Saturday, May 27, 2006
The Bootmaker and Me in NYC
Hooray! I learned today that my short film, Boot Camp will be shown as part of the Rural Route Film Festival in Manhattan on July 30. Not sure yet if I’ll be able to attend, but if I do, I guess I’ll need to finish those boots I started late last year. An occasion like this will require very special shoes!
Monday, May 22, 2006
Mighty Day of Many Meat Treats
I admit that I did sort of trick Pat into taking a side trip to Cle Elum on our way home from Lake Chelan, Washington, but any ill will he felt at being deceived was obliterated once he realized cookies and smoked meats were to be had. After locating my Italian great grandfather’s old tavern on the main drag, we walked across the street to Owens Meats. I tried a sample and immediately asked for a pound of their smoked Alaskan white salmon, but Pat, who is all too familiar with my various shortcomings, not the least of which is my grizzly-bear-like lack of self-control when it comes to cured fish, quickly doubled the order. I was easily upsold to Owens’ landjaeger, which, according to the kid behind the counter, is a German sausage with Swiss origins and popular with hunters and outdoorsmen throughout history because it doesn’t require refrigeration. He described the process Owens uses to make theirs, and it involves--if I remember correctly--grinding, pressing, seasoning, stuffing, smoking, and somewhere in there, fermenting. That’s the part that really got my attention--the fermenting. Why would anyone do that to meat unless it tasted really, really good? So I stepped right up and bought a sack, knowing full well that if I extended this line of logic I might find myself eagerly purchasing sausage packed in the butcher’s socks, if, by chance, they offered something like that for sale. Luckily, they didn’t appear to, but it’s not like I asked outright or anything.
We walked across the street to the Cle Elum Bakery, which opened in 1906 and reportedly hasn’t cooled its ovens once in over a hundred years. My own Grandma Katie bought torchiette cookies there as a young girl with her friends. She said they would sip milk through them like a straw. I decided I needed a sack of those, too, and they were just as tasty as Grandma remembered.
As we headed south, Pat dug out one of the Chelan apples to snack on while I sucked on SweeTARTS and--somewhat to his chagrin--carved off a piece of a sausage with my pocketknife. I asked him if he wanted some, but he just gave me a disgusted look. At first I thought he was annoyed I was eating it in the car, but then he muttered something about not knowing where my knife had been, which I have to admit made me stop and think for a moment. I quickly ran down in my head a list of the grosser scenarios that might require a pocket-sized tool that can cut, saw, dig, scrape, or poke, but determined that nothing I had done with my knife recently could be any worse than the fermenting that had happened to that sausage, and thus I resumed my lunch.
Somewhere past Shaniko, Oregon, the weather took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure if it was just that big wide open space capped by dark ominous clouds that tipped me off, but about five minutes after I uttered, “Pat, we gotta get out of here...,” it started raining so hard we lost sight of the road, and just when it seemed like it couldn’t get any worse, the rain turned to gravel-sized hail. We inched along with our hazard lights on until we finally found a wide spot in the road where other people had pulled off to wait out the storm. It finally let up after what seemed like several minutes, but the hail had made such a racket that we were both surprised to find the car unscathed.
When we got to Bend it was still early, so we decided to pass on mountain oysters at the Tumalo Feed Company, where Pat first sampled the delicacy that has inspired many a testicle festival across the West. Instead we continued south to Mount Shasta, where we arrived in time for homemade ravioli at the family-owned Piemont restaurant, where the food is so good that I once ate four dinners in a row here. The owner, Judy, told me she can make up to 160 dozen ravioli in a few hours using an ancient-looking machine to roll the dough. (I did some figuring and that’s roughly the same amount of Piemont ravioli I’ve eaten in my lifetime.) Our meal, complete with minestrone, antipasti, spumoni, and coffee was deeply satisfying and came to about $30 for the both of us. Where else can you get a homemade dinner for that price? If you know, tell me!
When we got home, I learned from my mom that the Owens Meat people are our distant cousins. I’m hoping they have some sort of family discount because, thanks to them, I’ve already developed a wicked landjaeger habit and will be looking to score some more fermented meat cheap in the very near future.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
The Miracle Mortgage
We thought this was a historical marker near our resort, so we went over to have a look. If you can’t read it, it says, “This rock stands as a perpetual testimony to God’s glory when he allowed the people of North Shore Bible Church to erect this building in the summer of 1987 and to pay it off by the spring of 1990.” Maybe it’s just me, but miracles don’t really seem what they used to be.
Where the West Meets the Northwest
I am back from another week on the road and feeling a bit relieved that I finally have some work lined up for the next several days...lest I be tempted to take off again. A girl sort of gets used to expecting a new adventure every day, not to mention taking all her meals at roadside stops like Flo’s Cafe in Grand Coulee, Washington, where the food is fantastic and the motto is “Ten thousand flies can’t be wrong.”
Pat and I drove for two days en route to Lake Chelan, where we spent a sleepy week at a lakeside resort, courtesy of my very generous auntie. This area of Washington is supposedly home to the world’s best tasting apples, and after sampling a couple from the business center in Manson, I couldn’t disagree: firm, juicy, good texture, and extraordinary flavor. From now on, it’s Chelan apples or nothing for me.
I remembered to bring my great grandparents’ book with me this time so I could explore some of the places they lived while they “gyppo’d” around that state. One of the first things we did was hike through a region close to Joe Creek, where my great grandfather and grandfather logged in the 1930s. I guess I thought walking where they once tread in their calks (pronounced “corks") would somehow slow down time, but its effect was exactly the opposite. Their lives were filled with both family and adventure, and yet how quickly they were over. You can’t waste one minute....
The following day we drove out to Grand Coulee Dam, mostly because Pat wanted to go. I was caught off guard, though, by how much the first sight of the behemoth moved me. Unlike Hoover Dam, which uses a visually striking concrete arch along with gravity to hold the Colorado back, Grand Coulee works simply because it’s so damn enormous. I know it destroyed fisheries and the Colville Indian Tribes’ way of life, submerged entire towns, and cost dozens of men their lives, but there is beauty in the testament it provides to the awesome human effort, cooperation, and ingenuity its construction required. I believe in the free market as much as the next gal, but it doesn’t seem possible that we could ever build something on the scale of Grand Coulee in this country again. I hope that doesn’t make me a communist.
A couple days before we left to come home, we took a ferry, Lady of the Lake II, from Chelan to Stehekin, which is only accessible by plane or boat. It took about four hours to get there, but the pleasant weather made for a smooth ride. I sat outside reading for most of the trip and consequently ended up with a red neck (for reals) and one red leg. Once we arrived at our destination, most of us got on an old school bus driven by a friendly but fast-talking preacher who drove us to Rainbow Falls and rapidly relayed some highlights about the community along the way (like the best place to pick blackberries, who fills in for the postmaster when she wants to take a break, and the place where he got his Plymouth Horizon stuck in high water one year when it flooded). I loved his style, but Pat was made nervous by the fact that all the while the preacher’s left hand was busy holding a mic, the right one frequently retreated from the steering wheel to wave energetically at passing cars on the narrow road skirting the roaring Stehekin River, which also just happened to be at flood stage. That Pat. What a nut.
Well, it appears I have run out of time to write, but tomorrow I will tell you how we spent a $100 on meat and cookies in Cle Elum, Washington, were nearly killed(!) in a freak hail storm in north central Oregon, missed out on mountain oysters in Bend, but eventually feasted on homemade ravioli before returning home.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Of Pigs and Pork
My friend Nadav is probably the only person who can truly understand the wave of emotion I experienced as I spied the 1956 edition of Meat from Ranch to Table tucked in Evany’s bookcase a few days ago. During the Hits.org years, he found this piece of meat industry propaganda (packaged just for kids!) among several boxes of tattered library books that a school was giving away. We brought it back to the office with us where it took its rightful place among the other treasured Webmonkey relics, like the shriveled-up eggplant named Renee that thau! was so fond of sending anonymously to unsuspecting co-workers. Somehow, Renee always found her way back home, but we thought for years that the book had been lost in the great exodus that ensued after a certain East Coast search engine company acquired ours. It turns out, though, that while Nadav and I were reminiscing about the good times we had with Meat from Ranch to Table, Evany had pulled it from the slow-burning metaphorical ashes of what was once our workplace, and has been carefully guarding it ever since.
I can’t speak for Nadav, but I loved that book because it reminded me of another I had as a kid. I paid $5.95 at Main Street Feed for Small-Scale Pig Raising by Dirk van Loon (still five stars on Amazon!). That was back when I was ten and embarking on my first career as a pig farmer. After that came babysitter, marijuana plant hydrater (which didn’t last long once my parents found out), biscuit maker, drive-thru queen, copy store clerk, AV technician, journalist, and eventually Web consultant and aspiring filmmaker. I can’t remember where I got the money to pay for the book, but my folks fronted me $100 to purchase two red Durocs whom--after a few days of careful observation--I named Trouble, after her ability to sniff it out with her snout, and Ignatowski, after Reverend Jim on Taxi. I think I just liked the way that name felt when I said it. A couple years later I also had a pig named Woodrow Wilson, and I am pretty sure there would have been a Calvin Coolidge and probably a Herbert Hoover if I had stayed in the hog business long enough. (Boy, for a period there, America sure seemed to be swayed by the alliterative candidates.)
On most days I would come home after school, grab my pig cane, and earnestly run them around the yard with the hope they would develop huge but not overly muscular hams. A nice big juicy butt would earn us high marks in the judging when it came fair time. Iggy and Trouble would snort and hop around when I let them out of their pen. Sometimes they would chase butterflies or the chickens. I often struggled to pull them with my cane from their determined rooting in my mom’s flowerbeds. And on days when it was hot and they couldn’t find any mud close by, they’d shade up under an apple tree, and I’d lie down with them and wait for a breeze. Just me and my pigs and all that pastoral pleasantness.
How could Iggy and Trouble have possibly known then that come August I would sell them out for cute school clothes and another chance at the big money the following year? Someday, when I’m feeling up to it, maybe I’ll tell you about the day we Windbiglers had to part with Trouble. All I’ll say now is...it wasn’t pretty.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Seam Squirrels and Graybacks
This is another excerpt from my great-grandfather’s autobiography. Based on his age, I think it takes place around 1903 or 1904 in Washington. I know everything in this world is relative, but I must admit I feel a little soft after reading this account of life at one of the logging camps where he worked. He would have had to work a couple years to pay for the Herman Miller chair I purchased recently to alleviate back pain while I type.
Granddad wrote:
“The next spring when I was 16, I went to work at Buck’s Camp, near Monroe, setting chokers. This was a hard place on men and one month saw 20 men killed. If 30 men were killed in one month, the company had to shut down for 90 days. I forgot to say in all the bunkhouses, fleas, lice (graybacks), and bedbugs (seam squirrels) were plentiful. My pay was $2.25 per day for 11 hours. Every morning the boss would kick open the door and yell, ‘Roll out, or roll up,’ and he meant just that. The bunkhouse was about 20 x 20 square. The bunks were just boards and made with one end against the wall on each side, and three bunks high. In the center of the room there was a ‘Sidney Stove’ sitting on a box filled with dirt. The stove pipe went up through the roof. The door opened in the middle of one side, a window in the opposite side. All men carried their own blankets. There were no mattresses on the bunks. The lighting system was a kerosene lantern hung on a hook in the ceiling. You washed in a wash basin outdoors--the ‘john’ was outback.”
(The photo above was taken in Blewett, Washington, in 1915. Granddad’s brother, Dean, is driving the team. Granddad is standing behind him. Here’s another picture from 1912 that shows “the first truck there is any record of hauling logs in Washington.” It was owned by Rucker Brothers in Everett.)
