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.