The Role of Turkish Coffee & Reindeer Cheese Quiche in My Life...

On the foldout table, a fresh boiled ibrik of Türk kahvesi curls tongues of steam into the frigid dimness which precedes dawn’s slow slide across the rumpled white hills surrounding Lahti. The only light is the evanescent blue glow of a diffused propane flame dancing beneath a heavy black cast iron skillet. Through cheap paper-cone Volkswagen speakers, there is music - I’ve turned Chopin down low – it is the sound of a Nocturne, something in C minor, but I can’t remember the Opus, or the number, I only know that it feels like I feel right now.

As must be the case in paradise, the air is suffused with the sweet-salty scent of butter sizzling down into brownness, the delicate aroma of baked eggs and pastry dough, the sharp tang of melting country cheese. Breakfast is a necessity, and the smell of good food a comfort, even though my stomach is unsettled, thrown out of balance by anticipation and nervousness. I glance to my skis and reflect uneasily upon my halfhearted participation in the coming day’s Nordic race - Finlandia-hiito – across fifty chaotic, hustled kilometers of frozen track with a crowd of some twelve-thousand lycra unitard-clad strangers before me, behind me, and beside me. I’m equal parts stoked and stressed-out. As if to interrupt what could turn into a funk, above me, in the loft of our dented and much abused Westy Syncro, Cesca shifts in her deep sleep, totally relaxed as always. I wish I could share her ever-present internal equilibrium

When the syrupy coffee has cooled a bit, and the reindeer-cheese quiche is warmed through, I pull gently on her chestnut pony-tail until she awakes, rubs her eyes, and rolls to her stomach. Peering over the upstairs mattress, she smiles flirtatiously comme toujours - biting the corner of her lower lip - as I hand an enamel plate and a little white demi-tasse up to her. Settling back down onto the narrow bench-seat with my portions and a favorite dog-eared book of poems by Neruda, I happen to catch a glance through the windshield and notice a vivid band of luminous violet outlining the eastern ridges like something out of a Kirlian photograph. All I feel is gratitude - how lucky I am to experience this wonderful morning, this wonderful existence.

The point is this: Francesca and I picked up that delightful reindeer-cheese quiche at Helsinki’s Kauppatori market years ago while driving through Scandinavia on a cross-country skiing adventure. In my own culinary history, that was a momentous purchase. While our northern road-trip wasn’t the adventure on which I first realized my love for the woman, it was the adventure on which I first realized my love for quiche. And so today - after a memory-stoking snowy drive down from the Silverton Hills - it will be quiche for lunch…

The Dream Garden...

The backyard is the set, the stage for an hour of weekend life.

Over by the grape arbor, he digs. Beneath the frost, the loam is soft and peels away in chocolate curls beneath the spade. A season ahead in his mind, he digs holes in preparation for what is to come, for the metamorphosis already evidenced by the sneaking celadon eruption of crocus tips from the bed behind the compost heap.

Beyond the front gate, running wildly, high on the crystalline magic of Water Street’s whirling flurry, neighborhood children bare their white teeth and scream at the falling snow like crazed pink chimpanzees. Watching their sport, Henry the Beagle howls and jumps in convulsive circles, nipping at the flakes. Shivering on the back porch, Kiva the Boxer, raised in the Hawaiian sun, won’t set foot on the icy lawn. They are all lost in their moments. For children and dogs, there is only an everlasting now.

He does his work. A convoluted jujube, the Blenheim apricot from the upper deck, the tiny lingonberry plant, the straight bud-studded clove currant bush – all of these go into the ground. He can feel that it is time to dream the garden again. Over there is where the strawberries will bloom in May, in the northeast corner is where the kale will be seeded, by the fenceline are the poplar suckers which will have to come out. He feels a twinge of impatience.

He is surrounded by a subtle magic. This Sunday morning, for the first time this year, snow fell on the eaves of his house. And this same chill day, for the first time this year, flitting brown sparrows returned to the bare branches of the dogwood tree. The cogs of nature’s procession turn in hiding, though he’s payed close enough attention to perceive their motion. All around him, beneath the brittle ice-coated veneer of winter, spring…

Damn This Nagging Dissatisfaction!

I've been feeling dissatisfied going on a long time. Out here at thirty-six years old, everything feels defined by the gaping disconnect between reality and guarded dream, between the tempting ease of a comfortable television night on the soft cushions of the couch and the unfulfilled pining for a wide rolling field with a humble wooden cabin and a noisy, jumbled assortment of livestock. Along with this, there is a paralyzing, debilitating indecisiveness which is not unlike the feeling I used to get on the cliff at Elkhorn, the hesitation on the brink, that sense of really wishing to jump down into the sparkling Little North Fork twenty feet below, but being blinking when the time came to take the risk. There have always been sweeping ideals, but I've always managed to shy away from uncertain experiences. Back then, I didn’t jump. And I still haven’t jumped.

Things seem to be spiraling to some unclear end. This past month, it has seemed as though each new day has conveyed another uncomfortable reminder of how far I am from where my heart – if it had the confidence to carve an unflinching path – would take me. From considering my friend Gaston alone in his wilderness yurt, to carefree and ever-drunk Straw with his goats and hounds and hibernating orchard, to my conversation with Géza tilling up memories of simple, gratifyingly sweat soaked days on the Szücs family dairy; everything seems orchestrated to draw my attention to the stark gap between the simplicity I lust after, and the complications, the emotional and professional crows-nests, I find myself mired in.

Appropriately, yesterday I received a brief email and a collection of beautiful photographs from a dear childhood friend and her husband, an amazing earthy-artisan couple who are putting hard work into manifesting the same bucolic dreams which I can’t seem to commit to pursuing.

Camille, I have known since childhood. Her family owned the vineyard ‘Les Cassagnes’ which stretched out behind our farmhouse in the Languedoc. She was my tomboy playmate, the only six year old around who spoke English, and the roughest girl I knew. We spent all the seasons together on adventures. When winter held sway, we would hunt doves in her father's woodlot. In the swelter of late summer, we would pick plump red Grenache grapes from her father’s head-pruned vines, and would ride her donkey up into the shade of the plane trees to climb like crazy monkeys. She was my best friend for years. And I’ve never lost my connection to her.

She met Thierry while attending the university in Montpellier. He was from Picardie - the son of radical communist parents - but came south to study oenology. He'd decided that his future was in winemaking after what he describes as a transformational revelation which occurred during a tour of Domaine Tempier's Bandol estate while visiting relatives. In this revelation, and for years afterward, he could only see himself as a vigneron, crafting the perfect Mediterranean rosé, using minimalist methods. And he also dabbled in the arts, painting wildly circular acrylic paintings which always remind me of something that Van Gogh would have done if his equilibrium had been badly compromised. Camille confessed to me very soon after they met that she’d never felt such passion for anyone in her life. For months, she was frustrated by his apparent inability to recognize the way that she’d throw herself at him.

That said, Camille is incredibly persistent. Despite his innate denseness, Thierry got the message eventually. He proposed to her in the mountains above the Grande Chartreuse. They married five weeks later in an amazingly picturesque sunset ceremony down by the edge of the Rhône and spent the next two months traveling through the Middle East, picking up home décor in the markets of Sanaa and Damascus.

Since graduating from the university, Thierry has abandoned his winemaking aspirations in favor of more humble pursuits. He was swept up in the nascent permaculture movement sometime back in the late-nineties and – wife in hand – spent his inheritance on the purchase of a crumbling but charming old mas on eleven hectares of Camarguaise pastureland just over the Petit-Rhône from Camille’s hometown of St. Gilles. After the initial years spent restoring the derelict farmhouse and its environs, they’ve settled into a romantic – if hard-scrabble – existence as operators of a seasonal gîte and full-time ferme biodynamique.

Her letter makes me wish for the huevos necessary to change the course of my life…

7/1/08

The mistral is back to us again this week and it is very cold indeed in the field where we have our cattle and our horses out to eat. Each morning I must walk out to them and spread out their foods. They have a smell which I mostly do enjoy, but I am not sure why it is a thing which I enjoy. They are good animals and provide us with milk to make the cheese which we have learned to make. I am becoming skilled at this, which I think is fun.

Thierry has recently finished a wattle shelter for our hens, it is a silly looking thing made of mostly sticks and dirt, but he has used only things on our little farm to build it of. He has many projects keeping him in work most of each day. Of course, he has been painting the building of the gîte in preparation for the tourist season which is coming in spring and summer. We are very happy for this business, which makes possible our livelihood. This June we will be visited by two WWOOF’ers from west Australia. They will help Thierry and I very much, which we will need because even not being fancy, there is much for two people to do.

Soon we will also teach courses here in permaculture and in biodynamique agriculture. We have done much studying of the Steiner method and have had great success. Thierry has been spending some time at Tamera in Portugal and has learned so much and has shared it with me. Now it is best for us to share what we know with others who have a passion for natural farming and ecological living.

At this time of day, I must go to gather the eggs of our ducks by the mud pond we have made near the river shores. So I will write soon and send photographs as the land wakes up with spring weather. Please visit Thierry and I soon, you would love our farm.

Ciao –

Camille Rebuffat

Perhaps I need to save up my cash, sell more of my books to pay for airfare to Barcelona and a train ride to St. Gilles for a visit to the Rebuffat oasis, to taste that life for myself for a little while. I’ve lived years of cautious dreams in my own head. And that has been mostly a waste of time. It is too hard to know how to assess radical alterations of life when they are experienced in an aloof and entirely vicarious manner, when the end result of the considered change only exists as a mental picture or an imagined concept. I think it is like hunting for truffles; there is no possibility of finding success without getting your fingers down into the cold wet soil.

And anyway, it’s been years since I’ve ridden the TGV…

Folkways of the Powerless French...

I cannot consume an infinite number of truffles in a finite piece of time. A limit exists, a kind of line of nausea which mustn’t be crossed. I’ve stood at the good edge of this demarcation for the past day and a half, watching as my bag of hand-gathered fungi began to weep, to exude their acqueous essence – which is a sure sign that they are nearing the end of their delicacy.

This has presented a dilemma for me, culinary dilettante that I am. And until this morning, I hadn’t a whiff of an idea what to do with my rapidly fading treasures.

Taking a break from dealing with the tedious winter business here at Mas des Rigolos, I started a pot of coffee and picked up the telephone from its charger. There was a particularly knowledgeable brain that I decided to pick, that of an ex-Michelin starred chef and master forager who lived just outside of Hebo in an off-the-grid yurt tucked beneath a meditatively quiet thicket of young red cedar.

In my mind, I figured that in his years as a near-Luddite, living an existence unencumbered by electrical impulses, and with his intimidating foodie pedigree, he’d know as much as anyone about preserving hand-picked bounty in delicious style. To my good fortune, one of the two concessions he made to modernity – the other being his vintage Willys Jeepster - was his possession of a solar-charged satellite telephone, which he uses to communicate with his contacts back in his native Bretagne, the ones that he sells most of his wild edibles to.

Much of my work keeps me on the telephone with all types of people. I’m comfortable with these conversations and have worked hard to develop a phone voice that is soothing yet persuasive. That said, I get all knotted up inside when I have to call either one of two specific numbers. Lena’s is the first. The other belongs to the guy I was about to ring, the idiosyncratic man known – depending on the nature of the social setting – as either The Siuslaw Frog or as Gaston Lachenal. My sense is that he’s learned to tolerate being called – if jokingly – a frog, but that he prefers to go by his given name. So, I address him as Gaston.

He never seems to be in much of a hurry to answer the phone. My suspicion is that he’s grown accustomed to the role of the caller, contacting his buyers when he has some seasonal product to sell them, as opposed to taking many incoming calls. He is really quite at ease with the idea of living in, as he calls it, “un ermitage.” He doesn't really get off on socializing. And as expected, he let things ring for a ridiculously long time before picking up. Twenty-six rings. I know because I counted.

“Allo…” his hoarse voice answered.

“Salut Gaston, how is life in the forest? I stuttered back, hoping that - despite having shared a tent together for nearly two weeks on a group cross-country skiing trip around the base of Sacajawea Peak - he’d actually acknowledge recognizing my voice. “This is your friend Farmer de Ville, from Silverton, the one with the Subaru that leaked oil all over your alpine strawberry patch. You remember, you broke my nose with your elbow when I tried to sing the Marseillaise while blind-drunk. It was when we were camped out in the snow with all of those people from Texas…”

“Right, it has been awhile ‘eh? Still having trouble with that Polish girl? How is your wife, did you ever tell her to come visit whenever she is ready to leave you? How are my children doing?” came the barbed response. Gaston is one of the world’s most accomplished smart-asses. I’m not sure if it is just his Gallic sarcasm, or if he is genuinely irritated and dismissive, or if he is just probing for reactions, but it is always like this with him.

“I see you are still the model of European etiquette.”

“Quite so, but let us stop with the pleasantries. How are you and what do you want on the telephone with me today?”

“I’m calling about a ziploc bag of truffles I picked on Sunday, they’re…”

He burst in mid-sentence, “you have a ziploc bag of truffles? Are they from Italy or the Périgord? And how on earth did you afford them, getting to be well off ‘eh?”

“No Gaston, they’re Tuber oregonense, you know ‘Oregon white truffles’ from the hills north of the town where I live, from up by Mulino.”

“Heh, this is very funny my American friend. Please don’t tell me anymore jokes. If you have the bag of truffles, say so. And if you have the bag of local smelly fungus, say so. But don’t say you have the bag of truffles when all you have is smelly fungus…”

Of course, I should have expected this from him. In Gaston’s xenophobic conception of reality, we have no truffles in the United States except for those which we import from France (preferably) or from northern Italy (if we can acquire nothing else). And – of course – those true truffles which we do manage to acquire at outrageous import prices are nowhere near the quality of even the kind of spoiled and discarded truffles which poor French children might use as super-balls.

I’ve learned - at least – not to try and convince him otherwise. And so I tried to play his abrasive words off lightly. “Okay fine, so I have this ziploc bag of smelly fungus. And it is just about to start spoiling. I’ve already pulled some leakers out of the bag and there is no way that I can polish off what is left before they go bad. Any ideas on what to do?”

And that was the trick. Gaston Lachenal is a sucker for humble seekers of advice. Ask him to share his knowledge, and he cannot resist.

“You must put them into the butter and put the butter into the ice or into your freezer. This will be best for you to enjoy the nice smelly character of your fungi over a period of months perhaps. It is simple. You rinse them, chop them, mix them in. This way they keep and are easy to use when you have a meal...”

Perfect. My principal question answered, I thought I’d see what he could tell me about where to find Black Trumpet mushrooms in the northern half of the state. “Gaston, what do you know about the…”

But he cut me off again, this time with finality. “You are going to use up my entire charge and there is not very much sunshine this day. Come to see me in March, when the Morels are coming ripe in the burned patches, we will pick, I’ll teach you what I know. And bring your wife. Or that Polish girl. Cul sec…”

For all my nervousness - and for all his rasps and jabs - it was well-worth calling him. He’d recommended a good, simple idea that I should have thought of on my own. And now, halfway through my dinner, all the truffles I had left are safely tucked into the iciest corner of my freezer, embedded in a hand-formed log of creamery butter. Just waiting for the tortellini and the green peas…

An Elderly Gypsy Outside My Bedroom Window...

Though an adequate explanation of why has never been forthcoming, my family took in Vadoma Faa when I was five and a half years old. She was an intinerant Roma gypsy and looked the part of a mysterious, weathered, powerful witch-like woman. For nineteen months and change, she lived in the clay-floored basement of the run-down farmhouse my parents had leased on the fringe of the Camargue just outside the village of St. Gilles. I remember that she had a weasel which she’d named Marcel and that he knew how to count on an abacus – something which I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen it. Many strange things seemed to attend her presence.

When my parents were not at home, she would insist that I call her Grandmère Faa and would teach me how to read the various signs which manifested in the mundane items of daily life. She fervently believed that the architecture of reality was etched with symbols and omens, with signs and portents which could be read by those who knew the trick. To this day, thanks to Grandmère’s lessons, I know more than the average cat about palmistry, and can do passable work with tea leaves. My own limited interpretive abilities have come in handy, although I seem to have a knack for dismissing those cues which – if acted upon – would have saved me the most grief. Such is my nature.

As it turned out, I did not know her very long. An unapologetic chain-smoker and never in particularly good health, Grandmère passed quietly away in her sleep one humid night in early August of ’77. Taking a steaming café noisette to her in the ruddy light of a meridional morning – per my favorite post-breakfast habit - I found her pallid and motionless on her simple rope bed, still clutching her string of rudraksha beads with tiny Marcel curled up asleep on her breast. A few days later, my parents arranged for a wooden casket to hold her and for her to be buried in a simple peasant grave outside Arles. Apart from the undertaker and his assistant, the four members of my family were the only ones who attended her funeral. She was a stranger to everyone but us.

Though I’d not really reflected on Grandmère Faa much since settling into the responsibilities of fatherhood and the workday world, just a few hours ago, I had an odd and possibly important encounter with her. Sometime between ten and eleven last night, floating in the vague frontier between wakefulness and sleep, as an icy January wind blew through the cracks around my old bedroom window , Grandmère approached me in a dream-vision. She stood outside my dark house – clothed in the same blue dress and black skirt she died in - on the second-story deck behind my headboard, holding her beads and talking in a soothing tone. Although she spoke in her obscure native Romani tongue, I found that I could understand her sonorous, slowly spoken, carefully enunciated words. “Christophe…” she muttered. “You must know that I am with you ever, that Grandmère Faa is watching over you. I have to tell you that something is about to happen, a great change will come to your life. Please believe these signs. I promise that I will help you, that I will return soon with important revelations…”

And already today, I am feeling distracted, thrown out of focus by the potency of that visitation, by the return of that familiar spirit to my thoughts. Though my own cues can be dismissed somewhat lightly – although not without the occasional regret – my Grandmère had the kind of intuitive abilities that demanded attention. Something must be brewing, and now I’ll just have to wait patiently. The problem is that waiting patiently is not one of my strong-suits….

Foil Balls, Black Holes & The Oregon Tilth Conference...

I arrived at Straw Hat’s spread to find his white Saanen billy-goats gathered around a semi-circular hole in the lee of the sheet-metal barn. My hickafied friend was nowhere in sight, although his cobalt blue ’65 Buick Sport Wagon was parked in the gravel driveway, its front seats occupied by a dozen or so Canada geese he'd captured in the middle of the night outside the State Penitentiary. It was a good old car, just waiting for the chance to rust in peace.

Once the clump of goats calmed down from their anxious bleating, I heard what sounded like a familiar folk tune. Softened by its passage through clodberries and tangled roots, the sound of flatpicked guitar music emanated from the muddy hole. All I could think was “how odd.”

It was a strange scene and I’ll admit to having been a little confused – momentarily - until I saw an empty forty-ounce bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer come flipping up into the cold blue sky, glinting like a clear brown jewel in the bright Sunday morning light, falling in a brief arc, and finally shattering on a lichen-clad chunk of weathered basalt. And then slurred obscenities. Followed by an erratically tumbling cheap plastic flashlight. In an instant of crystal-clarity, I realized what I was seeing. Straw was obviously down there, after months of delays, he'd begun work on what he’d long planned – The Deepest Hand Dug Hole in Marion County.

Over the past few months, I’d begun to slide toward the conclusion that he didn’t intend to hold up his end of the bargain. You see, the plan was – and is – that he digs this prize-winning hole, while I create my own wonder – The Largest Foil Ball in Marion County. I now realize that although he lost a bit of his steam and focus during the divorce which he recently finalized, I’d have to put in more effort than I’d bargained for to beat him. My foil ball currently stands at ten and one-quarter inches around. Our agreement was that six foil ball inches equaled three feet of hole. Peering over the edge of the pit, I felt conservative in estimating its depth at somewhere around fifteen or sixteen feet. For such a big ‘ol lanky ape-man, he looked pretty small down there.

After I’d finished telling him that he was a useless piece of crap, I hollered at him to get out of the bowels of the earth, that I wanted to discuss matters of international import with him. That is our code phrase for what is known colloquially as bullshit. He told me what I could do to myself, and began hauling himself up the frayed hemp line toward the surface. This involved an inordinate amount of grunting and belly-aching, but as improbable as the final result seemed at times, he finally arrived.

There is no point in taking my readership through the drivel and meander that defined our conversational preamble – it would read even more awkwardly than it flowed in life. We covered this and that, and the other thing, and of course we discussed how much he couldn’t stand his ex-wife. As I expected, things got mired in the twists and knots of that subject for quite awhile.

‘Ol Straw seemed to have taken a genuinely smug satisfaction in the fact that she’d finally lost it completely. After he moved to his new digs, she’d imploded so to speak, gotten high on hillbilly heroin, stolen a tractor from one of the Fennimore’s, hitched it to a new roadside guardrail, ripped it off like a sheet-metal banana peel and towed it down the Molalla highway looking for a scrap metal dealer who would exchange it for money which she’d use to buy a bag of meth, passing house after house until the Clackamas county sheriff’s deputy pulled her over and hauled her off to a few years in jail. Straw's final word on the subject – “The whole bad scene started with those goddamn child beauty pageants her mom forced her into. That and getting kicked out of MIT for sleeping with the Dean’s wife that one Easter…”

What I really wanted to do was to get the guy into a semi-serious frame of mind, to access the Straw Hat that everyone considered a genius, to discuss my experience at the recent Oregon Tilth Conference with him.

“Talk to me about Whole Foods, what do you think about that, you know, about the whole idea of organic mega-stores…”

Before I’d even finished the thought, it occurred to me that Straw probably had no idea what I was talking about. He’d be the first one to proclaim – loudly – that he doesn’t shop.

Predictably, he fired back, “You know goddamn well I don’t shop. I mean, take a look around you man. I got goats, sheep, chickens, apple trees, and look at that friggin’ chard out by the carport. Shit, I don’t need to go to the corner store, let alone some damn palace for rich folks whose consciences are buggin’ ‘em…”

“Right. Exactly Straw. That’s why I’m asking you what you think. You’re like the most organic jackass in existence. You’re so organic that it’s unsanitary. You’re out there on the scary fringe of organic.” And for a moment I lost track of what I was trying to say, then remembered “Which is why you’re perfect to editorialize the subject – you’ve got no horse in the race…”

“You just lost me. I’ve got no goddamn idea what you’re freakin’ out about or what you wanna hear from me.”

“Listen, I was at the Tilth Conference in Salem on Friday. The session I attended was called something like ‘Mainstreaming Organics.’ And for speakers on the panel, they had a purchasing administrator from New Seasons Market, a smarmy Californian marketing guy, an attractive and articulate sold-out foodie idealist from New York who studies American eating habits for the Hartman Group, a fairly brash and cocky guy from the Organically Grown Company, the General Manager of Organic Prairie (a midwestern organic meat co-op) and a flighty, disorganized-if-good-intentioned lady from the Organic Trade Association."

“Hey Asshole, where you going with this?”

“Shut up and listen Straw, I’m getting there.” I was getting irritated, but I continued, “The point is, you had all these high-powered people up on stage talking to a room full of small-change farmers about rationalizations for selling the entire organic movement - lock-stock-barrel – to multi-national corporations, agri-business, giant retail outlets, all in the name of increasing profit and market share. It just seemed totally backward to me…”

“Yeah, well what hell did you expect to find?”

“I expected to find people who understood that the nature of the whole organic movement is different, is more than just regulating what we can spray on our foods, more than a different label to slap on lowest common denominator products. I guess I thought I’d find people who represented the best interests of little farmers like Egor’s Acres, like Happy Harvest Farm, like Thistledown Farm. Instead, all I saw were cheerleaders for business and consolidation, a bunch of self-assured slicksters who dodged the question of organic agriculture’s ethical and philosophical underpinnings and – with various degrees of enthusiasm – served as cheerleaders, or maybe crack whores, for big business' domination of the organic market.”

“Listen bud, people are all the same. Greedy. Stupid. They’re as instinctive as dogs. No matter they say, they all want everything quicker, bigger, cheaper, easier. They don’t wanna put a damn minute into thinkin’ long term. People are full of shit. They wanna feel good for doing things easy. Don’t fool yourself – the hippies that started all of this are either fat and lazy do-nothings, or they’ve made a goddamn mint selling out their ideals…”

“And is that it, is that the best we can hope for? Are all of those farmers just supposed to sit there, smile big and say ‘where do sign up to I sell my legacy to ConAgra, to Monsanto, to Wal-Mart?’ Is that kind of thing just inevitable? Is it all just a bubble in the midst of being burst? Even the Oregon Tilth representative described mainstreaming organics as ‘finding a balance between reasonable compromise and selling out.’ Are those the only options? Isn’t there room for someone to be uncompromising, to hold a hard line?”

“Nope. There ain’t. Not in that room, or in any of the other rooms in that world.” Straw’s face was getting red by this point, and that is always a sign that the man behind the bumpkin image has rejoined the conversation. “You know where that hard line is? It is in this goddamn shit-hole that I call a yard, and in every other wallow in poor America. It don’t exist in board-rooms, or in supermarkets, or commodities exchanges. It's got everything to do with people just lookin' after their own backyards and nothin' to do with makin' a living. It’s as scared of money and commerce as a beaten dog is the back of his master’s hand. And you know that man, you know that. Those shitheads are dancin’ while it all burns. This whole damn world is sick with cancer and everyone is looking for mentholated rub. Man, capitalism is worse than the goddamn meth that sent my old lady to jail. She can’t quit the crank. America can’t quit the cash. When this thing comes down, goddamn communism's collapse is gonna seem like a friggin' little girl's tea party...”

“So what are you saying Straw? Are you telling me not to have any hope? Not to think that it is possible to change, to fix what we’ve damaged?”

“What I’m saying is that we’re greedy addicts who’ll never choose to really change until we hit rock friggin’ bottom and don’t have one goddamn inch of room to wriggle out of our own shitty mess. All that is gonna happen right now is what always happens. Money wins. Dreams get sold cheap to folks in power. Idealism gets prostituted out like a prison bitch. Ten years from now, all those fancy organic things’ll be no different from all them Twinkies. Corruption’ll just turn everything to crap.”

“Nice.”

“Did you come expectin’ me to candy-coat this shit for you? You go in there to this conference, and you’re an idealist, you wanna believe in the little guy, you wanna believe they can use their little pipsqueak voices for a good change, you’ve always been a goddamn idealist, and you’ve always been an idiot for being one.”

“Thanks for thinking so highly of me.”

“You know it’s the truth. You wanna think that David is gonna beat Goliath. Well guess what, that ain’t how it works anymore. Goliath is gonna buy the farms out from under every David there is, take their livelihoods, put ‘em outta work, dump their chemicals and shit all over the land. It is a lost goddamn cause, buddy…”

“You don’t think there is any hope that we can transform intelligently, that we can correct our course, that we have the power to do what is good and right?”

“Goddamn right I don’t. Listen, you know what our best and brightest are doing? They ain’t figuring out how to clean things up, how to change human nature. They’re designing nukes, bio-weapons, gas-guzzlers, plastic disposable garbage that they’ve decided is more important than a future. Get it?”

“Yeah, when you look at it, it seems pretty bleak, pretty desperate…”

“Damn straight it is.”

“I just feel sorry for all the good-intentioned people in that room. All the subsistence farmers, the market gardeners, the people that feed the land they love with their sweat, that try to do what is right.”

“So do I, but even if the world was made up of no one but them, things wouldn’t change. They’re no different either.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if you put them in charge, they’d get corrupted too, get to likin’ their money and power. Before long, they’d forget they ever cared about anything else. There’s only one way out of this mess, and it ain’t ‘mainstreaming organics’ or sticking to our guns…”

“What is it?”

“You remember what the first thing Lena ever said to you was?”

“No, do you?”

“Yep, she looked right at you and said ‘I pray every night for the oil to run out.’ And you said ‘me too.’ I think that you said that because you knew goddamn well what she was saying, it echoed your own understanding that the only safe world for a junkie is one where junk don't exist. In other words, getting to a world with no more oil is our only chance in the long run. Question is can we run out of oil before too much shit gets ruined. I don't know. No one does. Now excuse me while I get another Pabst…”

Straw limped back around the chicken-coop to a bucket full of red-white-and-blue cans of air-chilled beer. He tossed me one, and I cracked it open. We stood there for a half an hour longer, getting a little drunk, talking about this and that, nothing in particular. As quickly as he’d engaged, he disengaged and turned back to his don’t-give-a-shit ways.

Just a few minutes later I got back in my car and left, trying to get home in time for a steaming bowl of Tortellini with French Tarragon, Sweet Peas and Butter. Halfway back to Silverton, driving west toward a fading out January sunset along the crushed stone ribbon of Hazelnut Ridge road, I felt depressed. Depressed about the polished people who sat up by that podium and acted like they were selling something different. Depressed to think of all the simple country dreams that are being devoured by agri-business. Depressed by what my children will inherit. Depressed by the breadth of our mess and the slimness of our shot at cleaning things up.

I struggle with these issues, want to believe that there are good solutions, calm paths back to balance, measures which aren't panicked and desperate. And yet, roaring along, trailing greenhouse gases and a hazy spectrum of pollutants, it doesn't seem likely. My thoughts drifted back to Straw’s idea of our “only chance.” Maybe I should listen to my old friend, maybe he's right, maybe the surest way out of the building darkness is to drive all the way through it, to consume the substances that it is made of. "What the hell..." I heard myself think. Reacting to that thought, pushing on in doubt, grasping at an irrational hope, doing my part - I stomped on the gas…

Simple Spaghetti...

Most of those who know me at all have heard the name Francesca DeSantis, whom I loved and lost, my sweet trampled dream. But I’ve never spoken of her mother, a lithe divorcée, haiku poet and talented cook by the name of Domenica Pasquadibisceglie.

After fleeing her home – and her terribly volatile husband Emidio DeSantis – in Borgo Maggiore with her two young children in the early ‘70s, Domenica settled into a small stone farmhouse just outside Serralunga d’Alba in the rolling hillside vineyards of the Langhe. There, she learned to enjoy quiet evenings reading the works of Kobyashi Issa with a glass of Dolcetto d’Alba, to wander the hardwood forests in search of leather-capped porcini and tartufi bianchi, to wile the married men of the surrounding estates into keeping her roof in good repair. And, as I later discovered, she perfected the art of simple spaghetti. It was a discovery which has been made strangely poignant by fate.

There are moments in life – never more than a few - which mark the mind indelibly and deeply. Hearing the sudden panicked cry of your firstborn son as the midwife places him in your hands. Helping to carry your Great-grandmother’s casket to the yawning earth of the Even’s Valley cemetery. And arriving at a picture-perfect Piemontese house at sunset with a wonderful girl on your arm and the scent of roasted garlic wafting through the home’s open door. Such was the moment when Francesca introduced me to life in the care of her mother’s hospitality. It was the moment when I realized how in love I was, how in love we were. That moment formed the axis of the relationship which followed.

And today – as seemingly so often in the past – the food which I encounter in the course of my work sparks memories, nostalgic images, tender thoughts tainted with the certainty that the past cannot be retrieved, the departed cannot return. To confess the truth – at lunch today, I’ll withdraw to the solitude of my office, lock my door, sit down with my plate of red-sauced spaghetti. I’ll close my eyes and eat slowly, projecting my mind back across the immeasurable gulf of time, imagining that I am there still, back in the midst of that wonderful evening, my ears filled with the easy laughter of a lover who was stolen away too soon.

Memory is a grace and a curse…

Victory Arrives Smelling Like A Dirty Whore!

It was a near-perfect moment. The Westy cruised past the scattered farms along the highway. Chilled out bluegrass music crooned from the front-door speakers. And there was a wafting aroma which – if the day’s activities had been different – would’ve made me suspect that an unusually sweaty, completely unwashed Greek prostitute and a couple of wet dogs were rolling around together in the back seat.

But – thankfully - that scent was not drifting up from said combination of a filthy Athenian hooker and a couple of wet dogs. That sweet skanky perfume was something even better; it was unambiguous proof of my long-sought success. And I reveled in it, in the scent of the forty-odd Oregon white truffles which rested – poised at an almost complete state of ripeness – on the wicker-weave of my foraging basket.

Those truffles were the spoils of an exceptional day. I’d spent five and a half hours in the dense stands of the Bishop Tree Farm north of Mulino with a group of eighty to ninety members and acquaintances of the North American Truffling Society. It was my first adventure with these folks. In truth, I was shocked by the turnout.

My experience with organized mushroom forays is that they are poorly attended, and that the bulk of the attendees are – God bless ‘em – old folks. Not so in this case. The entire affair was a social melting pot. In the shelter of the proprietor’s humble single-wide mobile home was a gathered murmuring mass made up of snobbish looking couples standing next to the ubiquitous Willamette Valley hicks who were standing next to prototypical working-class families huddled with their bundled up children who were standing next to neo-bohemian wannabe hippies. It was a strange gathering of tribes, and I would almost swear that the ground reverberated audibly as the odd bunch of us stampeded aimlessly out into the thirty year old Doug-fir stands.

Initially, I moved east – at least I think it was east – into a stand of younger looking growth. It was a waste of time. All I found were a few tiny truffles of the Barssia genus. Not what I was looking for at all, but it led to the great revelation of the day: Good-sized truffles must need good-sized trees.

After looking at the baskets of the foragers returning from the more mature stands toward the south end of the property, I decided that I’d been concentrating too much on immature forest. I picked up my basket and my four-pronged rake and headed toward the substantially more robust trees on the other side of a grassy meadow.

At first, I was a little let down by what I saw. The duff seemed to have been ravaged around every single tree in sight. But as I moved into the center of the grove, I found virgin floor. And then, quite unexpectedly, I noticed what looked like the crushed remnants of a truffle in a hole which appeared to have been hooved out by a black-tailed deer. Dropping to my knees, I began scratching an ever-widening circle out of the topsoil surround this little divot. Almost immediately, my rake revealed a white truffle the size of a large gumball. Sticking it to my nose, I was hit with the scent I’d been looking for. I’d arrived.

For the next few hours I worked the ground slowly and painstakingly around that one spot. In the end, I probably mined an area roughly 25’ by 25’ square. Driven by back pain to alternate between sitting down, laying on my belly, and crouching low, I follow veins of fungus along the twisting warren of vole holes which spread out around me. Every couple of minutes, another rusty-white truffle would tumble out of the disturbed soil and into my greedy fingers. I strolled out of that lucky grove feeling satiated, totally satisfied with the work of those short hours.

Washed and cleaned, the truffles now inhabit a zip-loc bag in my refrigerator. And every few minutes I find myself sticking my nose down into them. The scent of the entire haul gathered together seems to me the olfactory equivalent of an aluminum baseball bat swung hard – it hits the nostrils violently; it is rude and delicious at the same time.

All that remains is to eat them, and that will commence any time now. Although, given the sheer volume of what I harvested, it will take me a while to get through them all. Poor Farmer…

The Coming Hungarian Invasion...

I’ve known Géza since he was eight years old and picking at his sister’s version of lamb paprikás as it simmered in a heavy cast-iron pot. During a three month stint as a dairy hand in the bucolic farmland of Drávaszentes – a small agricultural center near Hungary’s frontier with Croatia - I stayed as a paying guest in the attic of his brother-in-law, a diesel engine mechanic who’d married into the Szücs family.

Between hauling hay, the endless milking done by hand, and the early morning tractor rides delivering milk to the cooperative, it was the hardest work I’ve ever done. Despite its challenges, the experience brought unexpected rewards. One of those rewards was having little Géza as my own enthusiastic personal ambassador to the local community on Sundays.

Physically, that little Hungarian boy was almost as awkward looking as they come. Thin and bent as a chicken wing, he was a scrawny kid – and his scrawniness hasn’t changed – but he’s always made up for his fragility with a buoyancy of spirit so rare that I’ve never encountered it in anyone else. Everyone loved him.

During our weekend rambles, he was acknowledged with smiles and waves everywhere we went. I mean everywhere without exception. Old folks hibernating on benches before their whitewashed houses would look up and wink at him as he passed. Every time we walked past the butcher’s shop, he’d be offered a salty hunk of dried beef to snack on free of charge. Lovely little girls in their groups of three would huddle in together and whisper – eyes twinkling secretly in fascination – as my awkward looking guide led me proudly toward his stone-throwing spot on the east end of the bridge. More than once, the police even invited him in to play with their handcuffs and to make calls on their two-way radio.

That kid had an absolutely surreal ability to warm people up. It defied explanation. I never really grew accustomed to that, to the exuberant energy he radiated. He’s a totally unique individual. And despite his not understanding that 11:47 in the morning in rural Hungary equals 2:47 in the morning in rural Oregon, it still cheers me at a cellular level to catch up with him by telephone.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Géza rang me up in the middle of last night, waking me from a very interesting dream in which Kelly Slater tried to convince me that I really shouldn’t be afraid of sharks, that I should just get in the murky green water. I’ll try to describe our phone exchange.

Despite the wonders of international satellite communication, his voice crackled loudly as he practically yelled through the earpiece - “American, it is Mr. Géza!”

Since the first day I’d encountered him, he has never called me anything other than “American.”

I sat right up and smiled with surprise in the blackness of my bedroom, breaking my faux Art Nouveau night-stand light in an effort to find the switch. Answering, I tried to sound put out and irritated, just to mess with him a bit - “Yes Géza, and it is also the middle of the night, just like last time you woke me up to say that. Don’t you have a watch that works right?”

“No American, I cannot make the math, and also, I have two very important news for you…” he shot off in a rapid-fire burst which most native English speakers would not understand as a sentence consisting of actual words.

Knowing that it would be a waste of good intention to try and accomplish any small talk before he got through the subjects that impelled him to call, I stepped aside, conversationally speaking. “Go on…” was all I managed to get in.

Seeming to force a fast breath, he rattled up to top speed once again. “Uncle Béla, you know, the maker of the good Tokaji, the one who had baby with his housemaid, the one he found in Bulgaria at the Mexican restaurant. Anyway, he bought me an automobile car from a Dutch homeless person who was going to Turkey for good weather. It cost much but is wonderful to drive to Budapest on weekend. I am hooked…”

Nodding in my solitude and trying not to laugh so that he’d hear, I started to interject. “That is such a…”

“I am in love with the driving, American. And I have new dream and new vacation plan. Uncle Béla will give me job in spring to help with training vines. I am making money to come to your country for something. I think is called like ‘road trip.’” he exclaimed.

For just about half a second, I thought I might try to interrupt him, to encourage him to think things through. But again, it was pointless to speak.

Suddenly, I got the very clear impression that one of Géza’s sister’s hounds had burst into the kitchen and knocked over a large number of frying pans and dishes. The phone cut in and out with a confused mélange of harsh shatters and clanks, shouts in Hungarian, and frightened canine yelps. Those yelps cued some buried memories: I hated those dogs during my stay, and still do, even at this distance.

When he came back to the phone, shouting in English over the cries of the dog, he cut things to a very quick point before abruptly hanging up. “American, I am coming to do road trip with you. I will drive, you will use map. I come in August and we spend time seeing your home. You will see my new car, I email you…”

And now my own vacation plans have solidified, quite unexpectedly. It seems that I will have a visitor late this summer, which will almost certainly be the most unusual experience I’ve had for a very long time. And I guess that I will see America together with an irrepressibly fun – if hyperactive – Hungarian nineteen year old. Though I hadn’t been planning on undertaking the great American road trip in quite this fashion, there is no arguing with that kid…

An Unexpected Visitor Lifts My Spirits...

It’s been awhile now. In fact, though I’d reconnected with her partner Emma in the intervening years, I’d not seen Polina Czajkowski since a late August trip to the Netherlands more than three years back. And yet, last Wednesday night, I found myself waiting for her on a bright orange molded plastic chair in the arrivals lounge of Seattle’s international airport. She’d surprised me two days earlier with a phone call letting me know she’d be arriving to stay at my house for a long weekend. On a whim, she decided it was time to come and check out what Oregon is all about, and she was temporarily homeless due to her apartment being fumigated, which added impetus.

Though her overnight flight from Luchthaven Schiphol arrived on time, she didn’t emerge from the gate until more than an hour and forty minutes had passed. As Poli explained, the strange little customs agent wearing too much cologne took a great interest in her, as did his dog, his powdered latex gloves, and his x-ray machine. She cleared the border eventually, claiming that this is nothing new, that she’s been on an international watch list since she was caught trying to smuggle mangosteens from Vanuatu into Finland in her luggage eight years ago. I think she is paranoid, but that is part of her charm.

As she floated through the automatic doorway and moved toward me, I could hear her shouting “take me to the truffles, take me to the truffles…” She knew from our correspondence that I’ve spent the better part of the last month foraging for Tuber oregonense in the Doug-fir plantations above Silverton. And I knew that she had spent many afternoons in the mushroom shop of her utterly sweet Grandma Ekaterina – the primary local source for Périgord truffles under the Soviet regime - in downtown Kiev as a young girl. The pungently aromatic subterranean fungus had great sentimental value to her. “Okay Poli…” I shouted back at her. Who am I to disappoint an enthusiastic and eccentric Ukrainian beauty who wishes wander aimlessly in dark hillside groves and dig shallow holes in the forest duff with me.

Late in the afternoon on the day before yesterday – finally - as the rain-snow mix splattered against our bright yellow rain-gear and the cold south wind whipped needle-coated branches across our cheeks, we dug for truffles. In the midst of no success, I shared with her my latest cockamamie scheme, my fixation du jour, my contemplation of the purchase of a truffling pig to call my very own. She howled with laughter at this idea, and then said “You must do it, my friend, you just have to buy that pig…” Maybe she is right, it would certainly increase my chances. I mean with the truffle hunting – Poli is beautiful, but she is an avowed lesbian, she is married, and I am married as well…

As an aside, I think that a trained hound dog would be better – if only I had the time and patience to train one…

At any rate, nightfall came early and we never found a thing. So it goes. And as I arrived to work yesterday morning, running on no sleep after returning her to the airport for a four a.m. flight out of Seattle, I found myself smiling. Only nutcase Poli could see both the humor – and the value – in having a six-hundred pound sow to lead through the trees on a rope. And only Poli could look so wonderful covered in mud and dead salal leaves.

I miss her already…

Some Truffles Are Black...

He wanted to write something about the lone black truffle, to capture the frustration he felt at failing to find anything ripe beneath the little patch of young Doug-fir, to describe how he spent an hour and change today driving the roads above town looking for likely truffières. But all of those narratives are blocked by his overwhelming sentiment, the one he can’t shake, the thought that owns him at the moment.

Everything has become an imitation of authentic experience and I don’t remember what a real kiss feels like…

He is going step back from his normal approach. He'll just sort of ruminate for a moment. He’ll try to get his bearings. He'll reflect on the nature of traps.

This isn't any place he recognizes. An eyeblink ago, the world was wide and undefined, open to all interpretations, a vast expanse in every direction. Right now it has all the sweeping vistas of a small metal box.

He feels himself the axis of an alien geography. Life parades past him like an unrequited lover, brushing his fingertips and passing beyond reach. This wasn’t what he wanted. And he doesn’t remember how to find his dreams.

In Search of Jeanne-de-Porc...

Ah, the sad plight of provincial and uncultured Americans...

It would seem that in foraging, as in table manners, we come up short, we embarass ourselves. Common wisdom has it that European trufflers look askance at the savage harvest techniques of their Oregonian peers. This wisdom suggests that we in the western U.S.A. are percieved as heavy-handed, clod-headed, clumsy, ill-mannered boors bearing implements better suited for the weeding of our quaint Victory gardens. And to provide a complete contrast, it would seem that truffle hunting in the woodlands of Alba and the Périgord is seen as a wonderfully bucolic and dignified, or at the least humbly masterful, earthy and achingly traditional affair - views supported by most of the images of Old World truffle hunting one might find.

Flash to an image of the regal Italian property owner, his jet hair suavely arranged, sporting a stylishly rumpled vest, carrying a basket, leading a hound on an oiled leather lead.

Flash to another image – this time of the French farmwife holding her prized truffle pig on a rope leash – a picture prototypically captured for all posterity in Chez Pim's great little article which can be found by clicking on the following address: www.chezpim.com

And why wouldn’t these archetypal foragers view us with disdain, as we crash through the Doug-fir stands, sounding like so many oxen in the underbrush, wielding our sharp rakes, scraping away the topsoil in search of small finds. Our techniques brutalize the duff and yield as many unripe, useless white truffles as ripe ones. What we do is akin to a hunter firing his shotgun into the midst of a flock of doves, aiming at nothing in particular, hoping something will fall dead from the sky into the skillet. “Stupid Americans…” they must think, “shitting in their own piggy-banks…”

As one might guess, I don’t disagree with the notion that our uncivilized manner of truffling is flawed. That said, I’ll be practicing these less-than-polished techniques at every chance I get. I just love truffles and despite my lack of experience, I intend to find as many as I can.

But I am also an environmentally sensitive individual; I’d like to minimize the havoc which I wreck in my wild edible adventures. And that got me thinking about two things.

Dogs.

Pigs.

Wallowing in my backyard are two mud-caked dogs. Henry the Beagle and Khiva the Boxer. They are grown, I have no room for another, and I have no patience for the commitment necessary to train a hound to hunt Tuber oregonense.

Which brings me to pigs.

It is a well known fact that the scent of Tuber magnatum – the famed European white truffle – possesses a perfume which mimics that of male pig’s sexual glands. This aroma drives female pigs quite wild with desire, which accounts for their use as aids to the unearthing of these prized subterranean fungi. Furthermore, just as a man does not need to be trained to leer at a beautiful woman, the female pig needs little training to pursue the truffle. Which, to my short attention span, sounds wonderful.

Equipped with a spiel comprised of all these facts and reasonings, I emailed Hansel the other day to mention, ever-so-casually, that perhaps we might purchase a young female member of the swine family, and that we might raise it in his yard, and that we might take it out on walks in the forest, and that while in the forest it just might happen to find some ripe truffles – after all, pigs are only attracted to the smell of ripe truffles, which makes them quality control aids, in addition to aiding the efficacy and eco-friendliness of the hunt. His response?

“My wife already mentioned that. I told her ‘you’ve got to be kidding…’”

And yet, I can feel him beginning to cave. Just this morning he emailed to ask when we should begin the assembly of a pig parlor, and made suggestions as to the use of Heritage breeds. Oh, the possibilities…

I must state for the audience at large – I never imagined myself in the business of raising any kind of pig, let alone one with the primary purpose – the secondary purpose would likely be bacon – of rooting out comestibles. My hierarchy of desired livestock has always been ordered in the following manner: Goats, Pygmy Goats, Geese, Ducks, Chickens, Shetland Ponies, Donkeys, Mules, Alpacas, Llamas, Percheron and Belgian Horses, Castilian Horses, Clydesdales, Sheep, Pigs, and all other Horses. As you can see, pigs aren’t high on the list. Nevertheless, I may be on the cusp of owning half a pig.

The only unanswered questions at this point are:

Do I really want to be a fancy European? Sans doubt…

What would we name it? My vote is for ‘Jeanne-de-Porc’

Would the womenfolk permit it? Who knows…

Is Hansel still kidding? Perhaps, but perhaps not…

Does Tuber oregonense appeal to pigs? I’ve heard differing reports. When I get my hands on ripe truffles, I’m going to find a local piggery and do some hands-on testing…

Am I crazy? That has been an open question for years…

Sharing My Inheritance...

Everything about the family was told within the frame of history. As a child, there were stories of those who’d died before I arrived, accounts which I listened to but which were largely meaningless to me. And then there were the stories of those old lives that carried me in their arms, the ones whose smiles and tears I remember. Their's are the stories that remain with me. I was raised upon the life stories of these long gone forebears and cannot forget them. It is necessary, sometimes, to write them down, put them out into the world again, to share them for what they’re worth to a pack of strangers. It is the least I can do - they are the only treasures that my poor kin had to pass on to me. They are my sole inheritance. Priceless things.

Two come to mind on this particular night, as I sit alone in my own home and think...

Dad's side of the family came up from Kentucky some generations back and settled in the flatlands outside Minot. When my Grandpa Floyd was fourteen years old, he hitched up a team of strong mules and drove them across the Dakota prairie to find some petrified tree stumps which he'd admired since he was younger. All alone, he dragged three great chunks back to his father's farm and kept them there until many years later, when he brought the whole load out west to a new farm in Oregon, roped into the back of a pickup truck after the war. And after resting there, among the caneberries for a good stretch of years, he hauled the stone trees to a ranch-style house which was the color of lime curd and sat on a Woodburn cul-de-sac. It was another time, he'd given up farming after all the kids but one had moved on, after Cousin Roy was shot in the head by the .22 revolver that Dad kept loaded in his closet. Older with another intervening block of years, those same kids loaded the petrified heirlooms in the back of another pickup truck and planted them in the front yard of Grandma Verna’s little cottage on Salal Avenue, the little cottage Grandpa bought for her before he finally gave in to the emphysema and died on that cream colored bed in the Salem Hospital. As far as I know, they remained there after Grandma followed him to the grave. I could always drive by the place and check, but somehow, I think I won't.

The Schlegel's made their homestead outside of Banks, and it was out in that place, still farmed by the family, that my Great-grandma Emma had a playhouse when she was a youngster. She'd pass summer days inside it, nestled as it was by the edge of the western forest, and she would imagine all the things that young girls have always imagined as her brothers worked the wide fields. Little Emma was trapped inside it one afternoon by what she called a panther - although I think it must’ve been a cougar. To hear her tell the story, she was scared near to death until her older brother Earl Schlegel came along – hearing her cries - and shot the wild beast dead with his hand-me-down hunting rifle. He led her back to the farmhouse on that old southwest slope and I like to think he wiped away her sweet girl’s tears and gave her comfort as a brother should. And the story followed her into that house and out again. It came with her south to the farm she built with her husband Er Zimri, the one where they raised two girls as dissimilar as night and day, and tended to a flock of Araucana chickens. When E.Z. grew too old to get along in the country, it followed their migration to the house on top of East Hill, the one with the cobwebbed root cellar and the beetle collection on pins in the attic. In a few more years, after he passed on into the grave, she carried the story with her through a series of apartments and duplexes, to the Mt. Angel Towers, where one evening she fell down dead. We buried her next to her husband in Even’s Valley.

These stories and more followed me home from their funerals, lodged in my heart, where they rest in a state of vicarious life, nourished by my red blood for as long as it rushes. The lives of these story tellers have made a reliquary of my imagination. Their experiences will abide in me for as long as I abide. And then they will disappear entirely. I am the last connection to those departed lives, they’ll die with finality when I go. It seems to me that enduring legacies are for the few, posterity is for the famous and fortunate. The hard earned histories of common folk, of humble farmers and their long-toiling wives, endure no longer than the last loved ones to have known them. Every vestige, every trace of their passage is obliterated by a generation of strange relations.

Eleven Years of Evaded Intimacy...

The rain is coming down around the windows that look outside and I wish that I had a mug of hot cocoa with thirteen or fourteen little marshmallows floating on the top. I’m feeling nostalgic for something I’ve never had, something I’ve never allowed myself, an experience of self-consciousless affection, a dance with someone warm and comfortable, with an intimate friend whom I might hold close without risk of collateral damage. Hiding in pretended possibilities, I expose my fears to the partner in my thoughts and we trample them together on the golden maple dance floor of my daydreams. There is a sensation of relaxed ease with my hand upon the curve of her hip, she sways, she looks at me in a way which I cannot read, which I don’t need to read.

If only...

It would be perfect, but at this point in my history, it is just an imagined thing anyway.

Once upon a time I was at the seashore on the 4th of July, building a crenellated castle with young sweet Simona. Four hundred odd yards from Haystack Rock, our hands connected beneath the sand at Cannon Beach, invisibly, an intimate chance seen only through the vision of touch, sweetly, never to happen again. After those thirty seconds of easy embrace things were irrevocably altered. A glance was not the same glance as before, it carried implications. The brush of her fingers along my forearm in passing felt charged with a new and restrained intent. And yet nothing was said. The friendship grew close as hornet-stung lips locked in a delicious shared dream, yet never materialized into real experience. And what if I hadn't released her fingers? Last I knew, she married a piano-tuner. That was eleven years ago. I’ll not see her anymore, I can feel it.

Today, it is a New Year’s resolution of sorts, which I make to her absence – “If you were here now, I would ask you to dance. Now I’m strong enough to risk your rejection. I'd run away from everything for you.”

Come back…