Singing Into the Abyss

At seven o'clock sharp, Cameron Mitchell, the MC for Club Helsinki's open mic, introduced the first act, a fellow about my age, who clambered up the steps and rooted himself onto the stage, firmly clasping his battered guitar, beaming with amber light. After some string twiddling, he belted out Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, exultant in his past acid-laced youth, pretty much on key, ending the song ecstatically, if inaccurately, "Remember what the doorman said, feed your head, feed your head".  

My son Geoff leaned over and whispered to me, "I hope they're all like that." He, his wife Kim, two of their boys, and Michael and were seated around a table a level up from the stage. Michael, my grandsons and I were eating; my son and Kim were not: they were there to perform. 

Every Tuesday, anyone can sign up for open mic starting at six, but it's prudent to arrive by five or five-thirty, since the time slots generally fill up right away.  The music starts at seven and ends at eleven, with each performer playing two songs for a maximum of ten minutes.  Geoff and Kim had gotten there after the slots had been booked but were told they would probably be able to play, so they reserved a table and we showed up a little later with their boys to have dinner and watch their debut. 

My son and daughter-in-law met at Music and Art High School in Manhattan 30 years ago, Geoff accepted for painting and Kim for singing.  Except for the essential college break-up, they have been together ever since. Now that their three sons have reached ages of, if not reason, then a certain measure of self-sufficiency, they have decided to resurrect their youthful talents. After practicing for several months and accumulating a cache of about 100 songs, they were eager to perform publicly. This was their first gig. 

Hudson is not only a foodie, art, and antique town, it's also a place for good music.  Fine local musicians and singers show up regularly along Warren, Hudson's main street, to perform in restaurants, book stores, farmer's markets, and even street-facing apartments, where agreeable residents open up their place to the public so their friends can have an audience.

Club Helsinki, however, is the town's best-established venue for rock, blues, and alternative music.  A block over from Warren on Columbia Street, it serves good Southern comfort food and hosts important musicians, gifted professionals just starting out, and, once a week, the open mic hopefuls. The owners moved the club to Hudson a few years ago after entertaining people down the road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts for 15 years.  They bought one of Hudson's old gorgeous brick industrial buildings and carved out three beautiful rooms: an event space upstairs and on the first floor the restaurant and night club, which can be closed off from each other or opened up and connected by a graceful dark wood carousel of a bar riding between them.  The club itself has three levels of dining tables circling half the stage and a wholly professional sound and lighting system, which enhances all its musicians – from the famous to the anxious and the brave during open mic.

Cameron, who is not only the evening's MC but also a co-owner of Helsinki, is assisted each week by C. Ryder Cooley, who wanders the stage between acts, fixing wiring, adjusting mics, and making the newbie musicians more at ease. Strapped to her back is a stuffed bighorn sheep's head named Hazel, who stares bleak-eyed at the audience while Ryder does her various tasks. At first sight, I dismissed Cooley as deeply pretentious, ("Oh, god. A local girl being cute with a dead animal.") As the evening wore on, however, Hazel evolved into an eccentric but effective punctuation point for Ryder's own impressive musical gifts. Over the course of the evening she strolled in every once in a while to sing and produce strange and beautiful songs on the accordion, the ukulele, and the saw.  (I Googled her afterward and saw that when she's not helping nervous musical newbies on Tuesday night, Cooley is a performance artist as well as a song writer and talented player of weird instruments.)

And she wasn't the only good performer. Unfortunately, the acts following the White Rabbit singer were significantly more skillful and professional than his.   Geoff and Kim were told they would be playing around nine, and as the evening presented one good act after another, my son became increasingly anxious. Even though Geoff has played the guitar since he was seven he had never performed publicly, When he and Kim were finally called up to play, he later described his reaction to being on stage as holding a guitar for the first time. I thought they sounded fine, skillfully performing two covers from Wilco and the Grateful Dead.  I noticed Geoff screwing up his face a couple times at some tricky chords, but he made no major errors and Kim was relaxed and easy. She was having a good time.  When they got back to the table, Geoff was silent.  His stage fright had been unexpected and disturbing.  After they returned to their home in Queens, he wasn't able to look at this guitar for a few days.  Kim was undaunted, however, and Geoff realized he had to get back on the stage, so two weeks later they were back in Hudson for another attempt.

This time they arrived to sign up on time so that they were officially slotted in.  We reserved a table again for dinner.  That night after the opening act -- a bearded fellow playing David Bowie songs on a battered electric guitar -- Cameron read a text from Ryder, who was taking the week off in the North Woods, in which she complained that Hazel, lacking even a phantom tail, was unable to swish off the flies and there were no cats, but plenty of mice.

The musicians for the most part were not the same as those who performed two weeks before.  An exception was a young man from Brooklyn with a pleasing Eddie-Vetter-like voice who sang and played his own songs and was noticeably more relaxed this time, a good sign, I thought, for Geoff.  Again, as during the previous event, nearly all the performers were competent, skillful, and occasionally thrilling.

An appealing feature of open mic night is the on-and-off again appearance of local solid musicians (including Cameron on keyboard), who jump in to play throughout the night, collectively jamming as an improvised band or playing alone as soloists or as back ups to enrich the sound of other less experienced solitary musicians. 

Aaron, a young bass guitarist with excellent long hair, was particularly generous with his time and talent, deepening and strengthening the tunes for a number of homegrown guitarists, fiddlers, and singers.  One was Joan, who, with her r 

ound glasses, curly gray hair, and frumpy linen skirt, looked like everybody's third grade teacher. With Aaron unobtrusively backing her up in the shadows, she stood wide-footed behind her large acoustic guitar and forcefully strummed out and sang two original songs. I particularly liked the first, which involved trapping garden pests – mice, chipmunks, voles, moles, and woodchucks – taking them down the road and dumping them in the neighbor's yard.

Another excellent singer/musician regular, wrapped in dark clothes and so incredibly skinny that he looked like black lightning, introduced an original piece that he described as a love song.  Funny and haunting at the same time, it spoke for every love affair stuttering to its end with the refrain, "We're half way cross the river. Why shoot the horses now?"   

Our kids followed the lightning man. With the first few notes, I knew Geoff was relaxed and handling the guitar with his usual skill and competence.  He also has a genetic facility for picking out cord progressions and arrangements for even ordinary songs that resonate with the heart. That night Kim's sultry natural voice and physical ease played off against his focused attention, vibrantly revealing both the musical tension between them and the harmonious rhythm of their long affectionate marriage.  Another Wilco.  Another Grateful Dead. Applause.  One of the other musicians complimented them.  They were happy.  I was happy.

Certainly since the late fifties, American culture has danced, swayed, raved, and hopped on its music, and the musicians that come to open mic, performing spontaneously and unrewarded, exemplify the aching joy, anger, and grief in their home made songs that, for better or worse, underlie the currents of our nation's fantasies.

 "We wish we could play here every week," Kim said after we had gotten back to our barn. "We're going to work up some original songs," Geoff added, "for next time."  And when they're back, I'm bringing a crowd. 

Meating of My Minds

Dolores, another Salvation Army soup kitchen volunteer, who is even older than I am, hobbled in a couple of weeks ago and growled, "Who cooked last Thursday?"

"I did."  I confessed sheepishly.

"Well, two of my friends said it was awful.  They couldn't eat it."  Dolores' friends go to the local senior center, whose members we feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Dolores is, I guess, about eighty.  It's hard to tell because she tops her head with a bright yellow curly cap of hair, but she obviously lost the skill of walking fast and upright a long time ago. Nevertheless, she takes home all the aprons, washcloths, and towels every Tuesday and washes them.  She comes in the following week with the clean laundry and helps out, including washing big pots and pans.  Another SA hero.  I was justifiably rebuked. It was like losing a round of Chopped after being judged by an ancient glowering Anne Burrell with different but also odd hair.

Sometimes the meals for the seniors and our regular soup kitchen diners are different, but on that fateful day, both groups had gotten my horrible meatloaf.  The essence in these loaves comes from ground meat, donated by Walmart, that has been cast blushing-red by carbon monoxide, made E-coli-free by ammonia, and stuffed into five-pound tubes.   It doesn't cost the Army anything, and it's what we have.  That day I extracted the grim cow tissue from six tubes, mushed it together with two dozen eggs, four cups of bread crumbs, and handfuls of random seasonings found along the counter, squashed it into two long pans, which I shoved into our inadequate oven at 9:00 AM at 450 degrees. 

Unfortunately, our oven typically only manages to break the 400 degree barrier after a very, very long time, and, given that the 15 pounds of meat, bread, and eggs in each pain were compressed to the density of a dwarf star, even after two and half hours the meat was still raw. Ria, an awesome fellow volunteer, fired up two huge cauldrons and we threw the whole mess into them, frying it into a bacteria-free mush. We slapped half this beefy gruel into a serving tray for the duffers and the other half we used for our regular diners, piling blotchy gray slush onto humps of rice. It was not pretty.  It looked like the product of a chain saw massacre, a haunting reminder of the bad passage modern meat takes from life to death.  

I tried to be a vegetarian once.  It lasted three months; loneliness drove me back to meat.  While subsisting on nuts and berries, I realized that eating meat, and especially ungulates, is not only primal, it's celebratory – the hunters carrying the dead antelope dangling from a pole back to the tribe, which builds a huge fire and dances around the sizzling corpse.  The outliers, we vegetarians, are in the shadows gnawing on our roots alone. 

A recent example of this occurred over the weekend at my grandson's graduation party.  His uncle's wife, a wan and pretty woman, had been a vegetarian as long as I've know her, but until recently managed to eke out a meal at family events from any available carbs and dairy. This weekend I learned that she is now a gluten-sugar-free-vegan, so she brings her own food.  Late in the day I saw her in a dark corner, hunched over a plastic container balanced on her lap, scooping out tofu sausage and zucchini pasta, silently munching them down.  The rest of the tribe, including me, was cheerfully buzzing around the totem dining table, downing fried chicken nuggets, meatballs, and cheesy dips.  I felt sorry for her but also envious of her ability to sustain an eating system that was both healthy and humane.  

Nagged by this young woman's righteous example and by the memory of my meatloaf, when I got home I forced myself to watch slaughterhouse videos on YouTube.   In the first one, the initial few minutes were very tough; the cows were stunned, then finished off with some creepy device thrust through their heads, but the killing was quick.  The video is 30 minutes long, however, and after the initial shock of seeing a few cow murders and their subsequent terrible lurching along the gruesome assembly line, the ADD kicked in and I became distracted.  I focused on the workers, who were now gutting out the bellies, which, although gross, is a critical component of the process. Most were talking back and forth in Spanish and seemed to be cheerful, just like my imaginary hunters would be while cleaning out their antelope, dangling from its pole.

I decided to search on into YouTube's heart of darkness and found far worse examples of animal slaughter.  Most showed various creatures being brutalized in farm factories, but even organically raised animals were not spared, with one video showing several farm hands gutting a pig alive while it shrieked and screamed like a child and another a halal-slaughtered cow, still living while its throat was slit and its skull slowly crushed. Although most, if not all, of these videos were either a decade or more old or filmed in the rural backwater of some monochromatic foreign country, they were devastating. 

So to make myself feel better (because that's what certifiable liberals do), I watched and listened to Temple Grandin's soothing monotone while she gently directed cows and turkeys to their doom.   And I watched Larry Althier, a local butcher in Hartwick, NY killing with kindness.  I was comforted, perhaps hypocritically, by these videos and by a 2013 article in Modern Farmer quoting Grandin:  " non-humane handling’s no longer my biggest concern…[A] video of a farmer beating a pig with a gate rod isn’t any more representative of widespread practices than a fiery crash in one Mothers Against Drunk Driving video indicates that every driver on the road is hammered." 

Largely because of Grandin's influence and her changes in slaughter practice,  Burger King, Wendy's, and McDonalds have all claimed commitment to humane care of the animals they kill.  (Chipotle is top of the list of good guys.) 

Nevertheless, the unintended consequence of these reforms is that well-intentioned people who would ordinarily avoid fast-food might now feel it's ok to eat animals who have been kindly slaughtered but who still live out their short existences in penitentiaries, having done nothing to deserve this miserable life sentence.  Therefore, because I can, I spend lots of additional money on meat from the local farmer's market or in packages marked "grass fed" and "humanely raised".  So, of course, here's the next guilt-laden meat issue.  If you want to eat meat ethically, it costs big. Grazin, a diner here on Warren St, is owned by farmers whose menu lets you eat the remains only of grass-fed animals indulgently raised on their own or near by farms. A quarter pounder with nothing on it costs $8.50 and with cheese it's $10.50; a MacDonald quarter pounder with cheese is $3.70.  At Grazin a 10-oz burger will cost $19 with cheese; a Mickey D double quarter pounder with cheese is $6.79 (2 oz. less, but still…).

Now back to the Army kitchen.  We get a lot of really good food donations.  On a regular basis, local supermarkets and farms contribute fresh produce, baked goods, and diary products, often organic. And then there's the meat.  We can't expect the local farms where happy cows and pigs have only one bad day to donate an entire valuable dead animal, butchered and ready for our chest freezer.  Occasionally we get the odd package of meat from an entitled animal, but most of the time the meat donations are racks of ribs, big hams and turkeys, and, of course, the mysterious beef rolls – all presumably the remains of very, very miserable creatures, whose only happy day was their last one.

I checked out one of the beef rolls to see where the meat originally came from:  Tyson.   And if you want a major villain in this story, Tyson is Jaws. One of the world's largest processors and marketers of chicken, beef, and pork, as well as packaged snacks, it is not a good corporate person. It is not kind to its fellow creatures. Google Tyson and animal abuse.  You'll find links to both truly nasty stuff and corporate reassurances.  I suppose it's true that under significant pressure, Tyson is starting to reform their animal handling process, but they must be watched like a hawk.  

Death is not evil.  It just is.  The process on getting there is what counts. With the risk of stating the obvious, evil occurs when people take one aspect of a creature – flesh, boobs, skin color – and generalize it to suit their needs – eat, screw, hate.  We detach that one aspect from the whole individual and it allows us to inflict pain and even murder without feeling bad. And when this becomes institutionalized, the evil becomes more profound – penal executions, factory farmed meat, drones and air strike.  Couple this with corporate media that focuses and reports only on these flayed singularities in order to numb and distance the popular mind from any significant pain. and you have cooked up a very bad culture. To counter all this we have the distribution of unique experiences via social media -- YouTube, Twitter, FB --  that bear personal witness to such damaging effects on whole selves.  I'm counting on these Watchers and Recorders to impose grassroots pressure so that eventually what we kill and what we eat will occur in some natural harmonious balance. 

 

In the meantime, if we want to be perfect righteous Army volunteers, we should stop serving evil-empire meat to our indigent diners and start frying up tofu.  But that's not going to happen.  These are hungry people who like meat, and we have the privilege of serving it to them for free.  And when our ribs or ham or brisket are particularly good, the diners in our communal setting are lively and cheerful, almost celebratory.  And this makes those of us who have brought the dangled beasts to the table happy. 

Last Thursday, I cooked up a mean pulled pork for the seniors.  For the BBQ sauce I used canned chopped tomatoes and paste, phony maple syrup (but without corn fructose), red wine vinegar inexplicably imported from Italy, soy sauce, and a collection of random dried herbs.  I also added bacon. I considered that pig's fat and muscles and detached myself from her fate.  I'm looking forward to Dolores' review.  Anything's better than the meat loaf.

Can We Still Hang Foragers?

Forget grass fed cows and organic shiso. Spurn the local free-range ducks and non-GMO beets. Get out in the field with long gloves and haul in the nettles, pick up the purslane, chomp on burdock roots. Gnaw on salads grisly and deeply bitter with dandelion greens, tiny sour sorrel, and the evil garlic mustard. Smoke your road-kill squirrel on the Weber in nests of fallen oak leaves. And take a chance on that pretty mushroom popping up on a log after a dewy night. Foraging is the new farming! And it's easy. You just go out and pick stuff off the ground.  

And chances are that if you own some woods and an old apple orchard, you also have at least one forager creeping on to it when you aren't around or early in the morning when sane people are asleep. These are deceptive humans, often attractive, all smiley and natural when they emerge from the woods, innocently coming upon you walking up Your Own Path and asking, "Oh, are those your woods? I didn't know that." They are typically clean, earnest, full of good will. Often Democrats. Possibly even contributors to Bernie Sanders' campaign. Foragers have the purest of intentions. They even have a code! But don't be tricked! They are cunning Gollum-like creatures, sneaking onto your land to seek out Their Preciouses – mushrooms, berries, black walnuts, rooty treats -- which are actually, by law, Your Preciouses.  

One fateful day a couple of years ago, when we were still weekending, Dave, our friend and landlord, brought over some oyster mushrooms, which, he explained, were given to him by Brenda (not her real name for reasons that will emerge), a forager who lived near by and taught students at the local college how to steal food from others. Dave owns the barn we live in, the old migrant quarters next to it – now a woodshop and garage for his tractors -- and the land and house across the road. We had bought the other half of the property, which surrounds his barn, selling an adjoining parcel to him where he keeps his bees. Dave said that he had told Brenda she could forage on this property, but she had wandered beyond his up into our woods and found a stash of oyster mushrooms. She had given him "some" of hers and he gave us half of his, which in retrospect seemed to be have been about five pounds.

"God, how much did she get?"

"I don't know. It was a lot."

"That's so cool. I wonder if she'll teach me how to find them," I said naively.  

A few weeks later, I was in our back yard and saw a woman talking to Dave outside the old migrant quarters. I went over to say hello and was introduced to Brenda.  

"Oh. Hi. I've been hoping to meet you. I understand you found some oyster mushrooms [like a truck load] on our property."

"Oh, was that yours? I thought it was Dave's."  

"No, our land starts a few hundred feet west of the barn. Anyway, I'd love to learn more about this. Where did you find the mushrooms?"

Long, seemingly thoughtful, pause. "Oh, I don't remember…"

Alarm bells . She's a mushroom expert! Mushrooms show up in the same spot every year. She has the oyster mushroom location stored on her GPS! I squinted back. "Well, let me know when you want to forage on our property again."

Brenda flashed me an open-faced cheesy lying smile, "Sure." 

The path on our property that leads west of Dave's barn is lined each year with thick black raspberry bushes, which I pick for syrups and jam or I just freeze fresh in bags. Two weeks after I met Brenda, the berries ripened. I spotted them on Sunday, already shiny and black, right before we had to head back to the city. Back upstate the following weekend, steel bowl in hand, I trotted eagerly up the path and stopped at the first berry bush. It had been stripped, and the grass around the briar patch was tamped down. I walked up to the next one. Same horrifying denuded nubs. On and on up the path. No berries, just evidence of someone or something tromping around the ravished bushes. "The forager!" I growled.  

In my knee-jerk socialist days, I would quote Proudhon: "Property is theft." Now that I owned property, however, what ran through my berry-greedy brain as I walked from fruit ruin to ruin was a comradely affinity with the old English squires, righteous in their anger at poachers, fortunate in their ability to nab these thieves, rabbits dangling from their belts, and to string them up without any consequences. Viva la ancien regime!  

Once I learned from Dave that Brenda and a friend had been there earlier that week swimming in his pond, I needed no other proof. I sat down and wrote her what I believed was a reasonable and irate letter. She was renting a house near us and I drove by and stuffed it into her mailbox. Michael says I called her a "thief". I don't remember that, although in hindsight, I think that that I was one rant away from cutting and pasting the words from tabloid headlines. I might have gone a little overboard.

I added my phone number to the letter, and a couple days later I heard Brenda on my voice mail insisting on her innocence and suggesting that a bear might have eaten the berries. "Ha!" I said out loud and subsequently to all my friends and a few strangers, "A bear does not gently pluck single berries off a bush and carefully tread around it."  

I returned Brenda's call but only got her voice mail. I left a message, but she never returned it. She did call Dave, however, and argued her case to him because he's far cuter than I am, saying that she would never have picked my raspberries and always obeyed the forager code. "We only take a handful of anything we pick," she piously told him (forgetting, I guess, the 15-pound oyster mushroom haul she had pulled out of my woods).

To my relief, Brenda moved out of our neighborhood in the fall, and I figured that was the end of her. I relaxed my vigil. The following raspberry season was both bear- and forager-free, and I bagged about three gallons of them.  

Then, last spring, I found a morel. I had long suspected that these yummy mushrooms lurk beneath the old apple trees that spider among the thorny webs of multiflora rose and nasty honeysuckle, which coat most of our acres. Morels might be the safest wild mushrooms to forage. With their blonde spongy bee hive hairdos, they seem to have few toxic twins, and even those apparently don't kill you.

So last year, I Googled around and discovered a great site called morelhunters.com. I learned that they hit our area around mid-May. It was then too late in the month, but I decided to check anyway under the dying trees of the old orchard.  There, I discovered a wide well worn path skirting through masses of brush from apple tree to apple tree. Too wide and well trodden even for morel-loving bear. Foragers! Grrr.

I followed the path, poking about, until, under a battered old trunk, I found one soggy and forlorn morel. I brought it home in triumph, set it on a plate, and a slug crawled out of it. The mushroom lay there for a couple weeks, getting creepier every day until I finally tossed it out. But it was an inspiring event, and I was intent on getting started early this year.

Morels emerge when the soil temperature reaches 50 degrees, but this winter was so cold and the spring so dry that I failed to spot any when I started checking the trees in early May. I did, however, spot Brenda. That same week, sitting on the swing and reading my Kindle in the back yard, I saw a car drive up and a woman and her dog get out, walking up the path toward the top of our hill where our apple orchard lies. She didn't look over and didn’t see me. I headed over to the base of the path, silently (and I hope with a Squire-like menace) watching her peer about in the grass, her cute muttish hound pouncing around beside her. He started to trot toward me. She looked up and slowly followed him down until she was within stringing-up distance.

"Hi," she said, "I'm Brenda," and held out her hand.

"I know. I'm Carol." I shook her hand as if she wasn't in any danger, "I met you a couple years ago. We had an altercation."

Not missing a beat, she responded, "Oh, you know, I never took those raspberries."  

"Well…"  

She glanced back up toward the hill, "I've been looking for nettles." Right. "Dave said I could check for them on his property."

"Well, actually, you were on our property."

"Oh, really? I didn't know that. I thought it was Dave's property." She added carelessly, "I didn't see anyone around." 

"Our car is in the garage. We're up here full time now."  

"Oh, well, I thought it was Dave's property." She repeated.  

"No." I waved at a flagged stake a short distance up the path behind us. "That marks the end of Dave's land and the beginning of ours." She had been wandering about 50 feet beyond the stake.  I was too gracious to mention that we had pointed this out two years before.

"Oh, that's good to know…" Pause, then awkwardly. "So, I was looking for nettles. I'm really a mushroom expert, but I'm trying to learn about other things." Nettles are trash plants, growing on every available patch of earth throughout the Northeast. So what a coincidence that an expert fungi poacher would seek the ubiquitous nettle in mid-May right by the thief-worn path where I had found my slug-infested morel. And why wasn't she wearing gloves? Nettles sting.  

But it was a beautiful day, she was earnest and friendly, and her dog was adorable. "Look. If you want to forage on our land, just call me. I'd really like to follow you around and learn about nettles..and other things."  

"Sure." Same open-faced deceptive smile, but I had grown bored with revenge.

We exchanged phone numbers, just like new BFFs would do, and she gaily got back into her car with her bouncy cute dog and took off. I guess she hadn't been all that excited about the nettles. And she missed the wild strawberries.  I hope she calls.