Food

My friend Joe stopped by on his way to town the other day. I had set aside a couple of pairs of shoes for him, left when a mutual friend had passed away. Joe lives high in the mountains, at over 3000 feet though he can see the ocean from his trailer. At such altitude, the mushrooms come on late and he left us some white boletus that his son had found. In exchange, we had some fresh squid to trade, caught by a client of my mom's out on the bay.

The squid was enormous, and I cut a big steak for Joe out of the white rubbery slab. In the freezer was a bag of tentacles and for dinner. That night my mom pounded them up and fried the squid while I sauteed up the boletus. The squid, I was later told, was a Humboldt squid, a variety that used to occur mostly in Mexico but has established itself further and further up the coast. My mom's client is also our dentist and when I asked if the squid was following warmer ocean water or expanding its range for some other reason he said that no one yet knows for sure. I asked him to elaborate, but he had a dremel tool in my mouth and probably misunderstood.

I confess that I like hunting and finding mushrooms more than I like eating them, but I was spurred on by my mom's suspicion. I pointed out that, had they been poisonous, Joe and his son would have already died. The boletes buttery and mild, the squid was hot and chewy. It was a good meal.

The summer I was fourteen, I took my first solo backpacking trips in the mountains above where I am writing this now. First forays into self-sufficiency both literal and concrete. I remember on one trip arriving exhausted on a hot waterless day at a springside camp to the west of Ventana Cone. As I boiled up water for ramen and pine needle tea, I sat watching the fog ramping up along the Coast Ridge and found myself growing teary and thinking of my mom and food. It had not hit me before what it meant that she had put food on the table every day of my life. How good that was. How I had taken it for granted.

Her own mother's food disasters are near legend in our family. We went to visit her once and she had made cheese cookies with so much salt that they sucked the moisture right out of my mouth. Picture Wiley E. Coyote after the Road Runner would somehow get him to eat a block of epsom salts. Another time it was chicken fried steak so dessicated and over cooked that it lay on the plate like, I don't know, a pile of frisbees. When I was a baby, she once gave me a bottle of orange juice before remembering it was of the vodka-spiked variety.

Her ineptitude was all the more baffling given that she had no real ambition to be anything other than a housewife, or so it looked to me at the time. She was a dark and bitter woman who kept gallon bottles of Old Crow stashed around the house and eventually smoked and drank herself to death. I'm sure that what looked like manifest complacency to me was much more complicated. No one has ever been able to figure out what she might really have wanted to be, least of all me, but I wonder sometimes if she liked to cook but was incompetent at it. Or perhaps she hated it and took neurotic revenge by refusing to get any good at it. Either way, her foibles have made me laugh much more than mild competence might have made me smile.

My own relationship with cooking has always been uneasy. There are certain people I love to cook for, though when by myself I could live on on noodles, chips, coffee for much longer than I would care to admit.

But for now I live in a valley capable of producing a palate of food at my door that includes acorns and boletus and good red wine, feral boar, heirloom tomatoes, roast quail, year-round greens, crawdads, fresh eggs, peppers, pears, thistle heads, fiddleheads, miner's lettuce, chanterelles, local beef, and most anything else you can think of from a good sized garden. I even remember a particular driveway that, years ago, was planted with some sort of cultivated wheat whose unripe berries were delicious. The kind of pretense and consumerist instinct that attaches itself to labels like Organic or Artisan or even Locally Grown, fall away and this abundance is just here. It has awakened an interest in food that has been long dormant.

Michael, the local chef who puts on Cachagua Monday Night Diner and used to run a fancy Carmel restaurant or two, once told an interviewer that he had moved to organic ingredients many years before it was chic because (paraphrasing), “It was something we did for ourselves. Shit, we didn't even tell the customers about it. It was just that eating things created by our neighbors, in our little speck of the boonies was what we wanted to do. And the food was just so much better, we were just so much more inspired and we didn't look back.”

Things which we can put our hands on fill us up with stories as much as nutrition. What is missing in so much of the food we eat, even in the self-consciously local and organic variety, is any tangible connection. Sometimes buying an overpriced boutique apple at a co-op, even when accompanied with a precise and well-meaning pedigree, can be just another exercise in distance. Not always, not inevitably, not for everyone, though it works that way on me. But my grandmother's shitty cookies have given me as much amusement over the years as anything else I have eaten. And mirth, as we all know, counteracts toxins of all kinds.

I think back to those days up in the mountains, coaxing my first meals over a blue gas flame, the smell of dried beans and soy sauce. How I had read from Gary Snyder that I could just boil up pine needles and—what do you know—it's not too bad a tea. How I spent a day half-starving in my tent as a torrential downpour kept me inside after I had decided to make an arduous overnight trip with no stove. How that was a root of the appreciation of my mother.

It's good to be home here.