24 ~ Summertime…

“…and the living is easy.”

 First, thanks much for your responses (some by email, others in the Comments section) to the invitation to ponder your list of 3-5 essentials you would buy on a major grocery shopping trip, to stock your larder.  Please keep the ideas coming.

Some brief notes from a slice of this good life.  It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m in just in from my favorite ritual of the summer, and perhaps my favorite small ritual of all the year: going out barefoot in early morning, dew on my feet and birdsong in my ears, to pick raspberries onto a bowl of cereal (in this case, homemade granola from the Amish farmer near Viroqua who sold me some strawberries last month, Gideon Zook; now there’s a name for the ages). And better still, picking them into a bowl made by my daughter, and with cream from three cows I know up the road. The ritual seems to capture and compress the best of life into this simple act. It is one of the things that keeps me sane.

Young barn swallows in a nest near my bedroom window have fledged, and the last few mornings three killdeers – probably mom & pop and their young ‘un – have been visiting to inspect the lawn, in their pert, ever-alert manner. Hard to feel anything but good while watching killdeers.

 And the fish are jumpin’…  On Saturday evening, on the way home from visiting my friends Tod and Lynnette (six feet apart outside their beautifully converted schoolhouse-to-home, under massive, grandmotherly burr oaks), on a whim I stopped at a small bridge over a stream that held promise – or at least temptation – of trout.  One direction from the bridge led through open, grassy terrain upstream (the best direction to fish, since you approach the easily spooked trout from behind, as they face into the current), the other downstream, through a tangled, thickety patch of woods.  Upstream was much more appealing, and so I went downstream.  A key I’ve learned to trout fishing is not only to think like a trout, to find them, but like other trout fisherman, to avoid them.

After bush-whacking through the downstream jungle for a hundred yards or so, I came upon a more open area of bank, and started to fish.  On one of the first casts with a favorite fly for mid and late summer, an imitation grasshopper, a foot long brown trout leapt from the water to take it.  Its silvery flash into the air (brown trout in summer are more silver than brown), in the sublime evening light, is an image now etched in my memory.

After some gentle tug-of-war, I eased it to the net, gave it thanks for feeding me in this circle of life, and my assurances that I would remember it, and put it in my creel. 

Just three casts later to the same stretch of stream, with the waterlogged hopper now a bit below the surface, I felt a much more substantial pull on the line. Another trout on, and this one big brother. 

Now, I was using a tenkara rig, a type of fly fishing gear traditional to Japan (and increasingly popular in the US).  It’s just a long, limber rod, with a similar length of line tied directly to the end.  That’s it - no reel or other mechanics; think of a Japanese Huck Finn with a cane pole.  It’s beautifully simple, but options are limited when you hook a large trout, and it flees on its power run: you have no more line to give, and can’t apply a drag to slow him down, to keep the line from breaking.  You have just your wits, and the flexibility of the rod.

This time I also had Hemingway.  While I did my best to keep our battle within the breaking limit of the line, even following the trout as it fled upstream, like an energetic dog that walks you on a leash, I channeled the Old Man (and the Sea), talking to myself and the trout.  

“What would the great DiMaggio do?”  

“Fish, please do not my break my back and my heart before I break you.”

The Old Man and the stars were with me, and I soon brought this second, much heftier brown trout to my net, a hump-backed, hook-jawed male of 15 inches - the largest trout I have yet caught on fly gear.  I called it a day and went home, leaving most of this stretch of stream unfished. It was time for gratitude, not greed.

From the first fish of 12 inches to this 15 incher, the trout had doubled in weight, from a half pound to a pound.  Last month month my friend Tony landed a huge 18 inch brown with his spinning gear.  By adding just another three inches, that fish had doubled in weight again, to two pounds - nearly all of it streamlined muscle. Trout are a breathtaking combination of beauty, and power.

Back home, I filleted the two trout, revealing beautiful, wild flesh of a deep orange, like salmon.  My hens love protein, and relished picking the rest of the meat from the bones (maybe I should charge more for their eggs - how many hens are raised on wild trout??).  The next day, Sunday evening, my new housemate Jeff and I had a fantastic, home-grown, wing-it summer meal. 

I retrieved a fresh egg from the coop (preloaded with a taste of trout!), dipped the trout fillets in egg, then flour, and sautéed them in butter.  I’d been making sauerkraut that afternoon with the first cabbages from the garden, and had set some of the shredded fresh cabbage aside. Stirring into it some rice vinegar and cows-I-know sour cream (the stuff is like room temperature ice cream), we had fresh cole slaw. Other offerings from the summer garden rounded out the menu - pan fried yellow squash and boiled beets with butter and salt & pepper.

photo by Jeff

For dessert, I stirred a spoonful of this year’s maple syrup into more of the sour cream, and poured it over freshly picked blackcaps and raspberries. 

It was a good couple of days.  Here’s hoping you, too, are finding beauty and goodness in this challenging time.  The beauty is still here.