works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Caged Flame

    It was Saturday afternoon and for the first time in a week there was nary a spot of snow in my backyard.

    We had some pork loin marinating in the refrigerator and my wife was all “I was just going to cook it in the oven but if it’s nice enough out there you could barbecue.”

    “Or I could try it over a fire.” I offered.

    “You could.” She was skeptical. “But you’re the one who has to sit out there and tend to it.”

    Despite the snow there have been a number of fire restrictions in place across the prairies.

    No open fires. No fireworks. But carefully tended pits are fine… provided certain rules are followed.

    Rules, such as using a fire screen cover atop your fire pit.

    Caging your flames.

    I cracked open a beer as the fire burned to a good base of hot coals. I’ve been working my way through a Grizzly Paw sampler pack since we visited the mountains last month and I picked up the beer right there at the microbrewery in Canmore.

    This afternoon’s selection was called the Three Sisters Pale Ale, named for the triple peak mountain range that stands guard over the townsite below, down where the beer is brewed.

    It was a fitting spring drink to complement the first burn of the new batch of firewood and a reward for hauling a cubic meter of logs from my driveway to the storage space behind the shed earlier this week.

    Let’s also call it the small makeup drink from the alcohol-free hangover I endured on Thursday, the morning after joining club AstraZenenca and priming up my immune system against a future COVID invasion. No regrets, but that vaccine wasn’t giving free rides to many.

    My caged flames burned down to a smoky bed of embers and I cautiously added a bit more wood and some charcoal to maintain the heat level.

    My low-smoke firepit and the so-called clean burning cedar is belching smoke into the neighbourhood and likely annoying my neighbours.

    I should really focus. Tend those wild flames and pay a little less attention to my can of cold, crisp pale ale brewed in the mountains.

    I should. It’s fine though.

    “The smoke smells kinda nice.” My wife says as she comes outside to check on the progress of the cook and his fire. “Better than that pine we had before.”

    “I guess.” I say, but smoke is smoke even if it smells less bad than other smoke.

    I would just invite the neighbours over for a beer. No one minds smoke as much with a beer in their hand. But that vaccine doesn’t really kick in for a couple more weeks and even more restrictive than the local fire rules are the pandemic ones.

    The pork loin hits the hot cast iron grates and the sizzling, spicy sounds fill the backyard and for a few minutes as I turn and prod and manage the heat against raw flesh I forget. Forget it all.

    The smoke.

    The neighbourhood.

    The disease ravaging the world.

    The cage is off, the flame unleashed, so that I can just cook.

  • A Gift of Bread

    Since the pandemic began I’ve been baking a lot of sourdough.

    In fact, on my way home over a year ago from my last day in the office and even as we transitioned into working-from-home mode, I stopped at the grocery store and restocked my flour supply. Then as I checked into my kitchen and fed my starter, I kicked off the first of what now accounts for almost two hundred loaves of bread.

    All of it was practical. All of it was a kind of food security during a time of uncertainty. All of it was for ourselves.

    And then about a month ago as we were passing through on our way to the mountains and stopping for a brief puppy-pee-break at the in-laws house, I had bagged a loaf of fresh-from-the-oven sourdough and handed it off to my mother-in-law.

    A gift of bread.

    The practicality of that gesture was simply that a loaf of bread was best eaten fresh by someone who would enjoy it, rather than left on our counter while we spent the weekend on mini-holiday.

    The emotional aspect was that my mother-in-law had been halfway teasing that I should stop bragging about all my bread and posting photos of it on the socials if I wasn’t going to start offering to deliver to their house (an hour and a half drive away!)

    So I delivered.

    And this resulted in a text message the next day thanking us for the short visit and the gift, and suggesting it was probably the best bread she’d had in about a year. Great!

    Food of any kind, but particularly food one has personally made, is linked to a long history of human gift giving. It is probably one of the most foundationally human things we do: make something worth eating, then give it our family, friends, or… everyone.

    I had been baking bread casually in the years leading into the pandemic, and often the loaves I created were shortcuts to contributing to communal meals: something to bring to a gathering or a picnic or a thanksgiving dinner. And apart from a few gluten-adverse acquaintances, sourdough is simple enough to satisfy almost anyone, like the friend who cannot eat eggs, or my vegan pals, or even the picky folks who don’t like spicy food. Sourdough is just so basic… and yet robust enough to hold its own in that long human tradition of sharing your food with others.

    There is both a universality to bread and an implied effort with sourdough. Almost everyone’s eyes light with an “Oh! You brought fresh bread!?” as you pull it from a bag and start slicing it up.

    That same mother-in-law (though I only have one) put in a request earlier this week. One of our extended family just got some sad medical news (details redacted) and she was hoping we could make a delivery this weekend.

    A gift of bread.

    Of course we can.

  • Beaver Watchers

    We run hills on Wednesday evening, and in a prairie city full of creeks and a river valley, the only proper hills are where the roads and paths cross the water.

    It is not surprising then that our hill training brings us close up to nature, the bottom of our training hill being a bridge that crosses one of those creeks.

    The creeks are still a little frozen, but nature never really stops working.

    Last night we paused our multiple running repeats to watch this big guy, a beaver, paddling around the murky thaw of a spring creek still partially iced.

    This is the same creek where in the winter we did a small snowshoeing adventure.

    It’s amazing to me though, how even for people who routinely encounter nature on our runs, crossing paths with the likes of anything from birds, squirrels and hare to more substantial critters like coyotes and moose, we’ll all just stop what we’re doing to spend a few minutes admiring a lonely beaver in a creek.

    Nature captivates… or at least you know you hang out with the right people when you are all captivated by similar things.

  • firewood

    the fate of a tree brings a curious twist
    starting as seed
    on wind, through mist
    tucked into the soil
    spattered with rain
    sprouting and growing new heights to attain
    shrugging snow, budding leaf
    basking summers often brief
    sunlit evenings casting long shadows
    brilliant colours before even more snows
    year after year, decades pass, seasons withdraw
    until fate arrives
    as a wind
    or a flame
    or a saw
    to be hewn and moved
    lugged, logged and planed
    milled into geometrically linear grained
    lumber.
    or not.
    maybe nothing more than a log for a fire
    split
    axed
    set hot
    aflame and a flame to admire
    to warm hands
    hearts
    and cook sizzling food
    a curious twisting fate
    from tree to fire wood.

    – bardo

    A cubic meter of firewood landed on my front lawn yesterday and I spent well over an hour carting and stacking it while feeling a bit bittersweet on the fate of these trees to become fuel for my future backyard fires rather than, say, lumber for the doghouse that I built a couple weeks ago.

    I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.

  • A Blogging Good Anniversary

    I occasionally allude to an interesting-to-me fact: I’ve been posting my thoughts online in the form of blogs for a long time.

    To give that claim some context, as of today I have been a blogger for twenty years.

    That’s right.

    On April 20, 2001, twenty years ago to today, I posted my first dispatch post from a hot little apartment in metro Vancouver shortly after moving there for a post-university job.

    I don’t want to sour this post in any way with recollections of why I shelved that blog or mourning all the other little temporary websites that lived for a time online before fading into the obscurity of a backup file on my computer. Needless to say, the digital road from there to here has been long, rewarding, introspective, emotional, and likely worn out more than one keyboard.

    I’ve been read by lot of people for too many reasons to list.

    I’ve been scraped by content farms stealing my words and photos.

    I’ve been recognized by media and linked from news articles.

    I’ve been hacked.

    I’ve been awarded for words, design, and concept.

    I’ve been undermined by people I had trusted for things I’d written in good faith.

    I’ve told stories.

    I’ve had regrets.

    I’ve corrected mistakes.

    I’ve learned, grown, shared, and opened myself up.

    Literally millions of words have appeared online at times, and as many of those words as I have cared to keep are safely archived and privately backed up in safe digital spaces for my personal future reference.

    If you have been reading and enjoying this blog, thanks. It is the latest in now-twenty years of efforts to share my words and thoughts and creative soul online. It has been a big part of my life, mostly for good, and always interesting… well, at least for me.

    It has been an outlet and an inspiration to step out of a pandemic-based rut (an even more significant thing to say today as my age-group eligibility for a vaccine starts this morning!)

    I write and post, and I write therefore I am. And while this blog may still be young and new, for me personally this is a blogging good anniversary worth pausing to blog about.