Shelter (18 page)

Game birds are just as challenging. A meal of pheasant or grouse can mean chipping a tooth or cracking a crown on buck-shot—hardly worth the risk. One solution is a product recently launched that lauds itself as “ammo with flavor,” birdshot in cartridges packed with seasoned rock salt (in Cajun, lemon pepper, or garlic) that simply dissolves inside the bird’s wounds. Just choose your flavor, load, and shoot.

It’s a shame George Herter, Minnesota’s own cranky hunter-poet-historian-chef isn’t around to voice an opinion on Season Shot. Herter’s
Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices
was one of only two cookbooks in our mother’s kitchen. The Betty Crocker was used as ballast and a doorstop, and Herter’s was read for entertainment, though nothing much was prepared from it. These days there’s a copy of Herter’s on the cabin shelf and one in my kitchen at home. Having now read it from an adult’s perspective, a cook’s perspective, I appreciate its brilliance and oddness anew. I’ve yet to try many of the game recipes, like “Doves Wyatt Earp” (who knew he’d been a gunslinger
and
a gourmand?). It’s easy to get sidetracked by all of Herter’s asides, like how to survive an atom bomb attack or kill a wild boar with a shirt. A bull cook is one who works out of a lumber camp or fishing lodge, so by definition many of the recipes are simple and rustic, and given Herter’s vast experience as an outdoorsman and
chef, I trust his recipes are tried and true, though maybe not all his “facts” are. Did Genghis Khan really believe that after a raucous night of debauchery, the best way to restore mojo was by eating rhubarb? Much of Herter’s wisdom is best consumed with a handful of salt, as is his self-help poetry or his marital advice book,
How to Live with a Bitch.

As much as I’d like to try every recipe in
Bull Cook,
no water or refrigeration limits cabin cooking. At first we prepared food on either the one-burner propane camp stove or the rickety charcoal grill. The grill was eventually replaced by a larger propane model with a side burner, which meant we could heat water for dishes
while
making coffee or grilling toast—luxury.

Sam began barbequing in his teens, making easy things like Uncle Dave’s mesquite stand-up chicken or Jamaican jerk. For his twenty-first birthday, he hosted a pig roast, procuring the pig and the mobile cooker and doing the whole thing himself. He’s always been a good eater; his first words were food words, saying “more” before he could say “Momma.” As a toddler, he would try anything from capers to Milk-Bones, and once on the dock at Rustic Resort, he nearly had the fishing lure that looked like a gummy worm to his mouth when I snatched it away. Meals could wholly occupy him, and when something was particularly good, his eyes glazed over. I discovered just how food-oriented Sam is as we leafed through a family photo album together and I pointed to an old vacation shot, lamenting that he’d been too young to remember the ferry ride we’d taken. He shrugged. “Teddy Grahams and applesauce with Rice Dream in my sippy cup.” He’d been just over a year old. I flipped forward, testing him with a snapshot of him at two, holding a balloon. “Grandma Smith’s birthday?” I
posed. He shuddered. “Taco
casserole.”
I narrowed an eye, wondering if he remembered breast-feeding, hoping not.

Cooking outside is only fun until it starts to rain, or when the evening veil of mosquitoes descends just when your hands are slick with chicken blood, making it hard to defend yourself. The ultimate goal was to cook inside, but finding a gas range small enough to fit a hundred-square-foot kitchen was not easy. First I considered the old cast-iron, stand-alone footed cooktops with porcelain toggles, but they were never the right size, either two burners or four when three was my ideal. In any case, the safety factor eventually edged those out. I watched Craigslist for a twenty-inch apartment-sized gas stove to convert to propane. When the rare old stove did come up, it was usually advertised as “great for hunting shack,” meaning it was chipped, filthy, or missing parts and burner tops. Still, the apartment stove seemed the best option, even if a bit large for the space. I’d followed the renaissance of midcentury appliances, entire businesses popping up to reclaim and restore them. The prices were a shock. Dealers’ websites listed stoves like Granny’s double-wide Hotpoint, spit-shined and newly chromed for five thousand dollars. I gazed longingly at pictures of appliances with dignified enamel insignias. O’Keefe & Merritt sounded like a vaudeville duo, and Roper Town & Country would have baked a thousand pies. The evocative Duparquet would never collapse a soufflé, a six-burner Western Holly would’ve rustled grub for a passel of farmhands, and the elegant Wedgewood on its curved legs looked as if it might cook only when it felt like it.

Back on Earth, my budget was two hundred dollars. I trolled Craigslist again, and patience eventually paid off when I came
across a petite, freestanding, 1930s-era three-burner range that had sat rusting in a South Minneapolis basement since Prohibition. It was filthy but adorable on its little bowed legs, with an oven door that opened with a Bakelite knob. The top was a single molded piece of cast iron with simple star-shaped openings for burners. It was only 22 x 17 inches, and under the grime, the enamel was intact, a sort of pinky beige with cream and black accents. It would fit, was perfect, and I could afford it.

While researching how to remove rust and ancient grease, I discovered an old cook’s trick for cleaning skillets. After gussying up in a respirator, goggles, and rubber gloves, I wrapped all the cast-iron parts in ammonia-soaked towels and stowed them in heavy plastic in a lidded galvanized trash can. Overnight, decades of baked-on gunk blistered and molted off like burnt skin. It worked swell on the burner top and dismantled innards, and a wire brush and steel wool got the rest. I rubbed stove blacking onto the cast-iron and gas tubes until they gleamed like licorice. A guy who fixed RV appliances swapped out the natural gas jets with brass propane versions and connections. With heat-resistant glossy enamel, I painted the squat little feet. All the while, women’s names from the thirties sifted through my head. I wouldn’t have consciously anthropomorphized a kitchen appliance and begun to think of her as “Mabel,” but by then we had spent an awful lot of time together.

Mabel fits perfectly into the cabin but has proved a bit temperamental. She cooks awfully hot and might have been more aptly named Amber or Scarlett. Lighting a burner takes some finesse, but I’ve finally nailed the technique of whispering over her gas jets, ever so gently, blowing, “Please light, please, please light.” If
her cooktop is touchy, her oven is downright bitchy, and there’s no telling what revenge Mabel might take on a batch of tater tots. The oven knob is on-off, with no temperature indicators or control. The lowest setting—meaning just enough flame so she doesn’t sputter out and kill us by asphyxiation—averages around four hundred degrees. To bake anything all the way through requires rotating and shifting the pan from the top rack to the bottom rack halfway through and cracking the door a few times to lower the temp. Mabel has her good points, acting as an incidental furnace so that baking a coffee cake can heat the cabin for hours. Now we plan on charring cinnamon rolls or biscuits on cold mornings, scorching casseroles on chilly evenings, and baking nothing on warm summer days.

As my Aunt Mary used to insist, and as I try to convince Jon, charcoal in the diet is good for digestion.

I
f you’re ever wondering if your guy is
the
guy, save yourself the gnashing and girlfriend advice and kill several birds with one stone and two plane tickets. Travel is the ultimate relationship hazing. You’ll know within hours of landing whether he’s finicky or easy, a control freak or able to roll with it, a wiener or a stand-up guy. If he pines for a burger when served an aromatic
tagine
or uses the phrase “these people” when referring to locals standing two feet away, ditch him in Fez. A man’s travel persona is more revealing than his truck; only an autopsy says more. A trip is often the deal breaker.

Six months after we met, Jon and I embarked on the ultimate test and found cheap seats for the Bird Flu Tour of Southeast Asia, with an itinerary taking us to Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bali, timed to coincide with a record heat wave and the impending avian flu pandemic.

Bangkok was shrill and hot. At each intersection was a belching rally of
tuk-tuks,
mopeds, and motorcycles with drivers yammering into cell phones and revving their engines, waiting for the green lights as if for checkered flags. The round window in our hotel room ran with condensation so that our view of the city was
through a steamy porthole. Options for tourists were shopping, sex shows, or temples.

Hong Kong was gray, crowded, and fascinating. Singapore, just as hot as Bangkok, had an ash white sky and was oddly sterile and quiet—no surprise given that shouting, gum chewing, littering, begging, or public urination can land you in jail or get you publicly caned. Even the food in Singapore seemed timid, as if on its best behavior. In hundred-degree heat, we slogged along a sleepy, scorching beach and stumbled upon the start and endpoint of a triathlon. We watched as swimmers got out of the water to begin the run, the saltwater rivulets on their backs immediately turning to sweat. It was far too hot even to stand in the sun, let alone put one foot solidly ahead of the other.

Not the trip we’d dreamed of but awfully interesting, and by sheer luck, none of our eclectic group of tour mates was unbearable. We were looking forward to the last leg, a long stay in Bali on our own with no tour guide.

Normally just sweltering, Bali was so grossly humid even the locals were complaining and zombie-like. This was the heat of a prison laundry, surreal for anyone coming from a Minnesota February. Our pace was as fast as one can go while wading through knee-high porridge, our brains lightly simmering in our skulls. We lagged just behind ennui and lassitude, not even up for a debate on the precise differences between such words. We communicated like reptiles, blinking slowly at each other with about all the energy we could muster.

Curtains of humidity obscured the views from our beach hotel so that we never did see the much-touted vista of neighboring islands, or even much of the sea. It was too hot to wander
anywhere on foot, so one day we hired a driver to take us up into the mountains, at least a few degrees cooler and where there were terraced rice paddies looking vaguely like those in the brochures, just visible through the murk. We got a slice of local culture when we came across a Balinese funeral cortège, no doubt for a victim of the heat.

Only our mornings had any form, and those could have occurred anywhere in Asia in any tourist hotel. We would linger over breakfast on a shaded veranda, bringing books and newspapers along to stretch out the meal, loath to leave a place with crushed ice and overhead fans, knowing that whatever was on our itinerary meant going outside, which meant a mixture of sunscreen and perspiration dripping into our eyes. Bali was a blur of various Holy and Important Sites, but we could hardly say we’d experienced the real Bali. Determined, we set out on our own with no plan, taking a taxi to nowhere with the idea of walking back. We lost track of where “back” was. The streets were so empty under the noonday sun that I realized the poem about mad dogs and Englishmen was a jab at all fools. Anyone sane was home napping. We eventually grew hungry but had spent our last
rupiah
on the taxi and couldn’t find any cash machines because we were lost outside the tourist grid. We aimed and missed and aimed again in directions we hoped would lead us to our hotel. By then the heat oddly no longer warranted any mention, since 105 degrees and 96 percent humidity defied description, and complaining just took energy. We needed water. The only bright spot was that we didn’t have to pee—didn’t much need to anymore, all bodily fluids just sort of juiced out, wrung from our spongy limbs and places we did not know could sweat, like thumbs and elbows.

Bali is a spiritual place, and the kindly faces of its people reflect their Buddhist leanings and serene dispositions. So when we tried to take a shortcut through an outdoor market, we were shocked to discover that Balinese souvenir hawkers are maybe the most aggressive in touristdom. Deceptively delicate-looking females, aged prepubescent to crone, converged to shrilly and relentlessly badger us to buy pretty this for missy and pretty that for mister, following us and poking useless Chinese-made knickknacks into our personal spaces.

We eventually escaped, made it back to our hotel, and collapsed.

I’d already planned for the evening to be special and made a reservation at a restaurant down the beach. After the day we’d just survived, we deserved it. Once the sun was safely down, I inched into my best dress, pinned up my limp hair, and poked on a pair of earrings. We snailed over to the restaurant for a romantic dinner with tables set out on the sand. Tiki torches lightly flickered in the breeze, waves lapped. Best of all, it was mercifully dark.

The mild breeze during wine and appetizers was welcome relief but turned less mild during salad and gained momentum over the main course, stilting conversation when gusts blew napkins or sand into our mouths. Waiters scurried, shoring things up and battening things down and apologizing as if the weather were their fault. Halfway through the seafood, the squall kicked up and fat raindrops drummed the table, prompting a hasty retreat to the dining palapa, though not quick enough to dodge the rain. Dinner had not been the romantic interlude I’d planned. When the rain let up, we bolted through the garden paths, Jon urging me onward through the downpour while the dots on my silk dress
dissolved into a pattern resembling sperm. I urged him to slow down since hurrying wasn’t going to get us there any drier, but just as I was about to ask him something important, he bolted again, digging for the room key.

After we dried off and fell into bed to wait for the AC to kick in, I could finally pose the question I’d been rehearsing during the long hours we’d been lost in the heat, the question bumping against my teeth throughout the clunky dinner, the one I’d nearly managed to gurgle out in the garden.