Frost Hollows

Spilled air, as it loses heat at night, becomes denser and flows off the ridge into hollows. My hollow, Low Gap, gets little sun and has about twenty frosts more per year than the ridge. This is called a katabatic flow. Joel called, as he often does when he's on dialysis, he'd been watching the Weather Channel and saw that I was in for a ride. Power was out when he called, but the phone was still working. I was reading Thoreau by headlamp in the dark afternoon, and it was a fun call. He's quick to poke gentle fun at my curious obsessions. A serious reader, he sends me many books after he's read them. He no longer keeps a library (except for cook books) and most of my Wittgenstein books came from him. We generally talk about food, foremost, and old friends. We had worked together on several building projects with what must have been one of the most comic crews ever assembled, fifty years ago, Cape Cod. All of us (the various subcontractors), usually dubbed "The Whole Sick Crew", would get paid at noon on Friday, cash our checks, have a two martini lunch at the Binnacle, and return to the jobsite to clean up for the following week. A manic and hysterical couple of years, these guys, Les and Ralph especially, were very funny but also extremely fine carpenters. I was working summers, at the Cape Playhouse, with another great crew, and I'd have weeks, between gigs, to wander the beaches around East Dennis. I knew the area from the mouth of Quivet Creek to the breakwater at the harbor like the back of my hand, every plover nest, every clam or oyster bed, and I could collect dinner in a matter of minutes. Started me on the path of collecting wild food, which is now just a matter of course; I always have time to stop and gather food. D called, and we, also, talked about food, because he and Carma raise everything, and it was fun to share recipes. He didn't know about the mock apple pie made with Ritz crackers, he called to see if I knew about salsify, the oyster plant, and I had a couple of recipes off the top of my head, one of which, a cream soup, with a dollop of sour cream, is quite good. I told him to cook it like cattail spears or asparagus, maybe a cream sauce. I like it with browned butter, and lots of black pepper. I like anything with browned butter and black pepper, parrot, monkey, small rodents; I have a recipe for belts, cooked with fat pork for several hours, that sounds pretty good. Shakleton, not a single life lost, 1200 miles in an open boat, then hiking across an island that had never been hiked, getting some whalers to get the rest of his crew and they got back to England, amazing. In my most extreme imagining, I just want to get home, fourteen stations of the cross, the last half-mile over a scree slope that offered no footing. It's exhausting, fighting against the tide.