This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “Warm bread will give you a tummy ache,” Mama said, if only to protect the bread, moving it out of reach of my small hands. That didn’t stop my stomach or me, as I grew older, from indulging in the delight of warm bread and butter melting in the mouth.

  Our staple was a yeast-free flatbread called a chapati, which Mama learned to make from David Hatch, who learned in India. Mama let me help mix the flour from the grain mill with water and salt to make a pliable dough, then kneaded it to bring out the gluten and let it set for an hour before making round golf balls of dough that she flattened with a rolling pin into thin, but not too thin, pancakes. She prepared the cookstove ahead so there was a bed of hot red coals in the firebox, and heated a greaseless twelve-by-sixteen-inch cast-iron skillet to sear both sides of the chapati and trap the steam inside. The chapati was then placed on a bent clothes hanger over hot coals inside the firebox, where it would blow up into a steamy balloon. Once it was removed from the flame, the air in the middle was released and the balloon flattened to form a perfect tortilla-like vehicle, warm or cold, for whatever you chose to put on or inside it.

  Papa liked to make himself sandwiches by filling a chapati with alfalfa sprouts, sliced tomatoes, handmade mayo, arugula or basil, and grated cheese for the perfect quick lunch or snack. For dessert he’d take another chapati and spread honey and butter with coconut peanut butter from Walnut Acres or tahini made from finely ground sesame seeds and, depending on the season, fresh strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, or grated apple and cinnamon. This became officially known as the “Pa-wich.”

  “Mmm, mmm, mmm, Pa-wiches,” I’d sing, rubbing my belly.

  “Not bad for a boy,” Papa always said of his culinary creations.

  He made “bacon” by frying strips of nori seaweed in oil to form a crisp and salty treat. And on Thanksgiving he and Mama amused themselves by creating a “turkey” out of a large butternut squash filled with traditional stuffing and potatoes attached to it with toothpicks for drumsticks.

  Our other staple was goats’ milk, which we drank raw or was heated by Mama with Irish moss and honey to make a custardlike dish called junket, or blancmange. I loved to find junket cooling in small bowls on the shelves by the window. “Don’t touch,” Mama said from the stove, but when she wasn’t looking I’d tip one up to my lips and let the warm sweet curd slip down my throat to settle comfortingly in my tummy.

  Goats’ milk was also used to make yogurt with the help of cultures mail-ordered from France. Mama sterilized the milk by heating it to 160 degrees to kill the bacteria, then mixed it with the culture and poured it into quart canning jars with lids. These sat in a large pot of warm water on bricks on the far back burner of the cookstove for about six hours or more, depending on how tart she wanted it. When the yogurt was cultured, she submerged the jars in cold water in the root cellar, and it would stay fresh for days. Yogurt was especially recommended by a doctor friend of the Nearings, who said it would help provide the B12 vitamins missing in our vegetarian diet.

  “Scott-o absolutely loved my yogurt. Did you see him wolf it down?” Mama bragged to Papa after the Nearings joined us for lunch one day. “And Helen asked to borrow my corn dodgers recipe.” The recipe, which consisted of adding salt and oil to cornmeal mush, forming the mixture into patties, and baking these on a cookie sheet until firm and slightly crunchy, later turned up in Helen’s anticookbook Simple Food for the Good Life.

  “I was not born a cook,” Helen often said, but during summer there were many visiting and helping mouths to feed, and feed them she must, so she came up with quick and nourishing, if sometimes unpalatable, solutions. Her secret was that she had a captive audience—there was nowhere else to eat out on the cape, and when you’re hard-worked and fresh-air hungry, pretty much anything tastes good. Helen’s other secret was that her ingredients from the garden were fresh, and of top quality—like those in the parsley-laden vegetable soup of Mama and Papa’s first visit.

  Across the country in California, a French-trained chef named Alice Waters was opening, in 1971, what would become the well-known Chez Panisse restaurant, founded on these very principles of freshness that Alice had learned in France. Fresh local food was not political at that time; it simply tasted best.

  Names grew up around Helen’s less inspired and more utilitarian creations—Horse Chow for oats and raisins with oil and lemon juice, Carrot Croakers for a cookie made out of leftover carrot pulp from the juicer, Scott’s Emulsion for boiled wheat berries, honey, and peanut butter “where the eater does the work, not the cook,” as Helen quipped, and Miracle Mush for grated carrot, beet, apple, and nuts. There were always large wooden bowls of popcorn drizzled with melted butter for a snack, and Helen was known to drop handfuls into people’s soup bowls for extra fiber, whether they wanted it or not. These names and combinations didn’t exactly make the mouth water, but they provided the body with the necessary nutrition and fortitude for hard work.

  “A meal is best when eaten with your feet under your own table,” Scott liked to say over lunch, the philosophical feeding him as well as the physical. Papa often quoted another of Scott’s sayings, “Health insurance is served on the table with every meal.” As Papa saw it, good food was the secret to longevity and well-being that would save him from the early death of his father. The healthily aging Nearings were living proof that a simple diet was the key. But as it would turn out, the formula for health is not one-size-fits-all.

  As with organic farming, health is more about individual trial and error, and my family would soon have its share of both. Yogurt alone could not make up for the B vitamins lacking in our vegetarian diet. Not being a nutritionist, I know only one thing for sure: that our high-carb diet often caused bouts of “the farts,” a condition that Papa denied, Mama relished, and I liked to laugh about, especially when one struck while I was seated on Mama’s lap for a bedtime story.

  Still, even in the clutches of winter, when we should have been wasting away for lack of something fresh, Papa, like a garden elf, cut calcium-rich kale from the glass cold frames and dug parsnips and carrots buried and insulated by snow in the garden. Then, passing through the low door to the greenhouse on the front of the house, he added salad greens to the basket, ever amazed that the hardy greens and root vegetables germinated before daylight savings in October could survive the cold with such simple protection. He brought his offerings inside to Mama and laid them in her capable hands.

  “This meal is fit for royalty,” Papa said enthusiastically to Mama and me over the dinner of baked sweet parsnips and onions with steamed kale, brown rice, and a fresh salad. His eyes sparkled in the lamplight. “Who knew we could eat from the garden like this in December in Maine?”

  I see now that what also made the meal so delicious was that, despite the appearance of bounty, we were always on the edge of not having enough. And if our food supplies fell short, our “health insurance policy” was at risk. If either Mama or Papa were to become ill, there would be expensive doctor bills to pay, and the vital work to produce more food would fall behind.

  That my parents had chosen this lifestyle over an easier one wouldn’t matter in the moment when the goats had eaten the spring lettuce, there was nothing left in the root cellar, the drinking water was muddy with runoff, and there was no money under the couch for gas to get to town—not to mention that Jeep’s registration had expired, and we had no savings account, trust fund, or health insurance policy, no house in town to fall back on. We were living the way much of the world actually lives. On the other hand, we didn’t have phone, water, or electrical bills; health insurance premiums; or a mortgage, a car payment, or any other monthly payment, for that matter. No one could come to shut off our utilities and take away our home.

  Mama nodded at Papa over the dinner table and smiled, salad dressing shining on her lips. When eating a good meal, with our feet under our own table, we felt that we were, indeed, royalty.

 
“And applesauce for dessert,” Mama said with a wink.

  I hover close here because I understand that our survival lay in that exchange, and in the precarious balance of Mama’s and Papa’s emotional investment in our lifestyle. To succeed at this life, they had to constantly feed their vision of it, or it would wither and die.

  Chapter Four

  Seclusion

  Eliot, Sue, and Lissie pose for the Wall Street Journal (Photographer unknown.)

  By Christmas Day the ground was covered in thirty inches of snow, a few crystals still suspended in the air out the front windows. Papa brought in a spindly-branched fir tree, and Mama and I decorated it by threading strings of popcorn interspersed with shriveled red hawthorn berries.

  “It helps to think of Christmas as in ancient times, of bringing light to the dark of the year,” Mama said.

  Those darkening days of December filled us with the urge to hibernate like the animals. Hands turned clumsy, pulses sluggish, and we moved as slowly as the pale red-and-black-spotted ladybugs that clung to the interior walls of the farmhouse. It was the time to turn inward for strength to combat the blues Papa said came with lack of light and vitamin D.

  The darkest stretch was from Papa’s birthday on December 15 to Mama’s birthday on February 7, the shortest day being the winter solstice, a week after Papa’s birthday, when the radio reported less than eight hours of light. We followed the sun’s progress across the sky like a baby following his mother’s face, willing her to stay nearby. As early as four in the afternoon, Papa would light the kerosene lanterns with a poof of flame, turning down the knob of the fancy one until its cheesecloth wick glowed a winter blue. It whistled like wind in the trees and filled the little farmhouse with a steady glow as the last of the moths pounded the windowpanes, drawn like us to the light.

  Mama wrapped our gifts in newspaper, tied with garden twine. Other gifts came by mail wrapped in silver and gold foil and colorful paper with big bows and notes that said “From Skates” and “From Grandma and Grandpa.” Papa grinned his elfin smile that evening as he took down hand-knitted stockings and I tore through the wrappings like any child. My favorite gift was a painted wooden Russian doll Helen and Scott had brought back from a recent trip to Russia. Inside it was an identical-shaped doll, and so on, until at the very center was the solid smallest doll. The shells lay around me empty and broken open, but the baby fit into the space of my closed hand, a comforting shape inside.

  “That one is the heart,” Mama said, her own feeling tender during the dark of the year. “Let’s put it back in to be safe.”

  “People give us too much,” she wrote later in her journal, overwhelmed by the material bounty. “Decided to fast (me apples and simple raw protein, Eliot tea, water, Liss mostly milk).”

  The solitude and simple rhythms of the homesteading life suited Mama’s spirit well, but as it turned out, the winter of 1971 was the peak of our quiet years, as spring would bring a visit from the Wall Street Journal that would change our lives in unforeseen ways.

  Papa woke in the darkness before sunrise, stoked the stove, dressed, and went out. A short saw and ax were all he needed. Already he’d made good progress on the back field, climbing the trees and sawing off branches to use as firewood, then toppling the bare trunks and sectioning them into stove-size lengths to cure and chop for firewood. “Heating with wood warms you three times,” the saying went. “Cutting, stacking, and burning.”

  Cold pinched the inside of Papa’s nose as the first rays of sun bloomed behind the darkened points of fir and spruce surrounding the snow-covered clearing. The air was still, waiting for the day to begin, smoke rising in a column straight up from the chimneystack without a breeze to shift it. Those early mornings reminded Papa of the lonely snow-covered mountaintops from his mountaineering days, but as he warmed from work he was reinforced in his belief that a mountain with no top was far preferable. Rather than the glory of the peak, he found his salvation in the warmth that came with the constant effort of the climb, and the accompanying adrenaline that erased all sorrow.

  “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, and the true success is to labor,” Scott often quoted, from Robert Louis Stevenson.

  When Mama woke to find Papa gone, she left me sleeping and ventured to the outhouse, the snow brilliant white underfoot, each step squeaking like Styrofoam when opening and closing the root cellar door. The air sang with electricity, and sun sparked the snow into a field of diamonds. She scanned the back field for Papa and, spotting him in a tree, let out a yodel, the Swiss mountaineering call Helen had taught them for communicating in the woods.

  “Yo-del-lay-he-who!” She paused a beat as the echo returned from the forest. “Eh-he-who . . .” Then came Papa’s reply: “Yo-del-lay-he-he-whooo!” The call bounced around the sparkling bowl of the farm, making Mama’s sluggish blood surge to life better than any fire. She wanted this moment to last forever, but deep down knew its impermanence was what made it so beautiful. It was on days like this that Mama would gasp as the sun broke through the clouds at just the right moment, the trees shuddering with meaning, or when the Christmas cactus on the windowsill bloomed before her eyes. In those moments it seemed that the fulfillment she sought in nature had presented itself, attainable and real. But then the sun would pass, the trees still, the flower close, and nothing remained; even the searching was forgotten after such a moment. The physical world could not provide the depth of love she craved.

  When Mama and Papa went on their first date together, camping amid the bright foliage of the White Mountains, Papa was both gentlemanly and boyish, leaving Mama flattered by his attention and amazed at her luck. He in turn was taken by her natural beauty, shy manner, and adventurous spirit, and glad to find a woman who shared his love of the outdoors but didn’t expect a big diamond or bank account.

  “I’ll teach you to paddle and roll a whitewater kayak,” Papa suggested for their next date, and Mama felt a rebellious thrill. This meant tipping the kayak and its occupant over, as often happens accidentally in whitewater, then snapping the hips to flip it back upright, thereby saving the kayaker from a wet exit in wild waters. Being trapped beneath a boat in a murky creek was not most women’s idea of a good time, but Mama loved the challenge. She was able to relax underwater, thanks to summers on the ocean in Westport, and after a few wet exits she was rolling, much to Papa’s admiration.

  After school let out, Papa packed the car for Colorado to teach kayaking at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, as he’d done in previous summers, and Mama was overjoyed when he invited her to join him. Before they left on June 16, 1966, they invited some friends to dinner and halfway through the meal they asked the friends to be witnesses and went and got married, just like that, by the justice of the peace in the Littleton, New Hampshire, courthouse. They then hit the road in Papa’s old rust-colored Pontiac station wagon loaded with kayaks to drive straight through to Colorado. At a gas stop near Buffalo, they called their parents.

  “I got married,” Mama told Grandma, the feeling of a high dive in her chest. Prill was speechless, possibly thinking of her own inability to run away with that long-ago Kentucky suitor. Mama hung up with a heavy face, but Papa tried to cheer her. “Just think how relieved your father is not to have to host and pay for an expensive wedding,” he joked. Then Papa called Skates, who asked if Sue was pregnant. When he said no, Skates was profuse in her disappointment at not being invited to the wedding of her only son, and not even getting a grandchild out of the deal. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “I’m just doing my own thing.” The big white wedding was another tradition he was happy to shed.

  “To hell with it,” Papa said as they hit the road. “This is our life now.”

  Spending the summer building kayaks and taking students down the Colorado and Green rivers, Papa once worried he had gotten Mama in over her head when they hit a section of rapids and she flipped over. He looked
back upriver from his own kayak, helpless to do anything as she floated upside down toward some rocks that would surely ruin the fiberglass hull and might knock her unconscious. But when he looked again, she was back upright—she had rolled and steered clear of the rocks.

  “Way to go!” he yelled, pumping his paddle in the air. There was one cool woman.

  Upon returning to Franconia in the fall, Papa noticed an old hunting lodge on the school property, surrounded by open fields and forest, and asked the school if they could fix it up and live there. It was run-down, the outside covered in black tar paper, but he set to work creating a new interior of white pine walls with a sleeping loft and built-in bookshelves that he would emulate when building the cabin in Maine.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Papa told Mama when she returned from class one day. He led her into the woods, where he’d built an A-frame with the obligatory quarter moon in the door.

  “Our very first outhouse.”

  “So romantic.” Mama laughed.

  Mama took Papa’s rock-climbing class and studied Russian. They hiked and skied under the protective gaze of the Old Man in the Mountain, a rock profile that once perched on a cliff near Franconia Notch, and read Dr. Zhivago to each other. Mama tried her hand at pottery and became a fixture in the pottery studio, making cups and bowls for the cabin. You could say it was an alternative education; her pottery class even led a revolt against the administration. It was the 1960s, after all, and her spirit was coming alive in the atmosphere of freedom and self-expression.