L.A. Lost and Found:
Around the San Gabriels

"Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town." – John Fante, from Ask the Dust











If you park yourself in Pasadena, you have to be ready to get to know the freeways. Curls of concrete overhead, underground, tunnels, two-lanes, expressways, and dead stops at finely blind curves. These are the real mountain of L.A., let's not kid around. Out to the west from here, finally, up over the Santa Monicas, you can descend onto the luxury of water, those long beaches right at Malibu, where everything comes together: the traffic, the bad cliffs, the water, and they all crash at once at highway 1 ... that too is California. East, we just rolled up to Eaton Canyon Falls, a fun walk right in Pasadena.

Here is where the heat collects, down in lowland wash and palm arroyos, a bit like walking through wooded desert, where plants and cactuses shaped like twelve foot pods of asparagus shoot up in such random slots along the old river that you'd swear they had to have been...planted there. Slow climb up, many walkers, most unprepared, over gravel and offshoot trails, looking up, always, to the top of the San Gabriels and fixing that iconic image that comes to mind of California: the rugged ridges and

dried out landscape, and those enormous terra cotta houses that seem to find footholds on every last available inch of earth. We rise to the level of a shorter ridge of a foothill located across the skeleton of a river and see sitting there like nothing out of the ordinary a glossy blue pool, much like a jewel, precariously set onto the edge of a short cliff that is crumbling. On one hand it makes you jealous as hell; to be able to walk out the back patio into seventy degrees, a hot and dry kind of dusty heat, and to hop into your jewel is second to none. What man woman or child hasn't thought of days flying past from the perch of the steps of such a pool, agave drink in palm, and asking for the rest of the world to take a hike? On the other hand, of course, the house could fold tomorrow and find itself sliding down the cliff as a rain no tighter than a drizzle dislodges layer by layer of the crust that house is sitting on.

Well, we move on up the narrowing canyon where indeed there is real water, not the kind imagined. A narrow but clean looking creek that is cool and beautiful and provides a hundred little crossings by stationed rocks and limbs for the hiker. To either side of us are remnants of old mining projects, no doubt this as good a place as any to rush for gold or any other material considered worthwhile in the old days. An old defunct bridge above us, steep cliffsides, greening some the deeper in, rise up and we feel like we're right inside one of those old western movies, waiting for danger at the next turn of the canyon, this little creek at our heels, providing some comfort that things are fine and peaceful. Boulders start to pile up tall as a man. The crossings more frequent until a bend leads to a hollow, dark and noisy, lots of kids sitting and passing drinks and cigarettes, Eaton Falls dropping down hard and straight but picturesque. Not a bug to be had. Little salamanders, the precise colors of the washed out beiges of the landscape, scoot silently up the bald face of rocks as if it were nothing at all. From inside here, all that is down there – those other mountains of freeways – fade and we know this is the pretty town.

L.A. Lost and Found:A Lay of the Land

"One night I was sitting on the bed of my hotel room in Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or got out..." John Fante, from Ask the Dust













A semi-first go around in Los Angeles is, I am gathering, a little different than expected, even for the expecting type. Years ago we had taken a road trip from the deep spring of the midwest down into Huntington Beach, down on the southern edges of things, and we conveniently avoided virtually all of the various highway mousetraps and merely landed on that beach, stayed in a hotel across the street, and watched from our room windows the ocean a block away and a van patrol the parking lot for unlocked bikes. Other than movies and the occasional glance of Jack Nicholson at front court seats for Lakers game, let's face, I would say, that was it. Now we are hunkered down good in

Pasadena, with the big bald green San Gabriels in the background, nice pockets of uplifting yellow and bread colored architecture all around us, and then the little pockets of cluttered misfit neighborhoods. As a new driver to the city all of this palette of palm trees, terra cotta, dry mountain,

and not so far off sea, is a little like random slideshow of color and confusion -- one moment you are driving alongside a Bentley, it seems, the next, a young girl in an old motorcycle is cruising up through the cracks of traffic spinning through red lights. Shops of barbed wire; shops of dog-petting cafes and jewelry that might set back a rich man for the next twenty years. L.A., I am seeing now, isn't trip necessarily of pure and immediate immersion, but one of necessary retrospection, where that

photo album inside the mind reveals itself slowly in the days when you return to the land-lock, and what seemed a mass confusion turns to a yearning again for those days of visual excitement and the reek of prospective danger down the next road to come. All in all, give me one of those fine stoccato pads that line the dusty ridges of the San Gabriels, with a turquoise pool and an arcade courtyard set up for dining nightly against the California sun shine...just don't make me drive the cross town to a Dodger game again for awhile, bumper to bumper, and let there be no doubt, the folks commandeering those BMW's tweaked, at the very minimal, by a series of six expressos throughout this particular day and a patience level that has to resemble the mind power of the hummingbird we saw nip at the foliage along Eaton Canyon Creek just hours before.

"Coldly the remote mountains are clean.
Dusk comes. The long river races by.
You undo the rope, are already gone.
I stand for a long time, looking."
      – Wang Wei, from "Seeing Zu Off at Qizhou








From this very spot on lake terrace
we had years ago looked over the same open water.
We had seen the water-skiers in a line of three
pull back onto their ropes in unison
calling out their commands in practice
for the summer's coming shows
over the gurgling roar of the boat.
The rooftop was precisely the same.
White modern lights and walking tiles.
A sky that resembled the clean color of the lake.
Today I feel older by twenty years
but it has only been five.
Time somedays has wings.
I stand here looking out and say a goodbye.
It flies off. I will barely remember.

What I'd Serve in Spain
A-Z

"One time it is a nibble of Wisconsin Cheddar as big as a pinhead. She likes it. Another time it is a microscopic smear of Camembert or Liederkranz. She pulls away, shocked by its fine odor of putrescence, too decadent for simplicity."  – MFK Fisher, from "J is for Juvenile dining"











A. All Saint's Day (Did de Todos los Santos)

From our veritably land-locked stout northern state of Wisconsin, what do we know of All Saint's Day in Spain? We have a hard enough time, it seems to me, spending enough time rallying around a table long enough to take our nibble at the Wisconsin Cheddar, as Fisher points to above. There aren't all that many references to Wisconsin in Fisher's great canon of food dashes and sometimes trenchant articles, but the reference here does point to a slight problem with older perceptions of Wisconsin food, for example, pre-foodie revolution: we've got dairy, we've got beef, and we've got corn and bratwurst. It is all very fine fare – who of us could see living without the luxury of a thousand award-winning cheddars? We are spoiled in not only choice, but presumably quality, in which all it takes is a brief picking session down any large grocery store to seek out the generic stuff, and we will be able to tell the difference between the five dollar and twelve dollar in a very quick nibble. I find it safe to say, as I read Fisher with one eye and of Spanish cuisine on the other, that to look be a Wisconsinite foodie is by definition to also "look out onto the rest of the world in wonder," in order to see both parallels and certainly differences. As we get closer to our own trip to Spain, this looking abroad while looking within, seems a good strategy to simultaneously fantasize and appreciate where necessary. I already look forward to the moment when we are standing inside a Spanish restaurant, nibbling on tapas, sipping a zuritos, watching the deep golden sun wash over the calloused frontages of buildings in along the Plaza Mayor, I will be asking myself a simple yet most complicated question: what from here would I serve in my transplanted Spanish eatery back home?

Jeff Koehler, in his colorful and familialy researched Spain: Recipes and Traditions from the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucia, makes some of those parallels of geography mentioned above without really knowing it. Spanish food, he regularly suggests, is a product of the modern interplay between rural agricultural traditions and a similarly great migration to the urban centers, so similar as that trend in the US, and no doubt virtually everywhere else in the world. Despite, he says, such a migration, there has been some strong cultural backlash and even though the farming population can now be counted in a single digit where once in the forty percentile, it is not desirable or possible to rid themselves with a food culture that takes its inspiration from small farms, the sea, and the verdant hills. All Saints Day takes place on the first of November. It celebrates Catholic traditions by visiting cemeteries "with chrysanthemums, scrubbing marble headstones, replanting flowers, and tidying up graves. But, like all traditions here, the day is also celebrated with specific foods."

Keohler goes on to show us importance of chestnuts to the tradition, and their attendant "street corner shacks, roasted over squat, charcoal-burning braziers. Scooped still warm into rolled paper cones, they are sold by the half dozen. The blackened shells are peeled away to reveal the soft, nutty-tasting flesh." Who cannot picture these likely family-driven corner shacks, stirring up small fires, the nutty smoke wafting up and around the small roof tops, reminding all of their childhoods? But my own favorite is the reference to the quince paste, quince a fruit that also begins to ripen at this time of year. Koehler's wife's grandmother had been preparing the "stunning combination paired with some wedges of aged Manchego cheese or smoky Basque Idiazabal cheese," for a long time. The ingredients list is a short one, but likely much like the favorite strawberry preserve of the midwest states, a potent sweet and sour, built in this case by nothing more than lemon, two pounds quince, and two cups of sugar. There is a picture of the quince paste laced over the Manchego cheese on the opposite page. If the reader didn't know better, they might claim this was a fine pic from a small cheesery, quartered slices of a good Wisconsin Gouda, strawberry preserve spooned down thick. It could be any day of the year.

A Thousand Letters to the Moon

"A poet stands between heaven and earth
and watches the dark mystery.
To nourish myself I read the classics.
I sigh as the four seasons spin by
and the swarm of living things kindles many thoughts."
–Lu Ji, from The Art of Writing








1.

On a lowly sunday morning the fog stills to a quiet over the slate bay. Maybe there is a pair of pelicans left that, without my looking, I know that they are quietly paddling across the surface using their great yellow nets of beaks for the panfish. I am no longer drawn to moon or its attendant darknesses. Mystery is not of the darkness as so many shriveled voices have suggested; once past, it is the brightness of stars, of the theories of the origins, its ever expansion in galactic speeds, those crystals, how they meet upon the particulate and tumble down to register all of the colors, that is mystery to me. Two face, of course, to the moon, then. Of youth, the dark blotches poets cry of. That is the story of our unconscious. What lies below the surface of things? The fish which surfaces its silver abdomen from the depths just found out as he squirms inside the pelicans gullet. Have you seen a fish slap across the surface, mid-day, electric, under sun's gleam, untethered, free, juxtaposed against the depths. No need for the moon bottom shores. I had paddled through the flooding marsh. Just outside the reach of the forest border the main channel was full and released, as though a giant rake from above had loosened its surface and left furrows of silver and steel glistening, wave upon wave, and there I could see a sort of dance, a swimming, from fish eyes, looking up, wild, underneath nothing.

Shi or Studies in Chinese
Poetry for Today

"Clear moon pours bright light at night
and crickets sing in the eastern wall.
The Big Dipper's jade handle points to midwinter,
all the star's incredibly clear."
  – from Nineteen Ancient Poems









At city edge ancient glacial drumlins.
Late spring ponds full as steel ladles.
Outside the forest grounds highways in all directions
drone on out of sight like hidden crickets.

Shi and I always walk away from the city
and into the pages of marshland where geese
fly in and out of the linen marsh reeds
steady as pen lines margin to margin.


We find two pecking away at the gravel trails for seeds.
One makes eye contact and stops, spreads its wings
as if in fine pageantry; her black neck bobs
as the silhouette of a slender wrist behind a silk screen.

"Unbearable to watch these endless silk threads rain through the sky...Leisurely flowers fall to the green mossy earth." – Wang Wei, "A Young Lady's Spring Thoughts"











At night along the garden paths the rain has retreated.
It is a small war won today by the elegant crabapple.
How long they all waited inside the pulsing buds.
The light in the sky drifts off and fades over the lake.
The strongest perfume in the room there is little doubt.
As we stoop to smell we wish the rain away for May.  

Touching the Earth

"To practice beginning anew is to bathe in the water of compassion. Compassion gives us a chance to return to the joy of being alive" – Thich Nath Hanh, from Touching the Earth








I

There are many practices available to us to exercise spirituality, but do we take advantage of them? We perceive that there used to be a day in our not too distant past that people regularly exercised in prayer. We could easily conceive of a farmer, for example, who, directly connected to the land in a caring relationship, prayer for rain, sunshine and growth for harvest, would be a natural motion of mind and belief. Continue to move back through generations. With lives difficult, and phenomenon unexplained, we pause in our days to reflect and love the powers of this earth and, for some, the powers of something unseen. Why is it then that it is only in this particular generation that we no longer pray or pay heed to phenomenon, the earth, humility, our ancestors, what is possible, and what it is that we should avoid for the sake of decency. As we reel sometimes through the hours of the day in reaction to a scattering of loud voices and strange disparate images, we might come to see that now, more than ever, we all must cultivate some form of reverence, prayer, meditation, whatever you like, but that is something that is a daily reminder of gratitude and appreciation, at the very least. That there is any cultural pushback against these notions – that meditation or prayer, often seen as two sides of the same coin – is not a particularly heartening trend in our culture. If one man believes in a god, but another believes in the bio-spirituality of the earth, are either wrong, or should either be chastised or distrusted? In a time of spiritual limbo, it must be understood that it is those who might frown upon a spiritual exercise that are the very onlookers who need the most assistance in their lives, for they have lost fundamental tenets of any spirituality – tolerance, compassion, humility, reverence, and the list goes on. People of this generation must strong and willful. They must listen to the messages that they are receiving from within and realize that these messages, by definition, cannot be created merely from within in isolation; we are independent creatures, yes, but we are also product of our times, of our culture, of our education, and of our particular earth history. We are poised right now to cultivate those messages within and turn them into practices that release us towards the values listed above. For one person it is art; another it is traditional (genuine) prayer; for another it is meditation; and for another it is natural experiences.

In May we could consider the rain strings of crystal jewels.
A single raindrop that slides across the metal railing a lace.
Oak buds have bloomed along the riverside and I wonder
if there is a land so pure that jade blooms in every direction.

Such simple lines to create above. Prayer, poetry, reflection, art, whatever the case may be, takes only moments. We may feel lost inside any given time of day; we stay busy in order to avoid this, and then we look back to our hours and realize that perhaps nothing was particularly memorable. We sit down long enough to eat dinner and as we peak outside maybe there is a tree or river, a farm field, or a garden. We realize that this is the peace and decency that we have been waiting for, but we can't quite explain it. Why am I spending all of my time doing everything except for the very thing that provides me some connection or solace? It is upside down, convoluted. In a way, we are all still farmers, hunters, gatherers, but living at a time when none of these might be practiced. We live inside days filled with everything except what we are genetically. The way of spirituality, at any level, will have to do to some degree just as much renunciation of this 'opposite life.' When sitting at a desk inside an office which has no windows available to the outside world, consider visualizing the image of the natural world. Hold onto it and thank it. Write something down and make a promise that, after work, you will take a five minute walk among the trees. Don't just thank the trees, but thank yourself for having this message inside you already. It is there and always has been.

"If you like quietly in bed in the very early morning, in the half-light before time begins, and listen carefully, the language of crows is easy to understand. 'Here I am.' That's really all there is to say and we say it again and again." – Louise Jenkins, from "The Language of Crows"







Eagle Eye

What had been high marsh is now slowly marching waves of water through trees and over tin signs. Every floating cluster of spring limbs a refuge – an otter hunched up over little stand of bent cattails nibbling, five feet away from the kayak, a green stalk peppered with duckweed. One unrhythmic paddle stroke and a stick thin heron, blending against an overhanging willow, rises up and careens west against some unseen thrust of wind. Carp smack their way out of a new impoundment, lowering their dorsal fins flat against the surface then back in to swirl around the pool gauging the warmth of the sunlight. I flip both blades one more time for traction between trees that are usually above ground and display fishing lures caught in the side of their trunks like a dazzling brocade and look up to see the keeper of things – old eagle eye, poised like a brown garment, shaped like shield, motionless, except for a white head that rotates, bent forward a little bit, looking down at me, considering me as something likely sillier than nothing as upriver a pulse of the flood released over the spillway and soon here will be swimming in riches.

Odes to Monona

"The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine." – Whitman, from "On the Beach at Night"









Little White Roses

Father and child walk away from courts,
the sand and the concrete
wide open under the Yahara Park oaks,
where the small bands of canvasbacks sun,
glistening green heads
velvet and luminous as lit felt,
and find two jutting rocks to watch
the friendly blue day stay, finally, permanently,
no longer a temporary guest of April.

Shoes off, the clear shallow water
cool up over the white toes, cool over the ankles
cool up to the white knees,
have they seen each other over winter?
Doe the season set out a slumber
that does not awake until long days of May
turn like slow pages, white after white
the stories on the pages grow,
and along the side street houses
the tulips and daffodils grow, yellows
like sun flares, purple gentians
that lean in behind them, they on the rocks
listening to voices other than their cold own.

Bookmark these days on the rocky beach.
Bookmark the gently fingers
of sun across the front of the the neck,
out there, the fisherman, who are they
but neighbors of water,
neighbors of spring,
the fish they hook still cool and young
little white roses
by stems that grow up through
the ever shifting water columns.

On the Yahara Nature Center
A Sam Slater Mystery

"In idle moments, when there were no pressing matters to be dealt with, and when everybody seemed to be sleepy from the heat, she would sit under her acacia tree. It was a dusty place to sit, and the chickens would occasionally come and peck about her feet, but it was a place which seemed to encourage thought."  – Alexander McCall Smith, from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency








Chapter One

Some of the younger ones from the neighborhood, which was one of the oldest in Madison, WI, along the river that connected two lakes, would get away with calling him the old man even though, truth be told, he wasn't all that old, and that the gray hair no doubt gave that illusion and the way he carried himself, still solid and coordinated, but slow, also fed the illusion. There was more, though, about Mr. Slater that made him particularly successful in his little neighborhood 'projects,' as they were called – Sam was quite pleasant, perhaps even showing a strong sense of flightiness, and would found, as often as not, outside of his little neighborhood nature center, fiddling around in his garden, plucking weeds, or pulling whatever vegetable or herb planted in his back courtyard and bringing them inside for long session of cooking. In other words, it seemed much that Slater was a bachelor and retiree, married to the world around him, nose in a book, or hand on a fry pan. The nature center offered many things to many people and it wasn't treated so much as a business as drop-in education center, for Old Man Slater used to teach at the college level "many classes" but was becoming something of a hermit stuck inside the dark walls of academia.  He would bring what he knew back out into the light, open his doors to neighbors, friends, and take parents and their children on short hikes waxing as poetic as he could, without losing their respect, of course, the soulful beauty of incorporating nature back into their lives, "right there out in front of you!" In other words, Sam Slater was a Quixote, he knew it, and would spend his waking hours making sure to preserve that idea that innocence, once lost, is awfully hard to recover.

"Infinitesimal
star,
you seemed
forever
buried
in metal, hidden,
your diabolic
fire"    – Neruda, from "Ode to the Atom"






Ode to Fog


Where do you come from
my foolish friend,
taking over
at night, when no one is looking,
the rolling lips
of the coming green
of valley
and the poor buds
just now seeing outside
of the tips of their limbs?
I never see you coming.
I am sent happy
all day by the showers
of sunlight
that serenade the gentians
purple beautiful
earth snakes that rise
like cobras,
as do I and all the others,
and the river
now passes by in its velvets,
the robin
spins its eyes
to the passers by,
for it is spring, alive!
And yet like an army
of darkness you come,
such evil in the sky.
I wonder if love
is night,
where the wanderings
of the light
fade into the soil
where seeds only tingle
and agitate?
Only you would know
such things,
fog,
thief of stars,
thief of planets,
thief of our understandings
of the past,
for I see fog
too in distant mornings
for the farmers
of the worlds of the past.
May wind
will blow you away,
as the earth shifts
in its subtle
seed
of blazing darkness

Notes on Cocina Espanola 

"But just as it's impossible to talk of a single cocina espanola (Spanish Cuisine), it's impossible to talk about a single, nationwide cocido. Cocido can be defined only in regional terms, each with its distinct accent..."   – Spain: Recipes and Traditions from the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucua, by Jeff Koehler









With a much anticipated trip to Spain upcoming in a couple of months, it feels like it is time to turn attention back onto the wonderfully comprehensive cookbook Spain by Jeff Koehler. With lines that read like the following, from an introductory page dedicated to Tapas and Appetizers, it's hard to resist the visions of lively and bright restaurants as well as small kitchens that line along the avenues of Salamanca and Madrid, two cities we hope to visit: "In those bars, with a small glass of local, spritely white wine called Txakoli (or equally small glass of beer called zurito), you generally pay by the number of toothpicks on your plate at the end. In the 1980's and 1990's, these were miniature showcases for the culinary creativity of la nueva cocina vaca (New Basque Cooking), that led the wave of avant-garde Spanish culinary expression." Now, it is always a trick to take cooking inspiration from a country that you have not yet visited, but on the other hand what better way to get to know that country than to learn their cuisine alongside as many bits and pieces of their language as you can. And so, for starters, I tried a nice Catalan Flatbread with roasted red peppers last night as a kick-off and, as eating the final result, could most certainly see how this encounter with tapas could forge a new way of seeing happy hour! I looked at the picture first, and then quickly scanned the ingredients suggested, going off of the advice that more often than not a flatbread tapas will include ingredients found in the kitchen and has no real restrictions. I picked up some Naan bread, roasted red peppers, a thin zucchini and some olives and anchovies. I already had a tomato at home along with a secret ingredient that I decided to line over the top at the end.

We have a built-in stove top grill on our oven and so, for the first time in a long time, I fired that up to crisp the naan bread on both sides, took them out and sent a few strong drizzles of olive oil over one side and began to line the surface with semi-diced fire roasted red bell peppers, zucchini wheels, and some cubed tomatoes. I tossed some quartered olives over that and then anchovies relatively sparingly (a brilliant addition, but no need to overwhelm everything else with the potent saltiness). The flatbread looked colorful at this point, but also dry and I didn't trust that the olive oil was enough. I remembered that I had some ricotta cheese left over in the refrigerator and decided that I wouldn't likely go wrong with a few tossed clumps of white cheese for texture and creamy contrast. I broiled until brow over the top, but then baked to in order to tenderize the vegetables a bit more, took it out, cut each naan into quarters, and it was a surprisingly rich and even at times sweet (naan bread) flavor and texture. No doubt that the singing star here ended up a contrast between the zingy anchovies and olives versus the depth of the soaked red bell peppers, the ricotta adding a depth of variety, all in all a very nice companion to a zurito or two.