Of Moose & Men (& Women)

Of Moose and Men (and women, bi-coastal cornbread, and learning to live with "I don't know")
I saw a moose the other day. This was not in Arkansas, where I used to live, and where many of you probably still think I do live, and where I still sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really live, but in Vermont.
But even in Vermont, a moose-sighting is not an every-day occurrence.
Vermont is where for the moment, I sort-of-kind-of-almost-but-not-quite live, on the 60-acre farm that has been in my family since I was about four years old. (The house, below right. Photo, Ned Shank). I've spent part of most summers here since I was a girl; I'll be here now through mid-November, working on a book about cornbread. (The two months previous to this I was in Los Angeles, which is another story, one we will get to shortly. Then there will be a couple of weeks in Arkansas, and then, if all goes according to plan, Italy, possibly with you --- all stories for later. But you can see why, at the moment, it's difficult to reply when someone asks me “Where do you live?”).
Everyone who visits Vermont at this idyllic time of year finds it hard to resist contemplating a full-time existence here, and sooner or later finds someone of whom they can ask “What about the winters?” The person I picked to ask was my friend and fellow James Beard Award winner Deborah Krasner (the one who wrote The Flavors of Olive Oil, about which I wrote in Passionate Entirety, my last essay). Deborah, known affectionately to me as “Debkelah”, lives down the road a few miles. “Well,” she said, paused, and half-smiled. I could recognize this half-smile, having lived for the past 33 years in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a town whose economy rests on seasonal tourism (as does much of Vermont’s). It's a half-smile of ambivalent experience: life in a beautiful place sometimes overrun with visitors. Yes, these visitors are necessary to the economy. Yes, their contribution is part of what makes it possible to keep such places beautiful. Yes, once you get to know them individually, visitors are often extremely nice people, interesting, kind, like-minded (or they'd be drawn to a different kind of vacation spot). But, yes, en masse tourists do, at times, make life difficult or inconvenient for the locals.
And yet: everyone is a tourist somewhere. Given my current peripatetic lifestyle and the amount of directions I've had to ask of strangers (after years of having been asked, in Eureka Springs), I could hardly be more aware of this.
“Well… “ said Deborah, in answer to my question about winter, “It keeps the riff-raff out.”
Mishala, the Moose, and Me
Back to the moose. Mishala was the first to spot it. Mishala is a young woman with whom I have worked at intervals, back in Arkansas, always to our mutual pleasure, effectiveness, and interest. She had driven my ancient Blazer across country and then stayed for a couple of weeks to help with recipe testing on the next cookbook, which, as mentioned, is about cornbread. (Mish and I, pictured left, in the farm's kitchen, dishing up a bean soup --- after all, we had to serve our tasters something besides cornbread. Photo, Richard Rommer). She was sitting in front of the house in the late afternoon, gazing out across the meadow to the mountains, and she suddenly called --- no, bellowed --- my name: I mean, we are talking loud here. I came tearing-ass out of the house, alarmed, to see what was going on. What was going on was the moose.
He was male: in possession of an awesome and substantial rack (how do they manage to hold their heads up with all that weight?) which I’m sure would have turned the gaze of any female moose --- hell, it certainly turned our gaze. He ambled from the lower right end of the meadow to its upper left corner, which is bordered by forest. Mishala had run to get her camera, but by the time she returned, the moose had wandered through a fine patch of misty almost-fog at the edge of the meadow and disappeared into the woods. Though you would definitely call his gait an amble, it was at a pretty fast clip. (To right: Not "our" moose, but a good-looking Vermont cousin. Photo by moose-lover Barb Johnson, at her site Moose on the Loose. Another excellent moose site, as well as a source for some terrific Vermont foodstuffs, is at Maple Grove.org. "Our" moose, as mentioned above, declined to be photographed for this story).
Sightings
There have been other remarkable one-time sightings here. I remember a particular summer night when, at age seven or eight, standing on the lawn, I looked up. A piece of the sky was bursting open: eerie and compelling, changing sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, one color opening into the next or peeling away. It was like irregular, hauntingly quiet fireworks, set off far, far away. That was the one and only time I have seen the Northern Lights, a vision I've remembered all my life. Perhaps the moose will be another such sight.
Of course there are, as well, the remarkable every-day sights. The view from the room where I write now is a hillside sloping down to a small, dark, dark pond, cattail-fringed, reflecting a sugar maple, still green at this moment, but with one branch as red and gold as if dipped in paint. (Left, a photo which does not begin to do justice to the view down the hillside to the pond, taken a little later in the season. Below right, another view of the pond, looking up from it towards the house).
The farm has not only given me such daily beauty and one-of-a-kind visions, but inner epiphanies. Last summer, I was working frantically on PASSIONATE VEGETARIAN, going over the final proofs (often the only person I would see all day was the Fed Ex guy, Ernie, when he came to drop off the next chapter’s proofs while picking up the one I had just completed). I was then, as I am now, and will probably be doing for the foreseeable future, also working with --- in the sense of having as a constant background emotional hum --- the loss of my life-partner, who had died unexpectedly at the end of November, 2000.
Strange work
Last summer during that frantic final press, I was at work on the dining room table here, page proofs scattered around me, computer in front of me, wholly focused. When I paused to stretch my neck and shoulders, I gazed out, towards the meadow where Mishala and I recently saw the moose. Mowed except for one silver birch, the view of the Green Mountains remains unimpeded, receding timelessly into the distance, changing with every change in weather: sometimes veiled in mist, sometimes almost infinite. The day I am talking about the view was infinite: cloudless bright blue sky, layers of mountains fading from green to blue to gray.
For no linearly rational reason --- I was gazing at beauty, I was thinking about whatever chapter of PV was in front of me --- a realization arrived as suddenly as if, on that same cloudless day, I had without warning heard a deafening boom of thunder. This thought, if it may be called a thought, was this: you didn’t just lose your partner, CD, you lost your entire presumed future.
I suppose that is the way grief does its strange work: on its own timetable (often much longer and more slowly than those who have not been through it could imagine possible). It withholds from you the enormity of loss, giving it to you only incrementally, piece by piece, as you can handle it (although you never feel like you are handling it). Sometimes at a moment of the greatest relative happiness, peace and calm --- as in the cloudless day described above--- is when grief chooses to let loose.
Willing a tree to fall
That insight, if that is what it was, stunned, rocked and terrified me. The ramifications swamped my already leaky craft far too rapidly to bail. I stopped working on the book. I cried; I couldn’t stop crying for very long. This period, last summer, lasted two or three days. Going on walks, preparing meals, attempting (unsuccessfully) to get back to work on the proofs, I could not stop going down. On one walk, I noticed a large tree that had split, so that its top half wobbled precariously. I stood under it, and I remember thinking, “What if, say, this tree just happened to fall on me? Just a nice quiet accident in nature? Would that be so bad? No suicide, no one would have to feel guilty or that there was something they should have done, no bad karma --- yes, a little grief on the part of some, but they could say ‘She was doing something she loved and it was an accident and maybe now she’s with Ned.’ ”
I gazed at the tree, willed it to fall; it ignored me. I kept walking. And after all, they --- friends, family, colleagues --- would still have had to deal with my papers, my unfinished work, which was hardly fair. Clearly it was not my "time to go", as people like to say. (But had it been Ned's? Who left so much unfinished, which I am having, still, to deal with? On one level, yes, logically: if there is such a thing as a "time to go" , it must have been his. On another level, from my limited perspective, it was absolutely not such a time for him.)
After a couple of days, I said to myself, “Enough.” Something like the following interior dialogue took place:
"So you lost your whole presumed future, so what? Everybody’s future is presumed and without guarantee anyway."
"Yes, but most people get to have theirs to at least some degree."
"Maybe, but you now get to invent your own, new future, knowing it's presumed, instead of going on illusion, on presumptions that may or may not work out."
"Perhaps so, but I just don’t want to. I want my old life back."
"Well, you can’t have your old life back. It’s gone. Anyway, there are plenty of people who would envy you."
"You’ve got to be kidding!"
"Well, they would! You’re self-employed; you can do your work anywhere, you’re not tied down to a particular place. You don’t have kids; you’re free to make choices relatively unencumbered if you watch your money real carefully. At middle age, you have the privilege of reinvention, something most people only get once, when they’re too young to have a clue as to how the choices they’re making will impact their entire futures."
"Let them envy it, then. It’s not what I want."
"Yes, but it’s what you’ve got."
That last point was, finally, unarguable.
Reinvention, relocation, reorientation
So: a new future was needed. But what? That I would remain a writer I had no doubt. But it was clear I had to stop clinging to the flotsam and jetsam of my old life, hoping some piece of wreckage would keep me afloat. What was I doing in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for instance? I had loved it long and well and passionately, I loved my friends and viewed them and my support system as vital, almost intrinsic to my identity; I loved the town's architecture, and overall goofiness, and sometimes orneriness. Yet whenever I returned home, the grief kicked up : every road, every path, every building, every event, had a connection with Ned, and thus with his absence. (A piece of the past to which I kept trying to hold: Ned and I, in the last series taken of him just a few days before his death, photographed by our old friend George West, on the porch of our Eureka home, with our cat, Z, who was most reluctant to pose. Z is here in Vermont with me.)
Too, the transition with the non-profit he and I had co-founded in Eureka, while in many ways positive (the main one being that, thanks to a dedicated board, the enterprise did not die with him, and was actually functioning and doing good for those it was intended to serve), was also being handled in a manner personally, needlessly, and incomprehensibly hurtful to me and to Ned’s memory: a private and ongoing brutality. More grief, more loss. And unlike the loss of Ned himself, which was "clean" in that it was no one's fault, an "act of God", this latter loss felt "dirty" --- it simply did not need to happen in the way it was happening. I used to say it would take a crowbar to pry me out of Eureka Springs; that, it felt like, was what was being applied.
According to many cultures’ mythologies, only ghosts stay around a place where they have suffered irretrievable, irresolvable loss, hovering in an effort to find closure on what can, perhaps, never be truly closed. Did I want to be a living ghost? I did not.
A mantra for maturation, and maybe reinvention
How do you reinvent your life at age 50? Good question, one I suppose is answered only in the act of doing it. A life (or its reinvention) is a process, never a finished product.
I did come to a few conclusions about that process. I saw it had to be both active and passive. One had to make choices, even if they were provisional; one had to move towards the new life with intentionality, not just wait for it to show up. But at the same time, waiting was exactly what needed to be done: the future had to reveal itself. A peculiar dance between action and inaction, reinvention turned out to be like writing: you show up to do the work, then wait for the work, in turn, to flow through you and show itself. For all the awkward, graceless stumbles this entails, all the dead ends of the maze, the results sometimes turn out to be what is called "grace." Did I, do I, dare hope this might eventually be true in my case?
I learned to say, “I don’t know.” As in "Where do you live?" "I don’t know." I learned to say it without an overwhelming surge of anxiety; in time, to say it unashamed, almost proudly. Never would I, once so certain about so much, have dreamed that "I don’t know" was a necessary mantra for starting from scratch at midlife.
I decided not to sell my house in Eureka, but rent it, for at least a year. I began calling this period “my sabbatical away from Eureka.” I decided to try living, in one to four month increments, in every place other than Eureka that had ever called or even whispered my name. This included places both out in the country and urban, both in America and abroad. It included the Pacific Northwest (especially Seattle and Portland and Humboldt County, California), Vermont (the family farm), Asheville, North Carolina, and Emilia-Romagna, Italy (if you want to join me for part of the latter, please go to Passionate Italy with CD). It included Nashville, Tennessee, because I had three separate sets of really good friends there. It included South India, the culture of which has deeply shaped my life and values.
It included Los Angeles, because my late father had lived the last twenty years of his life there quite happily, because it had beaches, because it was not a place I would ever have pictured for myself and I was trying to surprise myself, kind of sneak up on whatever this future might be, because I had a few friends there, and, last but not least, because a very charming gentleman I was dating had asked me, “Would you consider spending part of your sabbatical in Los Angeles?” And where better to pick up on Central American cornbreads --- arepas, pupusas, humitas --- of all kinds? And where better to experience a complete change from my accustomed rural life in Arkansas, or for that matter, Vermont?
Shedding, storing, and farmer's marketing
I began going through my stuff. I had never been a big-time accumulator, but I discovered I had way too much stuff. I gave away, I sold, I donated, I threw out. I mailed boxes --- some to Los Angeles, some to Vermont --- and I rented a storage unit. And my oh my, did my support group ever come through for me! KJ, Mary Jo, Jan Brown, Cate, the Monarchs, Chou, Gina, Kali, Jason, David K, Jim Long, Jack Leuke, Patti, Tom and Jay Galyen, Debbie D and Richard --- I can never, never thank you enough.
The first two months of the sabbatical, in Los Angeles, were in a sublet, a fearsomely hot loft east of downtown LA, an area many would call marginal. (Here, in Vermont, you drive a couple of miles enroute to the co-op and drop the recycling in large carefully labeled green bins. In L.A., you placed anything that could be sold --- aluminum cans, bottles, plastic jugs --- outside the locked gates of the converted loft building. Within an hour, homeless people would have picked them up for resale).
In L.A., the two nearest supermarkets were one to the East, where I was generally the only non-Latino, and one to the Northwest, where I was generally the only non-Korean. There were also farmer’s markets, which as always gave me great pleasure to frequent. I usually wentt to the one in Santa Monica or on Pico Boulevard, on Saturdays or Sundays --- where, instead of the apples and pears and peaches and cherries I am accustomed to at farmer’s markets in Arkansas, they had produce like avocados, artichokes (including baby ones and ones as big as your head, oranges and other citrus fruits, dates, fresh figs, Asian greens I did not even know the names of, and prepared sit-down-and-eat food stalls (like Bertha's Tamales, at the Pico market --- yum!). Constants of both Arkansas and California markets: potatoes, corn on the cob, strawberries and blueberries, zucchinis, green beans, chilies and other peppers, and heirloom tomatoes (at a shocking price per pound). All of the latter, except strawberries, by the way, are Native American plants, given by the New World to the whole world. (Pictured above right: the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, photo courtesy of Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce).
Bi-coastal cornbread
In the L.A. loft I’d sublet, it was far too hot to do any baking. But between writing by day in the chilly (temperature-wise) but warm (welcoming-wise) Los Angeles Public Library, I made all manner of stovetop flapjacks and crepes and tortillas and griddle cakes in the evening, often but not always with said charming boyfriend (cherchez l’homme… also, I wanted us to do something less than live together, but something more than date, which is we did, and what worked out quite well for both of us). I'll tell you this much: try the johnnycakes --- you'll be very happy you did.
And although it is fashionable for people who live in cities to diss small-town life (boring, not enough energy or cultural stimulation, gossipy, small-minded, insular), and equally fashionable for those who live a rural small-towns areas to diss city life (unsafe, polluted, too rough and tumble, rude, crime-ridden), I have to say, mostly I had a ball in L.A. and mostly I am having one in Vermont. Experimenting with new lives has, for me, been much easier in the doing than in the contemplating (though the amount of schlepping is ungodly). Grief is less constant in its bombardment in new locales, though it still cannot be outrun, because it is in you, and wherever you go, you travel with yourself. And in time, the enduring absence of your beloved becomes a kind of presence, in itself, also a traveling companion because it is part of yourself.
(So, CD, you ask, since you brought it up, what’s happening with you and said boyfriend, how are you going to work it with him in L.A. and you in Vermont? Are you going to try? If so, how? Is he "the one"? Is he not "the one"? Do you think there will ever be another "the one" for you after Ned? Here’s one place where my new all-purpose mantra pertains: “I don’t know.”)
Serious cornbreadery
Here in Vermont, as both terrain and residents make ready for winter, cornbreads (and cornbread stuffings, cornbread bread puddings, and both Yankee and Southern cornbreads, to say nothing of Southwestern cornbreads, and corn muffins) come in and out of the oven as easily and appropriately as toast from a toaster.
Mishala and I remained somewhat under the moose-spell for several days. That did not stop us, however, from our work at hand, recipe testing for the still untitled book, which will (theoretically) be out next fall. After writing the mega-page, decade-long, PASSIONATE VEGETARIAN, I was wanting to do something simple, quick, fun, a nice little feisty brief single-subject cookbook about a food I love, cornbread. However, I seem to be incapable of nice little brief books. If you want to know more about this one, please visit Forthcoming Books. (Pictured right, the original Dairy Hollow House Skillet-Sizzled Buttermilk Cornbread from the days when Ned and I still ran the inn. I still think this is one of the all-time great cornbreads --- and by now I have tested dozens of them.)
As we worked --- me writing, she testing, me adapting, both of us pulling off shopping, tidying the kitchen, and organizing the recipe-tastings with four to ten invited guests who sampled the various creations, analyzing what we liked and didn't like about each --- we continued to talk occasionally, about the moose. Mishala, who is half Cherokee and half Italian, felt she might have "sung" the moose out, because her totem animal is a deer "and moose are in the same family, and the deer song was going through my mind all day." As I do so much these days, I gave this idea a kind of cheerful agnostic suspension of disbelief. If anyone could have sung the moose out, it was Mishala. On the other hand, maybe the moose just felt like a stroll that particular afternoon. There you go: another "I don't know." (Scenes from a tasting: left to right: Peter Stamm, CD's nearest neighbor, CD, herbalist Sage Maurer, and Mishala, who, with four other non-pictured tasters, sampled two kinds of cornbread, a cornbread dressing, a cornbread crusted-apple cobbler, and, just to balance things out, a soup and a salad. Check out the nearly empty bread basket. Photo, Rick Rommer.) All I really needed to know about, I reminded myself, was "Does this cornbread belong in the book or not, and if I should modify the recipe, then how?
Even Vermonters were impressed by our moose, possibly jealous. “You saw a moose? We hardly ever see moose. Not in southern Vermont, at least, maybe up towards Canada. A male moose? No one ever sees male moose; a female, every once in awhile, but a male…that’s really rare.”
"The stars now rearrange themselves"
I drove Mishala to the Hartford airport last Sunday. From there she will fly back to Northwest Arkansas, to contend with her own "I don’t knows. She has many; part of the pleasure of working together was in talking over our respective unanswerable questions.
We all have them, even when under the pleasant illusion that we do not. "I don't knows are not limited to the grieving, the very young, the very old, those who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, or those in the weird active-passive process of self-reinvention. They belong to all humans, who are, after all, constantly being forced to reinvent themselves just by aging, or events outside themselves, such as a 9-11 or their IRAs being suddenly worth half what they were a few years back.
Poets, being called to examine what most of us prefer to overlook if we have the choice, talk a lot about the edgy, powerful zone of not knowing. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, , wrote, "Be patient towards all that is unanswered in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves." (This is a patience I have yet to develop). And David Whyte, in The Heart Aroused, , writes, "If we can see the path ahead laid out for us there is a good chance it is not our own path; it is probably someone else's we have substituted for our own. Our own path must be deciphered every step of the way." And there's this, from Stephen Dobyns:
.	The stars now rearrange themselves above you but to no effect. Tonight, only for tonight, their powers lapse, and you must look towards earth. There will be no comets now, no pointing star to lead you where you know you must go
The stars here are very, very clear most nights. But none of them point the way. Even were I to see the Northern Lights a second time, or for that matter the moose, I would take them in with wonder and joy, but not as symbolic directional guides, not as archetypes, just themselves.
And that is so much more, and so much less, than enough.
At least, that is how I think about it today, as summer becomes fall, and you and I each turn imperceptibly into whatever the next person we are in the process of becoming will be. As the cornbread bakes, and is eaten; as the compost gets carried out and the dishes washed. What clues there are, still leave us clueless
But that, as the occasional moose appears in the meadow, will not stop our slow deciphering, step by step, surprised, sometimes horrified, but always passionately looking towards our shared earth.