by Daniel Duane
6
The Happy Hunting Ground
Heaven on earth, eternal sensory pleasure taken from the creation itself, in one long Edenic orgy among the organic apple trees: read Alice’s cookbooks closely enough, and with enough wide-eyed yearning, and the core Chez Panisse dream comes to look very much like this. It’s as if the pain of history, the toxic impurity of the mechanized present, and even the tragedies awaiting every one of us, in the passage of time, might fade to pink in the soft worship of a tongue savoring a peach at the height of ripeness, a late-summer’s tomato drizzled with good local olive oil, a line-caught California King salmon grilled in fig leaves on a redwood deck overlooking a sublime Pacific Ocean sunset among sophisticated wine-loving surfer friends equally skilled at oyster shucking, locating the G-spot, and selecting the right vintage of California cult Cabernet Sauvignon to go with herb-crusted Sonoma county rack of lamb and rosemary-garlic new potatoes. Nothing new about this, either—truly timeless human aches for simpler worlds in which the forest might always teem with game, the hedgerow with berries, the creek with fish, the Happy Hunting Ground of certain Native American traditions.
I found myself drawn to these dreams in the period of my recovery from that loss, beginning with a magazine assignment that got me on a plane to Anchorage, Alaska, and then out to Homer, and then onto a hired motorboat headed for a fishing lodge. Once we’d loaded my luggage, that boat ferried me through Homer’s little marina, past storm-battered Bering Sea crab boats moored alongside beaten-up purse-seiners and long-liners with dented aluminum bait shacks. We entered the open waters of Kachemak Bay, cruising below giant ice-covered mountains and rivers draining through sweeping spruce forests, past rocks roaring with the squawks of ten thousand seabirds, alongside sea lions and otters and kelp beds. I disembarked at a private little dock and carried my bags into the Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge, where I’d booked a private cottage perched among evergreens on a sunny bluff over the bright blue estuary.
I’d come for the salmon fishing, but I’d never been much of a hook-and-bullet guy. So I got a morning clinic from a guide named Josiah, a burly New Englander with a Moby Dick tattoo on his forearm. Then Josiah revved up the outboard on a Boston Whaler and took me into the glassy-flat waters of China Poot Bay. Eagles sat in the big Sitka spruce. Bears wandered along vast, vacant cobblestone beaches. Pink salmon schooled below the boat, heading inland to spawn and die. Josiah did everything, baiting my hook and casting my lure and getting a big, gorgeous fish on the line. The silver salmon rocketed away from the boat, zipping out the reel. Josiah handed me the rod and said, “Okay, when he turns back toward us, be ready. Reel in fast.”
I held the rod’s tip up, keeping the hook in the salmon’s lip. Josiah grabbed the net and leaned his barrel chest against the gunwale, ready to scoop. The salmon shot off to one side, then to the other. Then it bolted straight away, knifing my taut line through that mirror surface.
“Damn, look at that,” Josiah said. A dozen sea lions had just rolled off a sandbar. They swam toward us. “It’s hard to compete with two million years of evolution,” Josiah said. “Don’t lose this fish, because there won’t be any left when those guys get here.”
I stumbled for balance as the fish made another run toward me and then hauled into a U-turn, showing us a broadside of its long body. Josiah sensed a yielding, so he had me pull the fish back toward us, wearing it down. Then Josiah stuck out his thick Moby Dick arm and scooped up fifteen pounds of shining, writhing salmon. He pierced the salmon’s heart with a knife and blood gurgled out. We motored back toward the lodge so that Josiah could teach me how to gut it and then preserve it for the flight back to California. While Josiah concentrated on driving the boat, I thought about the seals and the bears and the eagles already eating their share of the fish all around. I said, “Hey, Josiah, what exactly are those crabs I’m seeing?”
“Just Dungeness.”
Right. Just Dungeness. “And is that seaweed edible?”
He stopped the boat so I could reel in a head of emerald greenery that was not only tender, toothsome, and delicately flavored but, because we were in a tidal interface of clean seawater and pure mountain stream water, perfectly seasoned.
“While we’re at it, Josiah, I’m noticing an awful lot of urchin down there on the bottom, like that sea otter keeps eating. They aren’t by any chance …”
Soon I’d sunk an arm dragging Josiah’s net on the bottom, bringing up bristly orbs. Josiah cracked them with his Leatherman. We scooped out sweet, creamy orange uni, discovering what the stuff in sushi restaurants is supposed to taste like. FernándezArmesto, in Near a Thousand Tables, celebrates the oyster as the closest anybody comes to a genuinely natural food, untainted by commercial breeding and typically eaten uncooked and alive, linking us to the most ancient of paleo-human oyster eaters. Equally true of urchin, a way to slurp that pure taste of the sea.
Once ashore, Josiah had me slit the big salmon’s belly and pull out its entrails. He pointed out egg sacs, bright pink: yep, like you can buy in a store, sold salted, salmon caviar. One of those big eagles sat nearby, in a spruce, waiting for my leftovers. This made me feel possessive, so I slipped the eggs into my mouth—sweet and saline, popping between my teeth. I tossed the guts onto the rocks. After a shower and a change of clothes in my cottage, I joined the other lodge guests for local oysters and blue mussels, flicking all the empty shells off the sun-bathed dock and back into the bay from whence they’d come. Word had it that a pair of eagle chicks could easily be seen in a big tree overhanging a nearby beach. So I stumbled into the woods after dinner, into the sweet golden glow of the long dusk. I found those chicks laughably huge, in a gargantuan nest. Then my attention wandered: the forest around me was a wild berry patch. In the space of an hour, I picked and ate bright, tart elderberries, salmon-colored salmon berries, high-bush cranberries and service berries and watermelon berries, and all that before I discovered a raspberry thicket. A few sheets to the wind from all the wine I’d drunk with mussels, I leaned hard against a log-pole railing the staff had built along the path.
Stretching again and again to grab yet another especially plump berry, I was reaching for what must have been my thirtieth when the whole railing broke. I fell flat on my back, unharmed. As I lay there, pulling branches down toward my mouth, plucking off the berries with my tongue, I knew that I had tasted a vision of heaven—not just because the raspberries were so good, but because the whole picture, including all the uni and the salmon and the rest, corresponded so closely to the oldest human dreams of an abundant afterlife, a perfect world made by the gods for human sustenance. I knew also that I had tasted a core aspect of the Chez Panisse dream, the very one Alice evokes in Vegetables when she describes the early days of the restaurant with “eccentric foragers” arriving at the back door with “baskets of chanterelles and morels, buckets of Pacific mussels, blackberries from the hills, and fish just hours out of the sea.”
The daily life of the modern Bay Area resident, commuting by freeway and shopping in supermarkets like everybody else, does not much feel this way; but that was a part of Alice’s power, her gift. By saying it was so, she helped the rest of us believe. In believing, we felt better about our place in the world, or at least hopeful that we would feel better, if we hewed long enough to Alice’s example. Upon my return from Alaska, therefore, I felt convinced that I had broken through some film toward the miraculous life available in the natural world of the West Coast. I became determined to replicate the experience at home, in those last months before Audrey’s birth. So I started with the easy parts: Hannah in the kid-carrier backpack, Sylvie on a leash, up that steep Bernal Hill and into the deep blackberry brambles. Edge of the metropolis, as if the countryside began right there; cool maritime breeze blowing through hot sunshine on the golden California straw, color of the West, fog bank’s misty blanket pulling itself across the distant skyscrapers. Few wildflowers remained, poppies curling up tight against the breeze, and Hannah love
d that she could call out their names. Little kestrels hunting on the wing, red-tailed hawks harassed by an aggressive crow—looping and soaring, parting and rejoining. Sylvie did her usual deal of running off uncontrolled all over the hill, terrorizing birds, while I placed my daughter in the dirt and found a crazy profusion of super-ripe berries all around me, as though nobody had ever been here, despite trashy evidence that somebody homeless made this patch a nightly bed. I wore a cowboy hat against the sun, and a long-sleeved shirt, and I stood up against this big bush, pulling down huge, swollen, ripe berries and saying to Hannah, “Okay, I need the mouth!”
“The mouth’s ready!” she’d reply, and I’d place a berry on her tiny tongue, both of us all-over stained with juice.
“Mouth’s ready for another!” she’d cry happily.
Plop: yet another, onto the tongue.
“Hold me, Daddy!”
I replied, quoting: “Hold me, Daddy?”
“Hold me.”
Slinging her up, I kept picking with the other hand, overcome by greediness—for berries in their fleeting ripeness, and also for life, in same. Shapes of surprising experience entirely new, satisfying, not so complicated, temporarily liberated from worries about status, or money, or what ever came next. The big hawks looped in a high wind; crows did likewise; Hannah joined me deeper in a thicket, no choice in the matter, thorns at our skin and sun scorching our noses and berries ripe-to-bursting all around. I hadn’t surfed in months; I hadn’t exercised in weeks; but at least I was picking blackberries, telling myself it counted because the berries were ripe and if I didn’t pick every single one that very day they might all fall off and rot.
Everybody’s life feels fragmented, in one way or another: the friends we loved in high school, but never see; the sports we played for years; the identities dropped along the way. And many of us find pleasure in stitching those fragments together—much as I did in all that fishing and foraging. The great joys of my twenties had come almost entirely from the natural world, the Pacific Ocean in particular. So I felt as if coming home to myself when I tried, say, abalone diving, north of the Golden Gate. Abalone were still plentiful in California back when I was a kid, every Berkeley backyard fence bearing a few of those big pearlescent shells. Berkeley children grew up hearing about dads “ab diving,” and I’d kept on hearing about it throughout my surfing years. But now it felt irresistible, a key part of that California-Edenic dream.
An old graduate-school friend, a former Navy SEAL named Mark, did it all the time. So I asked to meet him one morning on the Sonoma coast. He showed me how to pile all my free-diving gear onto a boogie board. Then I followed him in a long, kicking swim with flippers to an off shore kelp bed. We tied our boogie boards to heavy kelp stems, the sea cliffs about a quarter mile behind us. Then he cleared his dive mask, took a deep breath, and vanished. When I put on my own face mask and looked underwater, I couldn’t see more than six feet in the frigid gray-green gloom, and the ocean bottom was apparently much deeper than that. Not on your life, I thought, at first. Not on your life am I going to hold my breath and dive into that murk, with no clue what’s down there. I swam over to a particularly big mass of kelp and tried to float in the middle of it—the aquatic version of hiding behind a bush. But I was wearing a weight belt, so I could barely tread water, and my flippers kept getting tangled in the weeds.
Mark popped up holding a barnacle-encrusted disk that must have been nine inches across. He was smiling and relaxed, not at all winded.
“You swear you’ll follow me down?” I asked.
“The whole way,” he said.
“The whole way?”
Mark nodded—he’s a great guy—so I took a deep breath, turned upside down, and started kicking. Shooting downward with surprising speed, I focused on the small field of green around my eyes. That green darkened, and then I got too scared and spun around and beat it back to the surface. I tried again, with Mark following: breathe deep, flip over, shoot down, hit the panic point (Alert! Alert! You must turn back!), rocket back up. Brushing through a mass of kelp, this time, I felt a rush of panic, but then I was in the fresh air again, gasping.
On my third try, I made it twenty-five feet down before a great darkness approached from below—the ocean bottom, absorbing light. Then I got close enough to see the bottom: rock reef, seaweeds, kelp anchors, this deeply hidden little universe thriving in the frigid opacity of the sea. Invertebrates clung to the rocks all around, gorgeous little creatures, and yet I had no sense of the larger topography—was this a boulder I was looking at? The edge of an abyss? The bottom of a canyon? A shark or even a whale could’ve been ten feet off, and I wouldn’t have known it. I was already succumbing to my claustrophobia when I saw an abalone: a big round shell stuck to a rock. Flicking it off before it could seize the reef, I grabbed it, paused to look upward—the surface was only a distant haze of faint light—tucked the creature under an arm, and swam.
Home again, that afternoon, I felt more alive than I’d felt since Hannah’s birth; closer to my younger self than I’d thought possible. But I felt something new, too, richer emotions available only because of marriage and fatherhood: the pride and joy of strolling in my own front door, seeing tiny Hannah explode with joy: “Daddy!” I dropped my ice chest and grabbed Hannah up off the floor and kissed her. Then I spread my hubcap-sized mollusks on the table, for all the family to see. I’d been scared witless, is the truth, twenty-five feet beneath the surf, but I craved feelings like those; I got a plain, simple, indisputable satisfaction from telling my pregnant wife and daughter how I’d swum down to the bottom of the sea and pried up dinner. Even the gory process of cutting out the guts, like I’d learned from Mark, made me feel competent in a gloriously archaic way. I loved knowing the very thing known by early San Franciscans and Native Californians before them—that to render my abalone edible, I’d have to slice that tough white meat into thin rounds, pound it toward tenderness, maybe bread and fry it. Or boil it up as a chowder, the preferred technique of San Francisco’s original Bohemian crowd, led by a long-forgotten but then-famous poet named George Sterling, author of the great “Abalone Song”: “Oh, some folks boast of quail on toast, because they think it’s tony, but I’m content to owe my rent, and live on abalone!”
I loved showing Hannah the pretty inside of the shells, too, imagining that she and her sister-to-be might each keep one all their lives. I told Liz to call up our friends Kate and Jamie—we had about five total pounds of meat, so why not share? It was a beautiful warm night with the back door open and the sky purple over distant Mount Diablo; I still felt the fresh thrill of cold-water diving on my skin and in each deep breath; and with good wine and the stars coming out, I felt immensely happy and somehow at home, as if everything made sense, everything about the young man I’d once been, the middle-aged father I couldn’t stop becoming.
7
On the Role of the Menu in Human Affairs
The first great blow to my cooking confidence emerged from the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, which also happened to be the first book Alice ever published and the last of her books that I ever tried to complete. Liz was quite pregnant by then, and I’d already begun entertaining three or four nights per week, inviting everybody we knew for dinner, as often as they would come. It’s hard to believe in hindsight: with Hannah not yet three years old, and Liz carrying all that extra weight and needing all that extra sleep, and with our family finances only beginning to stabilize, I went on a dinner-party tear that would have left me desperate with exhaustion at any other time in my life. Plus, I still put a premium on maximizing the sheer number of recipes I could tackle in a given night. And I still did not see any point in cleaning as I cooked, preferring to tackle every single messy pot, pan, and spatula at the night’s end, when I was often plastered. As a result, those meals were remarkably chaotic, messy, and excessive. But they weren’t bad—especially when I cooked from Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking, which I’d grown to love. My mother and father came
for Bertolli’s masterful Fish and Shellfish Soup, a grand sort of California bouillabaisse, and they returned with friends for Veal Meatballs with Artichokes, Tomatoes, Green Olives, and Sage. I loved the role of the host, experimenting with five or six different new dishes at a time—twenty to thirty per week—in a mad, frantic rush toward I knew not what. I loved being at the center of the room, the heart of the action, whirling and spinning and heating and chopping. I’d begun writing about wine, too, so I had a lot of open bottles and I’d discovered that if I put out, say, a dozen Pinot Noirs from different parts of California, with maybe two dozen glasses for a grand total of six guests, and if I told everybody to help me sort out the regional differences in flavor profile, they’d all get drunk. And if I then presented four different varieties of shucked oysters and said everybody ought to compare and contrast, and do the same with a plate of Bertolli’s own salumi, from this new company he’d started, and if I then hit them with a pile of whole Monterey Bay sardines fresh off my back-porch grill, and if I showed everybody how to pick up the whole fish and suck the meat right off the skeleton and then discard the head and guts, everybody would get a little disoriented and begin stuffing themselves even before we sat down to the bone-in pork loin roast and the pancetta-wrapped figs and the creamy polenta. I’d get stuffed and disoriented, too, while Liz dealt with Hannah. When the very last of the guests had gone, I’d stay up cleaning for hours and then feel our bed’s mattress moving in odd, uneven circles, as if floating on a whirlpool.
Even now, I’m impressed by how supportive Liz was through that period. She’s an introvert by nature, finding social life more exhausting than exhilarating. But our dinner guests were mostly old friends of hers, so that helped. She knew also that my relentless entertaining was a means of fighting back against all we’d been through, a way to embrace life and insist upon a good time. So Liz meant only to encourage restraint—a move toward less destructive evenings—when she suggested I learn a little about menu composition, constructing our evenings not just for maximum drunkenness, stuffed-ness, and recipe completion, but for perfect enjoyment. Through her own mother, Liz had a deep grounding in the core principles of hospitality: she knew that a great dinner party had to reflect the exact mood of the occasion, even one’s relationship to each of the guests. I found these suggestions meddlesome at first—if I caved even a little, I feared, I would lose control over my forward progress.
