Spatchcock the Turkey

Spatchcock the Turkey

Lately, I’ve had the thought  I could have been a butcher.  I wonder why you don’t see many women butchers.   Is it a union thing?  I’ll have to ask one of the guys  at the grocery store in town. I need to learn their names. Any French housewife or gourmet cook gets to know her local butcher and I don’t mean in the biblical sense.

I like deboning.  I deboned some chicken legs and thighs not too long ago.  I like the precision, the clean feel of chicken flesh, and turning an inexpensive cut of meat into tidy bundles for stuffing.  Farce, I think it’s called.  I felt like Julia Child.  She could talk and  cut up a chicken at the same time, on television, as a matter of fact. 

What I really enjoy is spatchcocking.  I bought a six pound capon the other day just to practice.  I didn’t have the right tools.  I needed a sharp clever and a mallet to make strong whacks through the backbone.  Instead, I resorted to vigorous sawing with  my serrated breadknife.  It worked, but the sawn backbone was rough along the edges. Also,  I needed a boning knife to cut close to the breast bone, severing it from the rib cage.  I got it right on one side but the other looked like a collapsed lung.

This technique for splaying a fowl came to my attention before Thanksgiving, mentioned on several internet food sites as a speedy method for barbequing the holiday bird.  “Spatchcock”  is an Irish term that means “dispatch the cock.”  I can see some medieval Irish housewife standing in the barnyard, declaring that the mean old bastard has to go, referring to an irascible  rooster who  outlived his usefulness.  “Dispatch the cock!” she declaimed with her arm raised.  I wonder if her husband shuddered in his boots.

In fact, this Thanksgiving we roasted a traditional stuffed bird for a dinner of fourteen family members and then spatchcocked a twelve pound turkey on the barbeque for turkey sandwiches the next day.  My husband got do the  spatchcocking.  He didn’t do a very good job.  He didn’t remove the breastbone, so the turkey huddled over the grill, rather than embracing it. However, it browned nicely, cooked in less than two hours, tasted great.

 That I should admit how much I enjoyed spatchcocking a capon just for practice might make me seem like a figment of Stephen King’s imagination.  The truth is that being  a housewife these days is getting on my nerves.  My family is gone, grown.  My spouse has become  cranky and critical.  I feel like my time is running out, and I’m getting a wee bit peevish.

Where in the Hell Is Capistrano?

My neighbor said, “They were gathered…a thousand swallows.  Last Wednesday.  Where were you?  You missed it.  Now they’re gone.”  We were sitting on his porch drinking red wine, waiting for the sun to set somewhere north of Taylor Canyon, looking at open space, not empty, but empty of swallows.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it, even though I thought he was exaggerating the numbers.  It’s one of the things we do:  watch for the day in June when the swallows return, surprising us as they string themselves on the power lines beside the road to Tuscarora.  I'm not usually here in September, when they leave.  “Do you think they really go to Capistrano?” I asked.

"Fuck’d if I know,” he replied, finishing his third glass of wine.  He’s a retired teamster in his eighties with advanced emphysema.  We’ve talked about how sensible it would be for him to move back to northern California near his son and near sea level.  It would be easier to breathe.  “I’m not going anywhere” he told me earlier, as we admired the fall light warming the valley floor.  “It’s goddam beautiful here.  I’m gonna die here.  That’s that.”  He looked right at me, as if I were going to talk him out of moving or dying.  I’m not sure which.

My ninety-six year old mother hates organized religion in general and the Mormon church in particular.  The mention of an afterlife makes her furious.  “Their idea of ‘heaven,’” she says, her arthritic fingers making quotation marks in the air, “is stupid.”  She is glad my father’s ashes are scattered in the Ruby Mountains and she has repeatedly said, “It doesn’t matter to me.  Funerals are for the living,” when I ask her what her wishes are.  "You don't 'go' anywhere when you die," she informs me, again making that fluttering motion with her fingers.

And yet.  Last week I took her for a drive up Lamoille Canyon.  The view from the top of the mountain gave us the lay of the land and an infinity of Nevada sky.  “A sky like that makes you think there might be a heaven,” I heard her say to herself.

Rat Terriers vs. Wood Rat

I pulled away the cardboard I had tacked over the opening.  Both Linda and I saw something move in the white plastic dishpan where I stored cleaning supplies and a extra roll of paper towels, now half shredded.

"It's still there," I said.  

She called her two rat terriers, "Chewie!  Zeb!  Look!"  She pointed to the dishpan.  "Git 'em!"  The dogs, excited by her voice, sniffed  around the cluttered dishpan.  "They can smell it,"she said.  We stood back and watched, waiting for all hell to break loose, but the dogs kept getting distracted  by our voices or by something going on outside.  "Well, I'm going to have to get the big guns, " Linda said, referring to the other two rat terriers still in her rig.

What followed was both exciting and frightening, seeing the pack instinct at work.  When Linda came back in the house with all four of her rat terriers and pointed under the sink, the dogs crowded together and pounced.  Within thirty seconds, the pack rat was dead and half eaten on my kitchen floor.  Linda snatched the rat away from the dogs, held it by the furry tail and said, "Where do you want me to put it?"

After dispensing with the bloody pack rat and helping Linda call her dogs so she could get back to the ranch, I thanked her again.  "I hate to admit it," I said, "but I enjoyed that."

No Aha! Moment

Sometimes during my two-mile walk, I find that certain troublesome moments in my life come to mind.  I say to myself, “Oh, it’s that story again,” run it through, and then return to the August morning, noticing the haze of a forest fire somewhere north and hearing the distant yip of a coyote.  One such fragment is simply a question,  “What was I supposed to know?”  He’s dead now, so it’s not like I could call him and ask.

He was my therapist during and after an unwanted pregnancy, being deserted by my young—and crazy—husband, and choosing to give up the baby for adoption.  I was barely twenty-three and I needed  help.  By the way, this took place in Reno, Nevada in 1964 and 1965.

 It’s like remembering an anxiety dream:  if I could crack the code; if I could  have  one revelatory moment, no matter how awful it might be, I would say,  “Aha!  That’s why I did those things. That’s where everything I don’t like about myself comes from.   At least that’s the way I remember our last few sessions.

   

I relied on him.  Told him everything.  Learned how difficult that is—telling everything--especially talking about sex.  Now, when this moment comes up on my walk, I am angry with him, a slightly balding, forty-year old married man who chewed a single piece of Dentyne gum.  

At our last session, he asked me if I wanted to go for a drive on Saturday, maybe up Mt. Rose Highway.  Just to talk.  I said "Sure," but I never showed up.  I never saw him again.  I was dating a young geologist.  He wore plaid shirts and had a slide rule on his belt, loved hiking in the mountains, seemed to be in love with me.

What was the therapist trying to get me to understand?  Something about  my father?  My mother?  Why I had gotten myself into the mess I was getting myself out of?  Maybe nothing.  Nothing at all. 

Bambi, Anna Karenina, and Dramatic Irony

Bambi, Anna Karenina and Dramatic Irony 

When I was five years old, so the family story goes, my mother took me to see Walt Disney’s Bambi.  She must have read the Little Golden Book to me enough times that I knew the plot by heart.  The tension mounts.  Bambi’s  mother is killed by hunters.   The animals of the forest flee from the raging conflagration.   At that point in the movie, my mother recounts, I left my seat, walked down the aisle toward the flicker and crackle of the animated fire, saying, “Don’t worry, Bambi, your father will save you.”

I remember the story, not the experience, but something similar happened to me on my second reading of Anna Karenina.  While re-reading chapters XXI-XXVI and the intense sequence of scenes, I wanted to leave the safety of my armchair, step into the novel and warn Anna, “Don’t!” 

In a second reading, seated at the right hand of the omniscient author, I know what the scenes mean:  in the garden, when Vronsky watches radiant and pregnant Anna, I know the love child will not be loved;  during the steeplechase, when Anna watches Vronsky  take  the reins, causing the  mare to stumble and break her back, I know his  desire for control will  destroy what he loves most;  when overwrought Anna rides in  the carriage with her mechanical husband, I witness her reveal her deepest truth, “I hate you.  I love him,” and I know no good will come of it. Damn Tolstoy!  On a second reading I see he creates a world where I, at least, have to agree with Anna’s inevitable choice in chapter XXXI—throw yourself before an oncoming train.  

It’s human nature to want to know what the gods won’t tell us.  In a second reading, literature gives us what life does not.  My emotional experience is deepened precisely because I know how the novel  will “turn out.”

Lately, I find I am worrying too much about how things are going to “turn out.”  I suppose it’s my age. The worry has not translated into a “seize the day” attitude as much as an incipient fatalism, a belief that the script has been written.  I’m close to the end of the book, no matter what I do, or don’t do.

I (Heart) Fernet

I (Heart) Fernet

I asked the bartender, “What’s the name of that aperitif made from artichokes?”

 My husband and I had walked down past the Pikes Street market, along the Seattle waterfront,  enjoying the summer evening after a pleasant but early dinner at a restaurant five or six blocks away.  When my husband   suggested a nightcap, I said “Sure.”

The bartender must have sensed that I really didn’t want anything to drink. He was busy, in no mood to play guessing games, and clearly pleased with my husband, who knew what he wanted.    When he came back with my husband’s draft beer in one hand and a liquor bottle in the other, he said,  “Is this what you’re talking about?”

I liked the look of the label, cream-colored and dense with black print.  I studied the bottle.  “Fernet… I think that’s it.”  I wasn’t at all sure, but the bartender was giving me a “drink it or wear it look,” so I quickly said,  “Yes.  That’s the one.”

“Ugh!” he said.  “You want that on the rocks?”

“Of course,” I replied, as if everyone knows that’s how one drinks Fernet.

My drink, dark as molasses, tasted the way horse liniment smells and a little minty.  Someone on Wikipedia  describes the taste of Fernet as   “black licorice and Listerine.”

When my husband signaled to the bartender that he was ready to pay the tab, the guy said, “I’m not charging her for that,” glancing at my empty glass.  He didn’t say  “…that vile concoction” but I could read his look.

I laughed, leaned toward him, looked him in the eye and said, “I’m going to tell you a secret.  I really liked it.”

I did.   I  like Fernet.  Of course, I had confused Fernet with Cynar, made of artichokes and with a picture of an artichoke on the label.  Both are referred to as a“digestif” not an “apartif.”  Fernet is made with everything but artichokes and the kitchen sink.  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

           Fernet is made from a number of herbs and spices which vary according to the brand, but usually              
           include myrrh, rhubarb, chamomile, cardamom, aloe, and especially saffron,[1] with a base of              
           grape distilled spirits, and coloured with caramel colouring. Ingredients rumored to be in fernet i          

           include codeine, mushrooms, fermented beets, coca leaf, gentian, rhubarb, wormwood, zedoary,          

           cinchona, bay leaves, absinthe, orange peel, calumba, echinacea, quinine, ginseng, St. John's  

           wort, sage, and peppermint oil.[1]

 Who likes Fernet, besides me? Well, pretty much everyone in Argentina, where they mix it with Coca Cola.  It’s popular in San Francisco  and is considered to have  medicinal value, “treating menstrual and gastrointestinal discomfort, hangovers, baby colic, and (formerly) cholera.”

Who do I hope likes Fernet?  I would be pleased if Sting, Helen Mirren, and Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth shared my newly-discovered taste, but I’m skeptical.  I brought up the subject last night at a dinner party and one of the guests said, “Oh, _____________ loves Fernet.  Or used to love Fernet.”    He’s a recovering alcoholic and, I have to say, a very disagreeable person.

Tuscarora Sunrise: June 21, 2011

Tuscarora Sunrise

June 21, 2011

The phone rang.  "Go look out your window."  I recognized Linda's voice.

"What time is it?" I said, fumbling with the curtain, then opening the french door onto the deck.

"Is the sun up yet?"

"Well, it's pretty bright out.  I'm going to have to go out in the yard to get a good look."  I knew what she was talking about.  I kicked on some shoes, hurried out the door into the yard, and saw the sun entirely up and over the Independence Mountains, over Milt's trailer.  "Damn!" I told her.  "It's completely up."

"Not here.  Not yet," she said.  Linda lives four miles away, down on the valley floor.  "I'm going outside to take a picture.  Goodbye."

"Hey, thanks for calling," I said as I heard the phone click.  So, thanks to my childhood friend, there I was at 5:30, standing in the yard in my pajamas, surrounded by a glorious morning.   The lilacs, the sagebrush, the noxious whitetop in full bloom, all glazed by golden light and the promise of summer.

Hallelujah!

Crossing Over, Looking Down

Crossing Over,  Looking Down

"In me thou seest the twilight of such day/ As after sunset fadeth in the west"

Wm. Shakespeare Sonnet 73 

Every time we drive across Big River Bridge my ninety-five year old mother looks out the window, down at the beach, glances seaward, and says, "I'm always surprised how small people look."  She pauses and then continues, "It really puts things in perspective."  She smiles at me, acknowledging the double entendre.

Usually, I nod and say, "Yes it does."  If I'm tired and cranky, I say, "You've already told me that."  It doesn't faze her.  Whether we're coming back from errands in Fort Bragg or lunch in Mendocino, she makes the same remarks.  She is trying to tell me something about old age and  death.  I haven't been listening.

It is the diminishment of her self that she sees in the tiny figures walking on the sand.  Old age is doing that to her, making her feel small.  When she alludes to perspective, to a human being set against sea and sky, she is telling me she knows she is close to the vanishing point and that it is okay.

Phyrric Victory

Pyrrhic Victory

I won.  My mother  tired of fighting with me. That July afternoon I saw her coming down the dirt road towards the stables at the fairgrounds in our  black three-holed Buick. “I’m in for it,” I said to my best friend, Karen.    We were in seventh grade, skeptical of boys and crazy about horses.  My mother didn’t yell or scold.  She told me to leave my bike and get in the car, it was time for my piano lesson, and no, I couldn’t  go home to change clothes.  Not until I was seated at the grand piano next to Mrs. Watts did I feel the dust on my shirt and smell the horse sweat on my jeans. 

It’s curious that after more than half a century I remember the name, “Madame Schumann-Heink,” and that my piano teacher, Mrs. Watts, had been her accompanist.  I recently googled Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936).  According to Wikipedia, she had quite a career: operatic debut in Dresden as Azucena in Il trovatore and final performance at the Met in 1931, belting out Wagner at age seventy-one.  Wiki notes, “In the movies of the 1930’s, many a buxom opera singer/instructor/matron was modeled on her.”

I have no idea how  Marie Watts, her accompanist, ended up in our cow town  in the l950’s, married to Mr. Watts, a building contractor.  Their house, modern for the time and for Elko, Nevada, was built on a hillside, a  series of three flat roofs.   The piano studio rested on the bottom floor, cool and dark in the summer.

Mrs. Watts started me with two instruction books, one of scales, boring and intimidating.  The other, “First Lessons in Bach,” might as well have been “First Lessons in Greek.”   My  encounter with  an exceptional pianist lasted six months and I never advanced more than halfway through the beginner’s book.  I was in one recital, playing a piece called, “The Bells,” which seemed to be pressing with feeling on the g key with the fourth finger of my right hand.   What little practicing I did was fear-based.  I hated the thought of sitting at the piano bench, refined and patient Mrs. Watts by my side, and me, a terrible student.  My mother was not one to threaten or cajole me into practicing.  She bought a metronome and sometimes I didn’t mind sitting at the piano with that steady tock, tock as I played scales.  I think that my mother let me quit because she was tired of dragging a truculent, dusty young girl to a piano lesson.

Other girls my age started taking piano lessons about the same time, but they went to Mrs. Clark, a flamboyant little lady who taught girls  to play sentimental popular tunes on sheet music and watered-down classics.  By high school, my friend Gail, who stayed with Mrs. Clark, could play the “Moonlight Sonata,” at a high school  assembly. The boys were impressed by her athletic prowess, stretched fingers pounding chords up and down the keyboard, crossing the left hand over the right and back.  Another friend, oldest daughter of the town’s favorite doctor, could play Bach or Beethoven on the violin, an incredible social liability.  The brazen boys would put their fingers in their ears and make pained faces.

I know there is no point in dwelling on missed opportunities., but I wish I hadn’t won.  I remember a quote from a character in The American by Henry James:  “I have the instincts—have them deeply—if I haven’t the forms of a high old civilization.”   I did, eventually, want to become a cultured person, well-read, educated, and familiar with the arts. 

In a few months I will be seventy years old.  Lately, I have been listening to a cd  of Wanda Landowska playing Bach on the harpsichord, “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One.”  On the internet I found the name of my  piano book with the ochre cover and serious lettering:  “Beginning Bach,” from Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, listed as a “collectible” on Amazon.com.

 I’m having trouble figuring out what to do with the rest of my life.  Thinking about Madame Schumann-Heink and Mrs. Watts and twelve-year-old me, I have had a strong urge to buy a digital piano.  I would order “Beginning Bach,” books one and two.  I would practice every day.  I could find a piano teacher at the local community college.  By  the time I’m eighty, I could be quite accomplished.  Is it too late?

Second Runner-Up

Second Runner-Up

When I tell about being second runner up to the Wells Rodeo queen the summer of 1958, I  make sure the listener knows the population of Wells, Nevada—about a thousand—and that there were only eighty-four kids in the high school.  I frame the story to make fun of myself—wearing my mother’s hand-me-downs, and she was no cowgirl.   I remember her felt cowboy hat, a telescope crown with a wide, rolled brim and chin straps; her red suede jacket with its matronly cut, my own five button levis,  her brown cowboy  boots.

“I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy,” the old song goes.  It holds true for cowgirls, too.  I’m sure the girl who won wore a cowboy hat with a tall crown, a white cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons, tight levis that emphasized her big butt and well-developed quads,  a leather belt with her name tooled on the back, probably from Capriola’s in Elko; and her own boots.

My loyal boyfriend was angry with the outcome, me being second runner up.  He said   I should have  won.  “I was the best looking,” he asserted and then muttered some comparison between the queen and a mud fence. High school love is blind.  The first runner-up was a lovely, dark-haired girl  who was raised on a small ranch in Starr Valley but looked uncomfortable on a horse.   “You sure as heck had the best horse,” my boyfriend said. 

   Although I appreciated his  indignation, I knew  the judges were right.  The girl who won should have won.  She was the real deal.  I was part town girl, part ranch girl.  She came from a family that had ranched in the area for at least fifty years.  I had been in the area since September. .  The previous fall, after my sophomore year in Elko,  our family had moved  to the Marble Ranch headquarters at Deeth, halfway between Elko and Wells.  This was to make life easier for my dad, who was managing the whole operation: seven ranches with about sixty-five thousand deeded acres and about sixty-five hundred mother cows.  Dad was the real deal, no doubt about that.

I did have the best horse, a thorobred cross lent to me by the cow boss,  Jim Dorrance.  I remember practicing in the corral at the ranch, loping in graceful figure eights on this beautifully trained sorrel gelding at least  fourteen  hands high;  galloping to the far end of the corral, reining to a dramatic halt, then backing up.  I’m not sure I practiced getting on and off.  I should have.

The night before the contest it rained hard and the rodeo grounds were thick with a sticky mud.  Part of the procedure after showing my horse,  was to dismount, go to the announcer’s stand, say a few words, remount, and gallop out of the arena.   The cinch was a little loose after working the horse and I can still feel the  tight grip of my left hand on reins and mane and my fear that the saddle would slip.   I still wince, thinking of me in that frumpy getup with mud-caked boots  hoisting myself back on that tall horse and getting the hell out of there.

What was I thinking?  What was sixteen year old Nancy Harris thinking when she agreed to run for  Wells Rodeo queen?   I was flattered to be asked.  I can’t remember who sponsored me.  For all I know, it was some local business that wanted to ingratiate themselves with the Marble Ranches. 

At the time, I thought, “Me?  Someone sees me as a  rodeo queen?”  No way I would say no.  And it was fun.    I remember that we girls were driven to Twin Falls and  interviewed on television.  Television!

If Jim Dorrance lent me a horse for the competition, Jack Walther, gave me a joke for my  tv debut.  A shy bachelor with a gentle sense of humor, Jack also worked for the Marble outfit.   Now well in his eighties, Jack  is much loved at Cowboy Poetry in Elko for his comic verse.   With a twinkle in his eye,  young Jack prompted  me to have the interviewer ask me the name of my horse.  I was to answer, “Mignon.  Because she’s a little fee lay.”  Yep.  I really said that on tv in Twin Falls, Idaho in 1958.  Which was pretty darn sophisticated, since I didn’t know a filet from a rib eye.  A steak was a steak.  It was cooked well done.   However, I felt  no qualms about changing the sex of  Jim Dorrance’s  gelding to “fee-lay” for the sake of a joke.      

Besides being on tv in Twin Falls,  we rode our horses in the parade right down the main street of Wells, which also happened to be Highway 40.  I did know how to sit tall in a saddle. I was riding a fine horse.  The band played.  We waved to our friends on the sidewalk.  Of course, it was fun.

I do remember who  sponsored me to run for Miss Elko County the summer after my freshman year in college.  The Standard station on Idaho Street.  The best gas station in Elko, mind you.   Again, it was a matter of being asked.  If the  guys at the Standard station saw me as Miss Elko County material, I wasn’t going to argue.

 “Wince” goes to “ cringe” of thinking of that experience.   I didn’t come close to fitting the  beauty queen image and I did not win, place, or show.   Furthermore, it was not fun.   A couple of weeks before the contest, we did a photo shoot crammed in a boat in some duck pond east of Elko.  The girl next to me in the aluminum  rowboat seemed a sure bet to win. Going into her a senior year at Elko High, the  beautiful Italian girl  was in a sullen mood that morning, and the photographer from the Elko Daily Free Press standing on the bank  kept yelling at her to smile.  A week later   she dropped out of the contest,  dropped out of high school, and married the acne-faced boy who had knocked her up.

 I don’t remember much of the contest except how much I hated walking across the stage in a bathing suit and high heels. My loyal college boyfriend, who had driven to Elko to show his support,  left the high school auditorium halfway through the event and waited in his Nash Rambler, probably reading Kierkegard.  He later explained that he couldn’t understand why I was putting myself through such a meaningless ritual.   He was minoring in  anthropology.

   The girl who won should have won.  Her name was Nanci  spelled with an ‘i.”  She   had a bosom and a narrow waist.  I remember how cute she looked in a circle skirt with a cinch belt, let alone a bathing suit.

What was I thinking?  Why did  Nancy with a “y” Harris  run for Miss Elko County? Because I was asked.    Remember?  In those days, we waited to be asked.  Maybe I thought that competing would make a woman out of me, or I would be recognized as a woman. Beauty pageant as boot camp.

I understand that the beauty pageant industry has been exposed many times over since those days, and right now many young mothers are concerned with this whole princess madness marketed by the Disney corporation.  But I have to confess that Miss Congeniality is one of my favorite movies, where Sandra Bullock goes from klutz to gorgeous plus action heroine, deposing the mean ex-queen, saving all the other girls—and getting a second look from  Benjamin Bratt, a prince of a guy.  We yearn for transformation and recognition.

A number of years ago, I was  visiting my folks at their small ranch on Thorpe Creek in Lamoille.  I was probably in my early thirties, married with two kids.  I had saddled up one of their horses and gone for a long ride on a beautiful summer day.  Afterward, my dad came out to the barn to help me unsaddle and put the horse away and he said with an admiration that was a little unusual, given  his reserved manner, “You could be a cover girl.”  I beamed.   He continued,  “for one of those catalogs like L.L. Bean.”    I laughed.  LL Bean was not Silver Screen but we take what we can get.  Even if it’s second runner up.

Tuscarora Journal: A Reminiscence "James Sends a Poem"

Sometime in 1996, James sent me this poem by Seamus Heaney with the handwritten message, "Here's the Adobe House mantra."

                Lightenings

Roof it again.  Batten down.  Dig in.
Drink out of tin.  Know the scullery cold,
A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.

Touch the cross-beam, drive iron in a wall,
Hang a line to verify the plumb
From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.

Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.
Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.
Make your study the unregarded floor.

Sink every impulse like a bolt.  Secure
the bastion of sensation.  Do not waver
Into language.  Do not waver in it.

Tuscarora Journal: A Reminiscence "Second Artists' Week, Second Day"

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Tuscarora Journal: A Reminiscence "Second Artists' Week, August 1995"

Second Artists' Week, August 1995
Nancy and Rosemary

           "By Any Other Name..."

I started the day by sitting on the flat circle of gravel, a clearing in the midst of dried grass, weeds, and sagebrush about twenty feet from the trucks.  You could call it a meditation spot, but I prefer not to.  I stood up and went over to look at the old gray truck with a weathered stock rack and "Kenect, McGill, 129" in faded black stencil on the door of the driver's side.  Its sidekick is the faded red-to-gray Chevy flat bed.  Next to the wire fence is a jaunty green Willy's .

I'm not into meditation and I don't believe in personifying inanimate objects.  However--when I bring a cup of coffee out here and sit in the morning sun letting my mind wander--I guess that would be meditation if I relinquished the pleasure of random thoughts.  And--if those two trucks and that jeep could talk, I know they'd have stories to tell.  How did they get here?

Degrees of Separation

Notes from Tuscarora, September, 1994

We arrive on a September day that feels like a typical one in August:  dry, dusty, the time of day that flattens the landscape and makes me sorry for  choosing this place.  I don't like the roofline of the addition to the Adobe House.  I think the name "Adobe House" is stupid and pretentious.

Everyone pitches in, unloading the car.  The light changes.  Pretty soon it all feels better.

Getting there.  Every trip is different, but every trip has its own ritual.  Places where I stop.  What I notice on the way.  Stop at Raley's in Elko.  Notice the Hooper's stone house with  the beautiful blue roof.  Think about stopping at Lone Mountain for coffee, but we didn't do it.  We never do.  Notice the Van Norman sign, "In God..." weather tilted letters, some missing.  "What about God?" I wonder.  The willows in Taylor Canyon.  We're getting closer.  The Taylor Canyon Bar is closed.  Turn on to the Midas road for the  seven miles, then turn one more time.

The coincidences.  Six degrees of separation.  John Euler knows the Varneys, whose daughter is married to John's friend, the owner of a paint store in Mill Valley.  Wheatly Allen's friend, Elmer Colette, has been coming here for years to visit Doc Flynne, who has a house near Jack Creek.

The first Artist's Week, when I brought Heidi, Rosemary and Pamela to Tuscarora, we stayed in Winnemucca, had dinner at the Martin Hotel.  The owner asked us, "Where are you going?"

We said, "Tuscarora."

He replied, "We were just up there a couple of days ago."

Tuscarora Journal: A Reminiscence "Friends and Neighbors, 1993"

Friends

On his way back to Ukiah after visiting his son in Salt Lake, Doug Puckering, math teacher at Mendocino College, parked his camper down near the turn-off and spent the night.  The next day he drove around Tuscarora, trying to figure out which was our place.  A devout born-again Christian, Doug later told me that "somebody ought to fix up the cemetery."

My cousin Chris came out from Salt Lake, took a great photograph of me, Mom, Itha, and Annique standing in front of the adobe house.  I love that picture.

When my friend Heidi came, we--Mom, Heidi, Itha, Annique, and I--spent the night in the little cabins at Taylor Canyon.  We continued the discussion about "who would like this place." Neither Itha or Heidi thought their husbands would.  I told both of them, "if you ever want to run away from home, you can always come to Tuscarora."

Other friends:  Sarah Sweetwater.  She loves Tuscarora.  Mom's best friend in Elko, Berna Johnson, came up with her sister and brother-in-law, Kathleen and Bob Ewald.  They didn't say anything critical, but I'm sure they think Mom is crazy.

Neighbors


Charlie Woodbury, 81, was the one who said to my mother, "Helen, I know you are a good old ranch gal.  What're you doing hanging around with them art people?"

Lee Deffabaugh.  I transplanted a yellow rose from her back yard.  I think there are only four lawns in town--hers, the Parks, James's, and the Pottery School.

Jim Linnehan (aka James) left us a beautiful wildflower, wild grass bouquet in a cast iron pot.

Milt d'Azevedo, retired truck driver, Marin County Portuguese.  "Me 'n Charlie's next move is over there."  He nods toward the cemetery.

Felix Thornhill, the Ukiah Thornhills, much to Doug's chagrin.  "Where's Doug?" Felix says.  "I want to take him fishin'."  Milt says nobody will go fishing with Felix anymore.  Felix tells us about his "prostrate operation."  "You turn it on and off, like a little spigot."  No one wanted to inquire further.

One day two bottle hunters came.  We talked to them but wouldn't let them dig on our property.

Tuscarora Journal: A Reminiscence "Who Would Like This Place?"

                                           Who Would Like This Place?

I tell my sister that the residents are like curators of some derelict art museum, a tribute to two  epochs: the mine tailings are an earth art memorial to the glory days of silver mining and the rusted wrecked cars a tribute to the automobile age.

As we walk past desiccated bodies of ground squirrels lying on the road, we talk about who would like this place, who would "get it."

On the phone I wonder to my sister if we should encourage this "mystical high desert crap."
"Which comes first?" she says.

I said that the reclaimed mine tailings on the other side of  the Glory Hole look like ancient ruins:  slightly Egyptian, slightly Anasazi.

When I was telling John Wetzler about our  real estate purchase, describing the town, the lack of any distinctive architecture, the mining operations and their cyanide pads,  he said, "Nancy, Tuscarora sounds ugly."

On the defensive, I said, "Well, I'm not giving over my summer to O.J. Simpson.  Let's talk about Tuscarora."

Tuscarora Journal: A Reminiscence

Tuscarora in June, 1993

• Steve, the carpenter whose mother had a sex change. Steve refers to her  as "his Uncle Len."  James's twisted take-off on Fay Dunaway in Chinatown, "My mother, my uncle, my mother, my uncle." Slap. slap.
• First day, utter mess, boards, subfloor, room partitions, masonite, layers of old linoleum, old redwood shiplap siding.
• Ripping layers of wallpaper and newspaper, 1888:  S.F. Examiner, Salt Lake Tribune, Portland Maine Woodsman.  Fine brittle layers, toasty brown, elegant black typeset.
• Reciting poems standing on the subfloor, papers blowing, fallen walls--Helen, Itha, James, Steve, Maisie the dog.
• Lone Mountain Station.  The Piute proprietor who wouldn't let Helen in to make a phone call; the photographs of men holding fish.
• The concept of the western wave--laughing about the etiquette of waving from a pick-up truck, the kinds of waves and what they mean.
• Getting stuck at the dump on the edge of the mine tailings in a brand new metallic blue pick-up, rented from Gallagher Ford--our Thelma and Louise act.  "Who's going to go get Jerry?" James said, "and it's not going to be me," he added.
• Carrying coals to Newcastle--taking a case of beer to two alcoholics as a thank you for the free bed with a good mattress and box springs, a cigarette burn in the plastic headboard.
• Itha says, "It's the hottest summer in thirteen years, the town smells like dead ground squirrels, we're working like dogs, but we're having a great time."
• Itha called Boyak Surveying to see if there was an official map of property lines.  The guy laughed and said,  "We went up there one time. There was so much conflict and disputation,  we just got the hell out of there."