Dawn Wind

The Rains Of Appalachia. Started before dawn, sometimes just a drizzle but a couple good downpours. In my Goodwill bag of books was a McGuane I'd missed, Nothing But Blue Skies, which makes a good rainy day read. Knew it was forecast, so when I fried potatoes last night I fried a bunch extra, so that I could eat fried potato and onion sandwiches. I made a pesto mayonnaise to go with them. God, I love these sandwiches. A marketing call from a septic tank enzyme company and I laughed out loud, as I explained that I didn't have running water, no flush toilet, and no septic tank. We chatted about composting toilets. D called last night but I couldn't talk because Rodney was sitting here with his (actual) tale of woe. He said he'd bring the whiskey next time. Tales of woe are wearing me down. I made a great frittata with morels and spinach, and a little chopped watercress I'd found in my adventure yesterday. I topped it with a caramelized onion and a butter sauce. The butter sauce was particularly good. The cold nights have sent the mice back inside and I trapped two last night that had been attracted to my left-over fried potatoes, and fed them, fresh, to the crows when I went to the outhouse. A general merriment. I live to please my crows, they're way better than dogs or cats. They're not subservient, and I view that as a mark of respect. Had to sign off for a while, big thunder storms moving in from the NW, lightning, thunder, sheets of rain. Then some hail, which was very exciting and sounded like small caliber gun-fire on the roof. The electricity was still on so I played the pirated tape of Sara's Royal Hunt And Storm, big music with a point to make. It's kind of thrilling, thunder and lightning and opera being played quite loud. Another very dark storm moves in, but it's a little south of the ridge and I'm not concerned. Then I do get concerned, when a cell centers right on top me. I saved, on the computer, then dove beneath the covers. Slept well and woke recovered, we're all Irish, more or less. Read more...

Tax Return

Not that much, but $294 is a nice windfall. I put two hundred in the bank, had a nice lunch (fried calamari) then went to Kroger. Back-up bottle of booze, then a start on the larder for next winter, cans of tuna and sardines, cans of Mandarin orange segments in light syrup, 10 cans of baked beans. For tonight a got a nice discounted strip steak and a bottle of decent Zinfandel. Like an idiot, I forgot to take the laundry to town. I might go back and do it tomorrow, it depends on how long I read and write later, and the weather forecast. Scott is making some very fine soups at the pub, and his version of chili is quite good. It's striking, the difference in elevation between the ridge and town. The ridge is maybe 10% leafed out, but when I go over the Scioto, the Red Maples, which don't seem to mind being flooded, are fully expressed. So verdant, that soft green of early spring. I went below the flood-wall and poked around in the debris field. Plastic soda bottles as far as the eye could see. There's easily enough timber, caught behind the trees on the First Terrace, to build a house. There was a 12x12, 20 feet long, poplar, and I coveted it. I had no immediate need for it, and, saturated as it was, it probably weighted a ton. I looked at it for a while. There's a complex algorithm for where things are deposited in the debris field. Specific gravity, the angle of repose, how quickly the watershed is draining. But the real reason to go below the flood-wall is to look across at Kentucky. It's beautiful, lush in chokecherry and redbud.To my credit, I don't take any wrack home. I did reposition a Barbie and a Ken doll so that it looked like they were having sex. I got a little lost, looking for mushrooms. I'd parked on a forest service road and rambled of into the woods, got turned around and had to walk out to Upper Twin, then back in on the two-track. Nice walk. Thousands of miniature flowers. I was seriously lost for 36 hours once, in Utah. I'd hiked in to look at some odd rock formations. A day-pack and a couple of quarts of water. Probably 30 miles south of the LaSalles, and it was a landscape of bald domes of some granitic rock left standing when the softer material had washed and blown away. They were pretty far off the beaten trail. It hadn't seemed necessary to carry a compass. Late the next day I finally found some cows, and backtracking their ruts, a large holding pen, then tire tracks, then a ranch. I got a kind of hero's welcome, as I was the first person to ever arrive from that direction. Unfortunately they were Mormon, so there was no shot of bourbon to celebrate. But I did have a nice dinner, a bath, and a clean bed. When they dropped me off, the next morning, near to my truck, Cyrus (Myrtle and Cyrus) said to me that I well should have died; that we had driven 21 miles, as the crow flies, and that I must have walked 30 or 40 miles to get to their place. He slipped me a bottle of whiskey, and wished me well. Read more...

Moby Dick

What happened was an acquaintance called late last night with some questions about the book. I knew right where my Modern Library copy was, with the Rockwell Kent illustrations. I answered his questions but didn't bother putting the book away. Other than a nice walk to gather mushrooms, I spent the entire day reading Melville. Two lovely Goldfinches in the blackberry canes today. The canes are leafed. The birds were so yellow, I lost my place. Last night's left-overs on toast for breakfast (potatoes, chorizo, eggs). I had one last beef filet wrapped in bacon in the freezer, so in the interest of rotating my stock I got it out, before my mushroom walk, which is being a little cocky. But I did find a nice mess of them in a classic morel situation. You see one. You don't move. You stare at the ground for at least five minutes, then you harvest six or eight, then, being incredibly careful about where you step, you move eight feet. I cut them off right at ground level and flick off any little bits of leaf-mold with the tip of my knife. I never wash them. Before I put one in the little mesh bag I keep tucked under my belt, I thump it once or twice, to spread the spore. Sliced and fried in butter, then add a small spoonful of bacon fat, salt and pepper, and thicken. I often add finely minced shallot. This is the gravy of your dreams. Starting in High School I realized people from New Jersey or New York, when I started having friends stay over for dinner at Mom and Dad's, hadn't been raised on gravy. I went over to their houses too, but a dry pork chop and unseasoned peas never really caught my attention. In our poverty I was use to crab-boils, fried fish and hush-puppies, salt-cured ham slices with red-eye gravy, and vegetables that had been slow-cooked with salt-pork. Try this. Get a bunch, one each, of collard, mustard, and turnip greens, chop them, wilt them in a cup of white wine, fry some salt pork with an onion, add that, add a caramelized red pepper, cook off the moisture, roll them into balls; to be Jewish is dumplings, roll them in breadcrumbs and fry them. Chicken soup is well and good, but a dumpling is concrete evidence. When Ishmael woke with Queequeg's arm around him. When Charity lowers in a boat, heading back to Nantucket, she is the last female we see, other than Starbuck's dreams, but even Ahab had a wife and child. It's not the moralizing or the archaic language (though I do enjoy them) but the ballast that draws my attention. The try-works, the jaw-bone of a sperm whale, the absolute craziness of three years at sea without the sight of land. I wouldn't rule out anything, but I can't imagine compromising my position when it comes to just kicking back, putting my feet up, and reading Lorca in the light of a sputtering candle. It's strange, the satisfaction I draw from reading poems late at night. I read Birchard, or Skip Fox, B or Stephen, it's passing strange that I know so many poets. And stranger still that I actually understand what they're referring to. I think about transparences for a while. I'm trying to be clear here.The gel is 'bastard amber' a pinkish earth-tone that makes everyone look younger. Read more...

In The Rough

Pick a spot almost anywhere, build a crude shelter. Take care to influence your local environment as little as possible. There are codicils and protocols. It's fine to rake out small natural dams that form in the drainage ditch or even to drag branches off the path you use to access the outhouse. I finally got around to reading the several different versions of the snake story. All of them, I admit to writing, or I admit to probably have written; a couple of them, I think were ghost-written. It was a real event, but recounted in different ways, depending on the time available or the interest. I was listening to Ronnie tell a story recently, I'd heard the story several times earlier, but I was mesmerized by the telling. All those aspects that come into play, animal magnetism and tone of voice, and the story itself, the context. More rain, I feel guilty, so much water. I replenish my wash water, do dishes, take a bath, launder some underwear and socks. That early evening mist/fog thing, when the ground is saturated and the air is saturated, and the vapors hang around like in an English film. I read Gretel Ehrlich today. A wonderful writer. The attention to detail. A walk, between squalls, to collect enough morels for dinner. Mushrooms in milk gravy on a pounded veal chop. I thought seriously this afternoon about building a summer kitchen: a grill and an oven, with a roof, a smoking chamber. A raised floor of stone. A place where I could safely cook a brisket for 20 hours without wild critters getting to it. It's an interesting design problem, and I spend hours thinking about how I might build it. One could form it up, the guts of it, and pour it in special concrete, or lay in special bricks, the various dampers would have to be fabricated, but I know a guy who works in cast iron. I have to go, the trees are laying down, but we should talk about this. Bathtub gin and that silly parrot; I told you early on to be careful what you said. I view nothing as a good thing. Wait. If they had promised me a cherry Danish, not that they would. Rodney called, late, and I didn't want to talk, he needed someone and I wasn't that person. I don't want to talk about silly mistakes. I'd rather sink into the woodwork. Read more...

Compost Frenzy

Cleared a path out to the compost heap, then turned the pile, dug a hole in the center and buried organic waste, covered that with the stove ash then a goodly layer of green matter. The bob cat at 11:20, then a pack of feral dogs that I ran off with the slingshot around midnight. The alpha dog is a pit-bull cross that I will surely have to kill. I got a large bag of clear tinted marbles at Big Lots for $2, a year's supply at least. A Neco Wafer at 25 feet is a very good target. One summer I dated the Neco heiress. Her family had a compound on the Cape and flew down, in their seaplane, on week-ends. It never was going to work out, but it was fun while it lasted. I went quail hunting with her father once, on a farm outside of Marshfield. He had really good dogs, raised, kept, and trained by his dog guy, who made a small fortune selling young trained dogs. We were working through nice cover and flushed a large covey. He hunted with a beautiful double-barrel Parker and I was shooting a Sears pump sheet gun. When the covey flushed, he brought down two birds, one with each barrel, and I happened to catch two birds crossing and brought them both down with one shot. It must be noted that I had never done this before (or since) but I had heard that it was sometimes done. Good eyes and quick reflexes. It almost made up for my not going to Harvard. Sometime later, after two, a huge male raccoon becomes king of the hill. I can see the glowing eyes of a possum at the edge of the woods. There's a lot of hissing and snarling. I didn't actually turn the compost heap and clean out the refrigerator for its entertainment value, but there you go. The coon, having burrowed through the ashes, looks very old. I throw out a couple of firecrackers to run everyone off, maintain a modicum of control, but I'm left with a shy grin. Either Jack or Jim, John or Jose. Jesus is a pretty common name. Stove ash, maybe a dead chicken, some greens, you end up with top soil. I mention the chicken because I took one off the road recently, which isn't that odd except that was in the middle of nowhere. Middle of the state forest, miles from any chicken coop. They still fight cocks around here, and it's easy enough to imagine a few escapees breeding for one or two generations in the wild, but feral chickens are a stretch. They're so stupid. Still, you think about the difference between domesticated and wild turkeys. The fighting cock blood line comes from Malaysia where there are many more predators. Both the pheasant and the rainbow trout are introduced species. It's possible that the Ridge Hen could become a game bird. Not unlike Guinea Hens, where even the breast is dark meat; the chicken thighs, as Harrison says, of yesterday. I much prefer dark meat. The flavor, plus the fact that it's cheap. More rain, it's already tomorrow, I need to sleep. Read more...

Sweet Spot

It's so quiet in the early morning, three, four or five, read for a couple of hours, then nap, then breakfast and coffee. Stopped down at the lake and watched the heat releasing into the air. The state income tax return was in the mail box, so I thought I'd buy a decent bottle of whiskey and some groceries. Sampled a nice tomato bisque at the pub. Picked up a small strip steak and an avocado. High on the hog. And a great dinner, in the half-dark, reading with a headlamp. Lost a couple of hours looking for a very small screw, before I remembered I had a back-up screw, and repaired my reading glasses. I didn't even need to do this, because I hardly ever use those glasses anyway, unless I'm looking something up in the OED, I was looking up "settle", and I needed the glasses. I could use the magnifying glass, but I always get distracted, looking at dead bugs or something. The screw isn't exactly the correct size, and these are cheap glasses, ten bucks at CVS, so I melt the socket with my Bic lighter and jamb the screw home. It works well enough, though I can't close them up anymore, and put them, opened, on a dictionary of Americanisms. As expected, a good frost in the bottoms but not even close on the ridge. Cold air falls and the ridge top soil is already warmed. I'm in the market for a decent probe thermometer that I could use to chart soil temperatures. Surprise visit from a Colporteur handing out copies of the Watchtower. We shared a few laughs about access. I suppose life is somewhat easier if someone else dictates your mission. I made a small mushroom soup (two servings, both of which I promptly devoured) with just morels, chicken stock and shallots. I added mushrooms, fried in bacon fat, until I couldn't add any more and still call it a soup. This was so good I had to stretch out on the sofa afterward. Served in a fairly flat soup bowl on a couple of toasted slices of French bread. I rarely eat a whole loaf of French bread before it gets stale, so I freeze slices that I can pop out and either fry or toast. Things on toast have become 40-50% of my diet. One virtue is that I can easily eat with one hand and read with the other, and another is that I eat right out the skillet and don't have any dishes to wash. I have started spring cleaning. I started a pile of clothes that I need to take to the Goodwill. Clothes accumulate around me, coats and sweaters, and I wear things out. My mother always said I was 'tough on clothes'. I assumed it was part of the mandate, fibers abrade, knees and elbows develop holes. But she said it was more than that, she said I often slid into third when I could have gone in standing up. First, I like the dust cloud, and second, I actually like the abrasion, where ass meets the ground. Forces you too remember later. I'm pretty sure that was my point. Peter Piper. Tom 'O Bedlam. I have to laugh. I like being invisible. Steph said she thought I should be banned. Maybe so. I know I like hiding under the cover. Are you fully informed of your rights? Read more...

Desires

The wind over the top. Turn off the light and listen. Either Anthony or Joel said something about sleeping alone. I tend to wad a blanket between my knees and pretend there is another person. Usually I save myself then awake confused. Sometimes the idea of other intrigues me, but usually I realize I wouldn't want to be, in any way, predictable., and I can no longer deal with compromise. I can barely live with myself, and other people scare me to death. I was in the middle of a harrowed field, looking for flaked stone, sipping from my flask, not a threat to anyone, and the owner appeared, asked me what I was doing. I had to think about that. I showed him a few points I'd found, walking along the furrows. He took me to his house, for a drink and coffee, and showed me his collection of artifacts. It was extensive. We spent several hours talking; two guys in bib-overalls discussing Wittgenstein. He knew who I was and where I lived and gave me the history of the small church that used to exist one hollow to the west of Low Gap, the dead of which populate the cemetery on my property. More rain and the trees are loving it, every living thing sucking life from what has died and what has re-condensed. During all this spring rain I try and not feel guilty. I use less water than anyone I know but I still feel wasteful. The fate of the planet is an algorithm that involves water, and it's companion, drainage. Fucking driveway, I swear to god, I'm sick of it. Three places need to be raked out and re-channeled and there is a ton of dead leaves that need to be removed. If it's not one thing it's another. Butterflies all around, having a tough time in the wind. Turned on the radio to get a weather forecast and the water level in the Ohio has gone down ten feet in just two days, which, I figure, must be a lot of water. And it's supposed to get cold, but stay dry. The hickories are budded, and the tops of the oak trees are casting pale color. Just in time to start preparing for next winter. When those packets of instant rice or noodles are ten for a buck, I buy them. I recently acquired another large tin (a dumpster in town) that is dedicated to ramen noodles and instant mashed potatoes. I lived among survivalists for many years. The gamut from Mormons to Native Americans, and I learned to plan ahead. I have to close the house back up, against the chill, and it's so quiet I listen to all of the Cello Suites. Computer off, refrigerator off, phone unplugged, all the lights off except for the tell-tale on the radio/CD player. I crank the volume pretty high because I like to hear all the extraneous noises. It's a transport, to listen to Bach for a couple of hours. It allows me some limited insight into the concept of being "born again". Music, or art generally, Color Field Painting, a good production of a decent play, a totem pole, whatever pulls your crank, whatever pulls you out of yourself. I'm fortunate, I think, sitting in the silence, that I've known a great many people that were very good at what they did. Very good. And I'm humble, or reasonably humble, that I'm actually still alive.

Tom

No, wait. That wasn't where I was going. Words get the better of me. Often, the next day, everything looks different. The sun might be out, or the scent of jasmine in the air, something catches your attention, and you forget everything else. Partial Knowledge, PK: we see a lot of this; they seem to be looking for a free meal. B says we should feed everyone, no matter what. Off the record, I agree. Read more...

Cold Again

Chance of frost for a couple of nights. With the forecast rather vague, I went to town to get a few things, coffee and cream, meat and potatoes, water and juice, rice and beans. Excellent corn chowder at the pub, a pint of bitter, and I came home through the forest, stopping and looking for mushrooms. Found a few, but this cold weather will set them back. Soil temperature is everything. I set aside three little beauties that I want to stuff with cheese and shallots. I'll have a few on toast tonight, and have enough left for an omelet tomorrow. Stopped at the library and got some fiction and a book of David Mamet's essays. A woman I know in town brushed by me, eating at the bar, stopped and gave me a peck on the cheek, she said that I looked like a skinny mountain man and smelled terrific. This is good to know, the smell part, because I don't pay a lot of attention. I need to do my end-of-winter laundry and put things away, but I blow it off until my next trip to town. The Redbud is peaking right now, and there's one stretch on Mackletree where there are a dozen bushes in maybe a hundred feet. Takes your breath away. I stopped at the ford, drove backward and forward a few times, to clean the undercarriage, then stopped midstream, rolled a smoke and stared at spring coming on hard along the creek bank. A spray of miniature Iris in the median, a small white flower I've never identified. It shouldn't frost on the ridge, the cold air will sink to the bottoms, and I'll just wrap up in a blanket and turn away from the light. It's easier to just turn your back. More fucking rain, I can't believe it. They should pipe the Upper Mississippi into the mid-west, let it flow down to the Rio Grand, turn it into another California boondoggle. Seriously. The beauty of a water pipe-line is that even a catastrophic failure is just a mud-puddle. I do some calculations, using my hollow as a base line (the math is specious) and I figure that if they all got low-flow toilets and stopped watering there goddamn lawns, I could supply Bakersfield with water. Storing energy, in freeze-dried water, could be the wave of the future; and I'm working on a simple method to capture lightning bolts using pulleys and trees. The rigging would be no more complex than a three-mast clipper, and there would be all of those low-paying jobs, ready about, hard a-lee. Read more...

Spring Winds

All day storm and the partially leafed trees are fairly dancing. The first leaves are so tender they twist and writhe. Soft green. This front came in from the south, which is rare, and I feel like I'm seeing things in a mirror. Most of the day reading essays about the period 30,000 to 50,000 years ago and the fall of the great Neanderthal nation. Mid-day I steamed an artichoke and made a nice mayonnaise for dipping. It takes two hands to eat an artichoke, plus it's a damp and spattering dish, so I didn't read (I read at almost every meal) and just sat on my stool at the island and watched the rain. Rain on the window / changes the way I perceive / green in the hollow. An old friend calls, and I ask her to call back in five minutes, so that I can take something off the stove (onions and red peppers I was caramelizing toward an unknown end), roll a smoke and get a drink. When she calls back I'm well situated to listen. I could tell from her tone, in the first call, that I was going to be listening. Which I do. Another failed relationship, the abject fear of being alone, the cat has a tumor, the neighbors make a lot of noise. More germane, the wind shakes the house. I have windows opened, on the leeward side. I don't want to be pitch-poled in the night. Me giving anyone advice about a relationship is a joke, my track record is questionable, and I do actually want to be alone most of the time; it saves having to explain myself. Thunder, I'd better go. Slept very well and woke to an odd dream involving a pig that could write. Starving, so I fried a large skillet of potatoes and had a huge breakfast, with enough leftover for a folded fried potato and mayo sandwich for lunch. With a slice of onion this is an excellent sandwich and I've eaten them my whole life, standard fishing fare. Mom would fry them the night before and we'd take a quart of them in the cooler, a jar of mayo, an onion, and a loaf of white bread. In later years, when there was a bit more money, we'd also take sardines. Eating in a small boat, staked over a bream bed, are some of my happiest memories, though there are a great may happy memories. It seems almost criminal to have been raised in a functional family. To go fishing once a week (at least) and spend vacations with relatives in Tennessee and Mississippi, who always had, or lived close to, a stocked farm pond where the cows and mules would watch us for hours, chewing their cud. Another rain day. I think about the past, for a few hours, and it's like spreading out a reading of drift-glass. Then read a small book, 1885, about eating insects. Locust and grasshoppers are 50% protein, alfalfa hay might be 20%, a T-bone steak is 14.7%. Locust and grasshoppers are vegetarian. Consider the chicken, or the pig. Consider sucking crawfish heads, which most of us from the deep South do. You take your L/G and pull off the wings and legs, pinch the head off and most of the viscera pulls away. Grill them over a hot charcoal fire until they're crisp. Whatever dipping sauce you prefer. I like just dipping them in soy sauce. They need the salt. First Whip-O-Will, and I can hear the frogs down in the bottom. I'd forgotten how noisy spring evenings could be. Read more...

Nuts and Bolts

The small feeder creeks are truly lovely, flowers and grass on the banks, the shrubs, the wild fruit trees in bloom. It takes me a couple of hours to get seven miles through the forest. In the loop back home, I could have stopped at the Dairy Bar and gotten something fried for lunch, but it's Friday and I'm sure Scott has made a chowder at the pub, so I detour into town for a pint and a bowl of soup. Excellent decision, because I get a free sample of a very good melon gazpacho. I'm going to stop reading about the early Catholic clergy, because they're such arrogant assholes. Indulgences are bad enough, but declaring that rabbit fetuses were not meat is a stretch. What? They turn into geese? And another thing I'm getting sick of are basic mistakes, in main stream successful fiction, about building techniques and nomenclature. The best non-fiction writers, McPhee, Kidder, Barry Lopez, don't make dumbass mistakes when it comes to specific detail. But even very good writers of genre fiction, Lee Childs, John Sandford, Thomas Perry, don't know squat about construction. And it's such an easy problem to correct, you buy a carpenter a case of beer and talk to him for a couple of hours. Pisses me off, when I'm reading along, good plot, good characters, the psychological profiles are believable, and suddenly I'm confronted with the impossible description of something. No, I think, you couldn't do that, even in fiction. Plywood comes in sheets, not boards; it's a 2x4, not a 4x2. Almost nothing is built on eight foot centers. I spend an hour or so putting away books, then another couple of hours reading in books that I found while I was putting books away. This is just one of the weak links in my system; another is staring off into the middle-distance. The word 'blue' doesn't occur in Homer. Red, of course, and the wine dark sea, but evidently you don't see blue unless you have a word for it, otherwise it's just white or maybe green. Post modern, the Allman Brothers, "Blue Skies" and, of course, "Judy Blue Eyes". I'm thoroughly engaged by blue, and the blues for that matter, so I tend to see things as black and white and blue. For ancient Greeks it was black and white and red. This might mean something or it might be bullshit. Cones, and the perception of color. A prism shows you a limited scale. The colors you can see. There might be more colors than that. I read recently that we hold a hundred or so colors in our short term memory. Phlox and Chickory, or a very small iris, Jenny called it a Miniature Iris, are all clearly blue. A prison tat, using a Bic pen, or a glimpse of the ocean at sunset. Read more...

Leafing

Amazing. Rained off and on all day, sometimes hard, in sheets that swept across the ridge. My favorite Gunter Grass is probably The Flounder, I need to reread it. I got a little work done editing, actually inserted a complete sentence that was needed by way of explication. Usually, my close readers tell me, they can follow my jumps. Just now, for instance, I went outside, between showers, to collect enough morels for dinner, which I do in about eleven minutes. I knew this small patch was ready to erupt, because I'd noticed some leaves pushing up. The new leaves are breaking out, there's a faint blush of green against the sky. The oaks are holding back, but the maples and the poplars are right on the edge of exploding. The Bradford pears are blooming, they're pretty, but I don't like them. I do like the way their leaves just shove the blossoms out of the way, creating a rain like snow, and the trees go from white to red to green. The Redbud is coming on and it's a lovely thing to see. I need to get to the library again, I need to spend more time when I go there, and check out more books at a time. That would be part of my strategy for leaving the ridge less often. If I have enough interesting reading matter, I can weather almost anything. It rained hard enough that I shut down everything and sat in the dark, listening. Fell asleep, then woke when the rain stopped and flipped the breaker for the fridge back on. Cool enough that I need a flannel sheet as a blanket. I read about Southern trees for an hour. I might have to drive out tomorrow and look at the trees. It's a thousand vertical feet down to the Ohio and the flora is quite different down there. It's makes for an interesting time lapse trip. I'd dug just a couple of sang roots (as it's called around here) in the fall, and I remembered them. They were dry, and I rubbed off the dirt and skin, then sliced them very thin with a sharp knife, put them in a nice whiskey bottle with some grain alcohol. A sip of this, when you're embedded in snow, can be just the thing. Starting to get some things done, sharpened the clippers, bought one of those little testers that's tells you if an electric line is hot, and a new outdoor light for the back door. I need to be a plumber for a day and an electrician for a day. I have everything I think I need, for a couple of repairs, but in my heart I know there will a trip or two to the hardware store. When doing anything trips to the hardware store are inevitable. I sometimes stop, even when I don't need anything in particular, because I like the staff, the free popcorn; and just walk up and down the aisles, picking out a few things I might require in the future. Hardware stores are cool, especially that peg-board where they hang specialty items. Coffin locks and repair links for chains. I sometimes buy a piece of hardware just because I like the way it looks. I might not even know what it does, but elegance is apparent. The first ballet I saw, I was a junior in high school, but I'd skipped a grade, so I was young and stupid, was a revelation. "You mean, Sir, that my ass is a commodity?" No doubt exchanged on other exchanges. I come down strongly on the side of those who just want to be left alone. It's my body, I'll do with it what I will, I will not have some white slimy ass hole, male, telling me what I can and what I can't do. My sister flagged me down, from her golf-cart. She has good taste in pottery. Read more...

Scavengers

I'd found a dead dog on the road, a fat female Beagle, and I'd been reading about the eyesight of birds. Put it in a garbage bag and took it home. Thought about cooking the loins, using a recipe called "Dried Dog" which actually sounded rather good (a Chinese recipe), thin strips of meat, dredged in salt and spice, dried in the sun, then reconstituted in a stew, but she was a little ripe. I was interested in how scavenger birds found dead animals, so I built a crude shelter that hid the body from view. I didn't open up the carcass, which I usually do with roadkill, and just put the body under a scrap plywood roof, downwind. Interestingly, the vultures were on site within a day (smell?) but they couldn't find it. Within three days it was gone, no blood-print, a coyote (I could see the tracks) had hauled it back to her den. It's a good mom, I think, who takes her kits a dead Beagle. Stopped at the lake and picked a mess of cattail shoots, they're very good with mushroom gravy, you just peel them and steam the cores, salt and pepper; a quick sauce of morels in brown butter. I'm spoiled, when I think about it, the way I eat. Linda called, and commented on that very fact, that I ate very well, and didn't spend much money in the process. This, of course, is a product of not having much money and still wanting to eat. Contain your desires within the possible. Rice is good here, or a pot of grits, if you're Irish, a few pounds of boiled potatoes. Mixed greens cooked with salt-pork. Corn bread with cracklings. In a land-mark decision, snails cooked in sea water. It's a pain in the ass, eating barnacles with a straightened paper clip or a safety pin. The Pennsylvania Dutch call scrapple pawnhass, which has become my new favorite word. I made excellent scrapple for years and it was always in high demand. Sliced and fried it's a breakfast food of the highest rank. When I first made some for my friend Roy, in Mississippi, served with a little maple syrup, he swore it was the best thing he'd ever eaten. On one memorable occasion, he and I served it at a church fund-raiser in Babylon (the Black enclave of Duck Hill) and it became very popular. I was free-ranging hogs at the time, so when he got enough orders, whatever time of year, he'd come over and we'd kill one, skin it out (for the lucrative bonus of cracklings) and make 200 lbs of product (20 pounds of meat, 7 pounds of cornmeal, various herbs and spices), and we'd both make $100, which seemed like good money in that time and place. It was almost all profit, because he grew the corn and I had more pigs than you could shake a stick at. His friend, at the mill, ground the corn, Cecil, a black man in whiteface from the dust, after hours, did the grinding. We'd have to buy a small tank of gas, to fire the grill where we were making cracklings and lard, buy some salt and pepper, and we'd drink beer, very good beer that I'd brewed, and when Roy got a little drunk, we could talk about racial inequality. This was my Masters Degree in Sociology. Read more...

Morel Omelet

As soon as the dew was burned off I went out and got enough morels for breakfast. Took over an hour to make, as I wanted caramelized onions. A large three-egg omelet which provided a left-over piece to have on a sandwich at lunch. McGuane's new book of short stories, Crow Fair, is wonderful writing and quite comic. Read it today and started the new Llosa. Edited myself for a couple of hours. Feeling a bit cooped-up I went for a late afternoon walk and the light was extraordinary, walking back home, eastward, everything was perfectly lit and vibrant. I had meant to think about something specific (reviewing the way I spent my time, I had some questions for myself) and I ended up walking around like Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass. Blackberry leaves unfolding, buds on bushes I couldn't identify, the sound of water, in a small rill. Forgot, completely, what I had been thinking about, which I think was the point. When I get back I finish a small pan of short ribs of beef. I'd been cooking them for hours, after the stove died out, and I wanted to heat them one more time, so that their grease could mix with the beans. With bitter greens and a creamy blue-cheese dressing, this is a very good meal. I'm careful not to spit on library books and I only rarely leave a note, but this time I'll probably have to pay damages. I got a little on it. McGuane makes me laugh. I got my taxes off in time, I got a hair cut, and I was laughing, about the state of events. I needed to pay a couple of bills (I only have a couple) and go the library, where some books were being held for me. One of them, on head-cheeses and sausage, I've been looking forward to. B's brother Ronnie has promised me a couple of rabbits if he gets a share of the pate. A rabbit and morel pate sounds wonderful. Scott had made an excellent tomato and pasta soup at the pub, so I had a bowl of that, with crackers and a pint of stout, then came back home the long way around. Elevation is a major factor in the changing seasons, the chokecherries and the redbud, down at the river, are far along, but up here, on the ridge, a thousand feet higher, cards are played closer to the chest. A great many things, as it happens, are conditional. If this, then that. I zoned out, wondering if I'd learned anything. Not really. I can dry cast and put a fly right where I want to, I can handle a sling-shot. I can saw a cut, on either side or the middle of a line, determine what is plumb, and act accordingly, but all I've learned is to keep my head down, and focus on the task at hand. Read more...

Storm Damage

The driveway took a beating, but going outside to pee, in the clear light of morning, the sassafras and the oak are budded, and I need to leave early, to look closely at the wild black walnut grove that I pass on that trip, to see if the buds are emerging. The walnuts are extremely careful, so their actual growing season, at this latitude, is only four or five months and the buds are tightly protected. A park ranger stops, wondering what I'm doing with my pen-knife and a magnifying glass. Taxes done and I'm getting a few bucks back, I should never have to file again. A celebratory beer at the pub, chat with the staff, stop at Kroger, where, by the gods, there is a large package of short ribs of beef reduced in price, $3.07 for nearly two pounds. As soon as I get home I brown them in bacon fat, then bed them in thick slices of onion and bring chicken broth up to the bottom of the ribs, cover the pan tightly with foil, put on the lid and let them simmer for a couple of hours. While that's cooking I make a pot of baby butter beans with onions caramelized in diced salt-pork. The best side-dish of the year, and the short-ribs are so good I want to call Linda and tell her about them, but I'm pretty sure she has a performance tonight and I wouldn't want to take her off point. Only passion fuels passion, everything else is pornography. Egrets fucking is not a pretty picture. Anhingas. Dugongs. Most of the adults in West Virginia. Shoot for a wet spot, but it might as well be an arm pit. I was looking down today, and I already had collected $1.42 in change, before I found a wad of bills, $110, squeezed out of some tight jeans. Since the advent of skinny jeans I've found quite a bit of money in the Kroger parking lot, between parked cars. I can picture the physics of it, getting into or out of the car. Not unlike rocks coming to the surface in plowed fields. Cory was back from his flash trip to Florida and we talked about the great salt marshes in southern coastal Georgia. I quoted a passage from Sidney Lanier, The Marshes Of Glynn, and the room fell oddly silent. I admit that the rhymes are rather harsh, but these are the first lines I ever memorized for pleasure. I always thought I'd end up pulling crab pots in those salt marshes. I love the smell. Poling a shallow draft boat up a tidal creek is a great way to spend your time. Watching an osprey take a mullet. Watching otters play. Frying fresh fish for dinner. All the disturbance down at the lake, rebuilding the dam and overflow, has vastly extended the range of cattails. Spring cattail shoots are better than wild asparagus, with a nod toward a fruity vinaigrette, and the sure knowledge that you can gather a meal in just a few minutes. Food, fuel, is almost never the issue, what is at stake is your soul. I flip through the deck, the tarot of the moment, and I advise you to cook some greens. Read more...

Thunder Storm

Years since I've seen so much lightning. Rolling thunder, driving rain. No way to sleep, so I got a wee dram and rolled a smoke, sat on the sofa and watched for several hours. Epic fireworks and sound, I saw lightning hit a tree. The power went out, but it didn't matter. I wanted to see what the water had done, so I drove into town. The overflow at the lake was running full and Turkey Creek, below, was in full spate. At the race track the water level was up eight or ten feet (the top of the refreshment stand window) and the Scioto was roiling into the Ohio. A spectacular display of power. I went to the library and everyone was talking about the storm, got the new McGuane and the new Llosa. I had dawdled at so many places it was after lunch time and I was starved, stopped at the pub, and the special was a fried oyster plate, expensive, for me, for lunch, but I knew it would serve me for dinner too. A glorious surprise. I love oysters, have raised them and harvested many bushels, and these were very good. I have to go back to town tomorrow (I know this is terrible planning, but I needed a bit of the outside world) for my HR Block appointment with Ruth and if they're still serving oysters, another round. I got the bi-annual haircut today, and Mr. Bender trimmed my beard and eyebrows; his task, I told him, was to make me more presentable, I had been scaring small children in the supermarket. It's warm enough, when I get home, that I heat water and take a bath in the sheep-watering trough out on the front deck. It feels great to scrub off the winter layer of scales and flaking skin, dry off, then rub lotion into my feet and legs. The left-over oyster plate, with some English cheese and pickles, makes a lovely dinner. I'll take some grief about my spruced appearance at the pub, but I haven't felt this good in several months. I start a laundry basket of winter things that need to be washed and put away, then cull through clothing, things I never wear, that need to go to the Goodwill. I need a heavy wool shirt, the Black Watch I've been wearing for 15 years is worn through at the elbows, and I need another twelve-pack of black cotton socks, but my demands are not that extreme. That we are not virgins. That the ruts in the road are quite apparent. Maybe you've never had sausage gravy on biscuits. Heaven forbid. Where I come from, gravy was a beverage. Red-Eye gravy was a staple in my youth, Mom made it with just the flick of the wrist. Her version was black coffee in pan drippings from breakfast ham slices. A vinaigrette among the thickened gravies and sauces, thin, greasy, and salty, but on an opened, hot fresh biscuit, it is divine. I was spoiled early by good home cured hams, and, perforce, as they can't be found anymore, I've been a life-long student of curing meat. You start with salt-pork, it's hard to screw that up, then move on to Canadian Bacon. Eventually you build a smoke-house. First thing you know you're curing elk hams for Jewish friends. It could be a business, right? Antelope jerky. Eggplant chips. Shade-grown kale shoots dried in the mid-day sun. I got my hair cut, my beard trimmed, I threw away that shirt that was a disgrace; moving on, I notice that I'm using last year's calendar and it doesn't make much difference. You either add or subtract a day, it doesn't matter, except that they don't sell whiskey on Sunday, which is stupid, but easily avoided. Once or twice in fifteen years I've thrown myself at the mercy of whatever might be in B's cupboard, usually Elijah Craig; though once, in a snowstorm, after I had hiked through a crystal jungle, he sent me home with half a bottle of Woodford Reserve. Just after dawn two Red-Headed woodpeckers fly in, working the dead-bark spots on the hickory trees. I love the way they cock their heads, listening. Read more...

Breaking Bud

Conducting a funeral service for the dead fox, it is a male, and probably the father of the kits I should see later in the year, brings ashore a raft of thoughts about death and dying. Fittingly, it's spring, which provides a nice dynamic. I take him down the logging road and slit him stem to stern, so he should be quickly consumed. A good documentary for Swedish television, or wherever that was that everyone watched an eight hour train ride. Imagination pales in comparison. Almost anything might be a good sign or a signal. In the pile of my writing B gave me, there's a section, 20 pages, single-spaced, 42 lines per page, that I actually numbered and stapled together. I'd don't remember collating and stapling copies of this, though I do remember writing it. It was a hard winter and my feet were cold, Black Dell and I were getting along. She allowed me some liberties. I could take her boots off and stroke her ankles, but she knocked my hand aside if I ventured above her knee. Rolling thunder moving in. Rain starts pattering the leaves. When the house starts shaking I turn off the lights and go take a nap. It'll either be better or not later. It's right on top of me now, with lightning, I'd better go. Such a storm. It blew a gale and rained in sheets. The power flickered but stayed on, and I stayed curled on the sofa, facing the bookcase wall, remembering other storms. A thunder and lightning snow storm, with Glenn at the church in Yarmouthport, and one evening in Utah when I cowered under an overhang, eating trail mix and fully expecting to die. Ball lightning rolling up a Ponderosa Pine. When the squall passes it's so quiet I get up and put on some music. The Dead, Ripple. Ozone. Sitting on the back porch, a wee dram and a smoke, the past becomes a dream. Sure, I know I'm guilty, we're all guilty of something, but that doesn't mean you have to stop looking. When I was in town the other day I stopped at the Second Street Dairy Bar and got a footer, sauce, mustard and cheese, and some onion rings, went below the floodwall and watched the river flowing past. Barges pushing upstream. More rain. The river is high and the huge sandbar, just downstream from where the Scioto enters, is no where to be seen. Flood watches everywhere. Pretty good mess of morels and I just have them on toast again, with a pair of frog legs I picked up out of the stranger items frozen case at Kroger, rolled in seasoned masa and fried. The stranger item case, where I always look, is where they keep rabbit, cooked crawdads, duck, and various offal. Many pates had their origin there. First big morel day, I'm going to make one, with veal liver, morels, and ground veal. I need to get a few things in town and get my taxes done. I'm getting whatever I paid last year back, and I was thinking about buying a good bottle of wine and making ox-tail soup. I have an oxtail in the freezer that I need to cook. With roasted root vegetables and a salad of bitter early greens, it could be a decent palliative against the cares and fortunes. Read more...

Mussels

About twice a year, in the seafood section at Kroger, they have two pound net bags of mussels. I do cringe at paying eight bucks for a little bag of mussels, when I've collected hundreds of pounds for free, but I'm a long way from the sea. I got a bottle of dry white wine and a bunch of watercress, a small loaf of French bread, and one of those little jars of artichoke hearts in oil. Only one of the mussels fails to open, and I enjoy this meal as much as any in recent memory. Down Crow Pasture, where I had seeded mussel beds and oyster beds, where a tidal creek (Sesuit Creek) flowed into Cape Cod Bay, and where I often walked, I carried little beyond a flask and a lighter. I'd weave a crude grill from green willow twigs, build a small driftwood fire and roast shellfish until they opened. I always carry a small bottle of hot sauce. You roast them deep side down and use the flat shell to dig out the goodness. At home I make a dipping sauce of reduced butter and wine, but on the beach I just slurp the briny liquid. There's a dead fox in the woodshed, I saw it today when I walked in from the Jeep. No blood, no sign of damage, just a dead fox. Not my fox, this is a male and the ears are different. I'd like to skin it out, salt it, stretch it on a board, maybe use it for the ruff on my winter coat, but my tendency is to just bury and forget it. Mussels and a dead fox in the same day. Go figure. I assume a prime mover who has it in for me. I've certainly offended the gods. Why else would I have another flat tire? Morning walk, looking for morels, and I find a few small ones, enough for breakfast. I would have ordinarily left these for a day, but the turkeys would get them. After breakfast (mushrooms on toast, with a side order of soft scrambled eggs) the day is given over totally to the book B got for me, Harrison's The Raw And The Cooked, which I had somehow missed. It's a wonderful and quite comic food book. Articles from a food column, sundry other pieces about cooking game, overeating, hunting, fishing. Highly recommended. Outside one more time, in the afternoon, to take a bit of air. The leaves are matted and the fragrance is of fecund ground. The Red Maple buds have broken. The squirrels seem to have gone crazy. B noted the other day that they are a one-hit wonder, their trick is that they can do a 180 degree turn faster than any other creature. It's their main survival skill. I've fallen into a pattern, where when I get up to pee, at four or five in the morning, I just stay up and either read or write. At five this morning I could hardly wait to get out of bed, brew a double espresso, and start reading the Harrison, waiting for enough light to hunt mushrooms. Thank god I picked up a back-up pound of butter. Read more...

Library Service

B calls and he has a book for me that I'd had him get through university channels. I told him I'd pick it up tomorrow, when I figured to be off the ridge anyway. Maybe another footer and onion rings. A little celebration. A glass of bubbly. I'll probably eat left-overs and read all night, which seems to be a pattern. It's quiet at night, especially when I kill the breaker for the fridge. Duane Allman playing lead for Boz Skaggs, Sweet Release, then Robert Johnson, Come In To My Kitchen, I look up from my reading and grin. Wormed through another winter. And it wasn't bad except for the six or eight times I thought I might die. Twice, once when B and once when Emily dropped me at the bottom of the driveway I could tell they were concerned. Old coot slogging up the hill, but I make it to the print shop, and sit in the doorway until I recover my breath. The last hundred yards is easy, after a break, and I can start a fire, heat a cup of cider. Nothing equates to pulling up a chair next to the wood stove, thawing your hands and feet, and staring into the middle distance. A wee dram for my troubles and I usually roll a smoke. All winter I sleep on the sofa, so I can feed the stove, but in the spring I move back upstairs, which entails moving all of the winter clothes. Ash and cobwebs have taken over the house, and I need to clean out the shop-vac before I tackle the corners. Cleaning the shop-vac is a truly awful chore. The foam filter and the paper filter are thick with crap and that has to be knocked out, against a tree, and the dust is horrible. Usually penitents are eliminated at this point. They either have allergies or an aversion to beating anything against a tree. I boil water and gird my loins. Spring cleaning. I had no idea I was such a slob. Read more...

Turkeys

There must be a spring hunting season for turkeys because I've noticed pick-up trucks at all the pull-off places in the forest. I often hear them going to roost in the evening. They piss me off, eating my mushrooms, but I love watching them; large serious birds scratching through the mast. Just at dark the three crows are back, and I take them their slops: table scraps and a couple of mice. I have an on-again, off-again, relationship with a fox, and once a week or so I fix dinner for three crows, otherwise I'm almost normal. I was watching eight turkeys today, six hens and two drakes, or six hens and two toms, why are male turkeys toms? And they were tearing up the leaf-litter where I'd spread a few cups of dried corn. Turkeys don't fly very well, they're almost flightless, they'd rather run off into the bushes. They'll fly if they have to, but only a hundred yards or so, and you can track a covey of them all day. I'd vow it's a good way to spend your time, tracking birds. A young turkey, head-shot and plucked while still warm, makes a fine meal, crisp skin and gristle sucked off the bone. Only, of course, if I had accidentally killed a young turkey. Or as Ms. Rawlins might have cooked a pea-hen that might have tried to cross the road. Birds are really dumb. Jeep killed grouse are a staple of my diet. Pluck them while they're still warm, grill them on a rack or over an open fire, and suck the bones. Bird marrow could make you light enough to fly. Marjorie was pre-feminist and on point. She, and MFK Fisher laid the ground-work. A patchy day, then all gray. I went for a walk of long duration and short distance, looking for morels, finding a few; then the afternoon and evening reading a pretty good novel, Too Cool, Duff Brenna: then making rice and having the chorizo mix on top of that and eating a lot of it. I wished I'd had a big old-vines zin but I made do with whiskey, tempered with a maple-sap icicle. Nothing if not resourceful. I have to say, a bowl of this Pecan Rice, with the chorizo and caramelized vegetables, is very good. I vow to eat a salad tomorrow, or at least an avocado. Or maybe an artichoke. At least a pickle. Read more...

Water Use

Rain for 36 hours, five or six inches, flood watch until two tomorrow morning. Power went out and I took a nap, awakened by the fridge and lights when the it came back on, got up, finished a mediocre Randy Wayne White book, wrote for a couple of hours. Pretty much the story of my life, except that I didn't get outside today. I see some green leaves though, Verbena probably. The ground is saturated (I did have to go out for a minute, to dump my piss-pot) and the fire danger has gone from Very High to zero. They post the fire danger on a sign outside the Forest Service headquarters and I see it whenever I go to town. And the flood zones are always the same too, they close off the river end of 139; and the exit west, out town, involves a slight detour. Detours, like failure, can be a good thing, anything that focuses your attention. In the afternoon I rebound a couple of books, which took several hours. Binding books, I think, is not unlike carvings spoons, or any of ten thousand trades... making pickles or maple syrup... Jesus it's raining hard, I'd better close down. Intense. It lasted for maybe five minutes. Then another squall. I crawl under a blanket and listen to the rain in the dark. Awake with an agenda and head to town. Stopped at the hardware store (the kitchen drain), then the library, a pint at the pub, talked with TR; B had asked me to stop by, because in his move he had discovered a few hundred pages of my work including The Snake Story, in its most finished form. Another copy of this surfaced in Texas. And there was a section of the big book I had been writing about building this house, the lost manuscript. This section started at page 302, single spaced 42 line pages, the attention to detail over-the-top, and I could almost reconstruct what I was feeling then. I remember how I solved a problem. The most elegant solution usually involves the fewest pieces. A hinge can be reduced to a piece of leather and four nails (I use the term 'nail' loosely) or just being wrapped tightly with monofilament or even rawhide, which we all know, shrinks when it dries. Securing my place in line. A meaningless conceit. Some other view. You just buy out the opposition and serve them a tuna-noodle casserole. I don't know why people trust me, but they do. I think it's because I don't raise any red flags. Also, I'm a good listener, though I do walk away from stupidity, and, rather obnoxiously, often supply the exact word someone else is looking for. Hardly surprising, since I spend 10 or 12 hours a day parsing meaning from words. A beautiful day lures me outside and I walk around for several hours, squeezing buds and tasting their exudations. I make a small salad with willow buds and a great dressing of walnut oil and apple cider vinegar. First morels, and I make a spectacular dish of caramelized onions and red peppers, mushrooms, and chorizo sausage. They had discounted several packages of ground pork at Kroger and I bought them all. Sausage is a attitude. I add a squirrel I inadvertently killed. The devious little fucker was trying to build a nest in the soffit and I shot in his direction, just to run him off, he zigged when he should have zagged. Braise that in wine and herbs, mince, and add to the pork, scramble this with eggs, toast with a very bitter marmalade; a brunch, with a double bourbon laced espresso. Strikes me as rather high on the hog for someone in my circumstance. If I accepted a job at Harvard, it would have to be with the understanding that I could kill those fat squirrels on the common. Another book I want to write, Cooking On A Hotplate, or Camp-Fire Cooking, which might be just about technique. The truth is, cooking a Cut-Throat trout on a stick, is a very simple thing to do. You gut it, put it on a stick, and hold it over the fire until the skin is crisp. The last bite is usually fried fish-tail. Among the initiated fried fish-tail is absolutely sacred and holy. From what I understand of any sacrament, this (or there) is where we test the water. Read more...

Seasonal Weather

April rain on the back of March wind. I had to shut down while a squall line blew through, spitting hail, a patter song on the roof and deck. Very intense for ten minutes, then it dribbles rain for the rest of the day, while I drink smoked tea and research the long-eared white people building ziggurats in the Andes. A phone call from an old high school flame, I couldn't believe it, she'd tracked me down via my posts, to which she had been alerted by another former classmate in that network of those people who do that. I'm not hard to find, evidently. She got a phone book online. She'd been reading me for several weeks and it had surprised her, the person I had become. When she knew me, I was supposed to become a lawyer and then maybe a politician; and that didn't happen, I didn't even attend my graduation because I already had my first job in professional theater. Harder rain, and the wind is a muted roar, rolling thunder to the south moving toward the southeast, well away from me. She wants to know how I got there. The where of that is fairly nebulous. Later, after an entire day spent reading, I make an excellent stir-fry with sweet red peppers, mushrooms, and some beef tips, on a bed of pecan rice. Rain hammering hard on the roof. The driveway should be fine and this could be the last threat to egress because the trees will be leafed-out soon and then they drink all the moisture. Between showers I'm outside walking around, rolling thunder to the south, and I'm feeling good, having survived. Only three trips out and in that were remotely dangerous and I can avoid even those in the future, with a little more care to the larder. I'll want more acorns next year, and an additional sack of cornmeal, a few more cans of things I can eat without thinking, but I got it almost right this year, a combination of tinned sardines and South American corned beef. A small freezer stuffed with soy protein and greens. Rice and beans. I cut a deal with a pig farmer so that I end up with quite a bit of sow belly that I can turn into salt pork. Chewing on pork rinds is probably why I didn't seek higher office, it's hard to trust someone who drools. So much salt and so little substance. Still, if it feels right, you should probably see where it leads. Might well be a dead end, but you have to open all the doors. Someone, B I think, said something about responsibility. Everyone hit the exits. 42 trampled to death, 84 drowned when the ferry capsized, and a muffled cry goes out, "my dear sir, what about my check?" Frogs and crows, and mice that I microwave, I swear, I have no vested interest in this. My other self argues that I knew all along, but I'm sure I believe that; I'm just a simple guy, looking at trace tracks, most of them deformed by melt. The real world is just a construct. The wind is blowing. Leaves dancing. I finally just have to retreat, it's all too much, really. Read more...

Problem Solved

I always feel stupidly bright when I accomplish anything that had seemed impossible given my abject lack of knowledge about electronic devices. I now have an extra modem, which is fine, but the old modem wasn't dead. The problem was the fact that there's a new area code here, and we have to dial an area code for even a local call. AOL didn't pass that information along to their equipage. I found that I could manually insert the area code into the call number. Problem solved. I still need new equipment, but I have some breathing room. Picked up the new modem in town, lunched with TR; and Aaron, one of the staff at the pub, wondered about my lousy Internet connection and how that affected my access to porn. He had those of us eating at the bar in hysterics. Amazing what the difference of a few days make. There's suddenly so much green, the lawns down near the river especially. I'm nearly rear-ended, slowing to gawk. I become a road hazard this time of year. The farmer who raises corn in the big bottoms along Rt. 125 had plowed and harrowed those fields and I stopped to look for arrowheads. Quickly found a couple of nice bird points and a core that looked like it was being worked into an axe head. One of the bird points is quite small and very beautiful. After I get my paragraphs sent I celebrate with a sardine sandwich (a thick slice of onion, wasabi mayo) and a bottle of Zin. A Ravenswood Old Vines that is huge. Over the top, fruity, dry and tannic. I like a big, bold red with sardine sandwiches. The porn conversation today threw me for a loop, I didn't know it was such a given. I've bred so many animals, birthed so many babies, and wiped so many asses, I'm not much interested anymore. To be fair, to be with another person involves giving up yourself, some of the time, and I don't seem to be willing to do that. Not that it was a conscious decision, but at some point when and where I would take a walk, what I would stop to consider, the nature of things, became much more important to me. I treasure good conversation, but I really like being in the woods alone. It's not something you could easily fake. Nor that stupid smile on your face when you build a perfect fire to get you through the night. A matter of course. Read more...

Nothing Special

I'd just rather be left alone. I don't really like the way world operates, and I prefer my own system, where you throw out a baited hook and see what bites. My system has been proven a failure many times. The poplars are budding. First buds on the tips of blackberries in the sunshine. It's so beautiful outside, and I have a lovely walk, looking at buds with a magnifying glass and eating a few, to see what they tasted like. I carry a cup with me, because there's crystal water coming out of every cliff-face. The miniature flowers are coming out. You have to get down on your knees to see them clearly. Rodney did a good job on the driveway wash-outs. He's a chatterbox, but I can deal with that to get some things done. He's had an interesting life and tells good stories. A college degree, but he chose to move back here, live out in the country, on a few acres in a run-down house. Whatever the labor statistics say, unemployment in rural Scioto county must be 25%. Welfare and cutting firewood, dealing pain-killers, growing a little weed, robbing your neighbor, whatever it takes. Upper Twin is a tough nut. Hardened locals working hard to eat potatoes. It's obscene, that the coach of the basketball team makes four times more than the president of the university. Ten times more. I love soccer, don't get me wrong, but a 120 MILLION dollars for four years? Even if you have to walk with a limp the rest of your life you could afford very good take-out, have sex with an Argentinean model, or just bring the goats down the back way into the milking barn, studying, all the while, the way runoff was digging channels. I was looking at some sticks in the grader ditch, the way they blocked the flow; I poked them with my mop handle and they were sucked immediately out. I have a certain technique when it comes to clearing culverts, I allow the water to do most of the work, and I'm good at this. TR said the modem should be in tomorrow. That last cold snap brought another wave of field mice inside, so I set out all the traps and built my ingenious bucket trap over at the pantry. Cantilever out a shingle-shim and anchor it with a can of tomatoes, put a dab of peanut butter on the end and put a five gallon bucket underneath with an inch of water in it. This works amazingly well. Got me thinking about cantilevers, which I immediately started reading about. Galileo explored the structural mechanics in the 1638 book Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. I built a very nice house in Mississippi, from a modified pole barn design (the posts went from five feet in the ground to the roof line, 36 feet, 8x8 treated Yellow Pine) which is a design Frank Wright called a vertical cantilever. Late afternoon a serious wind comes up from the NW. Even the heavily stayed stove pipe above the roof, triple walled steel, moves back and forth a bit, enough to make a sound. Let's see, I can't control water, I can't control air, and I sure as hell can't control those slanted shafts of light that break through the clouds. The house shakes, straight line winds on the ridge top; it's warm though, and light enough to read. Later, I steam an artichoke and eat it with a pesto mayonnaise. I put the leaves in a bucket to rot, I'm pretty sure I can make paper from the fiber. I fed the crows a couple of micro-waved mice, they're terrible house guests, but they do love a warm mouse on a windy, early spring day. You could argue that I indulge myself too far, or indulge them, but the fact is that I'm going to the outhouse, and I have some dead mice I need to get rid of. What better way? Read more...

Visitors

Rodney stopped by, after a day of working down at B's place, shoring up a loft and then moving piles of lumber. B had told him that I had some work for him, and he's going to dig out the lower ditch and catchment. He thinks he can do the floor insulation work in a couple of days. This is a great boon to me, and critical to my plan for the future. Take the load off a bit. First time, though, that I've paid someone to do something for me that I was capable of doing myself. TR ordered the modem and it should be here Tuesday or Wednesday. B came over with the young couple who might move into his cabin. Earlier, Rodney had been in the house. They were all impressed with the beam-work and the staircase, more than impressed, they were incredulous. I pointed out mistakes and apologized for the mess. All of the clothes I wear in the winter are piled on chairs and the end of the sofa, there's oak bark everywhere around the stove, the cobwebs, thickened with fly-ash, control the corners of the ceiling, and I'm quite disheveled, personally, as I was up most of the night, finishing a Sandford novel and writing for a few hours. I finally took a nap just at sunrise, but there had been so much stimulation that I didn't sleep well, and then the sun was in my eyes. A monster breakfast, then another cup of coffee, reflections on social integration, a short walk to check for early morels, then I turned on the seat heater and drove across Rodney's repair of the driveway several times, to pack it down. I almost drove into town, for a footer and onion rings, but I went back home, ate olives, cheese and crackers, a tin of sardines. I felt like I had talked to enough people. I didn't have anything to say, and I was tired of listening. It takes several hours for the ridge to settle back to its steady state, sound and activity set up a vibration, and it takes a while before the birds resume mindless chatter and the squirrels start chasing each other again. Saw an odd bird today, that I couldn't identify, yellow and orange with a black band. I was going out to the compost heap, I had ashes to dump, and table scraps, and the fox was watching me from the edge of the woods. The bird swooped in and both the fox and I snapped our heads up at full attention. I think it was an Oriole. The fox was spooked, ran off into the under-story, then stopped, gave me that regal profile for just a second, and disappeared. Excellent idea for a very short film. Or maybe a part of something, a sequence of very short parsings. Tom O' Bedlam, Emily's dash, Pound and his endless striving. I'm content with a wee dram, and later, the halo of a moon, hung above the clouds. Read more...

Maple Blush

One of those days that start fairly warm and just get colder all day. Rain in the morning, supposed to be snow after midnight. Lovely outside in the afternoon, because the Red Maples are budding out and the and the sides of the hollows are fully flushed. A haze of color. I scarify a few of the branches to get some sweet icicles for making cocktails. McCord has become big in Europe and they're shooting a movie based on his novella. Wonderful stuff. B is feeling good about his work right now, and the work on his house. I need to do some spring cleaning and spend a couple of days doing yard work, muck out the outhouse and dump the composting toilet, and then I'd feel ok about my place in the grand scheme of things. Being focused generates heat for me, allows me to survive a cold spell. Sometimes I have to put my feet in a pan of warm water. I hate cutting off toes with pinking shears, especially my own. I always use dental floss, to sew up anything, my thread of choice. Dental floss is probably the greatest discovery of the last century. Birth control and dental floss. Wind energy and solar panels. If you could bleed off even a small percentage of what happens on the surface of a leaf, you could power the world. Which we could; but there are those vested interests, the Railroad Barons, who stand to gain a fortune. Asses the situation: everyone sells out, it's only ever a matter of price, I could do cost-stress-analysis on this, but it doesn't seem worth the time. What I really wanted was a cheese omelet, a couple of sausage patties, and a piece of toast with marmalade. Keep it simple. I spend several hours, most of a day if the truth be known, thinking about the standards of society. I'm not a good example. I've known that for a long time, but it's not something I dwell on. Yes, I don't have any money, but everything I have is paid for; I don't have any debt, and I can eat well off the land, if I need to. The last two winters, when the hammer was down, I just retreated to my personal tree-tip pit, a burrow I favor, lined with blankets, where I can stay warm enough and read by the light of a candle. The only threat I pose is by extension. I'd walked over to the graveyard, from where I could see another hollow, and it was blushed in Red Maples. There are dozens of places I stop, when I'm walking in the woods, stumps that I remember, places where I roll a smoke, maybe take a wee nip. It's not a standard I'd apply for other people, I don't even apply it to myself, I just try to stay warm and have enough light to read. I need a public library and a food market where I can buy a few things that I don't find locally, but the blush, of that hollow, was a wondrous thing. Being deprived of color for so many months. I could easily draw meaning from that. Red seems like a great celebration. That phenomenon when ice crystals appear in the air looks like glitter. Though glitter is much more difficult to clean up, ice crystals sublimate, but glitter is insidious in the way it inhabits nooks and crannies. As I understand it, they don't put modems in computers anymore, and even if I did upgrade my equipment, I'd need to have an external modem. I've noticed that there does seem to be a weak signal here now, which there never was before, and the guy at Radio Shack mentioned a signal amplifier. I, quite literally, don't know what to do. The foundation I propose, which might be called "Help For Addled Writers" would step in at this point and provide the necessary hardware, or software, or whatever. Dental care, new glasses, a more recent dictionary. HFAW, if I'm elected, would erect huts, in various locations, where idiot writers could wash their hair. And they'd have technical help, for those who never developed beyond the pencil. Free drugs for those that qualified. A certified person to trim fungoid toenails. Free boots, free shade-grown, organic coffee beans, that have passed through the digestive track of a Wombat. Free whiskey and tobacco. A cave for every hermit. Aluminum foil helmets and body armor. Amor. I swear. This budding is particularly important, because it marks a year in which I completely stepped aside. Not so much a retreat as a complete disengagement. Or, rather, being fully engaged in the present. Having no fixed course beyond the things that are necessary, and taking the time to look closely at anything that caught my attention. And I feel fully employed, reading for six or eight hours a day, looking out the window, removing a conjunction and adding a comma, rubbing that itch in my back against a door-jam. And eating well, marrow bones and morels, force meats, various greens cooked with salt-pork and onions, beans, of course, in their endless variety, and hot fresh cornbread. B was talking about ceiling trim, and I explained my theory that no one ever looked up anyway. They don't look down either, other than to assure footing, humans tend to look straight ahead in a fairly narrow band. The height of a door is generally six foot eight inches, the frozen ground is right in front of you. Let's say you're six feet away from the door. Your vision might encompass 90 degrees, one quarter of the known universe at that moment. It's difficult to determine what's real. Read more...

Off Ridge

Following my best advice, if I can get off the ridge and back up, I take advantage. I needed to go to the library and I wanted a steak and sweet potato for tomorrow night. No one was at the pub, so I watched half a soccer game and talked with the help. The museum was hopping, an all day kid thing. Too much going on for a conversation with TR, so I stopped at Kroger, then stopped at the Bridge Carry-Out for cigaret papers. The back way home takes me right by B's place, so I had put a small pack of his in the Jeep, to give back to him. Stopped and talked. It was so nice to get back to the ridge, a small fire in the stove, heat some left-overs, I just wanted fiction and a lap-robe. I read through a heavily illustrated edition of Jules Verne, the French love him, and Poe, go figure. We're meanwhile stuck with Sarte and Camus. It doesn't seem fair. Which ever way I might mean that. I had to go eat, a great meal of potatoes and sausage and eggs, and when I went back to writing I couldn't remember which side I came down on. I packed up my day pack and took a long walk, west and north. The red maples are starting to break out. It's lovely in the woods and I stop, whenever I find a stump, and sit still until the natural sounds restore themselves. In the early afternoon, I break out of the forest onto Upper Twin several miles up the road, hike back to the driveway, then up the hill. I was wasted, rolled a smoke, got a drink, and sat on the back porch for a long time. Birds, a few frogs, the wind in the trees. I had to take a nap before grilling a small steak and cooking a foil-wrapped sweet potato in the coals (I just cut them up with a knife and fork, put on a couple of pats of butter, a dusting of powdered Ancho Chile pepper) and eat at the island. I have one of the track lights positioned for reading at the island, and I spend quite a bit of time there, trying to read and eat at the same time. My equipment, such as it is, is not working. The exterior modem (# 7) seems to have died, so I won't be able to SEND, and exterior modems are getting difficult to find. Cory, at the pub, said he thought he had a couple, the point is that I have to upgrade my whole system. But I can't, because of the trees, and the fact that I do actually live in the boonies. When those companies call now, with their offer of free connection, I tell them to send their best person. Consider it a challenge. Sure, we can drop some trees, line of sight, true north. I might choose to be connected. I'd like to be better connected, actually; faster, able to open files. I feel like I'm wading in molasses right now. I need a better computer, and printer, because I need hard copy, and I need a couple of basic lessons in creating files and storing data. I'm such a fucking dunce when it comes to almost anything. I can read well, and take good walks. I did quantify the scale by which a couple of crows can totally screw the sound environment, the Beery Scale, and I've been written up in a couple of journals as someone you didn't really want to meet. Bridwell, yeah, I remember that guy, I'd cross to the other side of the street. I'd heard his kind had congress with goats. It's supposed to snow again, it can't last, the way the ground has warmed, but it could look very nice in the morning. Steak and sweet potato two nights in a row. I have to solve this modem problem which means another trip out, talk to Cory; if he doesn't have one, his brother will, or one of them will know where I can get one. The classic snipe hunt. I'm strongly motivated to stay in touch and I don't really know where that comes from, there's no real moral or ethic in my background, I can't even claim to be a failed Lutheran. And I only keep contact with a diminishing group of friends. I'd rather just read than talk to some idiot. All day on the elusive modem hunt, and there was not one to be found. The guy at Radio Shack said that I could order one from Wal-Mart.com but that no one carried them anymore. Lunch with TR and Anthony, and Anthony, reading my growing frustration, bought me a beer and a cup of soup; then I actually went to Wal-Mart, where I never go, and the guy there verified that I could order one. Stuck behind a wreck, I had plenty of time to curse my lot in life. A valve-stem leak in one of my new tires, so I had to stop and get that repaired; I just happened to notice, coming out of K-Mart, that the tire was low. K-Mart did have a shelf marked Modems, but there was nothing on it, and that's as close as I came. I'll get TR to order one, and have it delivered to him at the museum, then I'll have to go back into town to get it. The logistics of living in the woods: and any kind of hardware is the worst, because you always have to go into town twice. I've re-purposed a great many things to avoid the extra trip. I could write a book on the history of the hinge. Fortunately I have left-overs to eat, so as soon as I get home I get a drink and sit on the back porch. Spending an entire day in abject failure is a good lesson in humility. So I'm days away from any solution and there isn't anything I can do about it. I could probably drive a hundred miles and find what I needed, but I don't know where to go or what questions to ask and I don't want to drive a hundred miles anyway. When I'm forced by circumstance to write a longer paragraph I tend to brood too much. Open-ended deadlines, and I can spend a very long time considering a comma. If anything I'm even slower than before. I can still write a four-sentence hour, which I consider a goodly pace, but anything is likely to distract me. Consider my sources. Today I was reading Eyal Peretz, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Moby-Dick, and I'm several hours into this, the identity of Ismael, what Pip might be thinking. Flotsam in an endless sea. Another modemless day. Warm, but big winds and another cold front with snow moving in tonight. In preparation, I cook a pot of beans, get out some candles, fill an oil lamp. Blowing like crazy outside, a few rain drops, and it must be 65 degrees. Fickle. A small walk, to look for early morels, but there's so much leaf-litter blowing about I went back home, made a pot of smoked tea, and reread a book, Lonliness As A Way Of Life, because it's the book that turned me on to Peretz. There's a great discussion of the movie Paris, Texas, which is one of my favorites (it has a great soundtrack, Ry Cooder), and many things that I need to reference. The leaves are fairly dancing outside my windows. I called B at the college, to get him to get me a book through University Library Loan, and he invites me for dinner to meet a young couple he's befriended. If it doesn't start raining I'll go down. B's a good cook, and the conversation is always lively. TR told me yesterday that his Cincy musician friends think that I'm a fictional character. A construct, to hang his composition on. Zack, based there also, said that, no, he'd met and worked with me, and that I was a real person. I attest to realness. I feel like I'm here, or there. An inch worm, swinging in the breeze. I write all afternoon, the rain holds off, and at five I headed out to B's. Kinsey, I think was her name, I forget his. B made fried eggplant (which he does superbly) with a peanut sauce and a very good sweet potato/apple/ginger dish. I hadn't had a social evening in quite a while, many months, and it was nice to hear other voices. I still got back home just before dark, rolled a smoke and poured a wee dram, a liberal wee dram, and thought about human nature. This young couple, just starting their way, wanting to put experience ahead of money. Which is the way it comes down. B has offered them the cabin, to try an alternative lifestyle, and I don't have any objection, as long as we can hammer out a driveway protocol and they don't bother me. Be kind of nice, actually, to have someone within hearing of a gunshot. But they have the wrong vehicle and I don't think they can do it. Living without running water and no electricity is a big hurdle. You are immediately cleaved from most of the population. When the mosquito larvae squiggle in my wash water, I strain everything through an old tee-shirt; I boil the water when I make noodles. I make good coffee. This water that was passed through Jefferson's bladder. Read more...