FishingIt is summer, and the light is lovely and soft in the heat as is simmers down through leaves and leaves, giant green canopies above. Down the embankment of loose dirt we go, stumbling over exposed tree roots, coming up to a sudden stop at the edge of the clear water. As a nod to those who have already told this part of the story, we are laughing, perhaps. The water at our feet is not deep, perhaps to the knee at its most, and it is not wide, perhaps a dozen feet to the low moss of the earth on the other side. Larger rocks are strewn here and there, and small fish can be seen in the water if one holds still.
My question to you then, is this: what do you call this thing, this body of water, trundling by? Brook? Stream? Creek? Crick? Kill? Run? Rill? There are many I know, and I don't know them all. All of those words refer to that lazy slim ribbon of freshwater. There are groups of words like this, often with reference to things both simple and terribly important - that stream out back is only pretty now, but we used to harness the power in the weight of that water to grind our flour, saw wood, work leather. The words are also terribly useful for discovering, selecting, and cataloging English dialect.
(A favorite example: on a snowy night, get some friends and a rear wheel drive boat of a car and head out to the abandoned parking lot to turn the car in ever tighter skidding circles. Growing up, we called this activity 'doing donuts'. In other places in this country, they call it 'doing cookies'. And people in the northern midwest, I cannot fathom, call it 'whipping shitties'.)
Some remarkable results have been tabulated by The Dialect Survey, a furthering of an in-class linguistics experiment by Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University. Their website collected data from over thirty thousand participants, and breaks it all down both by percentages and (tellingly) by dot plotting on maps. They are not seeking participants now, but they claim another survey is in the works. Their results are worth a look just the same. The questions are worth a look; it is really something how language can mix and flex.
And so, I read today that PETA has asked, in an effort to make the world a more animal friendly place, the city of Fishkill, New York, to change its name.
I do not have any particular complaint with PETA, if only because I believe they believe in what they are doing. There are trade offs and consequences aplenty in the nature of our interaction with animals, and I can understand the impetus. In addition I suppose it gives them something to do. I can also believe that nobody in the organization who was responsible for this is familiar with the particular strains of English dialect that helped birth these names, although that is more of a stretch. I would hope that the weird beauty of English tripped them up, and they made a simple connection without understanding, and that they all had a good laugh when they finally figured out that the city of Fishkill is named after a channel of tumbly water, not death. I would hope that there are not voices in that crowd that continue to agitate for a name change, because they did not know, and so other people will think wrongly, and isn't that reason enough?
I say: hold your tongue.
In addition, changing the name of a city is an astonishing pain in the ass. Pass me a cabinet.
A Touch Of RefreshmentI used to live near the Ocean, or at least near enough for it to count. I live near rivers now. I seem to often find myself near streams, ponds, lakes. Water is a precious thing, and I have become ever more aware of just how much we depend on it. I do not wish to discuss the more alarming elements of our relationship with water (although that is certainly a topic for focus). Rather: drinks.
From southern France, Thierry & Guy have brought us a very spiky Shiraz. It was a deeply purple, and strong stuff. Not a bad wine. By far the best part: they have taken to naming the thing "Fat Bastard". At the checkout line in the state store, we must of said that ten or more times, and so did everyone else. As we stepped away and through the door to go, the gentleman behind the counter called to us. "Enjoy your Fat Bastard!" he said.
I have seen on many occasions bottles of Malta Goya in the supermarket, but never with the other drinks. I did not know what it was, and I've never seen any bottles missing from the shelf where they are kept. I bought one, which was interesting in itself, because the register (new-fangled, computerized, and sullen yellow-on-blue) expected the cashier to card me for its purchase. This confused us both; I don't think either of us were aware that there were any beverages in the grocery store that required ID. I think we both pretty much assumed that that sort of thing was frowned upon by law in this, the Keystone state. But business was slow, and we got a surprise out of it, and that was fine. We took it home and tried it. It really is malt soda; a bit thick on the tongue and sweet, too sweet. It was nice, and nicer cold, and we were all terribly intrigued and confused right up until someone pointed out that it was a lot like drinking Grape Nuts. And then we stopped drinking it.
A very long time ago, a good friend came out from the other coast and bought us a bottle of Pinot Gris from a place they call Valley of the Moon, in Sanoma county. That was most likely (for a variety of reasons) just about the best bottle of wine we've ever drank. I will invoke the Fielding clause here to mention that, if anything, I've gotten better at strawberry shortcake. The wine: the wine was wonderful. I will not describe it, for the memory is probably now more hope than fact. I note it now, because it is a good memory and worth keeping, but also because Valley of the Moon products have begun to show up in our area. The available Pinot Blanc on the state store shelves is pretty good.
Out tap water is pretty good; we keep sport bottles of it in the fridge.
Point To PointI would not consider myself well traveled. Indeed, the farthest West I have ever been in the low berg of East Liverpool Ohio; the southern-most I have ever been is some ones of miles south of Arlington, VA, and that was only because I was lost and trapped on the wrong side of 66. I have done better in the north and east categories, standing in the edges of the cold Atlantic at the end of Cape Breton, watching shadows edge against the horizon. I hope to do better than this before I am done. In the meantime, I take some comfort in the somewhat self-serving notion that I am deeply travelled.
Very far back in life, I was given a habit for taking slow roads. My senior year in high school, due to quirks of scheduling, circumstance, and a state mandated truncation, my good friend and I would be free of school on Wednesdays somewhat before noon. There was no element of truancy in this, just a product of strange times. The background facts are the rituals that developed: we would escape to his house, where I would eat a bowl of raisin bran, and then to my house, and he would eat a bowl of yogurt and granola. There are reasons for that, but it doesn't change the nature of the thing. We would then pile into his car again (with whomever was coming), pick a town on the map, and go.
The rules were simple: the town had to be small, the route could not include limited access thoroughfares, and we had to eat dinner there. In the same way that the modern green signed tree lined American highway kills the soul, the weird twisty ways that ghosts still use to go on holiday can ignite things, spark conversation, give rise to connection. There was a high "look at that" factor; we took notes at 45 miles per of odd handmade signage, weird buildings, llamas. We went on roads that still owned a place in what they wove through, and they somehow never failed to serve up surprises. At the end of that, we would find ourselves in a diner made from a pinioned caboose, or eating squash and haddock by the sea on a porch, or splitting a hot apple pie and wedge of cheddar four ways on the hood of the car in an orchard, fighting off the cold wind as the sun went down behind the hills. They were not all brilliant, those trips: many were iffy, and some disasters. But we saw a tremendous amount of New England much closer than I imagine most would, not just because of the way we went, but that we took care to watch it slide by.
In New England, the stunt is possible; there is stuff out there, hidden between the cities and big towns and middling towns. Hole in wall places that serve a four-story hamburger without apology. That sort of thing. The scenario is less likely here where I am now, but we try, and we make do (in our present situation, the anchor point of discovery seems to be the soft ice-cream stand, and we do most of our explorations in warmer weather). In the immediate environs, we have taken to investigating as best we can the alternate routes, the odd alleyways, the unknown ways from here to there. We do it by car, and we do it on foot. I try to walk where I go when I can, and I sometimes try to find as many routes as is reasonable to keep the experience fresh. In a curious effect to the opposite, I have found myself very intimately acquainted with my most often walked routes, and I have begun to look forward to taking them again. I do believe it is this: I know them well enough now that the slow pace at which they change has become open to me, and I can see the shift of things. It is somewhat comforting.
The other day on the train I was a faceless person in among all the other faceless people. I will be clear: I was not doing anything that seemed to attract any attention. I was somewhat tired, and in my own turn my eyes fell on this person or that one as we were jostled here and there, but I was discarding the information as soon as it met me. I was coming out of the reverie of that hum as we pulled into a stop, not mine, and a young woman kissed me on the cheek and disappeared into the haze of commuters with a laugh and a wave. I have no idea who she was, or even what she looked like, but I know I must of looked past her a dozen times while still on our way.
When I am in the car and driving, I find I build a mental map of the streets I am on as an orthogonal schematic, all turns on either side of forty-five degrees mixing in my mind to a left, right, or no turn at all. It takes some juggling to reconcile this view with the spatial map I keep along side it, but it gets me where I must go. The effect is less pronounced when I am a passenger, but it lingers. It is when I walk that I grasp the subtlety of the places I go: the imperfect geometry of the joins, the low rises and slopes, the tenor of the grit and trash thrown to the wayside by the traffic. It is at that speed that I have the best hope of understanding how I go, if I am paying attention.
XI am done with the letter X, and the letter X is done with me.
X has become proliferate in the naming of technology I would rather not use. Each time X pops up it whispers promises of hidden treasures and sunken ships, and too many of them lie to make those that tell truth to be worth finding. When I go to pluralize X, it makes fool of me. I put two pennies on X, because X has crossed me too many times. The letter X is done with me, and I am done with it.
Cross my heart.
Notes From The Field, The Kitchen, The FieldThere is something in the offing called the Slow Food Movement, dedicated at least in part to the notion that we are losing our cultural cuisines in the face of modernized, styrofied foodstuffs. In my own way, I am holding my banner with them. There is the community of souls who make up the Raw Food Movement, holding forth that we would do better to eat raw (vegetal) foods. For the past few sets of season, we have been paying attention to those things that are ripe in their proper time, and we have eaten with them at the center when we could. And today, standing in line at the corner store with my paper and my quintessential American cup of coffee with the flavored creamer in, juggling the small sin of a donut, my eyes turned over to the slim wire shelving near the register, upon which sat a row of shiny silvered bags all full of air and potato chips, Dill Pickle Flavor.
So here's one way to make rice with stuff.
I will note here that this is a popular dish in parts of the world, and it goes by many names, one name more than others. It is made in too many ways to count, and the following is not meant to be in any way authentic, authoritative, or anything else assonant. The normal rules apply: read the whole thing, for the following has twists and turns in.
You can use some meat.
We usually use beef, either thinly sliced strips of reasonable streak or ground whatever. Avoid stewing beef; this stuff will be cooked quickly. Marinate the meat for however long in toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, and truly aggressive amounts of grated ginger and mashed garlic. This is highly recommended, but optional if meat is not your thing.
For the soy sauce, go exploring and get a good one. This might mean attending new markets. It most certainly means avoiding soy sauce "tempered with a touch of lemon juice and a hint of honey".
You will need some rice.
Any kind of rice, really. We've used American long grain white, Thai jasmine, Japanese medium, red rice, black rice. Sticky types of rice seem to work less well. Basmati, although quite a brilliant rice, is very odd in this. We like the jasmine a lot. Go get some jasmine rice. Get it in a canvas sack. Get it where you got the soy sauce from.
You can cook the rice in a pot. I would offer some words to that, but I cannot make rice in pots. In my family we all have blind spots in the kitchen, and one of mine is rice in pots. An alternative which I heartily endorse is a rice cooker: we have a fancy one with a timer on it, because we use it to make breakfast for us. As far as actually making the rice, it doesn't do it any better or worse than less expensive models with less features. One thing to consider: get a rice cooker a size larger than you think you need.
You will need some vegetables.
This is wide open. We run through the refrigerator, pulling out this and that. Carrots, sprouts, broccoli, water cress, kohlrabi, cabbage, coriander, cucumber. Pick out two or three (or more) and wash and peel and slice them small (and thin), and steam them or fry them or leave them as wanted. Have them ready.
You will need an egg.
An egg per diner, if the diner wants an egg.
You will need the magic sauce.
I play my hand here. This is Korean red hot pepper paste, smooth and gloppish stuff the color of old bricks. It can be a little spicy, but it is very necessary. If you can find it, get the rice and soy sauce at that place. If you cannot, the ubiquitous red rooster hot pepper and garlic sauce is a reasonable substitute, used in moderation.
Quickly, now.
Start the rice. Cook the marinated meat until just done, and have it ready. Prepare the vegetables and have them ready. Get out some big soup bowls. Just (and I do mean just) before the rice is done, lightly fry an egg for anyone that wants one, so as not to set the yolk at all, at all. When the rice is ready, scoop it into the bowls, top with vegetables and meat right quick, slide the fried egg over top, and add a dollop of pepper paste.
Then: stir! Stir like a maddened alchemist, finding gold. Poke the egg to bits with your spoon. Get it everywhere. Get pepper paste on everything. Stir! Then eat.
(I will point out here that, yes, this thing involves a somewhat less than fully cooked egg. If that sort of thing is an issue, by all means replace with an egg well scrambled, or omit the egg entirely.)
There are more authentic names for this, and more authentic preparations. For us, the rules are highly variable: we have omitted the meat, we have overpowered the rice with wilted greens. I take an egg on mine, while the one across the table will not. The rice is always there, but how could it not be?
It is good food for cold, damp evenings: warming, spicy, creamy, zesty, hearty, and crunchy with vegetable. Rice with Stuff.
The other day, we found cheesecake flavored cream cheese at the grocery.
CoffeeI know that I can make Turkish coffee. I have the fluted copper cup for making, and the rose and orange blossom waters for putting in after. I was told a secret: let it boil up three times, pulling the cup from the heat with a quick wrist each time, and then on the third time, pour. I do not think of Turkish coffee as coffee. I find it to be a beverage out of bounds, a thick, powerful thing that is outside the realm of my normal coffee experiences. I like it a good deal, and I can make a pretty good cup of it, and sometimes do.
I cannot make a good cup of Espresso. We do not have appropriate tools, and with what tools we have I am fully inept. I can put everything in place and flip switches, and the resultant brew is not burnt or bad, but it is never good, or ever better. I have stopped trying. This is all right; we have an excellent local espresso place, and if I go there I do not get coffee thrown at me.
Here's what I know about regular coffee.
Use clean equipment. The simpler the coffee maker the better, as there are fewer places where old oils may lurk. In my youth, I have had coffee brewed with a simple filter basket over a metal bowl, with water poured carefully from a kettle, and it was really pretty good.
Use good water. If the tap water tastes weird, run it through a filter. Don't forget to change the filter! Or bottled water, even. Like in bread, it makes a difference.
Buy whole beans, buy them from a place that roasts them themselves, and keep them in an airtight thing when they get home to the kitchen. Don't keep them in the bag. Buy them in small quantities, so they don't get stale; we go through maybe a half a pound a week (we don't drink a lot of coffee). Grind them right before they are to be used.
If one can, find a local coffee roaster, and show up enough that they know the looks of one. When a level of rapport has been reached, ask for beans not by varietal, but by freshness. Most of the types of arabica beans are worth trying, and eventually favorites will be found, but the quality of the thing is better marked by the time since roasting than the particular place it fell from a plant, in our experience. We find that we gravitate to lighter roasts from Central America, and our roaster knows it, too. We know we will have a good week when we walk into our shop of choice and the proprietor gestures to to the large plastic buckets set beside the roaster, and we get to lift the lid to greet the fragrant steam, scooping precious, still-warm coffee beans, having never asked the variety, nor needing to.
A Closet of a Different KindMy eyesight is poor, and requires correction. I wear such to bed in order to read, but I remove it when it is time for the lights to turn down. It is this time, in darkness and calm (and clock) that I often think of things I would like to keep, and I know from experience that I will forget most of them by morning, over writing them with dreams that become distant and gone with equal quickness. The problem is that without my eyes, I have a remarkable trouble with writing. But I have worked at it, and have written down those things that visit just before sleep, presenting themselves as brilliant, fresh, good.
I have learned this also: it turns out most of these things are not so much.
I believe I am most powerful in the shower in the mornings, for ideas (the close second is the evening dishes, for similar reasons). I am fresh from sleep and the chaos of the visions of slumber, distracted by the broken rhythms of the shower and clean echo of the space. But I cannot see in the shower, much less write anything down. It is, at times, frustrating. Occasionally I crank up the CD player to give my mind something else to chew on.
The CD player sits atop the water tank, for there is no place else for it to be. This adds some interesting acoustic ingredients to the situation, for the ceramic tank adds some powerful selective amplification. Some pieces of music are more prone to this than others. The current favorite is the recent release Feast of Wire by a group by name of Calexico. This music, on top of all of its other wonderful qualities, takes full use of the water tank and makes it sing, makes it hum. The adaptive effect is so pronounced that in my dream I worry that I am turning Alcosan into a private sound system, blasting Quattro over and over into every home from just about the last place anyone would expect it to come.
Would that it were true. If it was to be, at least then the FCC would have a new broadcast medium to dump on.
The Blemish Betrays the SweetnessConsider the orange, the blood orange, with thick, structural skin and purple-black cells bursting with juice and a cloying tang. I am no expert on oranges: John McPhee has written an excellent book about oranges, and that is most of what I know from oranges beyond my every day experiences. We do not live in a climate in any way hospitable to citrus, so what we do get comes to us on truck or train, and we are lucky when what we get is good. We sometimes get good clementines, thins skins falling off to offer puffs of nectar'd floral scent. We sometimes get good navels, with a taste that puts popsicles to shame. I have a stack of Honey Tangerines in the kitchen for the coming week. Sometimes, we get the chance at blood oranges.
We buy them when we do, of course. There are many things that can be done with the things: sauces, fancy compotes, a fruit salad reminiscent of murder, duck. However: particularly in winter (it is still winter here) it more often happens that we simply eat the things, hungry for a peek into the sweetness of spring and the brightness of summer. At the market, then, the citrus was piled high with one large bin of mostly perfect blood oranges bright under the strong light of the window. I selected two fruits for their beauty, and one for its deformity, the ruddy skin marred by a thin patch of scabbed damage. The things are built to take abuse; the things are built to fall to the ground when perfect. I should have perhaps shied from the odd skinned one, but I did not. I like to think that I know better, but I hardly know anything. We took them all home.
We have eaten two, and the mangled one was too much sweeter than its perfect other cousin. I look forward to the third one; in the meantime, I will enjoy this little fairy tale, perfect in all ways except that it's true.
It Flows Coldly ByI am sitting, overlooking the site of Lock & Dam #2 on the least industrious of our rivers. It is very cold, and the wind is blowing. I have brought lunch, and the warmth of the food makes it welcome, and it tastes better for it. The river makes the wind visible where they fight, the water rising up against the air in little wavelets that dance across the surface as the battles rage from shore to shore. The sun is shining, but there are the distant smudged diagonals of snow squalls all around me in the sky.
It is sometimes useful to come to these places and imagine the unwinding of years, to try to see them as they were before the bridges and the roads and the sculpting of the land. River valleys in winter are good for this: the natural sight lines are more or less preserved, and the trees have not yet dropped their green veil over the shape of the surrounding slopes. It is unfortunate that the river itself is something of a fabrication: the locks and dams, while creating great utility, have tamed the thing, a steady navigable channel all the way up till the turn in the river where the work ends some tens of miles upstream from here, and such things are no longer important, or desired.
The river is a leaden brown today, with hints of blue from the shattered reflection of the sky, muffled with cloud. It has been warm enough that there is no ice on the river. There are birds on the river, both circling above and bobbing along, complacent. There is very little trash floating by.
The air is crisp enough to snap, and sound carries well in it. The traffic rumbles over the high bridge, each gear change of the big trucks clear and distinct in the distance. A train thunders someplace, low sounds carrying without direction. A more mangled hum of machinery comes from the roads all round, a wash of small engines speeding up and slowing down with the merges and passings. The wind is everywhere, whisking through the dried tan husks of old grasses and brambles at the shore line. The river itself only whispers, and even then I must go down the steps to the edge to hear it.
Planes hang lazy in the big sky. The other bank is distant, but looks strangely near. A gantry stands over there, reddened with time, moving back and forth on its short track, lifting and dropping twisted bits of industrial refuse for hidden purposes. It is very cold.
Ways In Which Bodies BreakI was given reason to attend the dentist the other day, for filling work. Filling work is in the territory of large pain, so along with it comes lidocaine to soften the landscape some. It has been quite some time since I had that manner of dental work done, and the details had largely escaped me. It has been gently pointed out to me that there are reasons these details fall by the side of time to become faded and distant, and that for most people they are best left there. I will sum my observations quickly then: the smells were strange, and it was far louder than I would have imagined.
The other amusing discovery was that, with half my mouth numbed rubber from the injections, I was mostly unable to speak adverbs. Those that ended in '-ly' ended instead in a gutteral, saliva frothing moan. 'Spritelarrgh did the fliers flit / quicklarrgh did the summer come', etc. I have recovered from that.
A better sign of my seasoning happened more recent, in the grim grip of spring cleaning: after managing to move all of the boxes out of the closet some small and mean muscle in the middle of the very bottom of my back decided without ceremony that it had had quite enough thank you, and the number of upright paces it had left in it was finite and low, and I would get myself to something more soft and flat post haste or the floor it would be. It will easily cross a cynical mind that this malady came most convenient; I must assure you that having the closet Fibbered all over the living room floor is about as far from that as can be, particularly when the problem of walking has demanded to be relearnt for different shifts of muscle and weight.
It has been instructive, however, for I now know first hand why my Grandmother walks precisely in this way. I hope I manage it with a tenth her dignity.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Commentary accepted at comment@goob.com, although the traps are agressive and the pointy bits simply drip with dark liquour. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.