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mildly-allegic to So-Called
Saturday, December 1 2018
After Saturday morning coffee, Gretchen put on her blaze-orange VEGAN hat dressed up the dogs in hot-pink neck warmers (made from knitted caps) so they could take a walk in the forest in hunting season. Meanwhile, I put on my blaze-orange NAMBLA hat, gloves, scarf, headphones, and light jacket and headed off with my battery-powered chainsaw and backpack to my ongoing oak salvaging operation about a hundred feet below where the Stick Trail fords the Chamomile. There I bucked up nearly all that remains of the one large fallen tree left to salvage. The pieces near the base were massive, about 13 inches in diameter and cut into pieces 22-24 inches long (short enough to fit in our large firebox). These weighed on the order of 60-90 pounds each, meaning I couldn't carry one very far in my arms and couldn't load more than two at a time onto my backpack. Once I'd done this morning's initial cutting, I could concentrate entirely on packing the pieces out. Today I worked more continuously than usual, and packed out ten of those heavy pieces in five backpack loads. As the light began to fade, I made an additional foray up the Farm Road with the chainsaw and the hand truck and salvaged another big load comprised of small pieces of white ash and white pine. The goal in all these big weekend firewood salvaging operations is to take advantage of the rare hours when it is daylight and I am not working to maintain a steady influx of salvaged firewood so that I can continue to build up the immediately-burnable firewood stash before the onset of the really cold (and dark) part of winter. I've already collected enough wood to last through a year and a half of typical firewood consumption, though a fair amount of it is too damp to burn, so I've also been trying to maintain the big 0.2 cord "dry pile" in the living room.
This evening Gretchen and I attended an intimate dinner party in one of the hamlets west of Woodstock hosted by an internationally renown yoga instructor and David, her husband (or is he just her partner?). The other couple in attendance was the woman who owns the bookstore Gretchen works at and her husband. Our host is vegan, so of course the dinner would be vegan. Gretchen and I arrived first, and we spent some time drinking wine and eating crackers with some spreadable "cheese" Gretchen had made. We also met the three cats: Stripey Boy (a big grey tabby), So-Called (a smallish cat with Siamese black-and-cream markings) and a globular cat who resembled an orca and whose name I don't remember. Amazingly, though they looked nothing like each other, Stripey Boy and So-Called had both been from the same litter of a calico rescued at the last minute from euthanasia at a shelter.
When the other couple arrived, we all sat down for dinner, and our host gave a long Hindu benediction over the food, which (amusingly) sounded to me like exposition for our benefit so we would know what we were about to eat. Gretchen almost had to laugh when she saw how incompatible the food was with what she knew my food preferences to be. It was a collection of all my least-favorite vegetables: cubed beets, sweet potatoes, cooked carrots, and mashed potatoes (my least-favorite manifestation of potato). The only saving grace was some hen of the woods mushrooms that David had foraged in the nearby forests. They were all arranged in discrete piles on the plate, sort of the way food in the 1950s was served. It all looked very meat-and-potatoes, but completely vegan. Well, I wasn't going to be the person at the table who complained about what was set in front of me. The truth is that I can bring myself to eat just about anything (even, as a vegan, meat), though I still cannot bring myself to eat an egg. So I started with the beets, the least-appealing thing on my plate, and worked my way towards things I liked better. I think a big part of my problem with beets, sweet potatoes, and cooked carrots are that they have misplaced sweetness about them that troubles me (and has always troubled me). I had less of a problem with the mashed potatoes, into which I mixed bits of mushroom. There was also some cranberry sauce, which made sense in this almost Thanksgivingesque meal, so I ate that last. My plate was clean, and I moved on to a nice little salad that included cubes of tempeh. The flavors were all a little weird given my mouth's expectations, but that's probably just an artifact of how familiar I've become to both Gretchen's cooking and the food at the Garden Café (the only other place where I would eat anything similar to this stuff). As for Gretchen, she actually likes sweet potatoes, beets, cooked carrots, and mashed potatoes. It was the foraged mushroom that freaked her out, though she did what I had done and made herself eat it anyway (despite it being, for the most part, "too fungal"). Later we were served a slice of pumpkin pie with a scoop of some sort of vegan icecream.
Dinner conversation featured a lot of talk about a young pianist whom our host knows (and who moved to the neighborhood so she could be within walking distance of the host's house). From there we our conversation moved on to the subject of Matthew Scully, George W. Bush's chief speechwriter. It turns out Scully, though a conservative evangelical Christian, is big supporter of animal rights. He even wrote the book Dominion, laying out the case for mercy upon the animal kingdom. Interested in this book, our host had reached out to Scully and become friends with him, even having dinner with him at his house in Washington, DC. (During that dinner, he'd actually had to take a call from the president; this was just before the Second Gulf War.) What struck our host is how compartmentalized Scully was in his animal activism. On the one hand, he clearly understood the issues related to animal welfare. But on the other, he worked for George W. Bush, whose administration was full of superpredators like Dick Cheney. And then, after working for Bush, Scully got a job working for Sarah Palin of all people. I don't need to elaborate on the disconnect between empathy for animals and anything that ever passed through the feeble mind of Sarah Palin.
Later we discussed whether non-fiction novelists could be trusted to write credibly about subjects they were only exploring for the purpose of writing a particular book. At issue was Michæl Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind, all about experimenting with psychotropic drugs. David was pretty sure he didn't want to read the book, given how into eating meat Pollan had been in The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Later our host gave us a tour of most of the house, including a library (it has a system for checking out books) and the basement (whose floor was covered with a shiny resin-like material that resembled the kind used to make bowling balls). In the basement, our host showed us a sit-down ironing machine that processed clothes through a roller and then fan-folded them into neat little piles. The rest of the house has a tasteful Victorian quality, manifesting as pictures with ornate frames and plushly-upholstered furniture, much of it from an antique store in Saugerties.
Near the end of the evening, after we'd drunk some locally-salvaged mugwort tea, Gretchen had a not-especially-contentious argument with David on the subject of the utility of unions. David, you see, had grown up in the Vietnam era and had bad memories of union-enabled laziness at factories in Michigan. Gretchen, of course, was once a union organizer in Wisconsin and sees unions as a foundational part of the American middle class. For some reason people were standing around having this discussion, but I'd been doing backbreaking work all afternoon and needed to sit down. So I sat on one of the parlor's plush Victorian chairs and stroked So-Called when she climbed into my lap. At some point I must've rubbed my eye, and it began to itch. Evidently I was allergic (but only mildly so) to So-Called's fur, which was about the softest fur I'd ever touched.
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