Quiet Holiday

Actually most of my holidays are quiet. I stay home, so as to stay off the roads, no one calls because everyone else has something to do, and I often treat myself to a nice dinner with a bottle of wine. Low profile. I read for a few hours, something fairly light but engaging, a Lee Child novel is good; then slip on my little day pack and go for a walk. Memorial Day is interesting, because I usually see my first rattlesnake about then, and the ticks are out, which means I won't go into the deep woods as often. I stick to the driveway and the logging roads, which are precisely not natural, but are interesting nonetheless. I talked to Mom, and she said again that I always amused myself. I have trouble understanding why most people need such social connection. I don't have time for it. Sweet potatoes were cheap so I'd bought a couple. pierced them with a fork, rubbed them with butter, wrapped them in foil, and cooked them right next to the coals; a small bacon wrapped filet of beef, pan seared (my preferred method, because I don't lose any juice) with a wilted endive and watercress salad. I had about $25 dollars worth of morels with the steak and in the salad. Samara calls and demands that I come and visit, and bring dried morels, she thought reconstituting them in sweet wine sounded like a good idea. So warm, even after dark, I have to give Black Dell a break. It's pleasant, sitting on the back porch, the door open, lights off, having a drink. A breeze that smells sweet and green. In the dark, but happy to be there; no debt, no medication, a general sense of good-will, what more could you ask? I never thought I'd get there, it was always a remote idea, extremely remote. Fifteen years of child-support and trying to carve out a living. B called and he was going to smoke a couple of pork loins and some sweet potatoes, so I went down. Excellent company and a great meal. The sweet potatoes took longer to cook than the loins. Homemade applesauce, homemade bread. Ronnie and I sat on the screened back porch, smoking, drinking beer, talked about distilling whiskey. I used to feed spent grains to the pigs, they'd get drunk and fall over. For years, in Mississippi, it was a spectator sport, with bleachers and a refreshment booth. The first time one fell over, with twitching legs, I was sure I had killed him, but he got up, in a little while, and staggered off. Excellent entertainment. Tonight, listening to Wayne and Ronnie talk about fighting fires in the state forest, was completely fascinating. I'm a cheap date, I actually like watching the tide come in, or waiting for it to go out so I can dig some clams. Read more...

Stress Failure

Inadequate bracing. There's a great deal of outward pressure placed on walls. The entire weight of the roof plus whatever load (three feet of snow) there might be. I was looking at one of the collapsed houses on my new route. It's a classic case: the walls blew outward and the entire roof fell straight down. In this instance the problem, I repeat myself, was one of attachment. Hurricane clips have largely solved this, a simple twisted piece of metal mandated after Andrew, that ties opposing strengths together. I like bolting things. A through-bolt, through a ten-inch oak beam, is a pretty solid connection. Under tension, bolts are good, if they don't exaggerate a fault of grain. There's a hardness scale, called the Rockwell Scale, that applies to bolts and rivets. One is soft, and five is very hard. A three, I find, I often shear off the head and have to back the bolt out, which is a pain in the ass; fours, and fives in particular, you can use a monkey wrench with a cheater pipe and there is no way you'll shear the head. Building this place, there was a day, after the beam set, when I needed to set twenty-two 8 inch lag bolts, a counter-sink bore and pilot hole for each, then setting the bolts. Full-shouldered tendons and I wanted a good bit of compression on them, so I borrowed a pneumatic impact wrench, which worked great but was one of the loudest days of my life. I used more bolts than that on the stairs, but only one or two at a time, so I went back to a socket wrench. You can read about these, and other stories, in my never published but widely circulated pamphlet, Bridwell On Bolts, which is worth reading just for the self-deprecating tale What Is A Carriage Bolt? Kim got directions when he called, and he'll be fine, then I talked to Joel and he thought I needed to meet Diane some place out in the world, the post office parking lot outside of Friendship, and lead her in from there. The difference is that Kim will drive in, Diane will require transport, to leave her Prius at the bottom of the driveway. Kim is a regular guest, once a year for his trip to Canada, and a real treat. Diane I haven't seen in twenty years, and I'm not sure she understands that I don't live her way anymore. I don't care about that world. My sister calls to say that Mom is dying, she's ninety, it's not unexpected, and she has become humorously disconnected. Imagining trash cans as distant relatives. About midnight it starts raining again and I have to get up and shut some windows. A lovely sound. I have to let the pollen wash off the roof before I can harvest rainwater, so I get a drink and roll a smoke, read an interesting piece about the mating practices of black bears. A nice cooling breeze, off the rain, and it's very dark, except for my reading light. The weather was coming from the NW so I could leave the SE window, in front of my desk, open, and the aromas rolling in; thunder and lightning, but it's off to the south, and shouldn't threaten my power. The thunder is great, rolling those impossible bass notes, against a background of drips. Berlioz does a storm very well, in the Royal Hunt And Storm, I forget which opera, and I always thought Sibelius did weather rather well. And that other Scandinavian, Delius (?) who actually lived in Florida for a while. His writing cabin had been reconstructed (from the original logs) where I went to college and it was spare. Like Henry on food-stamps. Another turtle shell, did you ever notice the way the layers overlap? Read more...

No GPS

How does GPS deal with detours? The road department finally got decent signage mounted, so one could tease out the detour route. The other route would be all the way up the creek from 52, the river road, but it winds around so much you're often driving by looking out your side windows. Coming in the detour route there are several abandoned house sites, two completely fallen down old houses, and the trailer where everything the family has ever owned is strewn around the yard. It's a nice drive. I've stopped at most of the abandoned sites, looking for fruit trees. I've come to believe that turkeys are a primary vector for spreading morel spore. This morning I listened to a flock coming off the roost. I'd slept downstairs, the windows were open, and they were as clear as day. They were all clucking, as they got down to the ground, not really flying, more of a controlled fall. Cluck, cluck, thump. They must have roosted on the ridge, and then were headed off to the west. Their feeding ground for the day. Maybe they'll be back tonight. I got a couple of things done, loaded a few hundred pounds of magazines and book reviews into the Jeep for recycling, got out supplies and rubber gloves to clean the cast iron sink and drain board, dug a hole in the compost pile, for some shit and ashes, and cut some green stuff, a path to the outhouse, to top up the pile. I have to tend to the dying fridge, I need a small freezer, for next winter, and maybe 8 cubic feet of cold storage, and no doubt I can arrange this. I have friends in high places. It finally hit me that this is a holiday weekend, when I didn't want to be on the roads, so I hurried into town for whiskey and oysters, a few other things, a trip to the library, a stop at the pub. Speak to a few people. Kroger is crowded, but I have a grin on my face, because the seafood lady had treated me very well indeed, 18 oysters and a No Charge sticker, she says she hates to throw them away, even though she'd never eat one. A couple of these are bad, and I just throw them outside, the coons or crows will eat them, then grill the rest open, to make a morel-oyster stew. A big day for reptiles moving on the roads. I stop for snakes. Linda emailed that morels were finally available in St. Paul for $49.95 a pound, which seems about correct to me, if you factor in a ten-dollar minimum wage for all that walking around. I think about getting fresh morels from Oregon to St. Paul, and then the store that finally sells them, and the profit margin for everyone along the way. Yesterday was the day, and I swear this is true, that the turtles started crossing the road. There is reason behind this (moving to the lowlands for water) but it's often suicidal. The good-old boys like to squash them with their trucks, so I have to stop and get them off the road, move them down-slope to the verge. This will continue for a week or two, then the reverse in the fall. A crude method of keeping time. In the patois of the time, early North America, when Kentucky was common hunting and salt territory, there must have been a sign for "when the turtles move down" as a way of setting up a meeting for next year. Which is not quite as accurate as "when the Dog Star rises" but actually works just fine. You have to adjust to a different sense of time. The last house I helped build in Utah, I lived in a trailer park on a Navaho reservation, and their sense of time had no relationship with time as determined by the British railway system. Noon today might well mean noon tomorrow, they got hung up, moving his cousin's sheep from one pasture to another, drinking with his father's brother's wife's family, or simply forgot. The turtles never move before the walnut trees leaf. I know what I observe is insignificant, patterns that I imagine are errant samplings. I don't desire much, not getting arrested, avoiding boring conversations, not falling. B and I talked about smoking vegetables. I've been making what you might call a smoked frittata, with purple potatoes and onions in a browned butter. If you add half a pound of morels, it's truly spectacular. I used a sling-blade to cut the young blackberry canes on the path to the outhouse. With house-guests coming I thought to tidy up a bit. Kim next weekend, then Diane the week after that. It'll be fun, but I can't write when anyone else is in the house, so I'll be even more intermittent. I look forward to some great conversations. Even though this means compromise. You and me babe. Read more...

Thinking Back

Got off the ridge, it had been a week and I needed a few things. I wanted to make lasagna, and I was into my back-up whiskey. Country roads are lovely this time of year. The snakes are out, dead on the roads, slipping away at night to suck the heat from a roadbed. I stop and throw them off the road. there was a crushed box turtle and I scooped the remains onto a plastic bag. When I got home, I cleaned off all of the shell pieces and spent an evening super-gluing the shell back together. This is at least as good as watching a decent show on TV, or watching a movie. Some pieces lock together, a dozen or more perfect connections, some are more vague, I have to say, the whole idea for doing this was lifted completely from Thoreau, either at Walden, or just before, he'd reconstructed a turtle shell. Stopped at The Buckeye Diary Bar on the way home for a large vanilla shake and marveled how good it was. Simple pleasures. Avocados are cheap right now, 69 cents, so I bought a bunch of those, I mostly eat then right out of the shell, with lime juice and black pepper, sometimes with salsa, I love the mouth-feel; sometimes on toast with hot pepper jam. Not wanting to start a fire, I made an extremely easy lasagna with pre-cooked noodles and a tomato/meat sauce from a jar, cheese, and topped it with morels cooked in butter. Cooked it in the toaster oven. This worked very well. I'd been to the library and gotten some topical fiction, so after a nap, I just stayed up all night reading. I figured I could sleep tomorrow, it's supposed to rain anyway. I need to restore a semblance of order to the piles of books, and I think I can put the rest of the firewood to rest in the wood-box, clean up the wood debris. A winter's accumulation of cast-iron skillets that needed to be treated and hung from the beam in the kitchen, books that need to be shelved, duck thighs that needed to be submerged in pork fat. But I'm good with this, especially if D arrives with a load of white oak stumps. I always park at the side of Kroger, so I can get out the back way. Going out that way, the second street bridge over the Scioto, the red maples are dominate. It seems they can digest anything. Which is quite a talent. Both rivers, the Scioto and the Ohio, flood frequently here, and these trees often keep their roots in water (from which, if you eat the fish at all, once a month is the recommended maximum) that smells of diesel fuel and sewage treatment plant. The muskrats are thriving though. No one traps them in town. They favor a backwater where a crude and ugly jetty alters the flow of the Ohio. It's a swirling debris field, and there are lots of dead minnows, which suit the muskrats just fine. I love watching them. They're almost as cool as otters. Dad knew about otters, he was always surprising me with things he knew about, but an important aspect of being a country kid was knowing your environment, and he had learned that where an otter slide came down a bank and into the water there was likely a spawning bed for perch (sunfish, bluegills) and that would be a good place to fish. During the Depression, when buying shotgun shells was a luxury, he only shot quail when they were crossing and he could get two with one shot. Raised as an orphan, by an extended family, everyone pulled for the commonweal. When Dad finally got an outboard motor (late 50's?) we'd go way up Julington Creek, looking for otter slides. Not often, but once in a while, if we were very still, the otters would come to play. A Walt Disney movie based on a short story by Poe, or a movie based on a Kafka scenario. Then you couldn't access this area, except by water, now it's completely connected, bridges and roads with exits. Shell-crackers, another perch, tended to feed on bridge abutments, little freshwater mussels that collected there, and I loved their fillets, dipped in cornmeal, fried in hot lard. I haven't deep-fried fish in years, though I still make hush-puppies. My recipe is about five thousand years old; three thousand years ago they started adding an egg, a thousand years ago they started adding minced onion/pepper. I use a melon baller, to form them, and they're a perfect bite-size; Carlene, who makes the best hush-puppies in the world, forms them with two tablespoons, they're larger, two bites, which is a bonus if you're spreading something on them. I recommend a morel tapinade, drinking an old-vines zinfandel, Miles in the background, Kind Of Blue, your hand, still slick, on someone's thigh. You might tap an off beat. I've listened to B/B maybe a hundred times, the Cello Suites at least that many times (two hours and fifteen minutes, on average), two other albums, from that time, were the Grateful Dead in Europe, and an Allman Brothers Band compilation where Dwayne and Dickey duke it out. This was about the same time as Boz Skaggs first album. Dwayne is amazing on that, extraordinary guitar playing. "Buddy can you spare me a dime...". That's what's his name, Stephen Foster, and a chorus in the background, great arrangement, John Phillips, that fucking brass, but I'd actually rather just be left alone, a dire wolf, the last of a dying breed. Read more...

Oak Galls

Cynipines, very small wasps (an eighth of an inch) are responsible for the oak apple gall which are the ones I most commonly take off branches. They're interesting to cut apart. A hard outer skin, warty, shades of yellow and brown, then an inner skin which is somehow composed of almost pure tannin, then a moist core that is quite sweet. The adult wasps build a gall, lay some eggs, goes off and dies; the larva eat the sweet stuff, dine on smaller bugs, and repeat the cycle. In the spring, around here, you get these fat, slow houseflies. Pregnant? Queen Flies? Clearly I don't know enough about flies, but they can be annoying and I've found the 100% successful fly-trap. I eat tinned Mandarin orange segments often, and I'd left a tin out, with a bit of the 'light' syrup left in the bottom. The next morning all six of the flies were drown in it. Excellent. I knew there were six because I'd caught them all and marked them with carpenter's chalk. This is easier than it sounds, I've marked honey-bees for years, to find wild hives, it's a simple procedure. When bees are feeding they're preoccupied, and fat spring flies are just stupid, the only difficulty is handling them without killing them. I wear cotton gloves, but I still lose a few. It's very easy to kill a fly, especially, it seems, when you've gone to great lengths to color code his identity. I just killed purple. It was an accident. I'm sorry. The play of shadow and light is a lovely thing, I sit outside and get completely lost. I'd been reading about the basal flair of oak trees. The author said it was largest of any tree, though I question that the cypress might be more. There was mention of the Eiffel Tower. So I read about the Eiffel Tower, about which I knew nothing. Opened 1889, two years to build, 18,038 parts, 2.5 million rivets, weighs 7,000 tons, 300 meters tall. One resident at the time called it "a truly tragic street lamp", and I'm inclined to agree. I would like to see the plan for the foundation. And we can only imagine the scaffolding that was necessary. I'd opened a can of baked beans, because I wanted baked beans and smoked meat on toast, with mushroom gravy, and I thought about a local phrase "I wouldn't care to" meaning that they wouldn't mind doing whatever it was. "I wouldn't care to bring the baked beans" means that they'll bring the baked beans. It'll be no problem, they don't mind, we all know they make great baked beans. I have trouble understanding English, I can't imagine translating into it; whenever I'm out, I hear things I don't understand. Nothing unusual, I usually listen to birds, and this is supposed to be the big year for cicadas. This area overlaps several different groups, and what I hear and read has said this should be a very loud summer. Bugs and political rhetoric. Be lucky to get through this with half a brain. Moonlight. Went out to pee and it was beautiful, so I got a drink and rolled a smoke, sat on the back porch in my Selma rocker, with the stadium blanket over my shoulders, and stared into the middle distance. I suppose cicadas are edible, I'll have to check. This whole group, crickets, grasshoppers, locust are about 45% protein. Not that I want to try, but I could live fairly well off bugs, acorns, and wild greens. Being civilized, I'll go into town tomorrow for the first farmer's market. Too early to expect much, some salad greens, so I'll get a small piece of salmon or tuna, maybe a loaf of Ronnie's bread. A browned butter to wilt the greens, and some mushrooms; and I do deserve a decent wine, because I've almost saved enough cash to cover the bi-annual bills, and I have a month to go, a month in which I spend almost nothing, little electricity, rotating the stock in my pantry. Red beans and rice, with cheap whiskey, Greg Brown on the radio, I can't imagine it gets any better than this. Read more...

Language

Every discipline requires a certain jargon. I use a fair number of carpenter terms because I was one for so many years, ditto printing and a dozen other fields of interest. I'd like to write a book called The Plumber's Patois but it sounds too much like a romance novel. "I knew from the moment I saw his butt-crack, when he leaned over to look under the sink, that we were going to make love." Another gray day, tender spring leaves turned inside out. I did get in a little walk, between showers, came home and made a nice single serving of mushroom soup. It occurs to me that I'm incredibly self-indulgent. I don't actually deny myself anything, I just don't want much. I find that the less I desire the easier it is to get along. TR's at the museum, another lazy Saturday, and we talk about shape-note singing, about musical notation; I'm curious about this, because I'd been reading about dance notation. They just recovered an early dance, 1910, caught on early film, that they had thought was lost. No one remembered the steps. Now there's notation, and of course digital reproduction. There's a record of everything. They know when I buy whiskey at Kroger. God knows what they do with that information. You have to scan a 'Kroger Card', to get the discounts, but I always use a card I've found in the parking lot, let someone else be responsible for my artichoke hearts. I made an oyster stew with morels and it's so good I feel guilty. Anything that tastes so good, and smells so good, must, in some way, be bad for you. I had to laugh, and I don't think Thoreau was trying to be funny, but at some point he rediscovers the square knot is superior to the overhand knot for tying shoe laces. I double-knot my shoe laces. Most of us that work in the woods wear boots that have six sets of eyelets and then two or three sets of cleats that you wrap the laces around; then you wrap the loose ends a couple of times around the top of the boot and double knot it. The Woodsman's Footwear. Which, I had the thought, would be a good title for a book on bondage. Too much cordage, I think, all the diagrams of rigging, have my interest, the naming, the re-purposing of words. A stay, for instance. A marlin spike. Taking a reef in the main sail. So much pollen in the air it makes collecting rain water rather a chore. I have to cut a couple of tee-shirts into filter cloths, then strain the water into a second bucket. I have no idea why collecting rainwater should be illegal, but Mac tells me there's a bill pending in Ohio. Heaven forbid I should break a law. Protect me, oh noble state legislators, from myself. I manage to get into quite a rage which I relieve by taking my clippers and walking down the driveway, clipping green-briar where it droops into the roadway. Up on top, the last hundred yards to the house, is a complete green tunnel, the last step in the mediation between the ridge and the rest of the world. I spent the afternoon examining seedlings, oaks and maples mostly, looking at the root systems. With the oaks, these yearlings are much busier underground than above. The root systems are amazing. I clean one of these with a soft brush, and the root-hairs disappear into nothing, angel hair. I threw a golf ball, then marked off a square yard where it landed, nine oak saplings, five of red maple, ferns, blackberry canes, every adventitious species known to man. It's a marvel. With my straight spade I'd opened a trench around my nominal square yard and I was busy with my inventory when a car drove up that I didn't recognize, one of the state cops that had been out here when tractors were disappearing. He's got his lady-friend with him, and he wanted her to see my lair. We have a beer, and I'm extremely careful because he carries a gun and she's attractive, with shapely ankles. Read more...

Squall Line

All night gentle waves of rain. Whenever there was a thunder storm warning on the radio I'd shut down, but nothing ever came of it. I kept the radio on, low volume (I did go over and turn it up to listen to some Clapton), because when the weather service breaks in there's a claxon sound, like a submarine diving, and they repeat everything, which is quite handy for half-asleep dimwits. It's a fine little radio piece, always, because they name the small towns that are threatened, you know exactly where that thunder cell is, and where it's heading. In tornado country, they take these thunder cells seriously. I had my emergency kit out, oil lamp, a candle for the island, my headlamp. Spent the entire night thinking about fences. Thoreau was talking about some fences around Concord that were made from inverted stumps. I'd never heard of this before, but it makes a kind of Yankee sense, like dry-stack stone walls. I have an inverted stump in my house right now, so I'm current on this. I imagine the entire process, building an inverted stump fence. Clearing a field, grubbing out the stumps, hauling them by horse, standing them upright (upside down), cutting and intertwining the roots. I love this, because it rots and disappears, maybe it lasts for ten or fifteen years, then it's gone, food for worms, where a barbed wire fence, with Osage orange posts, could last a hundred years. A stone wall might last a few thousand. Fences and walls divide space, and I get into an elaborate argument about whether or not that signifies anything. Paddocks and pasture. Defining space. Meaning is flaking a point, killing a young turkey, finding a clear cold spring. All the rest of it, appearance, is illusion. Read more...

Some Rigging

I want to get down and see what's happening at the bridge site but it's a ten mile dead end right now. Settle for a walk in the woods and realize quickly that it's going to be a bad tick year, I have to bag my clothes when I get home, until the next trip to the laundromat. Still and quiet all day, as if in anticipation of something. No crickets or birds, no planes, trains, trucks or sirens. I'm filthy again, from cleaning out corners, but it's supposed to warm back up tomorrow and I should be able to take a sponge bath. I had sliced smoked beef with morels on toast, with a browned butter sauce, which, with B's French bread made a wonderful sop. As a dish at my imaginary restaurant, Shit On A Shingle, it would have to be $40, to make any profit, but at my house it costs about 42 cents. The meat was free, the mushrooms are free, B baked the bread, and I used half a stick of butter. A friend had sent me some rigging diagrams, and they're quite complex, the stays on the main mast alone are almost beyond comprehension, and they're not even working lines. In the nautical world, the half-hitch is the perfect knot, because it releases under load, you can try this in several different ways, but you need to be careful, because a whip-lashed piece of hemp can take your head off. A boarding party used axes to chop at the stays, drop the mast and you win the day. 100% chance of rain for several days, so I got outside again, before it moved in, and picked a few mushrooms. Heavy feel to the air, and the soft leaves of spring are all hanging down. Back inside it's cool enough to need my bathrobe but not cool enough for a fire, get a drink, roll a smoke, slow my heartbeat, and read Thoreau for a couple of hours. Dripping rain on a metal roof is a lesson in the infinite. I read that a cord of dry white oak, burned, would yield 23 million British thermal units, which is about the same as 100 gallons of fuel oil. I'd never seen that comparison made before, which led to a sidetrack, into comparing relative values: one comma or three bananas? A rabbi, a Baptist minister, and a duck go into a bar. Read more...

Overwhelmed

Too much beauty. Blue flowers in the grader ditch, the dogwoods dropping their blossoms for a blush of soft green. Off the ridge for the first time in a week, and the green is nearly total, and after so much rain saplings hang down into the back roads. A very pleasant drive into town. The pub crew is happy to see me, and several customers shout out greetings, which perplexes the other customers, who wonder who I am. Why are all these people so happy to see a scruffy old guy in overalls? Whiskey, tobacco, and a great deal of food, head home, grinning, at having negotiated another round of the social contract. Stop at B's for some of the left-over meat, and he had saved me some potato salad, plus an extra loaf of french bread. When I get back to the house, I have to arrange an order of meals in my head because I have so much food. As soon as I get home I slice some of the beef, dip it in light soy sauce and dehydrate it into jerky, it'll make a great stew next winter. Put everything away, then dine on thin beef slices on French bread with butter, and potato salad. I can do this with Thoreau propped against my desk. It's difficult to describe, but I feel good about who I am and where I am. The test is that I feel so comfortable. Start a small fire, listen to the crackle, put on my bathrobe and slippers. It seems to me I enjoy great freedom by not being answerable to anyone else's demands. Despite the fact that it means I have to live alone in a cave. You spend a couple of hours hauling logs, to keep a fire going, to keep the tigers from eating you, and you find enough to eat. I heard the phrase 'fat chance' and the phrase 'slim chance', in context they meant the same thing. It must have a name, the rhetorical device whereby opposite words mean the same thing. If you translated them into Chinese, then back into English, what would they say? Something like 'the next time I call rooster, you'll hook up the plow'. Translation is difficult. With dictionaries and a grammar text I can almost handle Latin, except, of course, I miss most of the nuance. I spent several hours teasing out the sense of a couple of lines in Old English. From The Seafarer. About the way a Viking boat moved through the water. The train of thought had been the different ways you could build a boat from oak. I've been thinking about this for years, about how fundamentally different the Nordic boat was from what developed in Western Europe. The Nordic longboat is a flexible skin with a light frame, a ship of the line is a massive frame with a rigid skin. The battle was won by the 44's and the 88's, control of the high seas. Manifest destiny. Could Donald Trump be worse than Andrew Jackson? The real issue is the Supreme Court. The next president stacks that. Don't get me started. Read more...

Anodyne

The day started clear, then clouded over, another frost warning, for tomorrow morning. I needed to be outside for a while. Found a few morels, and generally cleared my brain, back home; a light lunch, reading Joan Didion, After Henry, and I her love her straight spoken, detail driven prose. There are either four or six piles of books clogging my passageways and I spend some time culling, a box for the Goodwill, a box for the library. I intend to get things down to a single layer against the walls. That seems both fair and restrained. The fifth pile is mostly hard cover catalogs of art exhibits. I need to build a special shelf in the girls old bedroom for them. Their covers tend to be slick and they slide. The sixth pile is more of a problem because it's magazines and off-prints, and I have no filing system whatever. It's only awkward when I can't find something (50% of the time) because my usual sense of book size and color has failed me, but I can't imagine what to do with so much information. The ash you collect from a camp fire is not text. My crows are back and they are absolutely obnoxious until I take them hot mice on a cold afternoon. I was reading a Corvid piece the other day, and the researcher felt she was beginning to understand a little Crow. I understand a little, three different sounds: a simple greeting, a warning cry, and what I think of as the usual bickering. They bicker all the time. I stopped feeding humming birds because of the bickering. I have to move quickly away if a couple are bickering at the store, especially if there's a kid involved. It bothers me. That escalation from normal to sharp speech. I didn't know people could get abusive until I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I was always off in a corner reading comics, Classics Illustrated, the next Tom Swift, it never occurred to me to complain, or that people could be so nasty to each other. B called, he'd saved me some meat, and I imagine several meals of beef and morels on toast. I'd exhausted myself, what with the socializing, took a nap and woke again after dark, rain on the roof, phone ringing. An old friend wondering about some walnut lumber, I got a drink, rolled a smoke and we talked about the staircase he wanted to build for a house in Aspen. Cantilevered treads buried in adobe walls, so he needed stout pieces, 3x12's, and he could get them there, but they would be very dear; I could get them here for a fraction of the cost and he could come and get them. He's got a Ford 350, and we spend a few minutes calculating, he needs 13 sticks (so he has to get 14, margin of error) and that shouldn't weigh more than half a ton. $500 for gas and motels, and he makes an extra three grand on the project. Of course, something will go wrong, he'll blow an engine in Kansas and it'll cost three grand, and I advise him to buy the wood there, but he insists he would enjoy the adventure. Fine. It's not my adventure, indulging my fantasizes, anymore, is stopping at the Diary Bar for a milkshake. I'd rather hole up with Thoreau. I just passed the section where he actually lived on the pond, and he excised most of that stuff from the journal, literally: four pages missing, two pages missing, a paragraph missing; he must have used some sort of cut and paste method. I've never read a biography but I suppose I will now. Up most of the night, finishing the Didion, then reading a large section in the Dictionary of Americanisms, fell asleep when it started raining this morning, dreamed about a crowded elevator. There was a narrative element to it, like No Exit, but I didn't know what was going on. After I'd gotten up and got coffee, I called Froggy Taylor at his sawmill in Lynx and he said he could get the logs and that it would be about a thousand dollars. Five thousand less than John had been quoted in Denver. Even if I gave Froggy the go-ahead and the deal fell through, I'd turn a profit. The central problem in all of this is that the wood will be sawn green, and will shrink and want to warp during the drying process. It'll need to be banded and stored out of the weather, but with good air-flow. It would need to stay here, for six months, to get down to 20% moisture, then a couple of months out west, to get down to 10%, so if we cut the logs now, he could use them next spring. I suppose there are kilns available that could do this in a couple of weeks. Kiln dried hardwood is more difficult to work, it's hard and brittle, but massive treads, emerging from adobe walls don't need a lot of finishing. I'm not used to 'fast track', I tend to bring things inside and let them dry, it sometimes takes a while. Read another account of the battle between the USS Constitution and the HMS Guerriere. It's quite amazing how detailed descriptions of these battles are, all the officers keeping journals and the ship's log, letters home. 475 men on the Constitution and she's 147 feet long; tight quarters, but half the crew is on duty at any given time. She's a frigate, a "44" (she carries 44 cannon), a gun crew is 6, so 264 of the crew are gunners, though everyone does everything, especially in battle. I love being engaged by a subject. I just ordered a book on rigging, to try and get a handle on the miles of rope it took to sail a ship of the line. A 44, a frigate, was the smallest ship of the line, Nelson's ship at Trafalgar carried 100 cannons, crew of 1000. A modern American aircraft carrier has a crew of 3000, and I was thinking about feeding all those people. Just before dawn I hear a few bugs and I hope that means it might stop raining for a while, though the rain and much cooler temps could produce a good flush of morels. In the US Navy there are three distinct mess-halls, officers, chiefs, and enlisted, all with different cooks and assistants. Imagine feeding three meals a day to 3000 people. Imagine the logistics involved in setting out to sea. Read more...

Temporal Displacement

Woke up to rain and had no idea whether it was evening or morning. Enjoyed that feeling for a few minutes, of not actually caring. Three in the morning, as usual, and I decided to stay up, make a cup of tea and read Thoreau for a couple of hours. I marvel more and more what people do with their time. I don't mean that in any critical way, I'm just amazed. Hard rain that finally died off about noon, and I needed to get down to B's, to assist getting the meat started. Two old poets barding a beef roast and rubbing a pork loin. Like Pinter on the bus in London, I'll listen to the conversation. I have water for a sponge-bath and a hair-wash, I'm prepared to be civil. It was great fun to prepare and start the meat with B, as neither of us knew what we were doing. We agreed that failure was the only way to learn anything, but suspect this meal might be pretty good. We're both good at this, and we conspire well together. In the course of your life, you don't find that many people to conspire with, so it's good to nail down the date, May 15th, 2016. A Sunday in May. I can't even listen to the news, the Republican party, Trump, spare me, I rather elect a clown, oh, wait a minute. B's calls, and, as feared, the smoker is too hot, I tell him to unplug it, don't open it, and we'll deal with it in the morning (the actual 15th, which dawns blue and beautiful). I call him as soon as I'm awake and he says the meat is cooked, but that we'd need a sauce. I tell him I'll be down at noon and we'll build a sauce from his larder. I'd looked at his larder, when I was down there yesterday, and I think we can make a very nice enchilada, wine, onion, blackberry juice thing, that we can reduce for an hour and will be perfect. Fruit, with the smoke, a bit of sweetness, seems to make sense. It's cold, I start a fire and take a nap. The meat was good, a little over-cooked but tasty, we made a great sauce. After the potato salad and beans arrived, people just started eating, and new items kept arriving, cheese stuffed olives, deviled eggs, slaw, another salad. A grand time. Kids running everywhere. No political talk at all, but some nice conversations about morels, about how the new bridge over Turkey Creek will be that ugly modern type that actually doesn't look like a bridge at all (it looks like a road), and about what beans Ronnie had planted. One bunch of the adults went off with B to look at some plum trees, and I slipped away. I'm not used to the noise level, though I did enjoy some of the one-liners hurled across the room. Zoe has a potty-mouth and she's a lot of fun to be around. There are always at least two divorced couples at a Richards' gathering, sharing kids or grand-kids, and everyone is fine with that. Everyone watches the kids. Jenny lost track of her toddler, but we found him behind the sofa. No harm, no foul, but a few hours of social interaction will do me for a while. The whole panoply of human interaction, all at once, overlapping, for a simple hermit, is difficult to process. Read more...

Wild Mustard

This time of year, the fields that haven't been planted, are a yellow blush, and the yellow day lily always precedes the tiger lily. Down at Turkey Creek there's a stretch of tiger lilies that runs for hundreds of yards. A very light tempura batter, with a beaten egg-white, is good, with a citrus/soy dipping sauce. I made a dish of wild mustard greens with dandelion greens, that was completely inedible, but the first fried lily buds were incredible, sweet and complex, and I vow to go there many times during the coming season. Seems early to me but I saw my first rattlesnake, a female timber rattler, the yellow sub-set, a very beautiful thing, and still half-asleep, so no threat. About five feet long and quite fat, pregnant I think. Hard rain moves in and I shuffle some buckets, fill the soup kettle with enough water to wash my hair. Sunday bodes fair, so I need to clean up before I go down and socialize. Stay on top of this, what's constellated, the mandate being that I pretty much remain myself. I wander into the role of father, wonder at the parts we play. I can't remember my lines and I'm completely blocked in by two fat ladies with shopping carts. Rather than saying something inappropriate, I read the labels on the cat food. I like reading labels and trying to pronounce the names of some of the ingredients. I wanted to ask one of the women (she certainly weighed more than three hundred pounds) where she got her blue jeans. And when they get to that size, how do the people that make them know what to make? Take a class in sail-making. I was in Ted Hood's sail loft in Marblehead a couple of times, once when they were making a main-sail for a 12 meter boat. It was a very large piece of cloth. There were several of the most powerful sewing machines I've ever seen. Amazingly complex operation. Boat and sail design were on the early band-wagon for computers. With good reason, so many numbers to crunch. Even if you're rich, ordering custom built cabinets means you're getting cabinets built from a computer print out which has listed every piece of wood for that set of cabinets and its exact size. I get called out a couple of times a year to hang or re-hang paintings, and I always find time to examine the various cabinets and shelves. What we display is indicative of something, it's not actually meaningless, but it might not mean much. Something is better than nothing, so we go with that. I was bundling some old London Reviews and New York Reviews to recycle and got swept away rereading articles, then listened to Science Friday on the radio. There was a piece on morels that was fun, $30 a pound in NYC, and I realized I'm living above my station, for six weeks or so I eat them almost every day. I had a simple omelet and fried potatoes, covered in morel soup, this morning. I browned them in butter, cooked until they released their moisture, added a can of chicken broth, thickened it with some crushed beans. This is, actually, the best sauce in the history of the universe. Read more...

Turkey Angst

I left a batch of morels to grow for another day and the goddamn turkeys got them. They scratched up the entire area. Evil creatures. Lovely, though, and I never tire of watching them, they're such eager feeders. I leave the radio on, sometimes, to remember to listen to a specific show, and I ended up tonight listening to an hour of music I didn't want to hear, so I could hear an interview with Carlos Santana later. It's difficult to remember something located in time when you don't pay much attention to time. I've always loved Santana's playing. Africa channeled through south America. It's raining hard again, so much rain, flood warnings. Heaven-filling thunder, thunder that shakes the earth, my first reflex was to crawl under a table, crawl under a table and cover my ears. Take a cup of tea to settle your nerves. Passed quickly. It rained hard for about seven minutes. The interview was great, and the music, seems Carlos got the old band together and did another album. Dappled light, but more rain in the forecast, decent batch of morels, then read Thoreau for six hours. There's a new hot-house tomato around here, the grape, and then the cherry tomatoes have gotten pretty good, and now this larger (two inch) variety. I buy them to slice with mozzarella, covered in balsamic vinegar, but I hollowed a couple out, and stuffed with the morel tapenade, cooked them in the toaster oven. Quite good. Better than that, but I don't want to extend my reputation as a morel nut case. Coming home yesterday I remembered where the last occupied log cabin had stood on the creek (the cabin has been moved and thereby saved) and remembered an apple tree in the old lady's yard. Sure enough, a nice clutch of mushrooms. I entertain the idea of buying an abandoned apple orchard, finding out what nutrients morels want, and farming them. The fact that they especially like burned over areas indicates a desire for potash. I wouldn't be raising them as much as encouraging them to grow. A little rust, a little bone dust, a dash of sulfur. The butterflies are on the blooming blackberry. The leaves uncoil, after a rain, when they're still young and flexible. There's a young red maple, maybe twenty years old, that I use as my forecast for weather, she's at least as good as the Weather Channel. Lately, she shimmies as she stands rooted, rolls her leaves over and doesn't say a word. I get the message, put out a bucket and collect some water. Voluntary simplicity. Twice a year I have to have saved $400 to cover land taxes, vehicle insurance and registration, another couple of hundred for the winter pantry, but it's not been a problem because I otherwise don't spend much money in the spring and summer. Lowest electric bill, the phone (my land line connection) is a fixed price, and I don't buy much food. Whiskey and tobacco, but since I inaugurated the multiple back-up system, I haven't once had to hike out, through snow, to satisfy a habit. For long periods of time, last winter, there were two paths, one to the outhouse, and one to the woodshed. Not going to town saves quite a bit of money. Enough that I can save, even on my meager income, adequate cash to pay the bills. Beyond that, it's morel gravy. Peanut oil has gotten quite expensive, even corn oil (fucking ethanol) is getting expensive. I've gone back to mostly using lard, and the other various forms of pork fat. Bacon, fried salt-pork, drippings from a pan. I make a gravy from drippings, with a little browned flour, then add chicken broth. Throw in a half-a-pound of morels, pan-fried in butter, call it the house sauce. Read more...

Preparation

B came by after his last day teaching (getting his grades in) and we took the smoker apart, discussed what we might do. Pretty simple, but we don't have a handbook. No real idea of the cooking times, but we're both good at taking things on the fly. I'm going down to his place tomorrow, to talk things through, since we'll be feeding 24 people on Sunday. Other people are bringing everything else (Ronnie bringing his delicious over-the-top potato salad) so we just have to cook the meat. A 12 pound pot roast and a whole pork loin. I figure we should start the cooking at 8 on Saturday night, then check it Sunday morning, giving us an additional 8 hours in case we need to finish them on a grill. B has apple wood for the actual smoking. My feeling is that we don't want to over-smoke the meat, so we'll be using the smoker as a slow cooker the rest of the time. The trick will be to keep them moist. I do think there needs to be a sauce or gravy, so there would be something to wipe up with the bread. A paper plate meal, with plastic knives and forks, people sitting wherever they can find a place, kids running around, a regular zoo; it'll be fun, for a few hours, and then I can leave. These people all know I'm a recluse, and I seldom say good-by, tend to just disappear. Oh, Tom? He left a while ago, mentioned feeding the crows. I do miss intimate intense conversation, but I'm not actually able to compromise my time, any more I just stare into the middle distance. I hear voices in the wind but in a language I don't understand. I like the sound of it, and maybe asking it to make sense is asking too much. Bacon wrapped filets of beef loin were on sale, so I had a great dinner of steak and sweet potato with morel gravy. I no longer feel guilty about this, I have morels: I work at it, not like it's a matter of luck. The first yellow lilies, so the tiger lilies of summer aren't far behind, and I love those fried in a tempura batter. I plan ahead, to use the frying oil efficiently, plan to fry vegetables for a couple of nights, then finish with frying fish and hush-puppies. After that you dump the oil and scrapings on the compost heap and all the wild animals wear a silly mustache for days. I save the dried tempura bits, like cracklings, to serve on salad. I'd been thinking about food, since I'll need to feed a couple of house guests for a couple of nights, several actually, Kim for three nights and two days and Diane for two nights and a day, so I need to plan ahead, especially because the main access will be closed. Hoe cakes and sorghum for breakfast, left-over stir fry for lunch, pounded pork tenderloin, stuffed with mushrooms and crab meat for dinner, a good bottle of wine, then port and a sharp Irish cheddar. Maybe a piece of chocolate. Fast run to town, library and Kroger for whiskey, then back around the longest route, all the way up the creek. Beautiful and lush, dogwoods blooming and the walnut are finally beginning to leaf. Stopped at B's and we tested the electric smoker, talked about rubs, maybe barding in bacon, soaking the apple wood. The pot roast measures 12 inches by 20 inches and will need to be cut in half, the heat and smoke need to circulate. I'll go back over Saturday afternoon, then again early Sunday. We'd both thought about the possibility of finishing the meat on the grill. I don't think it'll be necessary, especially if we rotate the meat at the half-way point. Not knowing where the half-way point is could be a problem. B expressed an interest in smoke/roasting vegetables, and driving home I was thinking about how good parsnips and sweet potatoes would be, cooked that way, with a butter sauce. Read more...

Spring Light

Broken light through clouds. The woods are awash in pools of intense brightness. I spent several hours just walking around, being surprised. I thought I wanted to read some fiction, but I fairly quickly retreated to an article, a long piece actually, about bear behavior. Turned on the radio, to listen to Science Friday, one of my favorite shows, ate some morels and baked beans on toast. Thought about how lucky I've been. To be where I am now, this wind-blown ridge, surrounded by books, free to walk about. It's a great release to not have to engage the social world. To just be able to stop and look around. I have to go town tomorrow, the last day before they close the road, stock up on a few things, and the library called, a book for me. I can mail my bills for the month, pick up a small steak, another avocado for the rotation, and not have to go to town for a couple of weeks. This driving around crap is a pain the ass. Months of it, at least a year. Either other way I go, the terrain is changed. I can't go fifty feet from the bottom of my driveway before most of the flora is different. A little late getting started, but I did get to town. There was a huge bicycle event, 1100 people biking down from Columbus, eating a pasta meal, then biking back, TR had called, to warn me, but it wasn't so bad, and the pub was open. By the time I'd had a beer and watched sports' highlights everyone was gone. The book at the library was the new John Sandford novel. I picked up a couple of pot pies, threaded my way through bikers, and beat it on home. Spent the rest of the day and night reading, soft rain, lovely coolness. When I'm reading my own work, in public or to myself, I read a page (30-42 lines, single spaced) in about three minutes; when I'm reading fiction, which is line spaced for readability, I read a page in about a minute (0.9). It takes me 6.66 hours to read the Sandford, actually it takes eight hours because I spend 1.3 hours eating pot pies and staring into space. I'm more careful drinking and reading, now that spewing coffee on the edge of a book cost me three dollars at the library. It's good to know these things can be quantified. Thoreau gets so much better, after Walden, when he slows down a bit on the proselytizing, and talks more about what he specifically sees. And how, when he doesn't know what something is, he finds out. I was cleaning out an old bottle, I use bee-bees for this, because they're cheap and reusable. Or is it just b-bs, or bi-bis, or be-bes; those little copper-colored pellets, though I suspect they're no longer copper, that are actually quite uniform. I believe they could be key to my system of weights and measures. All I had been trying to do was to determine what quantity of dried mushrooms were required for a certain dish, I wasn't trying to determine the weight per acre of pollen in May, but if you had a pint jar of completely dried morels, how many meals was that? Two meals, as it turns out, two meals and two additional meals of leftovers. By my calculations I need to dry 13 pounds of morels in the next six weeks, and I seriously doubt I can do that. For some reason I started thinking about prime numbers, a familiar theme for me. I know very little math, but I play with numbers all the time. When I last went to the courthouse, to file my tree-farm for a tax break, I'd stopped to sit on a stone bench. Knowing that sandstone weighs 140 pounds a cubic foot I calculated that the bench seat I was sitting on weighed 420 pounds. No wonder it wasn't attached. Most of the stone blocks, two feet thick, that make up the courthouse, weight about 1250 pounds, can't have been easy, to mortar and set those in place. And it's an odd unit of measurement, 18 inches by 24 inches by 36 inches, but maybe that's the unit they could handle. The quarry, at Lower Twin, was downhill all the way to the river, the only real problem was stopping the rock at the bottom. I like to take a couple of wraps around a hard-wood tree and set back on my heels. Never wrap the rope around your wrist. Or your waist, for that matter. Cut in half by a shroud, listen, 500 ropes, under tension, you lose a few; the French tended to shoot for the rigging. At the waterline, most of these ships are 22 inches thick, Florida Live Oak, but it still splinters after a 32 pound shot. Haul a prize into any neutral port, accept the current value. Two owls, how cool is that? Read more...

Water Vapor

A mist, I would say, is different from light rain. It's all about suspension. I've been observing water closely, the last couple of weeks, because there's been so much. Just when I think I'm bored with it, it surprises me. There was a ground fog, the sun came up in a clear sky, and all of the fog trailed off like smoke. I made a note to pray for fog, so I could watch it dissipate. The Tom TV show is just three hours a day. He hits us at eight with hog futures and a video of the fog dissipating, then at noon, with breaking news about sublimation at some of the higher passes, then a human interest story at eight, involving a pet. Add it to your package. In an attempt to not come off as a morel jerk, cooked them with parsnips, with turnips, with all of the root vegetables. Morels cooked in butter on a sweet potato is a revelation. Because I'd been reading about Mandelbrot I was struck by a passage in Thoreau: "... that each little pebble that had protected the sand made the summit of a sort of basaltic column of sand, --- a phenomenon which looks like it might be repeated on a larger scale in nature." Fractals. They're everywhere. A dreary day, threatening more rain, and quite cool. In the forties last night and again tonight, and the leaves are turned inside out. A freshening wind in the afternoon. Blossoms on the blackberry to the south of the house. I curl up and read for eight hours. Great day for it, a stadium blanket and a mug of tea, I unplug the phone and turn off the breaker for the fridge. Mere quiet, of course, because there is the sound of snow falling off branches, or a single crow, looking for a hand-out, or the white noise of gentle rain on the roof, some sound that is no longer silence. You deal with that, sometimes I use earplugs. I'd turned the compost pile and added some rank kitchen trimmings, stove ashes, and covered it with green-stuff I'd cut with the sling-blade on the path to the outhouse. I knew some critter would dig it up, and about 3 in the morning there's a huge uproar, the bob-cat and two feral dogs. It would be cruel and difficult to film this, and I usually break it up with my sling-shot and a couple of marbles. Since I discovered the decorator marbles at Big Lots, incredibly cheap, now, I only use marbles, and occasionally ball bearings, to make my point. Imagine, I used to pick up rocks. I still do, of course, rocks interest me, certain plants I see on the roadside, the colors ponds assume. Was there ever a bit of frost that revealed so much. I was going to the corner store to get a stick of gum. Read more...

High Water

I didn't know it had rained so much, but the bottoms near town were flooded. The heirs of Boone Coleman will be paid this year to not raise soybeans. A quick beer and a very quick trip to Kroger and got back home just as the rain started again. Red beans and rice for an early dinner, with hushpuppies, then read Thoreau for a couple of hours while rain pattered on the roof. I'm quite dirty, as I've been cleaning, and I look forward to a full bath on the deck in the sheep-watering trough, but I put it off for another day, because I'm just going to get dirty again. I'm trying to get rid of some paper, New Yorkers, London Reviews, New York Reviews, tie them into bundles, for the recycling bin and try to take two into town every time I make the trip. In just a couple of months I should be able to double the usable space in my house. In many ways I don't pay any attention to what's happening off the ridge. That other world. May 9 Mackletree closes down so they can build a new bridge over Turkey Creek at the spillway. A big job, months, millions of dollars, and an enormous pain in the ass for everyone to drive around. I can get out Saturday and lay in supplies but visitors (two in June for me) will be hard-pressed to find the back way in. What was formerly remote becomes very difficult. Thank god I don't have to commute to work. I will go down and watch them build the bridge, construction is always interesting, and I have an abiding interest in spanning gaps. An obsession of mine forever, a simple truss, or some complicated combination of king-posts and queen-posts. Reading Thoreau, just before and when he was living in the cabin, his writing style changes. He starts to notice things. The writing style becomes natural. The posturing falls away. He walks a lot in the rain, and I wonder what he wears. A slicker and a rain-hat? Nothing at all, probably. I keep a lush towel for drying off, when I come in, and a change of clothes, start a small fire of junk mail, just to dry out the house, a wee dram to clean out the sinus, roll a smoke with a nominal gram of tobacco. Two fingers and a thumb. Reading about Benoit Mandelbrot. Fractals. Interesting that the entire development started with a paper he read (or heard) on word frequency. I have a word frequency index, a study for a dictionary, and I often pull it out to see where a word falls. Harvey, bless his departed soul, made a poem out of the first fifty words, in order. It involved an amazing display of punctuation and line breaks. We printed it as a broadside but I don't seem to have a copy. It was quite funny. Another day of rain with a break of a couple of hours. Wandered outside, because it had gotten so still. Not a bug, not a bird, no wind, everything about as wet as it good get; extremely overcast, with a low ceiling. The rain (condensing drops of water, not quite rain yet) were forming at about the height of my chest. Right there in front of me. Watching rain starting to fall. Hiking in Colorado you could sometimes walk down into a rain shower. Many times I've walked down into a fog, but I was watching rain happen, and it felt slightly magic. Filed the thought away, or lost it, the magic part, at least. Gathered enough morels to make an excellent gravy for a small steak. Shad and the dog-wood are blooming, and it's lovely to see them, untended, in deep woods. What was I thinking? Read more...

Rare Intervals

Fleeting beauty. Broken clouds after a rainy morning and enough leaves that the light is becoming shafts. The green is beginning to run rampant. A flood watch, down in the lowlands, but the ridge absorbs like a sponge, now, and the driveway is little affected. More rain moving in, so I go out and collect a small batch of morels, to tide me over. I made a soft-spread last night, actually this morning, working off the tapenade theme, morels cooked in butter, smoked cured ham, sweet relish, and black olives; process with a little brandy. Being poor, I eat this on generic saltines. I recommend it as a way to use up extra morels. Most recipes using dried mushrooms call for using a reconstituted ounce. I don't have a scale that's accurate in small quantities, I mostly weight rocks and large pieces of wood, and I don't need very specific numbers. Sandstone is 140 pounds a cubic foot, more or less. So I was considering making a simple balance scale, but I have no standard, I need something that weighs a gram. This entire issue only came about because I was rolling a smoke and I wondered how much tobacco I used in the average cigaret. I guessed it was a gram, a complete guess. Thought about it later, and started collecting small pieces of metal, if I can get access to a decent scale for an hour, I can nail this balance down. B called and wanted to come over for a drink. This is like a once or twice a year occurrence and I could only imagine something was wrong, but, no. He's hosting the family dinner on May 15 and wanted to cook the very large roast I'd scored from the pub. Dinner for 20. I tell him, sure, we can do that, cook it in the smoker with a pork roast above it, dripping down, for about 20 hours. He's so relieved that I'd thought about it, I can see the worry leave his face. We make some plans, agree to talk again. Ronnie will make potato salad (really an egg salad with potatoes, the best I've ever had), Dawn will make a green salad, B will bake French Bread, Josh will bring beer and ice. I had thought about it. If Jenny and Scott are going to be there, we might arrange a morel gravy with several pounds of morels. This could end up being one of those legendary meals. I've cooked at several. You feed 12 to 20 people a feast, and a couple of years later 70 people swear they were there. See my offprint, The Family Meal, An Exercise In Manners. B wants to cook a whole pork loin as part of the mix, and I need to think about the arrangement of the meat in the smoker. This kind of feast takes a mind of it's own, yes, it will blow your mind, stay calm, arrange the meat and go to bed. Tomorrow, some things might be made more clear. Read more...

Story Board

It starts raining in the night. Cool enough, when I get up to pee, that I shut some windows, and put on my bathrobe. I'd been working on a paragraph for several hours, trying to align punctuation with what was said, had drifted off to into a consideration of the ambiguity of language. How emphasis is enhanced by structure. How structure is achieved. Finally nodded into a dream where little people were stacking large blocks of stone to build abutments for a bridge. Hours later, when the rain reminded me to pee, I picked up the thread of what I had been saying, saw clearly that there needed to be a comma before the conjunction. I often enjamb beyond my intent in the interest of being clear. The nature of the affliction. Joel gives me a raft of shit, well deserved, because I often fail to see the pile of yak dung. He calls while on dialysis, which sweetens the pot. In training for being blind, I seldom turn on any lights for mundane chores, going to pee, getting a drink, rolling a smoke. Rolling a cigaret in the dark was by far the most difficult. You need to know which edge is gummed, but there is a pattern and that's the key. The gummed strip is always on the inside top edge of the fold as it emerges from the pack. Learn to do this with your left hand, so that with your right hand, using a thumb and two fingers, you can pick up just enough tobacco for a smoke. When I succeed at this, more than half the time (54%) I'm proud, if I have to light a match or a candle, it's no big deal. As a test to my faith, the goat-suckers are out in force. I swear, when they were goading me down the stairways of hell, shackled like a slave, the soundtrack was always those goddamn Whip-O-Wills. Listen, I love a few things, the Cello Suites, Greg Brown, those last drawings Modigliani sketched without second thought; and I don't like other things, pretense, bad pottery, inexact language, so I figure I'm nearly normal. You like some things and don't care for others, welcome to the game, or the race, or whatever it is. It cleared a bit in the middle of the day, found a few morels and made a nice tapenade, clouds move back in with thunder, I shut down and took a nap. Rain on the roof wakes me. My earliest memory is of rain on a Quonset hut, last time we lived in one, on a Naval base in Maryland. Mom says this isn't possible because I was not yet two. Leaf-out is probably 25% on the ridge, nearly 100% along the river road into town. Saw a river tug pushing a load of road trusses up river. These are made at a huge yard outside Cincinnati where I've often stopped to watch them move very large things. They also make pre-stressed concrete roof panels which I figure are quite heavy. The weight limit must be whatever the weight limit is for the road that gets them to the river. Around here it's coal trucks, and I think the load limit is between 100,000 and 120,000 pounds. Factored out per axle. But still, there's a section of road over in Kentucky, on my route to Florida, a dozen or so miles, between a power plant and a coal mine, where the ruts are dangerous. I did the math on this, back when I could do math, figuring the coal at about 90 pounds a cubic foot, specific gravity of about 1.5, though I have no idea where I got those numbers. They mound the trucks with a shape that roofers would call a 'pyramid-hip-on-a-gable' which I'm sure puts them ten or twenty thousand pounds over the weight limit. There are never any cops on this section of road. I go this way to Florida, because there's a stretch of the road in Virginia and North Carolina that is absolutely stunning, and I love the geography, on the high ground, until dropping down at Columbia, to the coastal plain. Then hundreds of thousands of acres of pine trees. Until I was 16 I was pretty sure I'd end up being a swamp rat. You could tie up a house boat or whatever hull you'd re-floated on hundreds of miles of tributaries to the St. John's River. Easy life, in some ways, no bills, no debt, but it's difficult to get a library card, and you have to dock close enough to a town to row in and get supplies. The ridge is a good substitute, the isolation, the quiet, the darkness, though I do miss the lapping of small waves. More than compensated by the wind in the trees. Rain on the roof, thunder, I'd better go. Read more...