Isolation

 Sunday.

Changes for the weather ahead. I'm going camping today. Of course, the weather is about to change. If I am going to camp, it will rain...Say it again with me, IT WILL RAIN. I seriously am starting to think that if you could just send me to the drought-stricken areas around the globe and let me camp there, I can fix it for them.  

I am doing this outing alone.  We don't usually ever do that, but I have not done anything at all this year.  No vacations, weekend getaways, nothing, just a slave to the dump truck loads of dirt that my yard desperately needs broken cars and trees that need to come down and a few other things.  Donna got to go to Maine the week before, so it was her suggestion that I go since one of our brand-new cats broke down.  She was staying home to take very good care of him (we have gone through a lot of names for him) Leaf, Sorra, Tigger, Tarzan, but my favorite and I am fighting for it to stick is Roo.

After forgetting a chair, sneakers, and charcoal (an afterthought) I quickly ran home and resupplied. What would be cool to cook? Usually, steak is a nice and simple cooking solution. I would like to try out my Coleman dual-fuel stove. 

 There is no sun now. The clouds cover the sky like my list of things to do, in which search as much as you possibly can, you cannot find the end, the edge, the beginning, the terminus. 

Considering steak smothered in onions tonight. I guess I could have tried frozen or canned mushrooms. These are things we need to think about today for the road ahead. Can you take that can stuff and make a phenomenal meal with it? That is what it comes down to. Have you talked to any Midwest farmers lately?  There is a problem.

I love food podcasts that are more informational than entertainment. The more you know, right? Talking about cashews on the kitchen counter podcast. The work that goes into them I had no idea!

 Very soon, I will need to get a fire started so I can cook the steak. I feel stuck. I am not moving forward, and even relaxation is a task that I do not even know how to kick off. I wanted Samin Nosrat's book, Salt Fat Acid Heat with me tonight. But I forgot it. Oh well, I will glean elsewhere, I think. 

 Okay, so improvisation. I was home to pick up the things I forgot, plates, chairs, charcoal. I grabbed the canola oil from the camper, however, while making dinner back at the site I realized that the canola oil was nowhere to be found. I did not pack butter either! The steak had quite a nice fat margin on one side of it. No chef or Bushcraft knife either, but I did have one seriously mean Asian cleaver in my chef's toolbox. I removed the strip of fat and chopped it into 1-inch segments. I placed it into the cast iron skillet along with a piece of cooked bacon that I would be using as part of tomorrow's breakfast. Coated the pan enough to saute chopped cabbage and sliced red onion. Once cooked down, I found a soy sauce packet in the toolbox as well as a sesame oil packet. Both in, stirring in a little salt and pepper. This worked. It was done just in time to meet back up with the steak that I had cooked on the state park hibachi over dead fallen sticks and Kingsford briquettes. Somehow I also forgot a fork but you know me, I have enough chopsticks for about 12 place settings at any given time. This works too. The thing I like about chopsticks is that they double as tongs, which is excellent because they are multitaskers. I love them. Although I also carry real, not disposable chopsticks in the toolbox, the chopsticks I am using tonight are disposable. When I was done with them, into the fire they went. Cleans up in a jiffy! How can you not love that? I absolutely love contingency. 

This may sound twisted, but a worthy punishment for me when I was 11 to 12 years old was to forfeit the light bulbs from my room as well as my radio. Radio was my life, but I took the sentence like a man, not because I was formidable at enduring hardship, but because I thrived on contingency!  Not sure why other than we lived a pretty lean life back in those days.  I actually loved the challenge of finding ways to still have light and yes, even radio. Flashlights even back then were all around so that was easy, but the fact that I had one in my possession meant moving to my base of operation into the closet. Little light little space, perfect then, radio was another challenge. Radios in the 1970s could be small, but they cost money, and that was something we did not have. My radio was a 1962 Lafayette shortwave with an AM band. It was larger than a breadbox and was quite heavy as it was metal and glass and was full of glass vacuum tubes. 

In the summer of 1977, I got an Emerson AM FM cassette player recorder nonetheless, I was grounded, and I did not have these. I did have a crystal radio, which did not even look like a radio. It was a very primitive device consisting of a couple of circuits and a tiny Crystal that you would connect to an earphone and could barely hear AM radio stations.   Back then, they were the social media of the day and played top 40.  It required no electricity of any kind. All you needed to do was clip it to a ground source such as the old iron steam heat pipe that came up through the closet wall. The Battle Bridge if you will. 

There was some compromise on my part in doing this. When I had my regular radios, I reached across the night stratosphere, across the hills of Western Connecticut, and across nearly 400 miles of New York State. I plucked WKBW 1520 AM from Buffalo New York out of the sky. The crystal radio was far weaker. I would have to listen to the local Torrington station, WSNG, or WDRC in Hartford. But I had something and that was what counted. It was fascinating to me, I could almost be giddy about this! These were the days in which I first learned that stealth and suggested perceptions are powerful things. So when there is no butter, oil, cooking spray, or shortening,  I don't care. Somehow, somehow I will get this meal on the plate.

Monday, September 5th. What are all these strange years I am writing in this book? Did age occur to everyone in my family as it is for me?  I am for lack of a better term, not half the person I used to be physically.  All those years I wrote, "1970s, the 1980s", and even the messed up "90s" were all a cakewalk compared to the post-apocalyptic disaster of the now.  Yesterday, I was talking about expedient methods.  It is nice to see that I have not lost my edge. I opened my old Coleman stainless steel percolator to find that it was not clean this morning!  I heated up a little water in it, added soap, then cleaned it.  There were however sections of the funnel part that left me unsettled, especially since I was unsure what it was in the pot in the first place, having not used it in almost a year.  Employing old Army field expediency, I reached to the ground took a good pinch of sand off the ground, and put it in the pot under the wet paper towel I was cleaning with.  The grit instantly removes the offending marks with ease.  Rinse, and wash again, and we were good to go.  No one dies today. Really, why don't I keep a cup of sand by the kitchen sink?  

As I sit here, listening to the rain falling on the woods, and sipping coffee, there is another sound.  It is the Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts families packing up to embark on their miserable rainy journey down the interstate.  We all did it.  I did it back in the 80s and yes, gas was 89 cents a gallon and it was totally worth it.  I suspect at $3.84 a gallon it would still be worth it. 

I had a funny thought this morning.  It was that I had not allowed myself the alone time that I needed in life. I mean like this, sipping coffee, listening to the endless staccato of rain on the mountains. In 1986, in my recording studio days, I was alone.  Did I like it? I am so much like my father I would have to say. I loved to be alone, but then I would binge people later on. 

The spring of 1983. On Friday, April 15th, we drove up to East Canaan Connecticut.  It was the start of a new camping season.  I could not have been happier.  After all, I was 17.  Over the winter, I bought a Voyager Hi-Lo camper from the campground for $200.00.  I was going to be on my own all summer.  I worked at the campground during the season after the school year ended.  I had a great group of friends who also worked at the campground.  I had saved up money to buy a week's worth of food. I was going to stay at the campground for a beautiful warm spring week while on spring break from my wretched high school in the depressed, rusted, and morbid city of Waterbury, Connecticut.

On Saturday I helped my parents set up their new pop-up on their site I also helped all of their neighbors too. That is how I was. We were raking cubic yard after cubic yard of leaves it started pouring that day but I continued to rake and do my part because I knew when I was done I could go down the hill to my own little camper that was currently parked outside the campground corral and enjoy my space for the first time in my life. The campground was going to give me a site this week to park it on. Sometime around 6 PM, the hard rain was met by a cold front and the raindrops turned to snowflakes the size of silver dollars. All of my friends around my age packed themselves into my little camper. We made warm drinks on the stove ate snacks played music. We laughed and told stories about our winters. It was the promise of a great year. We lost power that night as the trees took down a lot of power lines. It was over a foot of snow on the ground at daybreak. 

All of the families left the campground Sunday, including mine. I was going to start my beautiful spring week up in East Canaan. But it wasn’t a nice spring week it was a barren, desolate, last guy left on the international space station sort of loneliness. I heard great new artists come out. It was the first time I ever heard of the band called U2. Sunday Bloody Sunday which was the same title as a John Lennon song about the same subject. I lived alone with my thoughts for a week and my radio me and my Writing. It was actually pretty amazing. I kept the camper warm with a pot of water on the stove burner not yet knowing how to run a furnace in a camper. I listened to Men at Work, Aldo Nova, and WPYX in Albany. I loved this week. It felt so good to be isolated.

I sometimes think a thru-hike of the AT, CDT, or PCT would be hard for me psychologically, but when I think of those past times in isolation, I realize that sort of alone time could be incredibly regenerating. Don't get me wrong, sharing is the best. When you create a fantastic meal, and there is a bunch of it, how much better is it to share with others? I think this is why I am drawn to Korean food. Their food is about sharing and celebrating life family and respect.