Ground Fog

A hanging mist in the hollow, rain all day. Read a slightly creepy John Connolly novel. Irish creepy. I had to put away a few books, as the pile on the carpenter chest had gotten too high to see over. I'd gotten out a great many books, when Bear had asked me about the sassafras beam, and they all go back to the construction section, which is difficult of access, being in the tool-room (soon to become my downstairs bedroom) amidst a bunch of dead chainsaws. My sense of order seems to be almost complete chaos. I'm collecting rain-water, so I can wash dishes; and I have to clean and re-season 6 or 8 cast iron skillets. I get awful about the cast iron when I don't use the cook-stove, because I have such a large flat surface and I own so many skillets. When I'm cooking on the wood stove, it's so easy to just wipe out the pan (burn the paper) and wipe on another layer of oil. Roy and I used to laugh about this, using a cured pig's tail to grease a skillet. Magwitching hour, overclap of clouds, tracking oomska through the parlor. Corned beef and gravy on toast. Gravy, in the south, is always an amalgam of fat and toasted flour, except for red-eye gravy which is just ham fat and strong black coffee. Cool morning and much more rain, but the crows are back and I toss a nuked mouse to them on top of the outhouse; then transfer water around until I can clean one of the buckets and bring in a kettle of water to wash some dishes. Another wave of rain moves through, but no thunder, so I turn on Little Dell and search for errant commas. Cold enough to warrant a fire, so I burn what's in the firebox (I stuff crap in there all summer) then add a couple of sticks. No danger of fire from fly-ash because everything outside is saturated. Perfect circumstances. In my bathrobe and slippers, wild beard and filthy hair, I get a nice fire going, and wipe down the stove-top with a lightly oiled towel; it burns off quickly. Sometimes I roast an herb, to scent the house; sage is always good, or juniper berries. I realize it's the perfect opportunity to cook a pot of beans and put on a pound of pintos. Cut up a cured jowl to make cracklings, mince a couple of yellow onions. While the oven is hot, make a pone of cornbread. Let the fire go out, and the beans cook perfectly. I'm reading Beowulf and looking up words all day; eating beans, and cornbread, toasted and drizzled with maple syrup. Rain on the roof, Bach, a dram of Glendronach. I love this life. Roll a cigaret, sit back in the dimness. It was dark today at noon but I have my seven-and-a-half watt LED reading light, my headlamp, to see me through. And just think, at the end of this next winter, I will have read all of Thoreau's Journals. Joel will give me some shit about this, us plumbers; but I defend myself as just someone who reads quickly. It allows me to coast through a lot of fiction, then slow down, and study the history of the fork. Read more...

Leaf-Fall

I found the rolled anchovies (with capers, in olive oil) today, and I was a happy shopper. Mac turned me on to anchovy paste decades ago, it doesn't go bad, or if it does you don't notice. But having rolled anchovies meant I cook a couple of pasta dishes I'd been wanting to try. I put anchovy paste in everything, it deepens flavor. I'd never spent much time in the canned meat and fish aisle, and was surprised to see that they still sell canned mackerel. Vile stuff. But also squid in its own ink, and pig's knuckles. I bought a few things, including several cans of anchovies. Moroccan and wild-caught, nothing but fish, capers, olive oil, and salt. Excellent with butter and olives on egg noodles, also good with ripe cheese on a salad. Visions of sugar-plums dance in my head. Acorns falling on the woodshed so I spread a piece of netting at the drip-edge and harvested a gallon. I want to make some acorn/cat-tail pollen cakes. Stored correctly these would keep for a long time. Temperature and moisture have very little to do with leaf-fall, it's mostly a length of day issue. I've never understood why certain trees (exceptions to the rule) drop all their leaves at once. There's a maple tree on Mackletree, isolated and hanging over the road, that always does this. I've never actually witnessed the event, which must happen fairly quickly (a couple of hours?) but I've seen the evidence several times: a pool of leaves mirroring the diameter of the crown and undisturbed by traffic or wind. Granted, there's not a lot of traffic on Mackletree, but there must be 30 vehicles a day, and the vortex of a passing vehicle is quite strong, leaves collect quickly at the edge of the verge. Twice I've been the first vehicle to view the scene. It's quite a strange sight. Three or four inches of undisturbed leaves in a rough circle. The mechanism of leaf-fall is fairly well understood, the hardening off of the bud for next year is preparing for winter, connection to leaf is severed, the leaf falls. The very idea that all the leaf buds severed connection at the same time is staggering to me. I follow the life cycle of a few trees, maybe a hundred of them, on a regular basis, mostly because they mark certain places; on the driveway, for instance, there are seven trees that I always notice, two of them are dead, which only increases my interest, two of them afford a view of the hollow, and the others are trees I lean against to gain composure. Any of the three ways I drive out are marked by certain trees, the trip into town, in town even, the city trees, the maples along the riverbanks, that survive the worst we can throw at them. At the house, I have to stop and count, there are at least 20 trees that I monitor fairly closely. Two in particular, a poplar out front and a red maple out the window where I write. Both of them are coppiced from the ice-storm, 12 years ago, and they're doing well. I could harvest them as firewood tomorrow, and let them re-grow. I prefer to just watch them, clear the underbrush maybe once a year and let things run wild. I don't want to interfere. Read more...

Saturday Rant

Maybe I slept in the wrong position or something, I don't remember, but I might have had a bad dream. I spill some ground coffee. I'd turned the radio on, but turned it off almost immediately. I was a debate champ, in high school, and my first plane trips were to speech contests, where I usually won, and had room-service meals in actual hotels, This is where my five years of Latin come back to haunt me, I actually know about debate. Tracking coffee on bare feet in my haste to kill the broadcast, I make a further mess, involving cornmeal mush. Completely pissed at my own inability to control simple problems. I have to sit and gather my wits. Watch another amazing battle between a wasp and the large spider that lives outside a window. The acorns have started falling on the roof of the woodshed, an irregular rhythm, that, after the first few surprises, I enjoy, as an alternative method of keeping time. The bell, ringing to start a new round. The rant was a little ragged, I haven't done them much in the last 15 years, but it's like riding a bike. I seemed to be more upset by some things than I thought I had been. I developed my ranting as a rhetorical device, a helpmeet I used to prepare for a debate. After discovering NPR I'd often have a mock-rant, listening to the radio on Sunday morning. These were often funny, sarcastic or ironic. On the Vineyard I'd built a bleacher overlooking the terminal morraine, to watch the sunset. We made the best home-brew on the island, and we'd often make a party of it, roasted oysters and beer, and I'd usually be asked to summarize the week's events. These were great fun. I've never, before or since, been surrounded by so many extremely bright people. Always two or three, as I don't actually live in a vacuum, But the Vineyard (then) was like Iowa City now. The waitress in a breakfast diner working on her thesis. I cooked Basmati rice, a cup of rice makes either two or three servings for me. Canned crab meat in Kroger, where they have a shelf of discontinued items and dented cans. I'd read all night, windows open to the cicada chorus, and I wanted a crab cake with a soft egg on top. I keep a box of dried mashed potatoes around, because they're a perfect binder, mince some onion and add a scant teaspoon of sweet relish, fried in bacon fat. The rice is for a shrimp fried-rice later as B had alerted me to some very inexpensive shrimp. The rice for this is much better if it's a day old, and I make a rice pudding (an egg, vanilla, blueberries) for either dessert, which I rarely eat, or for breakfast. Preparations complete, I sit back with a dram of single malt and survey my kingdom. First, I have to say, no one would aspire to this; sure, I know a lot about bullfrogs, I can make paper from artichokes, I cure elk hams for Jewish friends, but the thread, through it all, is just a spider web that I maintain, to hold my interest. Read more...

Unknown Aetiology

Now, the first day of fall, there's always a leaf falling. The splintered light constantly moving. It's quite dramatic. The fox was back, alone. I rolled her an apple, then as she hung around, another, and watched her eat. Her paw to eye coordination is excellent, and she's quite dainty. Then she perked up her ears, picked up an apple core and disappeared. I knew someone or something was coming, and it was a root digger, wondering where he could dig. The other side of the next ridge east, or this side of the next ridge west I told him, everything between is a Ginseng Wilderness Area. I must have looked a fright, a look I cultivate by not cultivating any look at all. What you see is what you get. He left very quickly, looking back over his shoulder. The legend grows. The ticks are not gone. I'd edged into the woods, after some mushrooms, and when I got home I had to bag my clothes and wipe down with alcohol. Since I had the Norton out I went back and read the intro to the earliest text, Anglo-Saxon, then around 1200 into Middle English. In London they were speaking a Norman-French; there was Manx, there was Jersey, there was Gaelic. I think of Claxton, fairly often, when I think about language. Movable type is one of the great things ever, but you need a codified language, AND you have to assume a reading public. I can't even begin to imagine. I could run a small boat rental business, one of those estuaries in south Georgia, a few crab pots, a trot-line. It's the perfect place to be, to watch lily-pads float on the water. Dark and very still, I can hear two small animals, nosing through the duff. I remember a night in Utah, south and west of Bluff. I'd driven to the end of the road, then hiked in for several hours. I knew there was a spring up the blind canyon that was marked at its entrance by a balanced stone. The Utes had a name for it that meant, roughly, "unhappy mother-in-law", just a couple of more miles, at the end of the canyon, there's a dwelling place. It could have housed and supported maybe eight or ten people. There's a perfect rock shelf, that protects a granary, a fire-pit, and places you might imagine sleeping on pine boughs. This was one of the finest spots I've ever found myself and I camped there maybe a dozen times. I never saw another person. Two rock faces of drawings. Five hundred years of flaked chert. The spring itself came out between two rocks and there was a basin, silted in, that had been carved into the rock. In the dry season it only flowed a gallon an hour, but in the spring it would have flowed enough to raise an early crop of corn. I carry a little piece of plastic pipe in my pack, to direct the stream out and into a pan. A gallon of water an hour is actually quite a lot of water. Glenn had noticed the new devices fitted on the end of guard-rails, they added miles of guard-rails this past year. The ends used to curve back and down, and die into the ground, which was stupid because it provided a ramp for flipping cars over. This new device absorbs impact and peels back. On the trip into town, one of them had been deployed. I stopped and looked, and I think it did exactly what it was supposed to do. I was coming back home on Forest Service roads and I was completely lost, someplace between the Boy Scout camp and the Forest Service horse trails, when I saw an apple tree, heavy with fruit. I stopped to collect a bag for the fox, and they were pretty good, so I collected another bag to make applesauce. Lost is relative, better to say I didn't know where I was. The Forest Service roads always come out on 52 or 125. Back home I had to shelve some books and I pulled out some early Beckett, Molloy in particular because I remembered a section of that [Molloy And His Sucking Stones] that I wanted to read again. It's a very funny passage. Another book from JC, Wildwood, by Roger Deakin, who's one of the people Macfarlane references in Landmarks. Deep clover. The library called and they were holding a book for me, in the interest of making every trip count, I picked up a few things for the larder, another cured smoked jowl, some charred red peppers in olive oil. Read more...

As Expected

Ate early, Mac and Cheese, with bacon and chopped jalapenos, sitting at the island reading the new Ian McEwan, Nutshell, and there's a ruckus outside. I can hear it's the bobcat and a couple of dogs. Ran them off with the back porch light and a couple of marbles from the sling-shot because I had arranged the entire day to be awake when "World Cafe" came on the radio. Bonny Raitt. I love her voice and she do play a mean guitar. An entertainment event. I think I could build a crude composting bin with five pallets, four strips of that perforated metal strapping called 'plumber's tape', and eight screws. I need a compost heap, although need may be too strong a word, because the system I've used for 15 years actually just involves putting my waste in a designated area and letting animals deal with it. They spread it around and dig it in. I can't believe I get the timing correct, but midnight, and listening to Bonny with her slide guitar, It doesn't get much better than that. She interprets songs. I saw her once in New Hampshire, with John Lee Hooker, and it blew me away. An interview and four or five songs in an hour, about all the excitement I can bear. I was back at the island, close to the radio, eating grape tomatoes with an avocado cream dressing, and repeated generous grinds of black pepper. I bought an extra of those self-grinder black pepper units, because there are few things worse than running out of black pepper mid-winter. This latest McEwan is very good, he's a great writer, told from the point of view of a very self-aware fetus in the womb. He hears everything, passed down through the skeleton through the amniotic fluid. It's a great conceit, and carried off perfectly. I love when the narrator discovers a shrimp between his legs and realizes he's male, and when he's finally born, at the end, and sees blue for the first time. After all the excitement (Bonny on the radio) I knew I wouldn't get to sleep. Coming across the word shadowtackle I wished I had picked up some Hopkins at the library, then remembered I had the Norton Anthology; a concise little bio, a decent discussion of the poetry, then a dozen or so poems. A wee dram and I read Hopkins until dawn. I think it's a bit over-the-top, but I enjoy a few hours of immersion, the creation and/or resurrection of words is quite wonderful. Sets the tone of the day, and I go on to read some Eliot and some Auden, then some Pound, then some Olson, then some Dorn. I have piles of manuscripts and books of poets I've known from my publishing days onward, so I read more poetry than most people. Shadowtackle is the shifting pattern of light caused by the stirring of the canopy. We know what some of his words mean because in letters he often explained them. I love the precise explication. Don't remember if I mentioned, but I had the thought, and continue thinking about the fact, that I could write a short story, in English, that anyone would be hard-pressed to understand. I might call it Logan Stone, which is one rock atop another that looks like it could rocked. You see this a lot in Utah. Is Dell just the feminine of Dale? Della? Clearly I have my work cut out for me. The opening of Logan Stone is: "A barf to the beam, and over the bedding plane, bequeen an old oak, hearing the bell of a stag. Keelbam on a kesh, all the luck, the ruts filled with ice. The llvybr, those fucking Welsh, canted and impossible." Reread Beckett's little book on Proust. Bought and read the first time on Nantucket. I always found Nantucket to be beautiful but rather boring, the Vineyard was still country, we lived in a 25 acre woodlot, and I had my own oyster beds. Still, if we had stayed there, life would be very different; I'd probably be making lovely books and selling them for a lot of money, but it was impossible, with the visitors and guests. No time to work. Mississippi was better, but Colorado was close to perfect, we had a guest house, a trout stream, and we raised everything. I actually traded cured pork for fresh game because I loved elk and everyone loved my hams; a very good lawyer once traded an entire antelope for a side of bacon. His family, he said, hated the gamy taste of antelope, but they loved my bacon. God bless them. Read more...

Broken

I don't know how I got to this place. AOL wasn't working correctly and I couldn't get to my working file because the toolbar was covered with an error display warning. I finally found my way around the problem, but I don't remember how because I tried a dozen ways. It took most of the day. Finally, just as it started raining, I found my Write Mail file, which is mostly where I work. With it being a weekend I got an early dram, rolled a smoke, and toasted my success. I missed the farmer's market, though, and I needed tomatoes, so I could continue the run of BLTs. I can always beg a few tomatoes, down the creek. Skipped lunch, reading a Peter Robinson novel and fiddling with Little Dell, Took time out to search through all the new material for words that related to dell. Turned into quite the chore and I ended up with over 50. B wrote a nice poem, a few years ago, nailing down various degrees of dellness. I was thrilled when I found Write Mail, the other end of the thread, and I immediately put it in my favorite file, Mail Waiting To Be Sent, where I now let a paragraph sit for a few hours, then go back, delete the last line, and Send. I should start saving the deleted last lines in another file, a manuscript called Deleted Last Lines. Such a realist. I had left-over shellfish, so I made a simple stew, minced onion, clam broth, a few oysters, some mussels, a diced potato, in a shallow bowl, on toast. This was quite good. Finished the Robinson novel, looked at some pictures, I'm outside during the gloaming, the low clouds underlit, text book alpenglow. Two times in two days, I swear, Hopkins has come up in a major way. B was looking at the ruts in his driveway, holloways I said they were called, and he quoted Hopkins. It's not that often, in your life, that you have Hopkins quoted at you, then he quoted Chaucer, and I knew what he was referring to was that last sentence in the prologue. The holloways. Still raining when I got up to pee, and it was so peaceful I stayed up to read. Dawn brought a breeze and the leaf-fall increased. First cool morning and I hadn't put on any clothes, other than my boxer-briefs and a tee-shirt, so when I went out to drink a cup of coffee and have a smoke on the back porch, I took my stadium blanket, to cover my legs. Soon I'll be wearing trousers. A sure sign the seasons are changing. I love sitting on the back porch with a morning cup of coffee, looking in the opposite direction of the rising sun. The slants of light. It has many names. Tree-rain in the afternoon. Aunt Sadie fixed the best sweet potatoes you've ever eaten, boiled until almost done, then fried in bacon fat, drizzled with sorghum molasses, until they caramelize, served with Jersey butter and fresh-ground black pepper. Sweet potatoes are cheap, right now, so I make some of those, and a fried cream corn from sweet corn sold out of a farm wagon on the side of the river road, a sliced tomato on the side, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Eating high on the hog. I go for days without eating anything not raised between me and town, a 17 mile Venn circle. Almost every possible edible plant within that circle. Bitter greens you cook with salted pork; day-lily pods, raw, with a sharp vinaigrette. Something dead nearby, I can smell it when I go outside. Back inside, I was staring out the window when a shadow swept across and it was the sanitation detail: two buzzards. Thank god. Whatever it is it's to the north of the house, so I'm downwind. A nasty smell (and smells rarely bother me) and I'm pleased that the professionals are on the job. When I send this paragraph, I'll have to take Little Dell in to the professionals, and have them remove the display from in front of my toolbar. To the radio, for the first time in days (I did stay up to listen to a blues show the other night) and I was surprised to hear the phrase "faith-based" so many times within an hour. The news, such as it is, is all terrible, and it's depressing. Sat outside; life lesson, when perplexed take a cup of coffee or a drink and sit outside. There's a invasive tree, in the hardwood forest, the Royal Pawlonia, with very large leaves, their survival characteristic is that they shade everything else out completely. Black Walnut roots exude a subtle poison, a pesticide. A squid and its ink. I don't comb my hair and wear tattered clothes, and it's a good disguise, most people leave me alone. The people that know me value my conversation, and I don't care about anyone else. Fuck a bunch of profiling. Read more...

Fact Fiction

Got up in the dark, as I've been doing of late, to finish reading a fiction, so I could return it to the library when I took B to town. He called, as planned, and I finally got dressed and brushed out my matted hair. B and his dog (a very handsome hound with a nice voice) seem comfortable with each other. A nice chat on the way in. Because of the detour, B gets mileage now (over 20 miles) days he teaches, and he's as busy as I am, getting ready for winter. His truck had a short somewhere and the battery drained, also a fluid leak; I need to get my oil changed, and check the strength of the radiator liquid. But the next thing on my list is the refrigerator. Now that B has his truck back we should be able to get the new-used smaller fridge up here in the next couple of weeks. The trip to town was interesting. Cory had a new beer on tap he wanted me to try, and they had a new dish planned for the menu, a squash ravioli, and he wanted my opinion on a sauce. It's pretty good, and I told him I'd just use an herbed butter/olive oil drizzled on top, with a salad side and bread. I immediately came home and made a creamed Butter-Nut squash soup, minced onion, chicken broth and put it to chill. I'll eat it cold, with roasted oysters. The new batch of oysters are from New England, they're sweet and tangy and I love them with just a squeeze of citrus, and they had beautiful mussels, from Prince Edward Island. I should have ended up on the shore somewhere, I love shellfish so much, but I take what I can get on a ridge in southern Ohio. I'll just steam the mussels in white wine and minced onion and eat until I fall over. The library was holding a book for me, on early English cutlery, and I do enjoy looking at pictures after a day of questioning commas. B had loaned (lent) me a book of Chuck Close photographs. I like these, but I'm not crazy about them, I just wanted visual stimulation. When I look at pictures my brain works differently. I was thinking about this recently, the difference between hearing books and reading them. Then thinking about visualizing the main beam in the clear-span room Bear was building for Jenny. He called again, thanking me for my advice. I had told him up front, because he's a large strong guy with a temper, that I did not want to be held accountable, I'm just reading some tables here, looking at weight-stress analysis, and I'm only assuming that sassafras is as strong as white pine. Dried peat, did I mention this? is about the density of white pine. Burns hot but quick. I'm currently working on an algorithm that translates turves to cords Compressed horse-shit might be a good way to store energy. Some work to do in the woodshed, last year's collection of pieces that are just too long for the stove and I need to cut them in half, burn a fire of chunks. If you're hanging around the house, drinking hot-toddies, reading Swedish mysteries, in a rocking chair near the stove, burning small burls is a perfectly acceptable course of action. Knocks for knock. Late at night, quiet as a tomb. Read more...

Soodle

To walk in a leisurely manner (John Clare), to saunter. Three deer outside my window, nosing through the ferns, sleek and lovely. Reading Gerard Hopkins, a writer very much in touch with the natural world. His name keeps popping up in researching landscape terms. He made up a great many of them: goldfoil (a kind of lightning), boarlight (the burnished quality of light at the end of a beautifully clear day, bright-borough (a night sky filled with stars), and they're so specific, especially about the nature of light. I need to read a biography of him. Forgot to eat, setting up Little Dell, so I made a pot of rice and had a bowl with soy sauce and chopped peppers, then spent some time writing, learning the ins-and-outs of the undated AOL service. I can't get over how quiet Little Dell is, she sounds, as we used to say about our Servel gas refrigerator, like a puppy sleeping. I hadn't realized how loud Black Dell had gotten at the end, but I had written 5,000 pages on her, five modems, two keyboards, and hundreds of brown and black outages. At the finish she was suffering shortness of breath and bad circulation. I held her hand until the very end, writing an eulogy I knew I could never send. I'm capable of emotional dross, anything to mitigate the erosion of memory. Joel called, wondering if I'd died, no, I told him, but the poplars are turning yellow on the ridge. And it's true, every time I go to town now, I add food for the larder, a couple of cans of hash, a few cans of beans; the Kroger brand of vegetables are two for a dollar, so I buy some butter beans and some turnip greens. I haven't been able to find dried eggs, which would turn hoecake into cornbread (in my extensive research, it's the addition of egg, and cooking in the oven, that makes a hoecake cornbread), but I can usually keep eggs through the winter;I also have powdered milk and bacon bits, that allow for a superior Mac-and-Cheese, if you're camping way off the beaten track. Sway is the word that designates animal tracks that deviate from a straight line, perfectly descriptive, Manx or Gaelic, and I think of my fox. When I follow her trail, I'm amazed and always interested in why she veered off the path. She also eats oak galls. B calls and I talk his ear off because I'm so excited by this rookie, Little Dell; she shows great promise, as a helpmeet for my dotage. He needs a ride to town and I'm certainly available, I tell him to call and remind me, because I don't keep track of time, but that I already had another list of things I needed, and a trip to town would be fine. Cory is holding a beer in abeyance, an oatmeal stout, and I want to connect. Read more...

Wrong Font

Took a little longer than it might have if I knew what I was doing, and the font size is wrong, but everything is connected. It took forever because I had to clean cables and the space behind Old Black Dell, she was messy in her final years. Fly litter, dead bugs, spider webs. I only had to go underneath the work desk once and I wore a mask. Jerome was here the very day she died and we went to town immediately, to the pub, for an early lunch and to question Cory about where to go, Adkins Computers, so we did. Jerome knew what I needed and talked the talk, the guy there was very quick. She's lovely and quite small, very quiet, and reconfigured in a black, sleek Dell housing. I thought for sure I was going to have to remove the now almost useless carcase, may she rest in peace, of Old Black Dell, and I was concerned, because the lamp, which sits atop, is perfect, or at least excellent for me, writing at night. Very cool, also, because their are a few pages I'd like to retrieve, from when I was still writing there, even though I knew OBD was dying. The Lost Pages. An extra trip to town, to take them my external modem, and the new unit will come preloaded, upgraded, all that. As it happens I could have gotten the damned thing on Saturday, but I assumed they'd be closed; on the modem trip I'd stopped at the library and got a couple of Scandinavian mysteries. Picked up a couple of pounded pork steaks that I breaded and fried, served with pan gravy, apple slices cooked in butter and maple syrup. The lych-way is the corpse way, the path the dead take to burial. I knew where the church used to be, two hollows over, and I finally found trace of the wagon path that leads up to the cemetery, a holloway, where the grooves are cut by the wheels. A raised path, in the fens, is called a cawnie. I'd noticed the rhododendron, across the road, on the opposite slope, was still bright green and glossy, like holly, and I wondered how long it held its leaves, so I tagged a few, to be able to follow the process. They must exude a toxin, because nothing grows under them; Black Walnut do this, an enzyme from the roots that discourages competition. There's a rain storm, which I need, being short on wash water, and I had clean buckets set out for water . I can get by on five gallons of wash water a week, two gallons of drinking water, I can boil rain or snow as drinking water. Read more...

Leaf-Whelmed

Defined as in such dense foliage that sight is limited. Wewire is foliage moving in the wind. Suthering is the noise of wind in the trees (John Clare). The glossaries in the Macfarlane book are wonderful. A fardon is a pillow made from a cow's stomach stuffed with hay. More phone calls about Bear's building project and I get him and the owner to agree to add diagonal braces where the beam meets the walls. That reduces the clear-span to an acceptable length. To celebrate I have a wee dram and roll a smoke. Thinking about large beams that I've built with in the past: a 5x14 yellow pine timber, 16 feet long, that I carved with a chainsaw to resemble a Thunder Bird; log purlins, flattened one side, that required two come-a-longs and a chain hoist to install; and a set of logs that required a crane. Bridge building, in Mississippi and in Colorado, we used some large pieces, but we always tried to off-load them directly into position. You never want to put large timbers on the ground, keep them waist high, on saw-horses, while you work on them. Two people can usually lift one end, otherwise you go to the pub and bribe a couple more people to help. If everything is completely prepared, you might only need extra help for five minutes. I've walked beams up two ladders many times, solo, oak is .7 specific gravity, 44 pounds a cubic foot, so a twelve foot 4x8 (a common size) is heavy, but lifting one end, resting it on your shoulder and lifting with your legs, isn't that difficult. I always kept the last step intact, so I could abort any attempt at final placement for any reason. At least duck out of the way in case something fell. I have a good record of survival. I never dropped a tree when I didn't know where to flee, a basic rule of the wood-butcher's art, and I never set beams without a meeting over coffee and donuts. A cheese Danish and a cup of fresh coffee goes a long way toward correcting any mistakes. Later, I'm frying some bacon, the house smells great, slicing an heirloom tomato, and breaking off some lettuce. Front-row seat for a display of raptor behavior. Mantling, it's called, where a hawk or falcon spreads its wings, fans its tail and arches its body over a kill, to hide it from any other predator. A beautiful Sparrow Hawk devouring a small rodent. D and I once, in town, in a parking lot, watched the resident Peregrine eat a small rabbit six feet from the sidewalk. Dad and I, fishing Julington Creek, off the St. Johns, watched an Osprey eating a mullet, and then watched an alligator take it away from him. On that same creek (wild swamp on both banks) we saw bear, the Florida panther, wild boar, and the last few people who lived on the water, running trot lines and selling blue crabs and catfish for a living. A manner of being that appealed to me, except for the snakes. There were snakes everywhere: moccasins hanging off branches, rattlesnakes as big as you arm, and copper-heads in profusion. I took up winter-camping in New England because there were no snakes. I don't mind that I reveal myself, what's to reveal? Another handicapped view. Read more...

Lost Again

Who can keep track of sea-grass? It's weightless and floats above controversy. I'd made a list of 42 words that all meant a small hill, then I made a list of 67 words that all referred to a small rill. Phone call with a construction question, a loading issue. I tell Bear to call be back, that I need to do some numbers, dig out a couple of books. I'm no engineer, so I always overbuild, especially in post-and-beam work. By my calculations his plan won't work, too much deflection, too much dead-weight, and I tell him that. Also, the 10x10, the main structural beam, is sassafras, and nowhere, in any of my books, can I find the strength of sassafras, so I have to figure it at the low end of the scale. Risk management. He could span 12 feet 4 inches, but not 15 feet (with the depth of wall thickness the span is actually only 14 feet 1 inch) because of the weight of the floor system for the second level. A post in the middle of the beam would neatly solve the problem. They don't want a post (which is silly, posts are wonderful) and I've run into this problem several times, over the years. It's not a problem if you're building to UBC specs (Universal Building Codes, which always struck me as amusing, like Universal Fluid, which is, more or less, transmission oil) because a beam, in this instance, would have to be certified by an engineer. Engineers, like everyone else, tend to cover their asses. I couldn't give Bear the answer he wanted, I wouldn't do it. I fully expect he will ignore my recommendation, but it's nice to talk with him. He knows as much about loading as I do, and I'm flattered he called me. He knew he was working right at the limit of what the materials could do. I wouldn't risk it, but he probably will. Get back to my reading, but I keep visualizing Bear's structure and grow more concerned, finally call him back and reiterate why his solution is a bad idea. The owl was back, haunting in the dark. Twilight had come and gone. Dusk is an odd word, eawl-leet, owl-light. Which seems true enough as darkness comes on. I was at the island, eating the left-over mushroom soup, which had solidified into a pate, which is testament to the amount of butter I consume, reading recipes for mock caviar based mostly on roasted eggplant. Windows open, lights out except for the 7 watt nightlight that illuminates my keyboard, and the owl settled in, tuned the chorus. Working opera in Boston, when the orchestra was rehearsing we couldn't work on stage, I'd take a blanket and retreat to a far corner of the theater, always thought that preliminary warming up and tuning period, a few minutes, was the highlight of the day. But the owl is back, the big news, and steps right in. I'd listened to some Miles Davis, between these owl sessions, Bitches Brew, Kind Of Blue, and every note seems significant. Now I know the owl is just another killer. Read more...

Late Blues

John Lee Hooker and Santana, both so distinctive. John Lee may have the greatest voice of all time, and Carlos sure do play a mean guitar. I'd gotten up to pee and it was quite cool outside, below seventy for the first time in a week but darker than a coal mine. Quiet, except for the hooting of an owl. Anytime after midnight I often turn on the radio, usually just for a minute, to hear what's being played, but when it's John Lee and Carlos I get a wee dram and roll a cigaret. I met Santana one time, when they were playing a concert in Boston, on a stage where we were rehearsing La Traviata. The usual fuck-up of scheduling, we had a Thursday dress rehearsal, they played Friday, and we opened Saturday. We couldn't take our set apart, so they just set-up in the middle of it and used our lighting, the best in the world, Gilbert Hemsley, and it went off rather well, the set actually enhanced the sound, and I went to the party afterwards which was amazingly boring because everyone was so tired. I never met John Lee, but I did spend some time in Delta road houses. Garish purple cinder-block buildings with no windows. Scary, unless you're with a guy that played tackle for Ole Miss. Stainless steel hit the market in 1914, and this was a big deal. Silver oxidizes, so you end up scrubbing it away to nothing, stainless steel, with 14% chromium, holds up much better. My Dad always used carbon steel knives, which took a good edge, but lost it quickly, so much sharpening; a butcher knife became a filleting knife in just a few years, ended life as an oyster knife, with no edge at all. They stained with anything, but citrus was the worst. Lime juice becomes aniline dye. I still use some carbon steel knives, I enjoy the process of sharpening them, but my current and best knife is very hard stainless, which is difficult to sharpen but holds an edge for a long time. Also, it's easy to clean. It's a miracle metal, stainless, and it has a thousand applications. Ball bearings and the like. The acoustic qualities of the night are varied and interesting. There's an owl at the tree-line, working the clearing around the house. The hoots seem to linger. The owl's song is like Miles playing solo in the dark. Listening closely it's not quite solo, there's a rhythm, very light, under the horn: the bug section. This goes on for a long time, a concert for one; I'm sipping a smoky single-malt, considering a recording of this sound-scape, Owl Plays Miles, and how it would have a guaranteed sale of 100 copies, to all those birders who enjoy Miles Davis. Suddenly the performance ends, an angel flies through the room, it falls completely silent. Then a sound series I've never heard before in which the owl kills a small rodent, rips it apart and eats it. This is noisier than you might think and makes for a great radio show. The Death Of A Vole. This holiday snuck up on me, I lost a week to Macfarlane, an entire week buried in dictionaries, before I realized I needed to put on the brakes and at least look around. Winter is always around the corner. Read more...

Knives and Forks

Catalog from the Victoria and Albert museum, 1979, an excellent exhibit of Cutlery. I love the cases, brocades and leathers, with velvet lined fitted hollows. One exceptional set was a knife, one of the first four-prong forks, and a spoon bowl, for which the fork, fitted into sleeves on the back, served as the handle. For a long time it was considered customary to carry your own silver to dinner. I had a set, fairly heavy, very plain, the years in the desert, that I kept rolled up in leather in the kitchen box in the back of the truck. I only remember a shallow wooden bowl that I ate everything out of, licked clean then wiped out with sand. A Shin Oak burl, a shinnery is underbrush you can't get through. I did get to town, got my free pint, and watched ESPN for a little while. Stopped at B's on the way home, and I hadn't seen him weeks, so we had to exchange notes on what we were reading. He's teaching three classes and doing his tutoring, which is a full schedule, and he still bakes bread and tends his garden plot; a couple of days a week, he takes the on-line tutoring over to Zoe's, gets the grand-kids off the bus, and fixes dinner. I don't know how he does it, it's all I can do to get home with a couple of corn-dogs and an order of onion rings. Down on the creek bank I found a batch of Agaricus and while collecting them got into a tick nest, I had to strip down and wipe off with alcohol, but I had a goodly sack of mushrooms. The AC was on because Black Dell had been pissing about the heat, I was gimping about, listening to Son House, and made a very good stew/soup. It wasn't a recipe as much as a process. Skinny dude, dancing around in his underwear, chopping mushrooms. I had my bar-stool, a book under my book-rock so I could read with no hands. Minced a large onion, smashed a few cloves of garlic, cooked those while I read, then added half the mushrooms (a pound) and cooked them for quite a while, added a can of chicken broth and cooked it down. Ran this through the blender and set it aside. I cook the other pound of mushrooms in a walnut of butter, fold them in, add some cream, this is so good it makes me dizzy. Ginseng season opens, so there are people in the woods. This is serious business for some folk. I harvest only two or three roots a year, for my own use (I have a single very small sip every day of grain alcohol infused with sliced root) but I like hunting them, picking the berries and planting them nearby. I go down the driveway so slowly that I sometimes spot a plant (the berries are orange) out the window. I always have to claim my territory, a time or two a year, and the poachers are always polite. I learned recently that I have a bit of a reputation as the Crazy Guy on Low-Gap Ridge. Stands to reason then, that I'd be suspect of nefarious activities. Still, I'm polite to Rangers and Cops, grease the ways, I'd never do anything to bring down attention on myself. I was reading some Dorothy Parker and she is so fucking brutal, it's a breath of fresh air, like that. Ed Sanders in All Stars, or Dahlberg in his entirety. B had loaned me a book of Chuck Close's photographs. I spent hours looking at these, detecting what his concerns were, and which were mine. The large Polaroid images are striking. Read more...