by Amy Thielen
The hot plate Rob had been using wasn’t going to suffice now that I was there, needing to cook to keep sane, so Aaron brought in a used avocado-green electric stove, which his friend Steve, a hobbyist electrician, hooked up live to the building’s main power source. We watched him disable the main circuitry for the building, which was in our bedroom, and reattach it, and then like idiots we returned our bed to its nook in front of the electrical circuit board. It hummed behind us, gently microwaving our cerebellums, rocking us to sleep.
I cooked nearly every meal on that electric stove—just as my mom had on hers. When I made a beef stew, at the point when the onions were caramelizing and it was time to add the tomato, I peeled it using one of her tricks: I cranked the heat on the biggest burner and watched as its bright red coils turned from red to chalky-gray, then stuck a fork in the stem end of a beefsteak tomato and held it just above the coil until the skin blistered and popped open and I could quickly peel it away. But a lot of what I made fell flat. I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t make tomato sauce in cast iron because it turns sweet-metallic; it chills the tongue. Twisted up the rest of that evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I could get that so egregiously wrong.
Finally, one day, my call came in: a freelance job at a custom publishing company in Minneapolis that came courtesy of Rob’s girlfriend, Pilar. I started getting up early every day to go to work. After pissing in a widemouthed quart jar—trial and error led me to embrace a widemouthed opening over the regular size—I threw it out the window to avoid making any more trips upstairs to the fourth-floor bathroom than absolutely necessary, always looking to make sure that the Circus of the Ridiculous bus wasn’t parked below us. This was all going swimmingly until one bitterly cold day in February when I dropped the heavy window instead of guiding it down, sending half of the pane to the floor. Aaron and Rob both howled at me when the subzero air came pouring in, and for the rest of the winter it wore a bandage of duct tape.
Then I would dress up in business-type attire and drive the Heavy Half to downtown Minneapolis. By every definition of the word, it was a plum job. I knew nothing of publishing but had a recent graduate’s false confidence and enough of a grasp of grammar that I could do the bones of the editing work Pilar needed and write copy when required. For this she paid me well, more than I would make for many, many years afterward. I could make my rent with a few days’ work, and she had me coming in every day. This meant that together with Aaron’s cash from doing stonemasonry, we were able to bank a lot toward our simple-life summer.
—
One day, Pilar took me to lunch at Café Brenda, an upscale vegetarian place near our office. We sat by the window and watched the lunch crowd passing by on the street. A slow-moving guy ambled in front of us, bulked up with layers, and when his eyes met mine, I recognized him. I’d talked to him the night before in Lighthouse Bay, when he’d been standing in front of my door, disoriented, staring at the nook beneath the stairs.
“Where did I sleep last night?” he mumbled.
“I think you usually sleep under the second-floor stairwell,” I said, pointing down the stairs. He looked at me blankly, the buzz in his head almost audible. “Down one floor!” I shouted cheerfully, as if I were in a mall giving directions to a turned-around elder.
Now on the street, he raised his hand and nodded respectfully at me, and I raised mine back.
“Who’s that?” Pilar asked.
“Oh, just a guy from the building,” I said. She laughed because she knew. She sort of lived there, too.
But at work I couldn’t shake the sinking feeling that I should have been enjoying myself more. Real-life editing and writing of corporate material? Swerving between cubicles, my skirt swishing? Going out to lunch in trendy restaurants? This was what I had dreamed of.
At night I let loose large, room-filling sighs of boredom. The technical writing we practiced, while as vibrant as the form could possibly get, felt like an internment in the dullery. Rearranging the English language to inject excitement into boring events felt dishonest to me—a near sin in my authenticity-seeking youth. Worse, I acted childishly at the office, ducking away from the boss whenever I came back after a particularly long lunch, even though I was being paid by the hour.
At one point we were working a lot of overtime, and Pilar asked me to let out one of her coworkers and lock the big main door behind her. I let her out of the thick glass door and dropped the bottom metal pins into the slots to bolt it shut. The woman, middle-aged, with a neat gray-blond bob, smiled politely and looked away. Unlike me, she was at ease with professional distance. Unsure if I should wait with her or go, I chose to wait. The round seconds trundled by. Suddenly I held my arms high above my head and started shaking my body against the glass door in rolling waves, doing a pantomime of a monkey rattling the bars of its cage, mouthing the words, “Get me out of here!” I smiled, expecting her to laugh at my joke.
Her expression froze up to her raised brows, and she escaped into the elevator. I walked back stiffly to the office where Pilar was pouring small glasses of expensive scotch in the conference room, kicking off our late-night editing drive.
“Did you meet Susan, our CEO?” she said, nodding encouragement.
That’s when I knew: Maybe the office life wasn’t gonna be for me.
15
GOOD NEIGHBORS
What I am finding out about myself is that I have a decent ability to adapt to austere circumstances. I’d grown up in a suburban house so warm, so thickly carpeted, that my brothers and I wore shorts on deep-winter −30-degree Saturday afternoons and rolled around on our bellies in front of the enormous television screen like tropical fish in a tank. My parents liked to keep the thermostat strictly unseasonal—75 in the winter and 65 in the summer—and the windows shut year-round. But somehow I have just spent the cold months living in a nine-story cement building with a belching dragon for a space heater. I’ve become very attached to my winter hat, wearing it inside, even in bed.
Now in the country, I experience a newfound love for summer breezes coming in the window. I walk by myself to the outhouse at night. When we’re outside and I’m too lazy even for that, I can piss on a tree in the pitch-black dark, holding myself at such an angle that the stream flows around stones like the early meandering part of the Mississippi River and always misses my shoes. I can drive Aaron’s old stick-shift truck fast through the oily spring mud of our road and make it, sliding widely, all the way to the end. I cut my own hair. (Not always well.)
Certain parts of our back-to-the-land lifestyle come to me more naturally than others. For example, I enjoyed picking wild berries. It was just the sharp saber nails of the wild raspberry canes, the yellow pine pollen sticking to my sweaty arms, the spring-action brush, the incessant cloud of soul-pricking deer flies—those were the only parts that bothered me. I discovered that nature doesn’t coddle, that branches ricochet back in your face just because they can.
I hadn’t grown up foraging for delicacies. My all-capable mother had always taken care of the hunting and gathering, mostly at the Red Owl. She’d grown up weeding Grandma’s half-acre farm garden in their backyard, picking thorny cucumbers from between the razored vines; she liked to shop at the store.
But these painstakingly picked wild raspberries, they were so sweet and so tart that even a ladybug-size one could make your mouth run with desire for more. I learned that washing them turned them into sweet red mush, so I spent nearly an hour picking through my haul spread out onto a wide platter, sifting through each one with my fingers, pinching out aphids and flicking out leaves. That night we sat on the candlelit porch and spooned up these meticulously clean unwashed berries beneath a drift of whipped sabayon—positively stinging with the whiskey I had naively subbed for the marsala wine I didn’t have—and yet the flavor of the berries still triumphed. They were that strong.
I didn’t work in the traditional sense that summer but instead coasted on our collected savings. My ambiti
ons were funneled into making our life more delicious, and we both considered our chores to count toward the business of living.
Aaron, powered by an incessant drive to finish projects around the homestead, was stomping the steep slant up the hill from the garden all day long, digging new holes, and dry-stacking heavy stones to create landscaping barriers. He was sweating. And me? Lady of leisure, waking up well after the hot sun had burned off all the dew and started to turn the ground to dry, fragrant toast, I made breakfast, shoved the dishes behind the curtained shelf, then walked down to the garden, picked some vegetables, and walked up the hill to start making lunch. It was all I could do to hustle three hot-cooked meals into the waking hours of my day.
I quickly learned that cooking with limitations is what breeds invention. The broccoli rabe grew like a weed, so I threw it indiscriminately into everything until I discovered that wet heat accentuated its bitterness but that dry-cooking in oil or butter calmed its bristles and turned it sweeter.
But I also discovered that I couldn’t cook meat as well as my mom did. My chicken breasts came out tough (overcooked), my chicken thighs wiry (undercooked). Cooking meat clearly involved something more than just following directions. A beef roast doesn’t surrender its tenderness to you just because you can read. Each chunk comes with its own idiosyncrasies. You have to imagine the protein’s inner architecture, the layout of its fibers, its juice pathways; you have to find a darkened side door into which you can slip inside; you have to put your thumb on its needs.
Increasingly, I stuck to the vegetables. The night Aaron’s friends Bruce and Cheryl first came to dinner, I was nervous. Aaron had been friends with Bruce—a silver-bearded, ageless Vietnam vet with dry comic timing and a well-articulated sense of political outrage—since he was a teenager. He joked that Bruce was one of his best high school friends. Bruce had moved out to the Smoky Hills in the early 1980s during the back-to-the-land exodus, and he and Cheryl lived in an underground house of his own design just a few miles away. Their place was off the grid and a paragon of modern counter-culture architecture. It was outfitted to the hilt with natural luxuries—an outdoor solar shower, a living roof covered with squash vines, paths lined with clover for barefoot after-lunch walks. Inside the house, a sauna was tucked right behind their central woodstove so that in the winter they could heat up canners of water in the chimney’s leftover heat and, via a submersible 10-volt pump, shower in the sauna. (I tried it once: rainforest-soft.) They had just recently built a studio out of stacked straw bales for Cheryl’s massage-therapy practice. Their indoor root cellar was stocked with Cheryl’s impressive store of canning. They knew how to build, they knew how to live, and they knew how to eat in August—from the garden. The minute they walked in the door, they handed off a jar of Cheryl’s pickled asparagus, which I took as a hint to whip up a batch of Bloody Marys in which to sink them. Our friendship was instant.
In retrospect, the dinner I made that night was nothing remarkable, but it was full of the latest discoveries from my Alice Waters–Edna Lewis–Deborah Madison phase. I can’t pick up one of their books without being overwhelmed with warm thoughts of meals made from those pages. The scribbled margins contain the blush of first-taste love that my future professional-cooking self would strive to recapture. My first caramelized onions. My first corn pudding. My first roasted heads of garlic.
Aaron lit the oil lamp in the center of the table and I set down the pizza, a whole wheat version topped with wilted blossoms of garden spinach, thin orbs of my family’s sausage, and pads of mozzarella cheese—the last contraband from the store. With it we ate cubes of sautéed zucchini and a simple salad of spiky arugula from the garden, dressed with a thin layer of garlicky, lemony cream. Good-tasting olive oil was hard to come by in town, so I made dressings out of various dilutions of heavy cream and buttermilk flavored with garlic, ginger, lemon, rosemary, or anchovy—not realizing until later that cream dressing was an old Midwestern farmhouse staple.
As Bruce and Cheryl got up to leave, they both hugged me with force, my nose diving deep into Cheryl’s reassuring mane of essential-oil-scented hair. Bruce slapped Aaron on the shoulder and said, “Well, it looks like you’ve found yourself a homestead honey!”
The words slapped my cheeks to a red blush. While this was a comment that likely played fine back at the height of the hippie movement, when Bruce was our age, the part of me that had minored in women’s studies did not take it very well. And she was not too happy with my pioneer-cook counterpart, either, the one who couldn’t suppress the hot tinge of pride in being authenticated as a homesteader.
It came off a little sexist, but I knew what Bruce meant. His point was that Aaron had found himself a girl, and one who cooked. Backwoods homesteads wither away without the cooking. This little cabin, with the soaring, rusty ceiling, the walls cluttered with paintings, the Swede saws hanging over the window, and the deer pelt draped over the railing, was—with the addition of food to the mix—becoming a home.
—
Aaron loves to dig. (“If I could make a living doing it, I’d be happy.”) Digging turns the human back into a nodding oil rig, as if hinged in two pieces; it renders a person automatic. I think he likes it because it’s full of simple purpose—just one scoop after another, nothing much to think about but progress made real. I feel the same satisfaction in the minutiae of kitchen labor. Whenever Aaron seems crabby, I’m tempted to hand him a shovel; and when I get surly, he wants to set me in front of a bushel of shell peas.
That summer, he shoveled out the hole where the porch would sit and a wide moat around the house in which we could plant flowers, holding back the dirt with lanes of dry-stacked fieldstones. It took just a single summer for the long prairie grass to grow in nets around the rocks and hold them in permanent suspension.
Then we set out to plant everything we’d need for the long term, the yard crops that turn a country place into a homestead. We got some horseradish roots from Aaron’s dad and planted them near the rock flower beds (a rookie mistake, for the spreading horseradish taproots would colonize my flower beds for years to come). I planted chive and tarragon, herbs that would return naturally every year, the chive so early that their moist green spires rise through the clear sponge holes of the melting snow. We planted rhubarb and crab apple trees and lilacs, the classic triumvirate of the Midwestern farmyard. On our walks through the woods, we always knew we’d found an old farmstead when we came upon any of these planted at the edge of a clearing. Lilacs outlasted generations; ours would probably outlast us.
We were still hauling our water that summer, and every couple of days we would go to George and Marie Kueber’s place down the road to fill up our five-gallon plastic tanks. I was well into the groove with the oil lamps, and the water kettle, and with splashing my face with cold water each night from the enameled basin. But even with four five-gallon jugs in our possession, we could hardly haul enough water to suppress the hoarding feeling. As the summer progressed, I began to catalog my peeves: how quickly the dirty dishes stacked into mountains, how impossible it was to rinse oily crud from your hands with cold water, how greasy and dark my bangs looked on the third day…the mosquitoes, which clamped onto my ankles when I was digging potatoes with such herd force that I feared I’d stepped on a hill of fire ants.
And the outdoor camp showers we took were a little cold. As I stood on a mere square of stone, the wind ravaged my naked body as a ribbon of warm water trickled through my foaming, shampooed head.
I began to long for the old days, when the power companies ran free electric lines to coerce rural people into getting hooked up to the grid. George and Marie had told us such a thing had happened to them in the 1950s, so I knew it was true. But in 1998 the power companies didn’t need any new customers. In fact, they didn’t give a crap if we hooked up or not. They let us know the terms and conditions: about ten thousand dollars, due to the length they’d have to run cable to us from the nearest box two miles away, a sum we could not af
ford.
But my cooking habit was thirsty. It needed more water. The garden agreed. That long dry summer, we babied the plants the best we could. After weeding, mostly we cheered them on. When it got really dry, we poured some of our precious hauled water into metal watering cans and stood by each plant for long moments with the heavy can levered from our hips. Anyone could see that this sustainable lifestyle was about as unsustainable as it gets.
“Aaron,” I said, growing gradually hysterical, “we need WA-TER. I am not coming back here next year without water, and I mean the kind that runs! From a real faucet!”
The next morning I contritely rephrased it. “It would be really cool if you could rig up something else.”
What we needed was our own well. Bruce came over to dowse for water—otherwise known as witching—and his out-held willow branch dipped at the bottom of the hill. It would be a trek, pumping the water there and hauling it up to the house, but we had no choice.
Aaron went to town to rent a well-pounder. I expected him to return with some kind of automated machine, but he came back lugging a heavy iron cylinder, which was open on one end. It looked like a giant hollow bullet with handles. Apparently we’d be pounding this thing by hand.