Making the Jerk

This started when I grew Habanero peppers without a clear purpose.  I liked the looks of them, knew they were hot, and figured they would fit right in with the serranos, poblanos, jalapenos, and those little red cherry peppers I grow.  They didn’t.

The jalapenos are mild enough these days to be used in most anything.  Serranos go great with tomatillos and onion for a Verde sauce, and poblanos can be used instead of bell peppers for kick.  All of them go well in chili.  They’re useful all around peppers.  Sort of like Zobrist for the Cubs.  You can play him almost anywhere.  But the Habaneros are a different story.

I’m not a good judge of peppers because I like hot food a lot and tolerate spicy heat well.  I knew the Habaneros were a problem when I had my family to the house for the annual McClure wiener roast and golf outing years ago.  The golfers used to come early and I’d make breakfast for them.  Usually omelets.  I used habaneros in a nephew’s omelet, one of the more adventurous nephews too.  He took one bite and looked at me as if I’d poisoned him.  They don’t travel well, the Habaneros.  You have to be careful how you use them.  Aside from some insanely hot Thai peppers I grow from time to time, they’re the hottest thing in the garden. 

Then I made a Christmas trip to Jamaica with my family and got hooked on Jamaican Jerk.  We were in Negril.  I began asking the locals where they went when they wanted great jerk chicken and the nearly unanimous choice was Bourbon Beach.  We made a pilgrimage there and found a no-name beat to hell shack on the beach with a sheet metal and palm frond roof, a single wall behind the kitchen, an open-air homemade bar and stools in the sand.   A pile of wood was on the beach next to the stove.  The kitchen, such as it was, was mostly a built up brick and concrete block fire pit with wire refrigerator shelves suspending halves of chicken above a wood fire.  On top of each chicken half was a brick.    Behind the bar a barrel of ice held cold bottles of beer.  The menu was jerk chicken, rice, and Red Stripe Beer. 

The only choice available was whether you wanted half a chicken or a quarter.  My son and I each had a half.  My wife and my son’s friend ordered a quarter.  Upon hearing the orders the young man behind the bar took the bricks off three chicken halves and placed two on tin plates.  The last half he placed on a board, and whacked it violently with a giant cleaver.  The two recently separated quarter pieces jumped up and settled back on the board.  He put the quarters on two more tin plates, added a spoon of rice to each, and ladled up four small bowls of jerk sauce from a stone crock by the fire.  I figured the sauce would have been baked on the chicken.  Not at this joint.  

As locals came to the bar and ordered up jerk chicken I noticed that the young man ladled the jerk sauce directly on their plate, covering the chicken and rice.  Evidently they’d learned to let the tourists control their own destiny spice wise.  My wife tentatively dipped her fork in the sauce and had a sample.  She went sparingly, dipping forkfuls of chicken lightly in the bowl of jerk sauce.  I dumped the bowl on my plate.  It was delicious.  I decided I had to figure out how to make it.

The deal with hot food is that pure heat means nothing.  Within the hotness there needs to be flavor, preferably lots of flavors that hit you at different times.  That’s what good jerk sauce or jerk marinade has, complex flavors and of course, heat.  This jerk sauce had it all.  The young man who served it claimed he had no idea what was in it or how it was made.  He just worked there he said, smiling.  We ordered more Red Stripes.   

When I got home from Jamaica I began researching and reviewing jerk recipes on the internet and picked one that made sense to me, made from fresh ingredients.  The recipe I ended up with is a marinade that I use to flavor chicken wings mostly, in a zip lock bag overnight, but also Cornish hens, pork, skirt steak, anything really that you grill.  I think it tastes best to grill whatever marinated meat you choose over charcoal or a wood fire, but you can also add to the marinade and make a table sauce like they did at the joint in Negril. 

It’s labor intensive to make, but I look forward to it.  If you’re going to go to the trouble of making this, you might as well make a lot.   It has a lot of ingredients.  I make enough to have several meals, give some to my kids, and serve at a party or two.  It’s an annual thing now.  I’ve taken to growing my own Habaneros, thyme and garlic.   In fact, I’ve been joined in this deal by a friend who grows Habaneros solely to trade to me for jars of jerk.  I make a double batch and give him about half. It’s a good arrangement.

A food processor and a juicer help the process. Here’s the recipe.  It makes a standard food processor pitcher full.  After the first two ingredients mix up each next thing as you go, making it smooth.

1 5/8 cup vegetable oil.                             Any bland oil except olive   Canola, corn, whatever.

2 ½ cups fresh squeezed lime juice         I think it’s worth it to halve limes and juice them instead    of  buying bottled stuff.  Here’s where the juicer really helps.

40 scallions                                                stalks and all

40 Habaneros                                          Also known as Scotch Bonnets.  I used to cut them and seed them but you run the risk of getting the heat on your fingers, rubbing your eye, hurting yourself in all manner of places in all kinds of ways gloves or not.  They’re mean little peppers. Pick off the stem and throw the thing in whole with the seeds.  Yeah, the seeds make it hotter but what the heck.  If you find it unbearable use 35 next time and throw in a poblano or two in their place.

30 cloves of garlic                                   Get spicy purple garlic if you can.

20 Tbsp. fresh thyme                            That’s about a cup and a quarter.  If you’re growing your own thyme that’s a little more than two plants worth, depending on the year of course.  My thyme did well this year because I planted it in a pot near my wife’s flowers and she kept an eye on it.  Watered it when it was dry.  Next year I’ll grow three.  I was a little short.  Strip the leaves off the big stems with your thumbnail. It’ll make the end of your thumb green for a while but it comes off. 

10 Tbsp. fresh peeled ginger               Half a cup more or less.  Forget the fancy gadgets and scrape the skin off with a teaspoon.  Put the skins on a plate and set it on the counter.  It smells great.  Do this after the garlic and it will take the smell off your hands.  Slice it before you put it in the food processor.

10 Tbsp. dark brown sugar                  Or a half cup packed tight.  About the same.  Close enough.

20  tsp. AllSpice Berries                         That’s a cup.  Not ground allspice, the berries.  I knock them around in the coffee grinder a few times.  Crack a few in half.  You don’t have to.  But if you do your coffee will taste different the next morning.  Change is good.

10 tsp. Kosher Salt                                  Throw it in there. 

You’ve just made the marinade.       That’s what you dump over your chicken wings or whatever you choose to flavor with this Jamaican Jerk and keep in the fridge in a zip lock bag overnight.  If you want to make a jerk sauce, for the table, with or without the marinade, add the following to taste.

Black pepper, with equal parts vinegar and soy sauce.  I don’t know what to tell you about amounts here, other than put the pepper in sparingly, starting with a quarter teaspoon, then add glugs, or dribs and drabs of soy and vinegar till you like it.  Don’t make it too runny or drown it out with the soy.

I can this marinade in pint jars.  A jar does a nice size bunch of wings.  Once it is canned it’s good till you make the next batch, but loses heat slowly after six months.  Even then it’s pretty hot.

Canning the stuff is not nearly as hard as it sounds.  Heat up the jerk and put it in hot mason jars, turn the ring and close the lid half tight, put it in a deep pan just covered with lightly boiling water.  Keep the jars in there about 10 minutes and take them out with tongs.  Put them on your counter on a dish towel.  The lids will pop.  When they pop you know you’re good.  Take the lids off when they’re cool and you’ll find yourself with a future enhanced by the chance of spicy tasty food.

Consider a cold beer.  Hang out by the Weber.  Listen to reggae.  Say “Yah, mon” to someone you love.  Enjoy.

Can We Talk About Guns Now?

If you were at the Route 91 Harvest Festival Concert in Las Vegas, inside the barriers erected to keep out the non paying customers, and heard the rapid pop of machine gun fire, seconds before people began dropping around you, bleeding and dying, in a sort of hell pit of death, it would have been natural I imagine to look around for the shooter, for the source of the death and destruction taking place yet again in America.  But who would have imagined it was coming from a hotel 32 floors up, 400 yards away?

Senseless and mass American gun deaths have been, up to now, up close and personal.  A gunman stalking down a school hallway, a killer in a dark movie theater, a man in a college classroom with a powerful weapon, a co-worker at an employer training, a man seated at a table at a church meeting, armed to the teeth with powerful fast firing guns and lethal ammunition.  Up to now your killer has been in front of you.  You are unsuspecting, minding your own business, living in America when your life is taken from you.  You are a soft target of someone’s what?  Rage?  Hate?  Mental illness?  Most often we don’t know. 

In Las Vegas the formula for death changed.  It was long distance, rapid fire, and seemingly anonymous.  I can’t imagine the victims were specifically targeted, that the victims represented anything to the shooter other than a gathering of helpless humans in a vulnerable setting.  Country music fans?  People of all ages, primarily white?  Attacked and killed by a rich white 64 year old male accountant, who made big money in real estate and enjoyed high stakes gambling?  Was he trying to make a point?  Are we missing it?  Was there a point?

We learned today that same man, the alleged shooter, rented rooms at the Blackstone Hotel in July overlooking Chicago’s Lollapalooza.  My sister in law, staying with us for a few days, looked at me with genuine fear in her eyes.

“My grandchildren go to that.” 

She was incredulous.  Is there no end to the widespread fear we experience for the safety of and our loved ones and ourselves in the course of simply living in America? 

Prior to the Las Vegas tragedy, after the death of 20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult school staff at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut, spokespersons for the National Rifle Association argued that the answer to preventing mass slayings and saving lives lies not in less guns in America but more.  Ideas for arming teachers, anonymously supplied with guns, carefully trained, situated throughout the school and able to take down shooters quickly, were touted.  Not less guns but more.  Wait till the killer appears and kill the killer.  More guns in the hands of the good guys.  I have often heard such a proposal calmly and earnestly laid out.  That argument doesn’t work very well in the Las Vegas case.

Had there been armed concert goers carrying concealed weapons among the 22,000 persons listening to country music that night, and quite possibly there were, they were rightfully reluctant to draw them lest they be mistaken for a shooter and would have been powerless to take down this killer anyway.  Shoot a man 400 yards away spraying bullets at you with a high powered rifle on a tripod?  I doubt any sharpshooter in the world could have located and calmly taken out the shooter standing in the chaos of that killing field.  You would have needed a hand-held rocket launcher and I don’t believe we’re allowed to have them.  As far as I know the NRA has not yet advocated the purchase or open carry of rocket launchers.

The NRA has been quiet since the shooting, as has Congress.  I did hear a gun rights advocate suggesting in the media they might barter the abolition of bump stocks, the little accessory that in effect turned Stephen Paddock’s semi-automatic rifle into a automatic machine gun, in exchange for silencers and the expansion of both concealed and open carry laws, tit for tat.  But mostly there is silence on both sides.  The Onion, a satiric media presence, suggests “we are all just hoping these terrible shootings will stop once and for all without circumstances changing in any way or any of us taking even a slight amount of action in response.”

The NRA has stopped saying much actually.  It is now more of political organization, funding sympathetic candidates on the state and federal level and ruining the careers of others who oppose them in even the smallest way by running primary candidates against them.  After shootings they have by and large stopped issuing statements.  Rather they sit back and count their votes.  There have been no votes either by the way.   Nothing to vote on.  Don’t you think it’s strangely quiet?

I believe we will find in the end that the shooter in Las Vegas broke no laws aside from murder.  Preliminarily it appears the guns, the ammunition, the device which essentially turned his semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle, were all legal.  He bought at least some of his guns from licensed dealers who found him not unusual, who report he stood out not at all from other gun buyers.  He was a guy in America amassing weapons and ammunition, and apparently that is not rare.  I think we will find him to have no known mental illness, no criminal background, no red flags that could have called our attention to him.  Stopping him by screening or background check would most likely have been fruitless.  The purported perpetrator of America’s largest mass shooting may well be in hindsight a person who offered no hints, no apparent means to identify him, to predict his behavior, to stop his actions.  I could be wrong. 

Ironically in Las Vegas, where what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, there are a number of entertainment themed shooting ranges.  The glitziest, it looks to me, is The Range 702 http://www.therange702.com, closely rivaled by Machine Guns Vegas https://machinegunsvegas.com.  At both you can book a time for you or your group (corporate events are encouraged) to experience what some call the ultimate adrenaline rush of shooting an automatic weapon.  Check out their websites.  They’re nicely done, complete with video of happy customers blasting away to rock music, then enjoying wine later in the VIP suite, laughing with friends recalling the day.

Turns out the penultimate rush may have taken place in the mind of the man on the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, when the shooting moved from the range, where bullets blast through paper targets and fall harmlessly, deflected into sand to real life, where those bullets tear through the bone, muscle, soft tissue of innocent human beings.  Sometimes they pass through one victim and strike another.   58 human beings were killed you know.  36 women and 22 men aged 20-67.  Additionally, 527 were wounded or otherwise injured. 

Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in a blog post following the shooting called what occurred in Las Vegas “the price of freedom.”  He went on to say that “Public safety demands logical gun laws but the issue is so polarizing and emotional…little will be accomplished as there is no common ground.”

Do you believe that?  Do you think that because we are free under the second amendment to purchase and own guns in America the possibility of senseless death erupting from the barrels of those guns, at the hands of American gun owners exercising that freedom, cannot be avoided?

I don’t.

Nor do I believe that debating, designing, and implementing common-sense gun control policy will result in government agents in jack boots kicking in our doors and seizing our guns.  I don’t accept the paranoid stance that enacting even one new law curbing our right to bear arms will cause the rest of our government’s gun policies protecting gun rights to topple like dominoes.  I don’t think that slope is slippery, that we are hopelessly of two minds on the subject, and cannot fashion a logical legislative response to mounting mass gun violence.

Let’s be realistic and clear.  America will never be England.  We have a different history and a different culture.  Long after my kids and I have passed from this earth Americans will be buying guns, hunting, keeping them in their homes for sport, recreation and protection.  I accept that.  Americans at some level will continue to be shot both accidentally and wrongfully, suicide and homicide rates higher than needed, because of our  heritage, our history, and our policies around gun use, chiefly the second amendment to the constitution. But for God’s sake must we accept this  current level of carnage?

I don’t for a minute believe that firearms possessed by the American citizenry are all that stands in the way of being dominated by our government.  I don’t accept loony arguments about the absolute need for unfettered freedom of gun ownership. 

And neither do most Americans by the way.  It’s not our guns that matter, it is our votes. We need sensible gun control laws.  Let’s take a deep breath and demand them from those we elect.  We’re Americans.  Government is there for us.  Do you want this record number of innocent civilian deaths at the hands of our fellow citizens to continue to climb?  Do you truly believe there is nothing we can do to prevent it?

I don’t.  I bet you don’t either.  Let’s begin by talking about it.  Loudly.  To each other, to our legislators.  We owe it to the victims of gun violence and their families across the country to do nothing less.

Golfing in the Moment

To build on the change from summer to fall I put a new set of discs into the CD changer here in the shack.  I looked at my music collection and found musicians I haven’t listened to in a long time.  I had one requirement.  No lyrics.  I have writing to do.  Words in my ear interfere with words in my head.

I turned to jazz:  Chet Baker, a couple of Miles Davis, two by Wynton Marsalis.  I have a two disc set on standby to replace the two CD’s I tire of first.  It’s the Riverside Recordings, a musical collaboration between Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane captured at New York’s Five Spot Café in 1957.  Chet Baker is playing “’Tis Autumn” in the background as I write.  Let’s get at it shall we?

For a couple years now I’ve been golfing with a good group of retired guys.  It’s an eclectic group, changes every week, goes to different courses, playing collectively or individually well one day and badly the next.  Some of us keep individual scores privately but we only note and report our group success.  We track the number of pars and par equivalents as a ratio of the number of holes played.  The number of holes played depends of course on the number of guys playing.  We aim to play 18.  Once in a while someone has to leave after 9.  At times (like now) someone goes past nine but doesn’t play a full round of 18 (that’s me, still getting my ankle back in playing shape.)  Anyway, using those numbers we do some math and rate the group’s performance.  I’ve decided to forgo that for last week’s round.  It was a different kind of day.

Five guys played 79 holes of golf.  Three played 18, one played 9, I cut out after 15.  But it was not a day for numbers.  That day was an experience, not a contest.  

It started when one of the guys on the list replied to the e mail announcing the place and time with an idea to bring an old friend known to most of us.  He’s a guy who no longer plays much.  Let’s call him Bob.

“Hey, I was thinking of bringing Bob.  It’s going to be a nice day.  He may want to get out of the house, or his wife may want a break.   He won’t play a lot.  Just hit some balls now and then.  Putt a little.  What do you think?”

When you’ve lived in one community for as long as we have you develop and keep friendships with guys important to you.  Bob was a mentor to many of us.  I worked with him for a very short time.  He was happy and expressive, said what he thought, and we realized he had good things on his mind.  He was well suited for his job.  I remember him as both sarcastic and good hearted.  Fun.

“Bring him.  I haven’t been with him in a long time.  I’d love to see him.”

I showed up late, last to arrive, and Bob was already in the cart.  He was wearing big orthopedic tennis shoes with Velcro straps extending down by the toe.  I check those things out these days.  Still recuperating from ankle surgery, I was wearing an Ankle Foot Orthotic (AFO), black leather over plastic covering my calf and laced up to my knee, in sensible black street shoes.  Hard telling when I’ll wear my golf shoes again.  Bob and I were both heavily shod.  When I shook hands with him he gave me a big smile.  You remember people’s smiles and how they make you feel.  At least I do.  His smile had always made me feel good.  It still does.

“You going to be our swing coach today Bob?  Our spiritual golf guru and advisor?”

“Nope.  Playing.”

“All right then, let’s go.”

We play at a fairly leisurely pace on the local courses, and playing on weekdays we find them rarely crowded.  For some reason that day everyone had the same idea.  It was a lovely morning.  There were lots of golfers.  We waited for the guys before us to hit and as we were teeing off another foursome was parked behind us.  That’s unusual for golf in the Illinois Valley.  As the last guy was teeing up his ball I saw Bob slowly step out of his cart.  Very slowly.

He was looking around intently.  When he finally reached the tee box he scanned the horizon all around. 

“That way Bob.”  I pointed down the fairway.  “Straight ahead.  See the flag?”

We were golfing at a course which was a country club that sold and went public.  Bob was a member there.  He knew the course well.  Or he did at one time.

He looked in that direction.  Slowly he bent to put a tee in the ground and once accomplished placed a ball on it.  Then he stood up.  A cart went by on the fairway next to us.  He followed it with his eyes as it disappeared over a little rise.  In the other direction a foursome cheered an apparent long par putt.  He turned and looked intently at them.

“C’mon Bob.  Hit the ball buddy.”

It was his cart mate gently urging him to hurry.  Another of his old friends called out.

“How long does it stay light out these days?”

That crack came from another supportive friend.  It’s what guys do.

Bob looked back and smiled.  Then pulled the club back, his back swing much reduced from the last time I saw him play.  He brought the club forward, all arms, and hit a soft liner about a foot and a half off the ground.  It travelled 80 yards.   But right down the middle and, you know, past the ladies tee. 

“OK.  We’re off.”

Four of us walked quickly back to our carts while Bob made a slow deliberate trip, one step at a time, back to his seat. 

Brilliant blue and plush green were the colors of the day.  A yellow sun moved across the sky.  White clouds came and went.  We played all through the September morning.  Sometimes when I come home from golfing my wife asks what we talk about.

“Golf.” I say.

People have tried to convince me that business gets done on the golf course.  Not in my lifetime.  We talk about turning slices and hooks into fades and draws.  We estimate distance, complain about sand traps, bemoan our bad shots silently (for the most part) and praise good ones openly.  We chide ourselves for bad habits.  We get serious about golf.

Golfing with Bob was different.  He was quiet and didn’t get out of his seat in the cart often.  At random times he would say

“Is it my turn?”

And when he did we would drop a ball twenty yards away from the pin for him to chip, or place one on the green ten feet from the hole to putt.  We kept him involved to some extent, but sometimes didn’t because the foursome behind us was waiting to hit.  He rarely initiated conversation so we took on that task.  Mistakes can be made unknowingly. 

“Bob do you remember that time in Berta’s when you …?”

At the word remember Bob looked in my eyes and replied firmly, but with a smile, “Nope.”

I was embarrassed but Bob wasn’t. 

I did see flashes of the guy I remember from the past.  I drove my ball off the tee first and pulled my cart next to his as the others of our foursome were getting ready to drive.

“How’s your wife Bob?”

Bob is married to a lovely woman, a nurse.  He looked at me for a long time.

“Compared to what?”

It was just the kind of smart ass thing Bob would have said thirty years ago.  Never a straight answer. 

“Oh, I don’t know.  How about compared to you.”

He smiled again, his biggest smile, very close to a laugh.

“Me?  Compared to me?  He paused.  “Fantastic.”

Bob changed our game.  He was living in the moment, enjoying each swing, while we were trying, like always, to figure out how few strokes we could manage at the finish.  He saw everything around him while we saw the flag on the green at the end of the fairway.  His life had changed.  At times we found that awkward to deal with.  But we also found ourselves changing to help our friend.  We pulled his cart to places on the cart path where he could walk more easily. We took his arm and helped him up and down the slopes.  We paid attention to him and each other more than normal.  We may have been good to Bob, but Bob made us a little better that day too.  The score was less important.   Kindness and enjoying the day ruled. 

Good to see you Bob. 

A Week Away

Eight men lived in a three room cabin  for eight days and seven nights on a lake in western Ontario.  They had no television, radio, phone signal, or internet connection.  No outside voices, no news, no information from anywhere else came to them during that week.  You might think it would be awkward, boring, perhaps tiresome.  It wasn’t. 

Room one was a narrow galley kitchen.  Past it was the main room with four handmade log bunk beds built into the walls, a dining table with eight chairs, a wood stove and a shelf unit.  In the corner was a tiny bathroom equipped with hot shower (courtesy of propane gas), sink, and a urinal.  Outside, up the hill, was an outhouse.  A fine outhouse I might add, perhaps the best I’ve ever encountered.

The outhouse had a tiny solar night light, a double door, a plastic seat, and dehydrated lime in a bucket, the kind you use to make the batter’s box and foul lines on a baseball diamond.  We were instructed to sprinkle a dipperful in the hole after each use and did so faithfully, or at least I did.  Despite the outhouse visibly reaching capacity the odor was minimal.  It’s said that outhouses in these fishing camps keep out those who require the latest in modern convenience.  So be it.  If true, both the fish and the fishermen benefit from keeping out the faint of heart.

We were the only cabin on a giant lake.  The cabin, the outhouse, a boat house for storing fuel and equipment equipped with solar panels for electricity, a table for cleaning fish, the docks, four aluminum boats with 9.9 HP gas motors, and a good wooden walkway up the incline to the cabin were the extent of man’s intrusion into Job Lake.  Nothing else was manmade.  Apart from that little compound nature took over.

The eight of us quickly fell into a simple routine.  Eating, fishing, drinking, talking, and sleeping.  We did each to extreme.  I’m recovering yet today, days after our return.  With the exception of fishing, which I do exclusively on this trip, and drinking for some, aren’t the rest of those elements pretty much daily life as we know it? 

EATING - We eat well, but we eat too much.  Let me illustrate that reality by rattling off just some of the food we bring for eight people.  Ten pounds of bacon, five pounds of sausage, a six pound box of Bisquick (along with a one pound box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix for peace of mind), two picnic hams, eight big rib eye steaks from Handy Foods, 12 loaves of Canadian Rye bread, 72 eggs, ten pounds of potatoes, a dozen onions, hot dogs, brats, homemade chili, crackers, not enough cheese, Pringles, peanut butter we didn’t eat, jelly, tortillas, homemade pasta sauce, pasta, rice, 7 heads of lettuce, too many tomatoes from home, peppers, carrots, celery, apples, oranges, powdered milk, 9 dozen homemade cookies, and a cake mix.

*Photos courtesy of Nate Robinson

And last but not least a box of Cheerios for breakfast for fly out morning.  Add to that 52 fresh caught walleyes and you’ve got a lot of food.  Little of it went to waste.  And it goes without saying  no one went hungry.

DRINKING - Some of the guys in our group have been coming to Canada on these trips for upwards of 30 years.  Their talk of the old days, when the fishermen were young, is rife with stories of prodigious beer drinking.  That’s changed.  We flew in just nine cases of beer, dropping below double digits, and have stopped buying beer as a group (like groceries) because of the great disparity of consumption among us.  You buy your own beer, more or less, though it’s shared freely.  Lately in addition to the beer, we have increased the hard liquor supply.  This year we brought in four bottles (3,250 milliliters) of Bushmills Irish Whiskey, in addition to a couple of flasks of whiskey, and a liter of Vodka along with the makings for Bloody Marys.  It made for a pretty nice bar in addition to beer. I continue to advocate for hard liquor over beer for practical reasons.  Beer is heavy, and we have weight restrictions due to the size of both the fisherman and the plane.  The plane only holds so much, and we pay a penalty when we exceed it's weight capacity. This year, like most years, some of our stuff had to be flown in later by a second plane.  I argue the blame can be placed largely on the beer. 

A case of beer weighs eighteen pounds.  Nine weigh 162.  The comparative buzz that results from one and a half ounces of whiskey equals roughly twelve ounces of beer.  Buzz wise hard liquor is clearly more efficient in terms of volume and weight.  I lose that argument consistently, and I have to admit a cold can of Moosehead lager or two (or more) each afternoon tastes damn good.  OK, yes, sometimes in the morning too.  But not as a rule.  Suffice to say we drank liberally and well, those of us who drank, which this year was all of us to varying degree.  While we were at it we had a cigar or two.  That’s an after dinner deal, the cigars, which often come out when the whiskey appears.  I’ve observed that the drinking leads to…

TALKING - What do you talk about for seven days with no news, no new information from elsewhere, with the same guys you’ve been talking to since you stepped off the plane?  I can’t tell you.  I can however report we talked a lot.  Occasionally one of us would peel off to read or nap, but for the most part we talked as a group around the table after dinner and breakfast, moved outside to the deck and talked there until it got dark.  Talked, drank, smoked cigars, told jokes, many repeated from previous years, laughed.  You’d think you would wear out after a while, that there would simply be nothing else to talk about.  Not so.  We talked about the past a fair amount of time.  Especially the older guys.  I observed that the young guys talked more about the future.  That all stands to reason.  The older guys have much more past to talk about, and to be frank, a more limited future.  The young guys are in a different spot.  We learned a lot from each other.  And refreshingly, we were able to disagree and fail to come to conclusions.

When people converse these days there is hardly any argument over facts because someone will pull out their smart phone, get on Google, and determine the accuracy of statements within seconds.  At the lake we had only our memories and beliefs to go on.  We were left to our own devices when it came to the truth.  It was refreshing.  You should try it sometime.

In addition to talking as a group of eight we paired off in the boats, switching boating partners each day so we could all get to know one another if we didn’t already.   Nine hours or so in a boat with the motor off on a quiet lake is a great way to form an acquaintance. 

SLEEPING - My single biggest regret is that I didn’t make an audio recording of the cabin when we were sleeping to share with you.  You cannot imagine the cacophony caused by eight snoring men in an otherwise silent black cabin, all with different pitches of a unique cadence.  Being part of a choir, I could pick out the bass snorers from the tenors.  We didn’t have a true soprano, but someone, somewhere got close at times.  The animals around the cabin must have been fascinated by the noise, the rabbits, the ground hog, the whiskey jacks and ground squirrels.  We didn’t encounter bear of moose on this trip.  Good thing.  They may have felt threatened.  We were damn loud.

We were outside all day in the sun and weather, busy fishing, then cooking or doing dishes, then staying awake to talk.  Alcohol may have also been a factor.  Bedtime seemed to get earlier and earlier.  I for one had vivid dreams.  I’d go to sleep, have a series of absolutely wacko dreams which would wake me, then fall back to sleep only to dream the sequel.  I think it was the profound silence, the lack of ambient light, the feeling of isolation that made me sleep so good and dream in such wild detail.  Others reported the same thing.  We used silicone ear plugs to protect one another from the snoring.  I’m sure that helped.  Others had only to remove their hearing aids.  Be that as it may, no one appeared to suffer from lack of sleep.

FISHING – Despite making fish the main part of our diet the number of fish we sacrificed for consumption was right around fifty.  We all bought conservation licenses that allowed us a daily possession limit of two Walleye per person, four per boat.  By agreement we cut that down to three fish per boat and it was plenty.  With few exceptions we only fished for walleye, choosing the three biggest and fattest of those between 15 and 18 inches, and ate only them.  We’d run a stringer in each boat and as the day went on if we caught something better than what was on the stringer we’d release others.  On some days each boat would catch and release upwards of 35 fish.  It was a fishing bonanza.  We go to feel the fish on the line, to experience the challenge of hooking them and getting them in the boat, to go after the big one.  But we want them to live for us and others to catch in the future. 

The fishing itself is a challenge, determining where likely good spots are on the huge lake, gauging wind direction, positioning the boat so it drifts over hot spots.  Sometimes a boat would be doing so well it would stay in the same spot all day.  Often we would see our friends across the lake, motor over, and they would gesture for us to come in, telling us where to start our drift.  There were certainly plenty of fish to catch.  The fish themselves are clean and beautiful, caught from clean water, in a natural unstocked fishery.  The biggest Walleye of the week was a 24 inches, caught by a guy on his first trip.  If we caught Northern pike it was only by accident.  It was a Walleye trip and we were not disappointed.

So there’s the highlights.  After you write a blog for a number of years you realize this has become an annual piece.  How long can you find variety in an endeavor which essentially has the same elements?  I think for as long as you pay attention.  Every trip is different.  This trip was special for me because it represented a needed break from the "civilized"world.  While there we missed eight days of political chaos in America, a devastating hurricane in Texas, crazy and potentially deadly military actions by North Korea, all part of the constant barrage of news that you feel is beyond your control.  We were spared because our cell phones essentially went dead.

Instead of being persistent constant reminders of the outside world they became timepieces, flashlights, and cameras.  I have to admit I forgot at times and pulled out my phone to check for messages, to see the weather forecast.  I found myself wondering about the Cubs score.  That all faded.  Against our will we were completely isolated, cut off, and thrust into nature.  After a while we fell into its rhythm.  Nature in that part of Ontario, though inherently savage as nature is, was to our eye beautiful, quiet and soothing.  I’m convinced we need more of that these days.

That’s why do I keep going back.  In addition to the company of good people it’s the beauty of wilderness.  Given the position of the cabin we could not, from our deck, where we smoked cigars and drank whiskey, see the sunset.  But each night in which we cleaned and ate fish we had a final chore to do, which was to take the fish guts, the heads, spines, and fins that remain after we filet those walleye, across the lake to dump them on rocks at the opposite shore.  Fish guts can attract bears.  It’s a sensible safety measure to dispose of them well away from the cabin.  I went one night, three to the boat, and sat at the bow with the white plastic bucket.  We cruised up to a rock ledge where I dumped them.  Then we backed off twenty yards or so, killed the motor, and sat in silence.

The first to cruise in was a gull.  He was able to make off with a nibble of fish flesh before the vulture arrived, chasing him off.  They were wary though, and skirted around the fish gut buffet looking over their shoulder.  For good reason.  Within seconds we saw the big daddy bald eagle, proud white head, come over the tree line like a B 1 Bomber, scattering all the other birds.

He landed in the middle of the pile and leisurely ate his fill.  We sat and watched.

 Then we looked on the other side of the boat.  The sun was setting over the lake.

When you see a stunning sunset, or sunrise, in a thin place like a wilderness lake you develop both reverence and confusion.  When is it most beautiful?  Which picture among the many you take is the best?  Three of us were transfixed.  We said hardly a word.  We just sat in the boat, in the still and silent beauty of the lake, and took pictures.  We barely spoke.  It was a moment.  I thought of the people I love.  Beauty can inspire beautiful thoughts.  It was one of the moments I go there for.

You get to know other men well when you live that closely with them, spend all day in a boat with them, share three meals a day.  It was remarked during the week that one guy out of sync with the rest can ruin a trip, but I’ve not yet experienced that.  Every year the group changes slightly, yet each year all the men I’ve encountered I would go back on a trip with no problem.  I think we get closer as we listen to each other and share common experiences.  I’d go back to the lake with this last group in a minute if I could. 

That’s the story out of Ontario this year.