by Jerry Nelson
It was hard to imagine how he’s still single. •
Experiments in Fermentation
There are farmstead wineries popping up all over the countryside these days. It seems that winemaking has become the “in” thing to do if you happen to own an old barn and a few acres of land. The land is for growing grapes; the barn is to give the winery “ambience.” And the older and more run-down the barn, the higher the ambience.
I personally have nothing against these barn-based enterprises. In fact, I am actually quite familiar with the fine art of barn winemaking. I was an early bloomer, having brewed up my first batch of barn wine when I was but twelve.
That was the year when I got wind of this intriguing fungus known as “yeast.” I had learned in science class that this seemingly innocuous microbe was the driving force behind a process called “fermentation” and was, by extension, responsible for such things as hangovers and many of the funnier scenes in the movie Animal House.
That summer I decided to test this process with some extracurricular scientific experiments. I enlisted the assistance of my two younger brothers, and after scrounging in the kitchen, we were able to assemble a winemaking kit. This included an empty quart-sized pop bottle, a can of frozen grape juice concentrate (purple, of course), a few cups of sugar, and a packet of dry yeast that we “borrowed” from the cupboard. And a balloon. You can’t make wine without a balloon.
We hauled our wine makin’s up to the hay mow, where, deep in the muffled sanctuary of the straw bales, we poured the thawed grape juice concentrate into the pop bottle. There was some debate over how much sugar to add, but it was finally decided that if a little was good, then a lot must be better. We added the purloined yeast, shook the bottle to mix the concoction, then capped it with the balloon.
Daily we checked on the progress of the pop bottle. As the yeast performed its mysterious alchemy, the balloon grew to an alarming size. It looked as if the quart bottle had sprouted a latex basketball. My brothers wanted to conduct a taste test almost immediately, but I said no, that we should guzzle no wine before its time. I told them that we would have to age it quite a while. At least a week.
A few days later, the three of us sat on a straw bale and, with great giddiness, unballooned our very first bottle of vintage barn wine. A fragrance slightly reminiscent of bread dough wafted throughout the hay mow.
I allowed my youngest brother the honor of the first swig. It’s hard to describe the bittersweetness of that magical moment. The sweet part was watching my brother’s expression as he took a big pull on the bottle, because the wine was definitely the bitter end of the deal. That stuff was caustic enough to cut through a plowshare.
I pretty much swore off of wine from then on. That is, until some years ago, when I took the family out to the West Coast to visit my wife’s uncle and aunt.
Doris and Jim Granflatten lived in the midst of wine country, and it was they who suggested that we go on a wine tour. Actually, it turned out to be about the best part of the trip: The previous couple of days we had spent in LA, doing the Disneyland thing with a couple of tired and whiny kids, rubbernecking at the tall buildings, battling with the traffic, and generally behaving like tourists.
It was a pleasant change then, when we retreated to the (relatively) sparsely populated hinterlands, where the sky was once again blue, instead of yellowish-brown, and we no longer had to chew in order to breathe.
Central California boasts numerous wineries, some of which are situated by the roadside like lemonade stands. As you might imagine, wine-tasting tours are an extremely popular recreational activity, even though it’s one that requires a designated driver.
The taste master at one of the first wineries we visited instructed me in the proper method for evaluating wine. “You must take your time and swirl, sniff, and sip,” she said. “Don’t gulp it down and say, ‘Wow! That’ll put hair on your chest!’ And gargling before swallowing is a definite no-no.”
After we had stopped at about half a dozen wineries and sampled two or three wines at each one, I was beginning to get the hang of things. It was quite fun, really, touring all those Old World–style buildings, savoring the balmy Mediterranean climate, and talking about how this wine has a fruity bouquet or how that one has an oaken finish. It was enough to make me feel tanned and sophisticated, unlike the pallid and clueless tourist from the hinterlands that I was.
Yet the ambience didn’t seem quite right. “Say,” I finally asked a winery employee, “something is missing here. You wouldn’t have a straw bale for me to sit on, would you?” •
Winter Storm Stories
Part I
I recently made the mistake of purchasing some clothing for my wife. I was quickly re-reminded that buying clothing for a woman is always a mistake, and that once the gift is made, the only thing that remains to be determined is the magnitude of your blunder.
If she reacts with words such as “I don’t think this will work for me,” what she really means is “You have no clue what size I wear, do you?”
If the gifted clothing elicits a response of “That’s really not my style,” what she might mean is “Why do you suddenly become color-blind whenever you go to the store?”
After all these years, I finally learned that there are only four things a husband should give his wife: money, chocolate, jewelry, or flowers. The ideal gift would be a box of chocolates that’s topped by a bouquet of flowers that contains a necklace wrapped inside a hundred-dollar bill.
We managed to make it all these years despite my gifting cluelessness. It’s safe to assume that we will remain married, due to the fact that my wife no longer introduces me as her first husband.
Also, when asked how long we’ve been married, she has quit saying, “I don’t even want to think about it!”
My wife and I recently spent a three-day weekend at home together. It wasn’t planned that way; the weather closed in and we became snowbound.
About halfway through the third day, I was informed of a calamitous development. According to my wife, the situation was as horrifying as a nuclear reactor meltdown or being forced to watch Carrot Top.
In fact, she claimed it was worse than either of those. We were clean out of toilet paper.
I suggested that there are alternatives to Charmin. Newsprint sprang to mind, followed closely by recycled plant material—specifically, the cobs I had stashed in the chicken coop for just such an emergency.
Both ideas were swiftly shot down.
As the Man of the House, I knew that there was only one thing to do: I had to brave the swirling sea of snowdrifts and voyage into town to requisition a new supply of Charmin.
It wasn’t my first rodeo, so I knew what to do. I girded my loins with insulated coveralls and strapped on my heavy winter boots. I threw a snow shovel into the back of the pickup for that “worst case” scenario.
Tearing along on our township road, I blasted through the forward guard of drifts. Turning a corner, I halted, gobsmacked. Endless snowdrifts stretched out before me like an angry, frothing ocean.
What to do? The term “no guts, no glory” popped into my head. With the theme music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly reverberating through my skull, I locked my pickup into four-wheel drive and floored it.
The pickup punched through drift after drift, until the drifts all became an unbroken wall of snow. The windshield was blasted with white powder, blinding me with whiteness and eliciting no small number of muttered imprecations.
Suddenly everything became quiet. The pickup was running, but all forward motion had ceased.
I was completely and utterly stuck.
The shame, the indignity! It’s been years since I’d been that stuck. You might think I would have learned.
I initiated plan B, which consisted of clambering into the back of the pickup to retrieve the aforementioned snow shovel. Ten minutes of dig
ging—the kind of frenetic shoveling that’s often associated with a person who is in the grip of a full-blown panic attack—uncovered little more than the pickup’s front bumper. I had forgotten what it’s like to shovel out the snow from beneath an entire pickup and that it usually involves moving several tons of snow.
This left me no choice other than plan C, which involved hoping that my cell phone would be able to locate someone to rescue me. Hands trembling, I dialed the number of a kindly neighbor. A breath of relief burst from my lungs when he answered on the second ring.
The neighbor said he would gladly come over and pop me out with his pay loader, but that it would be half an hour or more before he’d get there. I thanked him profusely and hung up, knowing full well that this would be a “you’ll never believe what that idiot did” story the next day at our local coffee shop.
There was nothing more I could do other than to sit and listen to the wind moan, and stew in my humiliation as I waited, helpless as a turtle atop a fence post.
Minutes later, the township’s snowplow appeared and began to head toward me! Woo-hoo! Freedom!
The snowplow poked its gigantic steel nose through the drifts that held me in their icy grip. We hooked the snowplow onto my pickup and I was yanked out as slick as a loose baby tooth.
I chatted briefly with the snowplow driver, who was kind enough not to ask, “What sort of idiot would try to go through THAT?!”
Turns out he wasn’t there to rescue me, but was simply plowing our roads. Had I just waited half an hour I would have never gotten stuck.
On the plus side, I’m sure that my reckless risk-taking furnished a good deal of fodder for the next morning’s coffee klatch. It could thus be argued that my getting stuck was actually a form of public service. At least that’s what I told myself. It helped me feel slightly less stupid about the whole affair. My excursion to the store ended our toilet paper emergency. And for once, the stuff I brought home from a shopping expedition was both the right color and the right size.
Which is outstanding, because I have now discovered an entire new category of acceptable gifts.
Part II
In this part of the world, cold is a palpable substance, as real and as hard as an anvil. Those of us who have lived through the crucible of the cold are imbued with an attitude and a set of values that are particular to Northerners.
The attitude could best be summed up with the words “It could be worse.” After enduring just one of our average winters, we know that no matter what manner of catastrophe might befall us, we should never complain, because it could always be worse.
This is because it has often been worse. At least that’s the consensus of those who talk about the weather, a segment of the population that includes approximately everyone. If you live in this region and don’t have a good story to tell regarding nasty winter weather, you may suffer from a lack of imagination. Don’t let the misfortune of not having experienced a spate of bad winter weather stand in the way of a riveting tale.
When I was a kid, the talk at Christmastime gatherings inevitably turned to the weather. “This winter might be a tough one,” one of the adults might intone, “but it isn’t anywhere near as bad as the winter of forty-two.” Heads would nod in silent agreement.
Someone else would say, “The squall we had last week was nothing compared to the blizzard of fifty-four. Now, there was a storm!” Heads would again bob in concurrence.
Not wanting to be left out, I would say, “That Christmas snowstorm of sixty-one was really something. The snow was belly deep.”
Never mind that I had been only four years old in 1961 and that “belly deep” is a relative term. Never let the facts stand in the way of a compelling story.
The cold has also instilled us with such tidbits of wisdom as “Fogged eyeglasses do NOT indicate a heightened level of romantic feelings” and “If you can see your breath when you wake up, the furnace has probably run out of fuel” and “It’s always the husband’s fault when the furnace runs out of fuel.”
Most of this is just common sense. But it’s surprising how uncommon common sense can be.
For example, one would think that nobody should have to be told, “Shut the door, you’re letting all the heat out of the house!” Yet you would not believe the number of times we had to say that to our boys when they were growing up.
Another ingrained value is to always Be Prepared. It’s no coincidence that the founder of the Boy Scouts was a Northerner.
Being Prepared means having enough food on hand to survive a three-day blizzard. This is why the mere mention of snow flurries by the weatherman can cause a stampede of panicked “It’s the end of the world!” shoppers to descend on the supermarket. My wife and I have sometimes been caught up in this groupthink, even though our cupboards already held enough food to feed a troop of Boy Scouts for six months. The Be Prepared instinct is that strong.
The other night, shortly after our most recent cold front roared through, I stepped outside for a moment. It had dropped to ten below under a clear sky; the stars were so bright and sharp, you could grab Orion by his belt.
And the stars were making noise. Specifically, they were producing a stream of honks and squawks. It took a moment to realize that a flock of geese was passing overhead through the black, brittle ether.
I don’t speak goose, but the squawks seemed to be saying, “It was YOUR dunderheaded idea to migrate in December! I’m freezing my beak off! Why couldn’t we be like the Gundersons? THEY don’t wait until the last minute! THEY always head south at the end of October!”
Which reminded me that it was time to check on the furnace’s fuel level. Because bad as this cold weather might be, I certainly didn’t want things to get worse.
One November weekend, rain fell as the mercury plummeted to the freezing point. Ice formed on every available surface, including the card slots on ATMs. Frigid bank customers waited patiently as the person at the head of the line struggled to get the robotic teller to accept his or her card. This would be a bad storm.
As the ice built up, trees and power lines sagged and snapped. Then came the wind, a full-throated nor’wester that howled and screamed, bringing air that smelled like permafrost, a special delivery direct from Siberia.
We denizens of the prairie have a name for such conditions: the kind of weather that keeps out the riffraff.
We lost power at our place on the first morning of the storm. My wife had opted to skip work that day, reasoning that the closing of the interstate highway system was a sign that she should remain safely at home instead of gambling with the skating rink–like roads.
We assumed that the power would be out for only a short time, since this is usually the case. We reported the outage and waited. And waited. And waited some more.
I called the power company again and was told that power lines were snapping faster than castanets and that it could be a day or more before we had electricity again. The wind had kicked in by then and was blowing at speeds normally associated with the jet blast of an airliner. The house began to cool at an alarming rate and my wife began to fret about the possibility of frozen pipes.
I was secretly gladdened by this development. Having grown up on the prairie, I knew that one should always Be Prepared. In our case, it meant having a wood-burning furnace and a supply of seasoned firewood in the basement. As my wife lit candles, I descended into the bowels of our dusty cellar and coaxed the old wood furnace back to life. It was strangely thrilling and primal, knowing that so much depended on my fire-making skills.
Upstairs, I reported my triumph with the wood burner and was hailed as the Master of Fire and He Who Keeps the Pipes from Freezing. “Isn’t this romantic?” asked my wife as she lit what appeared to be the hundredth candle. “It’s just like Little House on the Prairie.”
“Sort of,” I agreed. “Except for Ma and Pa Ingalls didn’t have a four-
wheel-drive pickup at the ready in case they decided to run for groceries.”
Things sure are different without electricity. There’s no heat, no light, and, since we depend on a well for water, no H2O.
As far as I was concerned, the lack of water was the least of our problems. I was born into a farmhouse that had no indoor plumbing, so going without running water seemed to be just a minor inconvenience at worst. But like the males of many species, guys see the entire out of doors as one giant bathroom.
My wife and I generally don’t mind spending a quiet evening at home. Normally, we watch a little TV, and I might surf the web or write a bit on the computer. With none of these things available, we had to resort to conversing with each other. It soon became quiet. Much too quiet.
“Do you have to do that?” she suddenly blurted.
“What? You mean eat this pickled herring?”
“Yes! That stuff reeks, and now so do you!”
“Hey! My Norse ancestors survived many a harsh winter on pickled herring! If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for me!”
Quiet again descended, accompanied by tension. To assuage the unease, I scrounged up a transistor radio and found some batteries. We were soon listening to a station that was broadcasting from San Antonio. “Cooler tomorrow with a high of fifty-eight,” intoned the announcer.
“Fifty-eight!” lamented my wife. “What I wouldn’t give to have it that warm again!”
The house was right at fifty-eight degrees when we awoke the next morning; it seems that I forgot to get up during the night and stoke the furnace. “That does it, fish-breath!” said my wife through chattering teeth. “I can’t take it anymore! You NEED a shower! My scented candles can only do so much! Either you get us some electricity, or I’m leaving you for the Super 8!”
Not knowing what else to do, I fired up the pickup and drove north, following the power line that feeds our house. A jolt of joy shot through me when I espied a lineman working on the line. I could have hugged him.