediate between some problems between 'talent' and management, I was good at this, for reasons not to be understood. I'm a good listener, for one thing. Gerry Mulligan was married to some actress that was appearing at the playhouse, a horrid play, a British drawing-room comedy, and they were having a spat. Easily settled as I had access to very good hash, and after the show that night, Mulligan played a solo set, over an hour, for an audience of twelve. I've heard the cello suites that close. Sweat slinging off the bow. But never anything with that sense of improvisation. Who could approach that? Miles, of course. I mean really, just leave out almost everything. Bitch's Brew is one of the great examples of ensemble playing. So after Bach, getting dark, rain moving in, I listened to Miles. Thunder and lightening, I shut down, curl up on the sofa with a good book, a Scandinavian mystery/thriller that is quite interesting, deep into the psychology of the characters. Aware of the world, the wind is howling (a full gale) and the rain is running across in sheets, but I have my protection, a roof and certain folk-tales.

Any given bloom,
cherry or pear or apple,
seems to say something.

I don't buy in to that, but wind force 10, when lawn furniture becomes air-born, is a very real state. I duck behind a low adobe wall, concentrate on not becoming air-born, and batten down the hatches. Burrow down into a ditch. Read more...

Startle Effect

Disturbing the rookery is a noisy affair. Maybe 100 crows taking to the air. Reading about the Corvid family I discover that my crows (The Three Mousekateers) do, in fact, know who I am. Of course they do, somebody else goes to the outhouse and they fly away. What I experience, alone, is not the same as what I experience when someone else is here. Everything is different. Everything. A simple walk, a quiet few hours reading, eating at the island, defending a comma; I'm not anti-social, I love conversation and watching people, but I do require copious quantities of private time. I enjoy spinning that internal monologue. Never know what tack I'll be on. I was studying the rigging on a clipper, using a magnifying glass, making a list, not complete, and I ended up with 110 named ropes. They built clippers in East Dennis, I need to research how they got the wood there, then towed the hulls to Boston for rigging. Boston was one of the rigging capitals of the world, which meant miles and miles of rope, so I got interested in the rope trade. And the sail trade, the large open rooms of sail-lofts north of Boston, the cotton trade. It's so easy to get distracted. How much belly in the mainsail? You see that same effect in schools of fish, blackbirds, even voles and groundhogs. The scattering. Certain fish and blackbirds do this so well it appears perfectly natural, which it is; that tired word, authentic. Talking with several friends recently, I realized that I get very good seafood locally. A small butcher shop makes a run once a week to the coast, and Kroger gets their delivery on Thursday. I'm on bear alert because I found a couple of destroyed stumps. This time of year grubs are a good meal. 38% protein. And I have to say, seeing a bear footprint in the mud gets your attention. I make a lot of noise, when I first go outside. It's good to be careful. I had to go down and get my mail, and I wanted to see B, so I went to town, got a few things and came back up the creek, lovely in spring dress. B was frustrated by a bad switch on a planer, and had a book for me. Essays on Cormac McCarthy. Ryan came over, and had a book for me; and I'd been to the library. I might have to take off tomorrow and read, postpone the spring-cleaning. The start of spring cleaning. Ryan asked what motivated me to write, he's a good singer/song-writer, so we talked about audience for a while. I have a target audience of about six, but they're important to me, and close readers, so it keeps me alert, but mostly, I told him, I just liked working with words, they're so much lighter than a twelve foot four-by-eight oak timber. If I never have to shoulder another it'll be too soon. Read more...

See It

The moon must be full. It rises a little less than an hour later every night (it varies quite a bit) and I know by now, when it scales the tree line about nine PM, and looks like a ripe melon, that it's full, and that it does affect human behavior. I went outside and it wasn't actually dark, moon shadows. I don't have a mystical bent, I spent the day gluing pop-sickle sticks together, to see the way a joint might work. It's not a waste of time, I do find an elegant solution. It involves skills I don't have, but I can call a guy I know. Actually, I'm only interested in the idea, a nine-hundred square foot, full-hip house based on ten foot bays. Some interesting joints. Building from a model is such an old technique. Everyone at Kroger was on the phone. I was in the spice area, looking for generic coriander, and there was a man, talking to his wife (he had been sent to the store, she was home, cooking for an event of some kind, he was not used to shopping) and he couldn't find the fennel. I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out that the spices were arranged alphabetically. Spices have gotten very expensive. They always have been, but it's getting out of hand, like coffee. I bought a pound (12 ounces) of remaindered Kenyan that was supposed to be very good, but I still like my cheaper Folger Black Silk, (the two pound can became twenty-eight ounces, then twenty-three ounces recently, same price). And I didn't notice that it was any better. Darkening in the afternoon, a big spring storm moving in, so I batten down a few things. The Beaufort book is interesting and informative but not very well written. The new book of Harrison novellas is wonderful. The wind is picking up, a 'near gale', and the maple blossoms are swirling, so I heated some leftovers while I still had electricity, and ate an early dinner. But it's not survival now, it's just spending a night reading by headlamp. More akin to summer camp, than freezing to death. Waves of rain move through and I harvest enough extra to wash my hair and take a sponge bath. A cold rain, and it sucks the heat from everything, I end up putting on a ratty sweat-shirt and wrap my feet in a stadium blanket, reading Coetzee interviews. Supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow, and I'm good with that, I have some reading to do, and I wanted to think about self, and what that meant. Last week I spent an entire evening thinking about conjunctions, then I started thinking about articles. How they differentiated in subtle ways. You can spend an interesting day with the word 'ways', boats that were launched and sank, bridges that failed, or those great clippers. The book I've been working on, Access And Attachment, which is just a book of days, is going to drive me to buying a new computer and a good printer. I'm lost without hard copy, and I'm at that point, now, where I need to see the actual pages. The text would be 365 pages, each page a separate paragraph, simple enough. The silence woke me, two in the morning, the rain just stopped. Got up, got a drink, rolled a smoke, reading back over something, had the thought that there was, actually, a book of 3,650 pages, ten pages per day, plus an appendix of leap-days. I don't imagine this as a book so much as a pile of paper in a box, the sheets are numbered, the leap days are a fascicle, tied with a ribbon. Grace notes. Or Change-Ringing, or circle-singing an old hymn. I listened to the Cello Suites, and tried to not think. Blessed are those moments when we merely sweep aside whatever spider webs and whatever insect carapaces there might be. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised by anything. Beaufort sleeping with his sister, when she came in as the nanny after his first wife died, the value of gold at any specific time. Read more...

Nothing Yet

It's certainly convenient, a rest- stop. I got up to pee and it was already after six in the morning, just breaking light, after the change in time, and I was surprised I'd slept through the night. It takes a while to back off the winter-mode, where you get up and put a log on the fire, maybe get a wee dram and have a smoke. I usually have four or more books complete with bookmarks and cryptic pencil notations, scattered around. One at the island (right now a history of salt), one on the sofa (usually fiction) and one on each side of my desk, the one at my left hand is generally my primary book of the moment (The Beaufort Scale) and the one at my right is usually a reference book related to the book at my left. An involved system that just happened, there was never a plan, a diagram or anything, but now, whenever I get up, there's something to attract my attention. Marjorie Rawlings is very good on grits and cornmeal; I'd started a small crock-pot of grits last night, and spooned out a bowl, added some cheese, and was enjoying the great stomach-warming effect of hot grits on a cold morning, reading about hominy. The first slanted light, I noticed a fuzz, a blur, at the top-most branches of the oak trees. Buds for sure. I'd thought about going to town, a stop at the library, a beer at the pub, some conversation, but I ended up wandering over to the graveyard. The annual counting of the graves. The graves are shallow depressions that fill with leaves, then water, and turn dark, so it's easier to see them, and I count sixteen (which is a low number, I believe there are 23). A breeze had picked up and I was sitting on my cemetery resting spot (a stump), leaning back against a large oak tree. There was a yearling doe, rooting around, about fifty feet away. Suddenly there was a gunshot and the deer crumpled. I knew several things instantly, a poacher, a .22 rifle, and I didn't want to get shot; so I wanted to make my presence known, in a completely non-threatening way. I waved a white flag of toilet paper on a stick. It worked, I didn't get shot. I told him we were on my property, but that I didn't him shooting a deer, as long as he used it all. Within a very minutes we'd hoisted and bled the animal; normally, he said, he'd cut off the head and feet, and take it home for butchering, but he asked me if there was any part I wanted, and I had to say, well yes, I wouldn't mind having the liver and maybe half a loin. There's this recipe where you roll a loin in something sticky, then ground nuts, dust with chili powder, and cook it very hot. Duck breasts for instance. I make a hash with duck breasts too, minced potatoes and shallots, that some people swear by, but this venison loin, I just layer in nuts and spices, slice thin, and serve with roasted root vegetables. The crust is incredible. I ended up driving the kid (which he is) down to the trailer where he lives with his mom and dad, an enclave of trailers on a Forest Service road, meet the folks, beg off staying for supper, and get back to my loin. The entire day became a diversion, field dressing and skinning the deer, driving him home, having a beer with his parents, getting back home and cleaning the liver, pate tomorrow, and grilling the loin, painted with honey and crusted in ground nuts, and making a reduced sauce that might well raise the dead. Time I get done, wash a few dishes, it's way after dark, and I went out to sit on the back steps. Twelve hours ago I had been considering going to town, thinking I needed stimulation, when I'm confronted in a very short span, without going anywhere, with a very interesting narrative. Why bother making anything up? I fired up the cookstove, to get the oven hot enough to roast chunks of sweet potato, parsnips and turnips, and I browned the loin in bacon fat, then braised in wine and butter, certainly didn't cook for more fifteen minutes, total browning and braising time, the very center should still be quivering. I favor venison steaks for breakfast, very hot cast iron skillet, bacon fat, seared two minutes on the first side and one minute on the other, a perfect fired egg, cheese grits on the side. Done died and gone to heaven. This is a special treat, and left-overs for another meal, and a pate that I need to make, though I freeze the liver so I don't have to make it tomorrow. Exhausted and stuffed, I fell asleep early, then got up about three and wrote for a couple of hours, cleaned up and went into town mid-morning. Amazing. Almost a thousand feet below the ridge and everything was in bloom, spectacular color, blossoms on the wind. Portsmouth is not an attractive city, but it was quite handsome today. No one at the pub, so I was able to chat with Justin, then stopped at the museum. Kroger, picked up what I needed to make pate, got a slice of Feta and olive pizza, and headed home along the river. The seven and half miles up the creek, I didn't pass a single car, and drove about 15 mph, noting abandoned apple trees. The creek itself is a lovely thing, the banks covered in rampant growth, and I park in the middle of the first ford, to sit and have a smoke. It's so lush, and the green is so intense. Harrison's new novellas at the library today, and a series of interviews with Coetzee, and in the mail an Audubon issue about crows. I won't starve for lack of reading. I won't starve generally, as I have too much food right now. I almost started cooking a pot of beans, because I didn't have any, but caught myself in time. The wind is blowing a fresh gale, I save, such as is possible, go eat cheese and olives, waiting for the power to fail. Read more...

Eating Alone

Officially Spring, though it was 28 degrees this morning, but, again, only in the bottoms. The ridge was 36. I spent several hours preparing the barely remembered (not Portugal, I think Cape Verde) dish. Marinated pork cubes, 24 hours in a wine, hot sauce mixture with copious ground chilies. Made a pot of saffron rice. Caramelized onions and sweet red pepper, reduced the marinade into an unspeakably hot sauce, cooked a small pot of mustard greens. I read an entire mystery novel during the prep. I went outside a couple of times, to be braced by the weather, a sip of Irish and a smoke. Occasionally a small gust of wind would lift some dry leaves, and they'd rattle off. The quiet is certainly one of the reasons I live the way I do. I can't imagine living with all that interruption. It's about mediation, how much you allow anyone (or thing) to separate you from the natural world. When I finally serve up a plate, long after dark, I don't know what to think. It's very good and it's not too hot, but I have no way of knowing if it even resembles the dish that I remembered. It's good enough to remember, so I file it under "Upper Twin Pork" which put it just after "Twice Cooked Pork" in my memory bank. Cold for another night, then it's supposed to warm back up. The maple catkins are starting to fall, so I'll have to start filtering all of the wash water. I'd picked up a bag of clean tee-shirts at the Goodwill and cut out a nice pile of filters, and I keep a clean five-gallon bucket around at all times, food-grade, so in terms of harvesting water, I'm always ready. I think this last year, in terms of water usage, was probably my most conservative ever. I don't think I used 365 gallons. I wash some underwear and socks in the creek, wring them out and dry them, and I don't know how to count that water. I don't count it, actually, making an assumption that if I don't interrupt the flow I haven't used the water. If, for instance, you had a large perforated bin of cracked acorns, and the out-flow at the dam was dispersing tannins downstream, do I have to count that water? My rule of thumb, a haphazard scale.

It's green, under leaves,
I love the deer nosing around,
nothing but blue skies.
Read more...

Cornbread Again

Above the beaver dams the trout are native. Pink-fleshed cut-throat trout I catch on a delicate bamboo rod I fabricate on the spot. You can weave a willow grill that'll last for an evening, settle back with mulled cider. I like a sweet potato, cooked in the coals, and a few olives. It's easy to flip open a small trout and remove all of the bones with a flick of the wrist. Breaded fried fish tail is a great treat.A great tapa would be various fish tails. Since I need to fire the cookstove, I make a pone of cornbread. Bow to Demeter. Excellent fare after a week without. There may have been a frost in the hollows, but the ridge is 39 degrees. Cold air flows down, and in the fall and spring saves me from a great many frosts; in the winter, being totally exposed, the protected hollows are warmer. A walk over to a stand of young sassafras, where I slice open a couple of buds and taste them, not that pleasant, but they are a little sweet. I had a small salad of willow buds which are quite good, crisp and delicate, and the last oysters, broiled with bread crumbs and cheese. There were some pork tenderloins remaindered and I cubed one into a very spicy marinade, in an attempt at reproducing a Portuguese recipe from my first years on Cape Cod. I'd fallen in with the son of the owner of the Provincetown newspaper, and we often (I only had Monday night and Tuesday morning off at the theater) did drugs, drank, and cooked together. My first taste of international cuisine. We often ate in the kitchens of restaurants, sampling everything; this must have been before 1968 because LSD wasn't illegal, and P'town was, to my country brain, a free-fire zone. Country bumpkin. But I was a quick study, and it was an interesting world. There were ten thousand things I knew nothing about, one thing led to another. It seemed like a natural progression. All the usual stations of grief, the scree slippage, the fucking angst, finally putting your fist through a sheet-rock wall, or breaking yet another toe by kicking something you shouldn't. On the way you pick up incidental knowledge. It's not a bad deal. Of course the mice move back inside, but I'm ready for them; I catch four in one night, which is a personal best. I don't see the crows as often, they have other places to be. Before I froze them, I stuffed a couple of the mice with hot pepper hash. And people ask me what I do with my time. Last night I had self-medicated, to nip a case of nostalgia in the bud, gotten a drink, rolled a smoke, writing about something specific, just a phrase, not even a complete sentence. Over the course of an hour I changed the word order and the punctuation a dozen times and every one of them was different. Fortunately I'd kept the original thought bracketed out of the fray, so I was able to go back there later and pick up the thread. Actually followed the action. Last time I went to town I'd pulled out in the pull-off lane, checking for teasel shoots in a hardy colony that grows in one of those traffic triangles that have a name I can't remember. I do remember what book the name is in, and that narrows it down to an hour or two, but a more immediate problem is cops with guns. I'm flicking away debris, at the base of the plant, Jeep off the road with flashers, and I know it's a cop because he squeaks. I only wear ballistic cloth and lycra, and I never squeak. "Rabid ass-hole in bath-robe, wearing a knit hat, considered armed and dangerous." In my defense, I'm not sure I was doing anything wrong, making some notes, the temperature, the average shoot height, and a lady cop wonders what the fuck I'm doing. I tried to explain. As usual, nothing made any sense. It matters less to me now, that anything makes sense. Read more...

Night Noises

Could have been anything. It's the breeding season, and there's competition. Pretty sure there're bobcats involved. It's been so warm I'm sure the bear's out of hibernation. Two dogs out of the eight made it through the winter. One problem, always at this time of year, there isn't much to eat. Roadkill is a big deal, and, of course, my compost pile. I keep firecrackers and matches by the back door. The power co-op called just before five, to ask if I had electricity; technically B is now the end of the line, but they still call me because they know where I live. Called, is another thing. The phone is restored. I'd thought about going to town and getting a motel room, take a bath and watch TV, but it was St. Patrick's Day and the pub would be impossible, so I read and made a few notes that I'll never make sense of. I'm charting Sir Francis's sail around the world on my inflatable globe. A great thing about an inflatable globe is that it's almost weightless; if you lay on your back, on the sofa, with your knees up, you can balance both a book and the world. I log on and send, without reading over what I'd written. Raw text. I hadn't cleaned up the commas, which usually allows me to drop some words, so I apologize for being sloppy. I hate actually having to throw a firecracker out the door, even though I turn my face away and close my eyes, because the sonic blast is so disruptive. It's always an act of the moment and I never have time to remember ear-plugs. But it does serve as a method of time-factoring, before and after the explosion. Two wild dogs and a rabid coon fighting over my scant left-overs. I run them off, I hope they don't take it personally, but I don't even feed humming birds anymore, because I hate the way they spat. I'd rather be alone forever, than to ever argue again. Most Likely To Secede. A tangled blanket and one sock might not be the path to victory. A good day, nice weather, but snow flurries tomorrow, so I run into town for a few things; a book in the mail , on the Beaufort Scale; sushi. Honeysuckle and blackberry leafing out. A greening along the river. The Scioto is well out of its banks and flooding is extensive in the bottom fields. I haven't had a fire in the stove for a week, but I still have quite a bit of firewood if we do have another week of winter. At this point, it can't be all that bad. I was thinking about my daughters and Samara called; we caught up, laughed, and made up stories about people we knew in common. They want me to visit, I wouldn't mind a trip to Colorado, a road trip generally, so I get out the atlas. There's no 'getting out' involved, as I keep a atlas on the dictionary table, at hand, because I love maps, and I spend a while figuring out how to avoid a couple of large cities, Indianapolis, Des Moines. The pork fried rice is very good, and I'd gotten my dozen (16) oysters, so I actually have too much food. Oyster stew seems extravagate, but it's not, and it's so fast and easy. It feels strange to eat a two course meal, after a winter of eating one thing, out of the pan. Table manners notwithstanding. I was thinking about that today, and about how the survival mode kicks in. Winter camping is an example, down bag, parka, heat packs for your feet; ear-muffs, full face mask, a yak under-fur scarf. You build a fire, you balance a pot on a couple of rocks, eat hot gruel, and fetal yourself into quasi-hibernation. Then you wake up, and if you positioned yourself correctly, you can restart the fire, without getting out of your bag, and boil water for instant coffee. This can actually be fun, with the right people, in the right circumstance. Even a horrible experience, if you survive, can make a good story. I've always tended to do a lot things alone, long hikes, over-nights in caves, setting off from Key West in a rubber raft and being rescued by the Coast Guard. I was writing and or editing for several hours yesterday, in a cone of comfortable attention, when I snapped back to the outside world it was dark, and I was tired, mentally exhausted, so I took a nap. Hours later I woke up hungry, three in the morning, turned on the kitchen light, put on some Skip James, and made an omelet with cheese and peppers, toast with a tangy Seville Orange marmalade. I'd only bought the jam because it was remaindered, half-price (I have to stop and think about hyphens), and I don't ever buy Crosse & Blackwell because it's so damned expensive. It's very good, I had a second piece of toast; and I was holding the jar, reading the label, and the light hit it just so, there seemed to be a hint of green. The word hazel came to mind. I've been on this hazel kick for about forty years. I just ask people, after we might have talked about the weather, or whether or not the soprano was any good, what color they thought hazel was. This falls under the category of usage change, or whatever they call it, but hazel was never green until fairly recently. It was chestnut, tan, a light brown. Brown includes green, or brown precludes green, or the other way around. Colors are at least as confusing as smell and sound. I don't know how we make sense of anything. Snow clouds moving in, I can sense that as a measure of moisture and a look at the thermometer, and those large flakes falling, nothing, though, would keep me from my appointed rounds. Under a thin layer of ice I watch embryonic tadpoles struggle to stay alive, not to mention certain bottle-neck flies, banging against a window, that I can easily catch with my bare hand. Life goes on. A stutter-step, but movement, in whatever direction. Something had been nagging at me, and I didn't know exactly what it was. The power was out again, briefly, twice, and it was enough to make me lose my train of thought, and I'd gone over to the island, to get a drink. I'd laughed at some stupid thought, politically incorrect and vicious, talking back at the radio, and I realized that I was actually quite content in my circumstance. And that was it, what had been bothering me, why anyone would satisfy for less. Not that anyone else would consider wandering aimlessly in the woods to be a desirable thing, or almost freezing to death, or eating cold beans from the can.

I don't have to tell
but the small iris are budded
and ready to bloom

One of the great things about being disconnected is not being connected. I always pull for Gonzaga, in the tournament, because there's a z in the name. Z, really, after all. The very last thing you'd think about. Read more...

Hawks

Used to seeing Red-Tailed hawks, but a very lovely Sparrow hawk today. Came in under the trees and settled on a branch about twenty-five feet away and proceeded to clean itself. I've watched them do this before. A forty minute video on personal bird hygiene. Makes my day. After it leaves I go outside because it's supposed to rain later, and resume my bud patrol. It's fascinating how quickly this is happening, not the oaks yet, and certainly not the walnuts (they're always last) but all sorts of things going on. The smell of rotting leaves is wonderful, having windows open, looking across the hollow and seeing a flush of color. Outside with just a tee-shirt, when, a month ago, I was wearing four or five layers. A few wasps inside and I always get stung a time or two, every spring. Moistened tobacco takes the sting out. Reading Charles Darwin on coral reefs. I need to get to the library, because I'm getting backed up on a few things, and I need some fiction. Distant thunder, and these afternoon storms are more of the season, hit or miss, short-lived. I'd like to get out tomorrow, mail my Visa bill, get some seafood, have a conversation. Which would involve cleaning up myself and washing my hair. I had to clean the foam filter on the Shop-Vac, a truly dusty operation, so I've managed to get fairly dirty, but I'm poised to begin cleaning. The house is the quite the mess, anyone, I think, coming in from the outside, would be appalled. I wrap up some New Yorkers and London Reviews, to take to the recycling center, and flatten some cans, to use as shingles on a pet house despite the fact that I don't have a pet, STILL, having a pet house shingled in flattened 303 cans seemed like a good idea, rain, dripping from the eaves. But does it actually signify? Later, I'm listening to some early blues, Son House and Robert Johnson. I would certainly sacrifice anything to be there, come into my kitchen. Rain on the roof, then I pick up some early Allman Brothers, Dwayne, Dicky Bets, and great percussion, one of the drummers off-beat, a great version of "Whipping Post". The signal fades, and I hear a train over in Kentucky, makes me want to go shoot some stop signs; not really, but I do turn off the light and smoke a cigaret in the dark. I can roll a cigaret (with just a flicker of light, to see which is the glued edge) in the dark, get a drink, go outside to pee. Deep black, completely overcast, a clear and present danger is knocking over a pile of books, and it starts raining hard, so I shut down. I lost part of a paragraph, a total sidetrack, about the Sargasso Sea, I was reading Maury, ocean currents, the Gulf Stream. There's a wild grape in Portugal, that looks like the flotation devices, sargo, or sarga, so that's what they called it, and suddenly I was in the dark, literally, it was so dark you couldn't see your hand. I have my headlamp at hand, and I get a wee dram and roll a smoke. But mostly I feel my way around. Phone is out, so I can't send. Up early, and I'm out the door quickly, driving down the creek. It's lovely, daffodils, actual green stuff on the creek banks, then fifteen miles along the Ohio. A glorious day, the sun comes out, and Kentucky, across the river, is beautiful. I stopped at almost every one of the places where I can safely pull off the road. QWenr to the library and discussed catachresis with the new librarian (Angie). Someone else had told her I was a writer, so I went out the Jeep and got her a copy of the "Cistern", and wrote down the blog site. She was wearing Tommy Girl perfume, lightly, and I told her it smelled good on her. She asked how on earth I could know that, and I told her it was actually quite distinctive, and that I had a blind friend who could identify everyone he knew by smell. Stopped at the pub. Nice conversations with the staff, Justin is almost disgustingly happy, stop at the bank, and our numbers balance, I have a little more money than I thought, because I hadn't been to town for weeks at a time and you do save money by not leaving home. Later, a few bucks burning a hole in my pocket, I was walking around the seafood case, and they had two pound bags of cleaned smelt. Decided the course of the evening for me. Hush Puppies, with smelt rolled in a spiced corn flour. I went back and bought a pint of cold-slaw, a very good Irish whiskey, and a smoked jowl. I was going to just cook everything in peanut oil, but it was so expensive, that I bought a smoked jowl, rendered out the fat, cooked the hush puppies and fish, filtered and saved the oil for cooking potatoes later, and had a batch of cracklings. It's a better deal. Everything is better cooked in pork fat. Smelt, I have to smile. I used to catch these by the bucket-full in Sesuit Harbor, head and gut them with a pair of scissors, and fry them by the dozen in an old cast-iron skillet on the grill. If you cooked them inside, the house smelled like fish for a week. They're as good as I remember, and the hush-puppies are fantastic, corn-meal, an egg, some rising, a minced onion, buttermilk. They had Mackletree closed again yesterday, road crews and truckloads of Asplunt tree guys. Finally getting some of the fire dead trees removed, and they (the tree guys) had knocked the phone line down in several places and the phone company wasn't going to repair until the tree guys were done. A cluster fuck. Don't know when I'll have a phone again. Way too many guys working, so I'm sure it's a state-funded project. I parked on the other side of the lake, on my way around, and watched them for a while; they were working at about a 50% level, stopping, chatting, a couple of them having a smoke. I don't blame them, I worked hard physically most of my life, and being paid full wage for 50% effort is a good deal. But it's also why everything costs so much. I've built houses (this one) for twenty dollars a square foot, and I've built houses for $150 a square foot (Telluride); but how it can possibly cost 13.5 million to add a 2,000 foot addition to a museum in Houston is beyond me. Even if everyone was making the maximum amount of money possible. That's $6,750 dollars a square foot for a building that is mostly empty space. The profit margin on this is amazing. It is expensive to build, you have to buy off so many people, and it does have to look nice, but greed is such an ugly thing. Women with fat asses should not wear tights. Geneva Conventions or something. And where do all those delegates stay, and what do they eat, and who pays for that? Room service, a bar, a sudden craving for nachos. The power goes out, the phone is still out, the weather is fine, just a bit of wind, so the outage usually means someone took out a telephone pole. Light rain yesterday and I was reminded of the time I spent living in a gunshot trailer on the Navajo reservation, building a house in Utah. I had a friend there, a very old man, and we'd sit in the shade, after work, discussing the old ways of doing things. He always referred to light drizzle as "female rain", a Navajo word that I never could say. I loved hearing the language, it was so completely alien; and their concept of time had a profound effect on me. I've never worn a watch, so I had a step up on not keeping track, except for the bench-marks: dawn, mid-day, and dark. When I was stage-managing, I did keep a pocket watch at my command post, because certain things were timed.

Tight green curls of fern
buds swelling with sap bursting
pollen in the air

The last of the smelt, with a final round of hush-puppies, and I feel like I should eat nothing but greens for a week, drink beet juice, and maybe spend a few hours in a sweat-lodge. Weevils had gotten into the corn flour, I just sifted them out, but I have to admit that I thought about adding them to the pork fried rice I was starting. Remaindered loin chops that I cube and marinate for 24 hours in a balsamic tinted wine and highly spiced liquid. I made the rice too, a saffron flavored Spanish rice I had read about somewhere, because fried rice is much better if the rice is left-over. I've been reading quite a lot, recently, about raising rice. About the whole concept of being 'married to the soil', which is pretty rigorous, if you get at all serious, you end up with a lot of frown lines, and miles of irrigation; I wasn't even thinking, humming a Grateful Dead cover of a Dylan song, trying to put together a list of things I needed to get in town. When it struck me that being out in the woods was so completely different from living any other way. You have a faucet, a thermostat, I have a five gallon bucket. On three. Read more...

Being Equal

I have to listen to the news a second time, but I'm sure now that what Trump said was that if any of his supporters wanted to hit a protester in the face, he'd take care of the legal bills. Glass houses. I did once call for the lynching of certain coal mine owners in West Virginia but I'm pretty sure what I said was understood, was taken, as being sarcastic. I'm a real asshole when it comes to being nasty. That's why my reality TV show failed after less than a season. Being honest has no place in the world. One more cigaret, and one more drink for the road. Not that I'd drive anywhere, usually I just fall prone on the sofa and wrap my feet in a blanket; I have a very secure mode where I just go to sleep, then get up, make coffee, fry some hash, attempt the perfect fried egg, and get on with things. I don't think I could be judged as any more than slightly eccentric. " He seemed like a nice enough guy." "It always seemed like he was walking a dog, but it was usually just an umbrella." Dada, and the nature of reality. I could actually go to town tomorrow, but I couldn't buy booze and the library would be closed, why bother? Overcast at dawn, rain off and on all day. Between showers I went on a budding tour. A lovely sight. Next trip out, I should be able to harvest cattail shoots, which are great with browned butter and lots of black pepper. It's interesting in this terrain of hollows and drainages, that there are slopes facing in every direction, some favoring one plant and some another. There's a wonderful under-story of Mountain Laurel on the slope across from the mouth of the driveway, and not a single bush on this side. I planted about four dozen ginseng seeds, I had wintered over (stratified), on a protected northern face I think they'll enjoy. It amuses me to plant things I'll never see again. I've planted fruit and nut trees wherever I've been, I don't even think about it, walk over to the edge of the property, and poke a pip in the ground. Not quite a prayer, because I never learned to pray, but I make a hand-gesture that looks like it means something, and mumble a word in my private language that equates to "good luck". The budded trees certainly look nice against the sky. I raked a couple more of the patches where I expect early morels and wonder why I hadn't thought of it sooner. The raked ground is darker, so warms more quickly, and you can actually see the surface. I salivate at the very idea of morels. A cream of morel soup, with asparagus, bite-sized pieces, steamed then finished in butter. It's still hard for me to believe I made it through another winter, never once hiked in with supplies, that I still have firewood, lamp-oil and candles, back-up battery for my head-lamp, and a pile of books I haven't read. Scores pretty well in my accounting. I might rather be spooned but the odds of that are fairly long. Read more...

Catachresis

Deliberately unnatural usage. I spend most of the morning with that word, wishing I had a few more reference books. I've misplaced my Greek dictionary, but I do find a book of Sri Lanka aphorisms that I had forgotten about. "Never let an elephant in the garden." Catachresis came up in a book on metaphor. I make a note to get the wonderfully attractive new librarian to help me out. She's asked several times if she could help me with anything, found a few things for me, and was impressed with my knowledge of the fork. A reference librarian, after all, likes to do their thing. Taking a little shuffle outdoors, I'd stopped down at the print-shop stoop to roll a smoke and the sky was a neutral off-white, fairly bright, and suddenly there are buds on the red maples and poplars, I'm seeing them quite clearly, and they weren't there day before yesterday. Yesterday I think it rained and I stayed indoors Temperature? It did hit seventy. Thawing earth? Running sap? I went back to the house for the small bow-saw, cut off a couple of branches on a red maple (because I like the sap) and sure enough, running strong. It's doesn't seem odd to me, to be standing in the woods, in my tattered overalls (fucking green briar) sucking on sticks. All sap carries sugar, so it's a great source for water, the first sport's drink. Even the Mackletree, a sycamore, carries one or two percent. Forget all that crap about a sheep's stomach, use plastic buckets, I only make bamboo spiles because they're cheap and easy, and there's a stand of bamboo west of Friendship on Route 52. Free for the taking. Egyptians used vegetable starch to fill and smooth papyrus. I found polishing with a stone worked very well. It's actually fairly easy to make papyrus if you have the time. Once Ted and I tricked out a decent press, a three-ton hydraulic jack in a very stout frame, we found we could make paper from almost anything, pressure is the key. The micro-fibers on the fibers want to mesh together, felting and papermaking are closely related. The frogs are loud tonight, but I'm listening to Mahler and the frogs don't stand a chance. I take a few breaks, get up for wee drams, smoke a lot, and it takes almost twenty-four hours to listen to nine symphonies. I listen to the cello suites, which is a little over two hours, maybe once a month, they are the most sublime thing I know. I borrowed a book, I have it for a month, and I'd buy a copy but it's quite expensive, that documents the wrought iron work in the American Cathedral in DC. It's incredible. There are still people who can do that. Bronze tools are still very important, where you don't want to make a spark, but the Bronze Age was a brief period, once you learned about higher temperatures and melting other rocks, cast iron, wrought iron, and steel. Steel is purified iron. Coke is charcoal coal. It burns very hot. Converting ore into aluminum requires most of the power grid, but you get these very cool swords, light-weight and sharp. Rain and wind, I'd better go. Read more...

Closely Reasoned

B's probably correct, he often is, that it's a snipe or a woodcock. The Spring Presentation. The frogs are in a breeding frenzy and a good many eggs have survived from the first go around. The much vaunted quiet of the ridge sounds more like a delta road-house. I may have to flip over to the night shift for a week and pay attention to what I can't see. Goddamn Whip-O-Will is icing on the cake. The house is so warm I have windows open on the lee-side, despite the rain, and the moisture feels wonderful at the end of the heating season. An interesting aspect of a rookery is the amount of shit on the ground. I'm thinking about marketing an up-scale guano impregnated leaf-mulch. For those plants you really care about. I don't have any pets, but I end up using the pet food aisle at Kroger (usually) to get to the cash register, but even the express aisles in the supermarket (which the pet food aisle is) can be blocked by two fat people and their shopping carts. I'm patient, as a rule, and I actually enjoy reading the labels telling me the cost per ounce and the sodium content, but I was shocked to see that some of the pet food was so expensive. If I had a cat, which I'd have to name, and I don't want to get into that, I'd assume it ate mice and give it some water. I find it difficult enough to feed myself. If there's any Irish cheddar available, or any of those Nordic herring, I'd keep them for myself, I wouldn't feed them to a cat. I always set the bar fairly high, to make things interesting, failure is a good thing. I was visiting the poet Ted Enslin, at his home in Temple, Maine (before they moved to the coast). He had an ice-house, and burned thirteen cords of wood in an average winter. We talked about failure an entire weekend, deciding we were both quite lucky to have failed so often. I also remember fiddle-head ferns with a cream sauce. When he visited me, later, on Cape Cod, we ate a free seafood harvest that would astound anyone, prying periwinkles free of their shells with bookbinding needles. He was an odd duck, among the many brilliant odd ducks I've known. The moon is that sliver of a Viking longboat tonight, very sharply defined. It's a lovely thing, and brings to mind a hundred tales. I took the day off, though I don't see how it was that different from other days, read about table manners, took a walk, poking under the leaves with my mop handle, discovered the first of those miniature flowers emerging, then read some social theory that I didn't quite understand. A pretty normal day for me, a fried potato sandwich with a slice of onion, a few olives, listen to Bach, water-proof my work boots, read a few of Jim Harrison's poems. It actually takes a concerted effort to slow things down, because the world is spinning so fast.

The cherry blossoms
are a life force you see,
not an illusion.

The final snowfall of the season are the petals from the blossoms of the Bradford Pear, a useless tree, and weak. A specific use might be a bonfire, telling scary stories, ignoring the pops and fizzles. The street is awash in petals. Another day in paradise, what can I say? Read more...

Fully Engaged

On my hotline "Complex Loading Questions" I get into some strange conversations. A builder friend called, from Arizona, wondering about parallel cuts on natural tree-trunk posts. Arcane discussion. Building an eight foot miter-box out of 2x12s, and teasing out methods of dogging down the log. Designing the 'cutting chute' for the actual chainsaw cut. Marking a face of the log (thereby labeling it as 'top') and staying as accurate as possible, within an eighth of an inch over eight feet. There are four natural log posts in this house, three of them are nearly perfect, the fourth one I had to do some sanding on a beam that had twisted slightly in drying. I peaked at this twenty years ago, but I still remember the moves. Increasingly all I do is wander about the ridge and look at things. The deer are beginning to nudge through the leaves for green stuff underneath. The next time I go out I should be able to find cattail shoots. I put a couple of mesh bags in my day-pack, in case I find anything. Also one of those little sample bottles of hot sauce. There's a dish I prepare on the trail, that I would never ask anyone else to eat. Fried minnows with hot sauce. I perfected this recipe walking into a Indian ruin, nameless, in southern Utah. I'd chew a willow stick down to a brush, and I always carried a junior baby-food jar of bacon fat which was half-melted from my body heat, brush the minnows, impaled on sticks, doused with hot sauce and slurped in a single bite. I carry a cornbread mix, add boiling water and heat on a rock, pone cake, which is either a fat tortilla or a hoe-cake cooked on a flat surface, but always sops up the goodness. Rain starts overnight, so I get up, empty a bucket of water into the soup kettle (for heating later), and set the bucket out to harvest rainwater. Second nature, things done as a matter of course. Soon I'll have to start filtering the wash water, to strain out the pollen. A square of tee-shirt (six per tee-shirt, Goodwill, dollar bag day) in a strainer that perfectly spans the top of a five-gallon bucket. Strainers, I think, have been around for a long time. Almost dawn so I just stay up, brew my double espresso, eat a bowl of cheese grits with bacon bits. Monet was a good cook, Vincent not so good. I can't actually find any Monet recipes, but I know, from his letters, that Van Gogh ate beans on toast quite often. It's good to know small details. They tend to humanize. Emerson changing the conversation when Thoreau started talking about the breeding habits of turtles. I know a lot more about olives than I used to. I'm always interesting in foodstuffs that require complex preparation. Tapioca. I forget what day it is and haven't changed the calendar to March yet; I had to admit to the police the other day that I didn't remember what day last Saturday even was. A feeble witness to nothing. Incessant rain, but the frost is out of the ground and I can at least travel freely. A dreary afternoon and I entertain the idea of taking a road trip, get out the atlas for a look at possibilities. It's a fantasy, and one I love, because I do love maps, but decide, ultimately, that I'd rather stay at home and buy a nice single-malt. A trip to town is adventure enough, I can take a thorough sponge bath, eat a great meal, and still come out ahead. It's very cool to sleep in clean linens and watch cable, I'd be the first to admit, but it does seem to dodge the question. The rain goes on forever. Read more...

Strange Noise

It doesn't take much to wake me up, and I'm sure it isn't actually a monkey, but it sounds like what I would imagine a monkey to sound like. If it's a bird, which I suspect, I've never heard it before. Maybe it's a parrot. At the height of selling raw milk to people raising exotic pets, which was a lucrative sideline, I attended the birth of several camels; they made a sound like that. Plaintive. I have a auditory file of sounds that I can't identify. The death kneel of a rabbit, two ewes a lambing, that little song and dance a hen gives when she's laid another egg. Bats in the belfry, seriously, I carry a tennis racket wherever I go. A second cup of coffee, and I was sitting on the back porch, lacing up my work boots, considering where I would walk, when I heard a car on the driveway. I'm a little irritated at being interrupted, but I see it's The Law, so I put on my friendly face. Two guys, one is the Highway Patrol investigator I'd met before and the other one is in a suit complete with tie, introduced as Doug, from the Ohio Bureau Of Investigation. I ask them inside, for a cup of coffee, and apologize for the extreme clutter; they don't seem to mind, and seem to notice everything. I have to explain a few things for them, lifestyle choices and such. Doug takes shine to the cookstove and I explain the double damper system. Getting down to business, another tractor had been stolen, up where Rocky Fork meets 125, and they wondered if I had seen or heard anything. I laughed out loud. Not, I said, anything that would be relevant to their case, that mostly what I heard was the wind, and for the last couple of months most of what I saw was water in one form or another. After they left, I wondered if I was being assessed as some sort of potential problem. I am guilty of passing along some tripe recipes, and I've advocated civil disobedience on occasion, but I don't see how I could be viewed as a threat. I'm trying to arrange a trip to town to do my laundry, I don't actually have the time to be a bad guy. Mostly I feel like a runt pig, sucking on the hind teat. My Mom and my cousin Jackie both talk in southern idioms, you can never expect a straight answer. A simple question, "Is Jim picking up beer?" is met with a story about bird dogs. There's a tangential meaning implied, the implication that there's an overlap somewhere; even if I can't find it, and I find it exciting that language can do that. I'd much rather spend an hour in a 'tense' situation, thinking about tense, than create a plan for getting to the laundromat. I want to wash everything, all the towels and washcloths, the linens, then clean the kitchen, then vacuum all the corners, and recycle at least a ton of paper. My goal, when I go to town anymore, is to not set off any alarms. Late for my walk, because of the interruption, so I mentally check off any idea of getting to the laundromat. Take some Trail Mix and a cup for drinking spring water and set out to find the headwaters of a nameless rill that flows south and west. I'd set out some watercress there last year, near there, I'd never actually found the source. Ends up being a seep where a shelf of sandstone forms a solid layer. There's a bit of an overhang, not a cave exactly, but a protected spot, and I sit there for a long time, watching the water flow. It's very cold and quite delicious. I have some very good maps, and I'm sure that when I get home, I'll be able to figure out where I was. The wind is blowing a full gale by the time I get back to the house. I duck inside, check my batteries, shut down completely. I got the whole winter laundry scene together and headed of to town, straight to the laundromat, not straight exactly because they had closed down Mackletree and I had drive back then all the way around. Everything I own is clean and dry. The staff at the pub all agreed that my hermit look was coming along nicely. Came back home up the creek and it was lovely, there must be a dozen little waterfalls. Stopped at B's and he was building some rock steps at the front of his house, we took a water break and chatted about his family, then I beat it on home, with groceries and laundry. By the time I got everything put away the day was gone. Made a plate of pickles, kimchee, cheese and crackers, settled in my chair, and read a New Yorker. Satisfied with my efforts. Tomorrow I want to put the remaining inside wood in the wood-box and sweep. Rain forecast for Friday through Sunday, but still warm, so I can use some water, maybe vacuum and mop; and now that I have clean clothes, I'd like to clean up personally, and powder my privates. Citrus pips are non-determinate, any of the various (and they are various) species can grow from any seed. You don't know what you have until you harvest a fruit. Grafting, which I had thought of as a fairly late development, must have been early. Quite a leap. Grafting is quite sophisticated. The library calls, and they're holding a book for me. Probably a new Sanford novel. On my way out of town, I could get some potato wedges. Read more...

Attachments

There's a great, absolutely secure, almost completely invisible attachment called a coffin lock. They're expensive, and I was thinking about how I didn't mind, maybe even preferred, exposed attachment. Totally sidetracked. Mid-day, temps above freezing, and it starts snowing hard, large flakes. A white-out for a couple of hours. Absolutely mesmerizing. I just wander around the house looking out different windows. Listening to the drip and watching it snow just about as hard as is possible. Instant slush, several inches thick. I had a can of squid in ink that I needed to use, so I made a very quick pasta that proved delicious. Squid needs to cook for less than a minute or more than hour and I'm fond of it both ways. I was in Columbus, once, with the daughters, museum hopping, shopping at ethnic markets, and they talked me into buying a 15 pound block of frozen cleaned squid. For a while, we were the tempura capital of the world. The drip is incessant and the slush is sublimating. I finally put on some music, Bach, and just zone out. It's nice, being in the dark, remembering emotional attachments. My last Florida sweetheart, Sandy Harper, was tough to leave; I liked her a lot and loved her family, but it was already ordained that I would run away with the circus. It still amazes me that I hit the rails. By all rights I should have stayed local, but I kept meeting interesting people and one thing led to another. I couldn't say where the line lay, some where in the Back Bay, eating pasta with Beverly Sills, talking about a new (and final) opera; or that one night, when the original SNL cast, pitched their show to me. Another dawn, no rain, the snow is mostly gone, and another thaw cycle is under way. Supposed to be seventy degrees the next couple of days. When I went to sleep last night I was reading about olive trees and when I got up this morning (still on my stoking-the-fire schedule) I let the fire go out, poured a night-cap and went right on reading. Slate gray sky, and the diffused light is strange on a bleak landscape. I made a lovely jam/marmalade, red onion and mandarin orange, and as soon as I heard the forecast, I baked another pone of cornbread. No fire for a few days. I need a new grill for my grill, the small Weber I use most of the time. I figure to go to the welding shop and get them to cut me a circle from some kind of grating. A plasma cut, so there'd be no rough edges, and I could cure it according to the revised standard code. I'd hate to be a fruit grower right now, because the trees will want to bloom, but there is still a serious treat of frost. My plans are mundane, do the laundry, stop by the library; I've stock-piled enough credit that I can afford a very good steak, a sweet potato, and a pint of kimchee. If it is true, that I've survived another winter, I have only my wits to blame. A break in the overcast, some shafts of sunlight, shadows that I hadn't seen in days. Fucking crows come squawking in, they seem to be setting up a rookery over near the graveyard. Very loud, I go out and sit on the back porch, smiling at how the pristine silence can be so totally interrupted. It's like a young war. They'll be quiet after dark. The ground had firmed and I went for a little walk, checking buds. Two red-headed woodpeckers are a nice splash of color. I was composing a comic opera in my head, a sexually ambiguous rock-star was running for president, there was a great song and dance number about how not knowing was better than knowing. You can dance around that. My hero. Tom O' Bedlam. I love the apparent sense. That the fact was, a bikini model could become the first Lady. Read more...

White Again

The snow I mean, the usual fucking winter wonderland. Soft and slightly sticky, the branches are quickly covered. Small crystals, delicate and ephemeral. I look outside, once in a while, but I'm much more interested in the fact that chickens were raised mostly as fighting cocks; eating chicken, or eggs for that matter, just wasn't done. You might sacrifice one, spitted and grilled, and it would disappear, among the acolytes, with much licking of fingers. Pretty soon, grilled chicken becomes a standard of the diet. Peril and taboo. It's so quiet, when I get up to pee, I know the snow has continued. I pee in a piss-pot and flip on the back porch light, three inches of slightly compacted new wet snow with a drip line at the eaves. Right at freezing. Dangerous weather, the roads will be terrible tomorrow morning, school delays and various warnings. Then flood warnings, because there's no place for the melt to go, and, of course, the driveway is semi-molten. I'm a little hungry, so I fry a couple of polenta cakes and have them with local honey. I'm a great believer in local honey as an anodyne for local disease. Or local molasses. I read all day, an entire span of hours, drank tea, moved some commas around. Most of time I wasn't even aware of what was going on around me. Put another log on the fire, get a wee dram of Irish, roll a smoke; fall into a reverie, a lost hour in a lost day. I'm content with this. Tree snow cascading all day. Cabin fever, so I had to get outside, walked over several ridges tops, a saunter actually, because I stopped and looked closely at dozens of bushes. Swelling is evident at the branch tips, and I marvel at the natural anti-freezes that make this possible. Stopped at a puddle and raked away the snow to examine the frog eggs. Some of them survived the last cold snap. I'd love to be able to monitor temperature in these egg clusters. When I finally brought myself to taste the embryonic fluid, realized how sweet it was, and what a heat producing miniature power plant each proto-tadpole-egg actually was, it was a minor revelation. Survival is more than just not freezing, it's about storing energy in seeds and eggs, starting another growing season, toss the caber again. My depth-of-field perception is completely destroyed by which branches hold the snow and which release. Background and foreground all exist on the same plane and it's very disconcerting, I kept walking into bushes thinking they were ten feet away. Many prints in the snow, dozens of stories. A flock of turkeys had moved through and they had plowed up every leaf in their swath. There seem to be a great many grouse. I haven't heard any owls, but they must be about, the sign all points to it. Un-insulated footgear, and my feet were freezing, came inside, stoked the fire, heated water, and soaked them for a few minutes. A blissful flood of warmth. Pampered is a relative word., but massaged toes are a stair step to heaven. Read more...

Good Timing

Slept a bit late, then slow to get started, but I needed to get to town. Library, then the courthouse to file papers on my tree farm, for the tax break. Then the pub for a conversation with Justin and Cory, talk about the prep for St. Patrick's Day. I don't need much from the store, some light bulbs (truly become a shopping nightmare), some steel-cut oats, batteries for one of the flashlights, a new rice, a bottle of single-malt. Stopped on the way home at the Quik Stop and got eight fried potato wedges. Got down Mackletree as the first drops started, got my mail and easily up the hill just as real rain started. It's not surprising that my timing has been very good on trips to town this winter, now that the necessary is removed, a job or any kind of collaboration, I can pick the best time to get in and out. So I have new books, I'm current on bills and paperwork. About five-thirty it started raining hard, supposed to change over to snow later, one trip out to the woodshed, before I get out of work-boots and into slippers, then settle in to read the history of lemons. The driveway is, surprisingly, in good shape, for this time of year. The added width and camber means the track can creep outside. Unless we get a deluge before the leaves start unfurling, I'm fairly confidant about access. This is a good thing. Not that I want to get in and out, but that I could. So much water, the creeks are running spate, and the napp at the spillway is a smooth sheet twelve inches thick. I hadn't walked over, this winter, to feel the percussive blow in my body. It's an amazing thing, and the noise, my god, it approaches the painful. And this isn't punk rock or whatever, it's what's happening down at the dam. Get home before the rain, nuke some leftovers, think about how nice a fresh pone of cornbread will be tomorrow. Dean Of Forgiven Future Mistakes. I've been cloistered, it's true, I don't pay attention to almost anything except the very next thing I see, or hear, or feel; after the fact, I might have an opinion, but I don't mention that. It's not worth the bother. I used to love to argue, anymore I just nod my head and stay silent. A friend of mine said to me recently that I was getting more abstract, that the more I got into things the less real they became. I know what she meant, it seems surreal to me. Hollow freezing rain, sleet, the phone has been out for twenty-four hours, so I have no idea when I'll be able to send again, and the sense of isolation is exacerbated. I have to turn off the radio, as the whole Super Tuesday, Trump, Clinton, brokered conventions, all becomes too much. I still have leftovers but I'm thinking ahead to a pot of Black Crowder peas, served on a bed of one of those new nutty Louisiana rice varieties. Sweet release, a long sleep and no bad dreams. Outside to pee and sniff the air, and it smells like snow. Go back inside and get dressed, start some coffee, carry in an armload of wood. I have what I need, so I settle in with a history of chickens. It starts snowing, and the quiet quotient, which was close to zero, fell even lower. A few drips of water off the upper roof in the afternoon and it's snowing harder, not actually in the forecast, "little accumulation" indeed, but it's a bad combination for an ice storm. Blessedly the phone makes a half-bleep, which means it's working, so I'll send this now. Read more...