Our introduction to our plumber’s sportsman side came when he installed a tankless water heater for us, about a year and a half ago.

We’d only had the house for a few months when the seventies-era water heater, which we’d been warned about during the home inspection, crapped out. Enter Bob, the plumber recommended by the builder (also Bob) who rents an office to Kevin.

Bob the builder told us that Bob the plumber did excellent work, and knew a lot about tankless water heaters. When Bob the plumber came to take a look, he told us all about tankless water heaters, but he also told us that we lived on a great trout pond. He’s a fisherman, and he comes here all the time.

We knew it was a great trout pond, but we hadn’t yet had any success getting the trout out of it. We talked trout for a while, and let drop that we hadn’t caught one yet.

Bob installed the water heater (a Rinnai that we’ve been happy with once we got over the expectation that hot water would come out of the hot water faucet in the first forty-five seconds after you turn it on). When he dropped by with the bill, he also brought four beautiful rainbow trout, caught right in our backyard.

I’m sure he did this in part to soften the blow of a fairly substantial plumbing bill and in part because he’s just a nice guy. But I suspect there was also just a little bit of a sportsman satisfaction in having so many fish that he can afford to give four of them – count ‘em, four! – to the city slickers who bought the waterfront house but can’t hook a trout.

Bob’s certainly an excellent fisherman, and he seems to be an excellent plumber (judging by the leaklessness of the work he’s done for us). He’s also a hunter.

Bob’s main quarry is rabbits, and he has a stable of beagles he’s trained to hunt with him. When he found out that Kevin is also a hunter, they had a long talk about game and guns. Any discussion of guns naturally has an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours component, and Kevin mentioned that we have a Remington 1100 semi-automatic .410 shotgun. It’s about 20 years old, in perfect condition, with a beautiful wooden stock.

Bob really likes that gun. He’d like to buy it, but Kevin also likes that gun, and is unwilling to sell. Lending, though, is another story, and Kevin has repeatedly told Bob that he’s welcome to borrow it any time he likes.

Yesterday, Bob took him up on the offer. He’s taking his son to their camp in Maine, and he asked if he could bring the Remington. But he didn’t just ask – he came bearing gifts.

I’d have been quite content with more trout but, this time, it was venison. I love venison.

Between Bob and his son, they’d shot six deer this past season. Six deer is a lot of venison, and Bob brought us two packs of steaks and a pack of sausage.

We’d have been happy to lend Bob the gun, venison or no venison, but the idea that we can trade its use for several dinners’ worth of wild game makes my day. Last night, we broiled the steaks in a cast-iron pan and served them with a wine sauce and potatoes roasted with Brussels sprouts.

I love barter almost as much as I love venison. Everyone should have a plumber like Bob.

A tip-up, not tipped up

Ice fishing is an activity in which you risk your life by venturing out on ice which may or may not be strong enough to bear your weight, hack at the ice right under your feet with an ax to make a hole, bait and set a gizmo called a tip-up, and sit outside in the cold watching the flag on the tip-up stubbornly refuse to tip up.

The flag is attached to a spool of fishing line, which is attached to a baited hook.  In theory, the flag will pop up when a fish takes the bait, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.  

People argue endlessly about whether, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, it really makes a noise, but everyone seems to agree that when you go ice fishing and there are no fish to tip up your tip-up, it’s still called ice fishing.

This activity shouldn’t be called ‘ice fishing.’ It should be called ‘freezing.’

Ice fishing is very strenuous

Have you ever tried to reproduce a flavor? You eat something at someone else’s house, or at a restaurant, or you even decide that something that came from a box or a jar is worth trying to make at home, and you set about figuring out what’s in it and trying to whip up a duplicate.

As a kid, I didn’t eat much that came out of boxes or jars. Cold cereal – Life, Chex, and Cheerios, mainly – was our usual breakfast and, if my parents went out for dinner, we sometimes had frozen pizza or blintzes (the only childhood food I remember disliking), but that was about it. My mother is an excellent cook, and she cooked every day.

Inimitable

There was only one boxed food that ever graced our dinner table: Near East Rice Pilaf. I’m sure you’ve had it. It’s a combination of white rice and orzo, and there’s a little foil packet of spices you mix in. You add a little butter, boil it all up, and you end up with a steaming pile of fluffy pilaf.

They don’t tell you exactly what’s in that little foil packet, but I think it’s crack. Near East Rice Pilaf has a particular hold on me, and I know I’m not the only one. It has a mild, salty, nutty flavor that makes it more like potato chips than rice; you can’t stop eating it.

When I lived in San Francisco, some twenty years ago, I decided that no self-respecting cook should serve a pilaf out of a box, and I set about trying to make my own. I scrutinized the ingredient list (“rice, salt, crack”). I went all over town trying to find orzo (not commonly available at the time). I carefully measured and mixed my spices, checked the rice-to-orzo ratio, and started cooking. The first batch was good. It tasted like mildly spiced rice with orzo. It went well with lamb chops. It tasted nothing like Near East Rice Pilaf.

Neither did the second, or the third. I don’t know how many iterations I went through before I gave it up, but it was probably well into double digits. Since my Near East Rice Pilaf fixation was entirely my mother’s fault, I called her to complain about my defeat.

My jar of herring

She laughed. Laughed! Right out loud, in my face.

Now my mother, while not the most sensitive of people (that’s not a trait that runs in our family), certainly does not take pleasure in my failures, and I was a little taken aback.

“Why is that funny?” I asked, after the guffawing had subsided to a soft chortle.

“Because I did exactly the same thing about ten years ago,” she said.

The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree, as my husband likes to say.

This is the incident that kept pushing itself to the forefront of my thoughts as I pickled my herring the other day. For me, pickled herring has a very particular flavor – the Vita flavor. That’s the brand of pickled herring I eat, and that’s what I think pickled herring should taste like.

It was with great trepidation that, this morning, I took my first forkful of my herring. I took care to get a good balance of onion and fish, with no whole peppercorns or allspice berries. I looked at it closely. Looked right. I smelled it. Smelled right. I tasted it.

Miracle of miracles, it tasted just like it was supposed to. My herring was quite lean, so the texture is a little different, but the balance of vinegar and sugar was right on. Astonishing. If you want to pickle some herring yourself, I’ve posted the recipe here.

And if you’ve figured out how to duplicate Near East Rice Pilaf, both my mother and I would like to hear from you.

Vini, vidi, Vita!

My starting point was Linda Ziedrich’s Joy of Pickling recipe. I adapted it slightly.

Pickled Herring

3 cups distilled white vinegar
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
3 T. allspice berries, cracked (use a mortar and pestle, or put them in a bag and use a hammer)
2 T. whole peppercorns
4 bay leaves
1 ½ lbs. filleted salted herring, cut in bite-size pieces (see NOTE, below)
2 large onions, sliced

In a small saucepan, bring the vinegar, water, sugar, allspice, peppercorns, and bay leaves to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for five minutes, and then let cool to approximately room temperature (that’s so it doesn’t cook the fish when you pour it in).

In a jar big enough to hold everything, pack the onions and herring in alternating layers. Pour enough brine into the jar so that everything’s covered, and then knock the jar on the counter to free any air bubbles. Pour in more brine if you need to. As you pour, most of the allspice, peppercorns, and bay leaves will tend to stay behind in the pan. That’s fine – you want some of it in the jar (mostly for looks), but probably not all of it.

Refrigerate at least 48 hours. It should last in the fridge for a month or so.

NOTE: I used fresh herring that had been stored in brine, and I soaked them overnight, in two changes of water. If you buy salt herring, de-salt it according to the instructions before you use it.

Back in September, I thought I was all that because I filleted fourteen bluefish. By the fourteenth, I was getting pretty good at it, so I was feeling confident as I broke out the fillet knife yesterday to tackle the herring I was planning to pickle.

An onion, a herring. An onion, a herring.

There were about twenty of them (and another twenty in reserve for my second attempt), and they were small – about seven inches, headless. I’m here to tell you that a seven-inch herring cannot be filleted. I don’t care if you’re sixth-generation Swedish, born on a herring trawler, dextrous as a circus performer. Seven-inch herring cannot be filleted.

Oh, sure, you can get the spine out, but there are gazillions of tiny bones that simply will not stay attached to the spine as you remove it, and remain firmly lodged in the flesh. The flesh, meanwhile, will not detach from the spine in one piece. If you’re lucky, you get two strips per side. More likely, you get a couple of chunks and a few tatters.

Two hours after I took the fish out of the refrigerator, I had a bowl of shredded, bony herring and bubonic carpal tunnel.

Given the choice, I naturally prefer my pickled herring boneless. But if I were to throw up my hands and head for the compost because there were some bones in my fish I would betray both my waste-not-want-not ethos and my Norwegian heritage.

I went ahead, using Linda Ziedrich’s Joy of Pickling as a starting point, and adapting that recipe to suit my tastes. If it’s good, I’ll post it so any of you who have a bucket full of salted herring in your basement can follow in my footsteps. I should know tomorrow.

I’ve had a five-gallon compound bucket full of herring in the basement for almost a year now, courtesy of our friends Geri and Emory. They got the fish from our neighbor Bob, who fished them out of the sea last winter with his own two hands. The fish are cleaned, headless, and packed in salt, waiting patiently to be pickled.

Herring coming out of the brine

Geri and Emory are expert herring picklers. They spent many years living in Denmark, where pickling fish is a national pastime, and they brought their herring habit home with them. I, however, am a rank amateur, so I looked around for reputable sources to guide me through the process.

Plenty of pickled herring recipes are out there on the Internet, and my local library came through with Linda Ziedrich’s The Joy of Pickling.

The Joy of Pickling?

I probably get more pleasure out of food than most people do, but I’ve never uttered “joy” and “pickling” in the same breath.

I blame Irma Rombauer for the “Joy of” genre. Her 1931 Joy of Cooking was the first, and there have been hundreds since. Specifically, there have been 477, according to the Library of Congress, and the list of things book buyers are presumed to take joy in is mind-boggling. It runs the culinary and religious gamut, but extends to just about every hobby, discipline, and character trait.

If you don’t take Joy in Cooking, how about Birding, or Demography, or First-year Piano? There are Cats, which are to be expected, but also Frogs and Cockatiels. There is Hockey, there is Rugby, there is Snorkeling. Every kind of sewing project, from Split Ring Tatting to Machine Embroidery, appears on the list.

If you can’t find joy in the mundane – Geraniums or Jell-O Molds, say – perhaps you can find it in Being a Woman, Being a Vegetarian, or Being a Eucharistic Minister.

Maybe Ernie J. Zelinski’s 1998 magnum opus, The Joy of Thinking Big: Becoming a genius in no time flat, is for you. No? Then there must be joy in Negative Thinking, Failure, Funerals, or Being Wrong. Or Lent. Or maybe Liberace.

Why must we find joy in a pursuit in order to deem it worthwhile? I understand why The Drudgery of Cooking didn’t make Rombauer’s short list, but isn’t there something between that and joy? Can’t something be merely satisfying? Amusing? Gratifying?

In a world where joy is sometimes hard to come by, the “Joy of” list isn’t going to be much help. I’ll give you Sex, but Vegan Baking?

Granted, I haven’t done much vegan baking, but I pickled once, and there was no joy to be had. The incident involved a crop of cucumbers harvested from the rooftop garden we had in Manhattan.

We thought we were pretty clever. Our building had a skylight with a grate over it, and we planted the cucumbers in whiskey barrels we put right next to the light. When the vines started coming up, we trained them to grow across the grate. The system worked beautifully, but we had to be vigilant about making sure the cucumbers didn’t lodge in the holes in the grate, which were about an inch square. If they did, they’d grow and wedge themselves in, like someone who gets fat and can’t get his wedding ring off.

We lost a few to the grate, but still had a decent harvest. I set out to make dill pickles, using a recipe someone had given me, and swore by.

I followed the steps to the letter, but then got to an instruction I had somehow missed in my first reading. “Store the pickles in a cool place for three weeks.” An ideal cool place, it went on to specify, would have a temperature within a degree or two of 60.

Pickles-to-be

This was Manhattan in August. There was no cool place. The refrigerator was too cold. The basement, too warm (not to mention public). If I air conditioned the apartment down to 60 for the requisite three weeks, these would be the most expensive pickles in the history of mankind.

It took me a full hour to realize that our wine cooler – the cabinet-size kind that holds about twenty bottles – was pretty close to the right temperature. Out came the Veuve Clicquot, in went the pickles.

For three weeks, I faithfully skimmed the scum off the brine, and did several other things which the recipe required but the memory of which I have clearly repressed. When all was said and done, we had two gallons of some of the soggiest, saltiest pickles I’d ever tasted.

I’m hoping to do better with the herring. They’ve been soaking for almost 24 hours, in a couple changes of water, and I’m going to tackle them today. I’m not expecting joy, but pickled herring is almost as good.

There’s oystering, and then there’s oystering. For me, oystering involves wandering around in the shallows at low tide with a rake and a bucket, looking for specimens over three inches long. For my friend Florence, oystering is an entirely different proposition.

Florence suiting up for oystering

Florence has an oyster grant, a two-acre parcel in the flats of Barnstable Harbor earmarked as her oyster farm. It’s dry at low tide, underwater at high tide, and marked out by buoys. She grows oysters in part because she owns The Naked Oyster, arguably the best restaurant on this end of the Cape, and in part because she’ll do anything.

Florence is French, but not in an effete, Chanel-wearing kind of way. Florence is tough and intrepid, both of which qualities come in handy for oyster farming, especially this past week.

This was the week the oysters had to come out of the harbor. Because the water generally freezes over the course of the winter, and the ice floes can crush both the oysters and cages used to contain them, the whole shebang has to come out before winter hits in earnest.

For Florence’s operation, which only uses a small portion of her two-acre allotment, that’s about three days of cold, heavy work. Two of them had been done when she called Monday morning to see how Kevin was.

She was concerned about him because, in the course of helping her son Julien with the oysters the day before, he’d fallen in the water and come to the brink of hypothermia. I’d put him in a hot shower as soon as he’d come home, and put clothes in the dryer so they’d be warm when he got out. In an hour or so, he’d been fine, which is what I told her.

“Don’t you still have work to do out there?” I asked her.

She told me they did. And that, given the weather forecast, this was probably the last day to do it.

“Do you need help?”

She told me, essentially, that our household had already made the maximum allowable contribution to the oystering effort. I told her that was nonsense, and I’d be there, suited up, when she was ready to go out.

We set off at about 1:30 in the afternoon. It was me, Florence, and two young, strong, boat-savvy guys, Jeff and Drew, recruited for the purpose. We took her boat, a small Carolina Skiff, as well as a slightly larger one she’d borrowed from a friend, and went out on the meandering path to the grant.

Barnstable Harbor is shallow, and its many sandbars make it difficult to navigate at low tide, even in the flat-bottom skiffs used for oystering. We took a serpentine route around the shallowest spots, and we probably only drafted a little over a foot, but we still had to tilt the motor up several times to get through. We did get through, though, and arrived at the grant some time around 2:00.

Then we had to make a decision about where to put the boats. The central conundrum of this kind of oystering is that low tide is the best time for the work, but high tide is the best time for the boats. The oysters are on dry land at low tide, and you can walk around the grant, doing what you have to do. You want the oysters on dry land. Not so the boats.

When we got there, the oysters were high and dry, and we could get the boats within about thirty yards of them. But the tide was still going out, and the spot where we had them would be dry soon.

“We should keep the boats floating,” Florence warned.

I’d checked the tide, and dead low was at about 2:30. I thought that, if we left the boats where they were, we’d be significantly into the flood by the time we finished the work (which I thought would take about an hour and a half), and the boats would be afloat again, even with their heavy loads.

If we wanted to keep the boats afloat, we would have to put them about twice as far from the oysters, which had unpleasant implications for how far we’d have to carry each load. We left them where they were, and started loading.

Oysters at low tide

There are several different techniques for farming oysters. Florence begins with the seed oysters in bags. When they’re big enough, she transfers them to flat wire trays, each about two feet by three feet and holding several hundred oysters. The bigger the oysters are, the more the trays weigh. Most of the oysters we needed to move were approaching legal (three-inch) size, and the trays probably weighed between twenty and forty pounds each.

The work didn’t take as long as I thought, though, mostly because I didn’t factor in just how much lifting and carrying two young, strong guys can do. Florence and I aren’t sissies, but we are middle-aged women There’s just no substitute for being male and twenty-three.

By 2:45 we had the oysters and cages stacked in the boats, ready to go. But something was wrong. The tide was still going out. How could that be? Tides have been well understood for centuries. Tide charts aren’t wrong.

“How could the tide still be going out?” I asked Florence, with some indignation. “The chart said low tide was 2:30.”

“It depends on exactly where you are, and the wind,” she told me, with a shrug. “It’s unpredictable out here.”

“We should have kept the boats floating,” I said ruefully.

There was nothing to do but wait.

If it hadn’t been getting darker and windier by the moment, waiting wouldn’t have been a problem.

Fully loaded, high and dry

We watched the water, we watched the sky. Finally, at some time well after three, the tide turned. Ten minutes later, water was lapping at our stranded boats. The level slowly crept up until we were able to get the smaller boat to float. But the big one sat stubbornly in the sand.

We pushed it, we rocked it, we redistributed the cargo. It moved, but it was stuck on some kind of lump of sand that just wouldn’t give up its hold. The sun was setting, the wind was blowing. My fingers were beginning to get cold. We pushed some more.

Finally, it came loose. “Let’s get going,” Florence said, and she yanked on the pull-start of the motor. Nothing.

A litany of everything that could go wrong was going through my mind, and it started with a failed motor. From there, it went on to swamping, stranding, hypothermia, and even drowning. We’ve got overloaded boats in an increasing chop. It’s too dark to see the sandbars. The temperature’s dropping fast. We’re all wearing waders – which are the last thing you want to wear if you fall in because they fill with water and drag you down.

I knew at the time that most of my fear was unreasonable. We had two boats, and there were several others out there, so help would be at hand in case of a mishap. The harbor wasn’t more than about six feet deep at the deepest spot we’d be going over. The wind was behind us. Although it was getting cold, we were properly dressed and dry. The likelihood that something could go catastrophically wrong was very, very slim. But fear and reason are strangers to each other.

Florence pulled the starter again, and again nothing.

“Do you want me to have a go?” I asked.

She didn’t want me to have a go. She wanted to start the bloody thing herself. She hated the idea that she was having trouble pulling it hard enough, accustomed as she was to being able to do everything that needed doing. But this was the third day she’d been doing this work, and she was depleted.

“Give it a try,” she said.

I pulled, hard, and the motor turned over. She and I got in, and Jeff and Drew followed us in the bigger boat. It was slow going. The boats were heavy, and the prop on the other boat was so worn down that its top speed was about three knots. The water came within inches of the gunwales, and Florence was navigating from memory, since the water was too dark to see the shallow spots.

Not only was Florence in complete control of the situation, and confident in a successful outcome, she even had the bandwidth to reassure me that all was well. It’s not like I told her I was scared. I wanted desperately to be brave and intrepid, and I was doing my best to be cheerful and positive. It was probably the white knuckles that gave me away.

The oysters' winter home

I could see car headlights shining from the ramp at Scudder Lane, and it crossed my mind that Kevin might be there to meet us. I’d told him I was going out, and he would have known there’d be unloading to do.

He was there, and I was mighty glad to see him.

We pulled the boats in, loaded the oysters and gear into the three pick-up trucks we had, and brought them to the restaurant. There, Florence’s staff helped us get them into the refrigerated truck where they’d be dormant over the winter.

When the work was done, Florence made us drinks of whiskey, lemon, and hot water. “I’m sorry you had to go out on one of the hardest days,” she said.

“Hey, it was fine,” I told her. “We got all the oysters in, nobody was hurt, and I’m sitting here with a hot drink in my hands.” And then, after a pause. “Were you scared at all?”

She shook her head. “I don’t really get scared,” she said. “If I’m scared, we’re probably going down.”

Kevin’s that way, too. Are you born that way, or do you get that way? I want to be that way.

I can’t decide whether I want to stick with oystering along the beach with my bucket and rake, or get my own oyster grant in the hope that it will make me that way.

“Next time, we’ll go out in the summer,” Florence said. “We’ll bring a cooler full of ice, and some really good white wine, and we’ll sit out there on a warm, sunny day and drink wine and eat oysters.”

All in all, I don’t think I want an oyster grant. I just want a friend with an oyster grant.

I know it’s winter because I saw a species of bird I’d never seen before. It’s not that we get new species only in winter, it’s that I notice only in winter. The rest of the year we’re busy with other things, and our bird-watching falls by the wayside. We started keeping a list of species sighted this past January 1. We had thirty-six by the beginning of May, and not a single one after.

Until yesterday. This one was a small, duck-like, black job with a white beak. It swam by as Kevin and I were looking out at the water, wondering if it were a trout-fishing day. “That’s new!” I said, and grabbed the binoculars. Unfortunately, it swam out of sight before I could get a bead.

“I wish I’d gotten a better look,” I said to Kevin as I leafed through The Sibley Guide to Birds trying to make an ID. I didn’t know then that, before long, I’d get the chance.

It was an uncharacteristically warm and still day, and we took advantage of it to – what else? – get food. I went oystering. Kevin opted for trout fishing and emptied the snow out of our skiff to set out. We both did well. I got a half-peck of oysters and, just as I came home, I saw Kevin land a fish right outside our bedroom window.

I went into the kitchen to clean the oysters and fold the laundry (our washer and dryer are in a closet off our kitchen, and we fold clothes on the kitchen table) as Kevin put the boat away. I heard him open the kitchen door and turned around to see him leaning in, holding the fish out to me.

“Could you take this?” he asked. “My boots are all muddy.”

I took the fish, which was still very much alive.

We usually leave the head on our trout, and just gut them to prep them for poaching or smoking. But I couldn’t bring myself to gut a living fish, so I decided to cut off its head with one strong, quick, painless stroke. This didn’t appeal to me either, but it seemed my best choice.

I got a cutting board and the heaviest knife a could find, a big Farberware cleaver. I held the fish on the board and took careful aim. “Sorry,” I said to the fish, and brought the cleaver down, hard.

Hand-eye coordination has never been my long suit, and I cut the poor thing’s face off. I still killed it instantly, I think, because it abruptly stopped moving. Whether that was from actual death, or just the indignity of facelessness, I’ll never know.

What I didn’t count on was the blood. If you bring a cleaver down hard on a living creature, there is inevitably going to be spattering. This fish was no exception, and it brought home to me a key disadvantage of having your kitchen double as your laundry room.

I cut the rest of the fish’s head off using the sawing method, and I was removing its innards when Kevin stuck his head back in the kitchen.

“You’ve got to come see this,” he said. “It’s total Wild Kingdom out there.” He pointed to the woods behind the garage.

I thought I’d had enough blood and guts for one day, but I figured I could take another episode as long as I was just a spectator. I put on my boots and followed him into the woods.

We’d gone in about thirty feet when he stopped and pointed to the snow-covered ground. There, with black feathers scattered all around it, was the mystery bird. Black with white beak, and very, very dead.

Kevin pointed to a nearby tree. There was the killer, a red-tail hawk, not more than twenty feet away. The hawk looked at us, he looked at the dead bird, he looked back at us. He didn’t move.

“I saw him get the bird when I was out in the boat,” Kevin said. “He was flying by and, all of a sudden, he tucked in his wings and dove. I didn’t think he’d still be here, but I had to check.”

Our red-tail. Kevin calls him "Pell-Mell."

I was amazed at how close we were, and how little our presence seemed to bother the hawk. “I have to get the camera,” I whispered to Kevin, I ran back to the house, and was just returning with the camera when the hawk flew down, picked up the dead bird in its talons, and hopped up on the dead log that was right next to us.

Right next to us. He was seven feet away, max.

We watched as he (which is not to say we’re sure he was male; this is the generic avian ‘he’) started pulling feathers off the bird’s neck, scattering them in the snow. When he’d cleared a bare spot, he started eating, tearing off big hunks and gulping them down. He did it very methodically, starting with the neck and head (white beak and all!) and working his way down the carcass.

No other species balks at killing things to eat; squeamishness is unique to humans. We inhabit the top of the food chain, keeping company with ruthless hunters like lions and grizzly bears. Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, kill without balking. So why do so many of us have a hard time with something as simple as cutting a head off a fish? How did a revulsion for blood and guts and death get into our evolutionary make-up? What kind of survival advantage could it possibly have conferred?

This hawk didn’t spare a thought for the life of the bird he’d killed, and had no qualms whatsoever about dismembering it, which he did very skillfully – he didn’t even get any on his laundry.

When we got back to the house, I checked Sibley again. It was an American coot.

Red-tail hawk lunching on a coot from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

Our driveway. See the truck at the very top?

Nothing like two feet of snow to bring home to you that it’s winter. And, in winter, our food procurement efforts grind virtually to a halt. The eggs keep coming, but after that the pickings are slim. We can shellfish year-round, an unusually nice day might find us going after trout, and I keep hoping Kevin gets a hankering to go rabbit hunting, but that’s about it.

I figured this would be a good time to take inventory. We’re not technically snowed in; the truck is at the mouth of our 500-foot driveway, and we can hike up there and leave the premises any time we want. But the hike is enough to make you think twice about going anywhere, so we’re planning to make good use of our laid-in supplies.

Which got me wondering. I’m planning to continue the one-food-a-day challenge into next year, and winter is the toughest time. Last year, it was all shellfish, all the time, but this year I’ve got a few items socked away. Here’s what we’ve got to see us through to spring:

The canned goods:

2 12-ounce jars of the blackberry/anise jam Mary and I made from Dianne’s blackberries
1 12-ounce jar of Jane’s raspberry jam
1 12-ounce jar of Mary’s rhubarb jam
4 12-ounce jars of red pepper jelly (which dates back to our Manhattan life)

The frozen goods:
(“Bag” means a 1-quart Ziploc bag. It may or may not be completely full, but let’s not split hairs.)

5 bags parboiled butternut squash
8 small smoked bluefish fillets
2 bags diced roasted eggplant
2 bags parboiled beet greens
3 pounds Linda and Dan’s cranberries
9 bags Christl’s Sasquash (a bland, orange squash), diced
7 bags diced tomatoes
1 quart prickly pear juice
1 bag chopped jalapeno peppers
4 bags parboiled collard greens
1 bag sautéed painted suillus mushrooms
1 bag sautéed hen-of-the-wood mushrooms
4 dozen oysters
1 pound Dan’s Alaskan halibut
3 pints chopped clams
3 bags smoked trout
1 pint strawberry-rhubarb compote, from Christl’s rhubarb
1 quart crab stock
1 bag Dianne’s raspberries and blackberries
1 pint clam sauce
1 pint clam juice

The indoor herbs, still hanging on

The living goods (which may or may not still be living in a month or two):

Parsley
Sage
Rosemary
Chives (no thyme)

The rest of the goods:

Sea salt
Bay leaves
A few dried jalapenos
¼ cup dried hot pepper flakes
Eggs
Wintergreen extract
1 bucket Geri’s herring preserved in salt, awaiting pickling
2 gallons of dandelion wine (we want to let this age, but if things get dire…)

It’s not a bad list, but when you think about how long it has to last, it seems a bit anaemic. Other than the winter fare, we won’t have any new items until April, when the first of the wild green edibles come up.

Although I did manage to dig up a sassafras root before the snow came, so I’m ready to try that root beer again …

Today, as I was cleaning up the kitchen and Kevin was outside cleaning out the boat, I heard a cry. At first I thought he’d hurt his back again, but the “Honey, can you come here?” didn’t seem to be infused with that note of excruciating pain.

I walked outside. “You’ve got to see this,” Kevin said from the bow of the boat.

The last crab

He was leaning over the boat’s cooler, which was open. I climbed up to look inside. At the bottom was a crab. It had been in the cooler for a week and a half, having escaped from the bag that held its fifteen brethren, and it was still alive.

“Should we cook it?” I asked.

“It’s probably emaciated by now,” said Kevin.

“I’d hate for it to die for nothing.”

We both just looked at it for a while.

“It’s not that I’m sentimental about a crustacean,” Kevin said. “But since it lasted this long, maybe it’s earned a reprieve. Let’s take it to Prince Cove and set it free.”

Sounded good to me. We headed out to the boat ramp, which is about two miles south of us, despite the fact that our lunch guests were due within the hour and we were behind on preparation.

I expected the ramp to be empty, but there were two young boaty looking guys taking their 21-foot Boston Whaler out of the water. Now Kevin’s always been in touch with his feminine side, but I figured even a man as liberated as he is wouldn’t want to be seen releasing a crab back into the wild.

“Let’s go over there,” I said, pointing to the side of the ramp away from where the guys were winching the boat onto their trailer, which was attached to a big, muscular Chevy pick-up. I had the crab in a box, and there was no need for them to see what we were doing on the other side of the pier.

But there’s no embarrassing my husband. He took the crab out of the box, in full view of the guys, and jumped down off the pier to the water’s edge. One of the guys came over to see what was going on. Kevin told him.

“When I was pulling my lobster pots out of the bay a couple weeks ago, I got a bunch of crabs as bycatch. We ate most of them, but I just found this one today when I was washing down my boat, and I figured it was too skinny to eat, so we decided to put it back.” He didn’t actually flex his biceps as he said this, but even I, who generally doesn’t know subtext even if it jumps up and spits in my eye, understood the message. Only real men pull lobster pots and have bycatch and wash down boats.

Kevin, or Mary Tyler Moore?

“Huh,” said the guy, and went back to his boat.

“Loved how you worked in the lobster pots,” I said when he was gone.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want him to think I was Mary Tyler Moore or anything.”

Good thing the guy wasn’t there four hours later. That was when Kevin, after our last guests had gone, said to me, “Let’s go back and check on the crab.”

The crab was still there, but it wasn’t doing well. We moved it to deeper water. “I hope it survives,” Kevin said as we watched it sink to the bottom. But he’s not sentimental about a crustacean. Not him.

Peekytoe, or Atlantic rock crab

Jonah or rock crab? After whether we should send more troops to Afghanistan, that seems to be the question of the hour. Rick weighed in on the last post, agreeing with my husband. He claimed authoritatively that our crabs were the Atlantic rock crab, otherwise known as the peekytoe.

Since there’s argument about whether a peekytoe is a sand crab or a rock crab or a bay crab, and there’s yet another argument about whether sand crabs, rock crabs, and bay crabs are all the same crab, Rick had the goodness to include the creature’s scientific name, Cancer irroratus.

I’m beginning to think that Kevin and Rick might be right. The claws on the Jonah crab seem a little long and pointed, and ours were short and thick. A New York Times story way back in 1998 said that peekytoes were generally caught as lobster bycatch, which ours certainly were. And peekytoe meat is supposed to be particularly sweet and delicate, which ours definitely was.

So I’m changing my vote from Jonah to Atlantic rock crab.  We might have been able to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt if we hadn’t eaten all the evidence.

The Jonah claw

Our crab claw

I’ve lived on the Cape a year and a half now, and the question I’ve asked more than any other (with the possible exception of “What am I doing here?”) is “What is this?”

There are variations on this question, like “What on earth is this?” and “What the hell is this?” My husband has his own, unprintable version. However we phrase it, the problem is the same: identification.

Back in Manhattan, there were plenty of things I couldn’t identify, but identification was less important. I could kill the crawly thing in my bathtub without knowing what it was. I could admire the flowering tree without putting a name to it. Identification is a higher priority, though, for things you’re planning to eat.

Sometimes, like with mushrooms, it’s absolutely critical. Other times, it’s just very useful. I’m willing to sample just about any green plant I come across, but knowing which ones taste good would save me some significant nastiness. Still other times it’s merely window dressing. You’d think a rainbow trout and a brown trout would be pretty easy to tell apart, what with their distinguishing characteristic right there in their name, but I’m here to tell you it’s just easy enough that everyone expects you to get it right, but just hard enough that you sometimes don’t.

Our crab

Crabs are way harder than trout. I came home from my last trip to a heap of them, the bycatch from Kevin’s last lobstering expedition, and I didn’t have the first clue what kind they were. They certainly looked edible, so I sampled a claw. Tasted fine. Good, even – briny and sweet. But I wanted a positive ID.

Before the Internet age, it would have been hopeless. Post-Internet, it’s merely difficult. All crabs look similar, but there are distinct differences. Those differences make it easy to tell pictures of crabs apart, but it’s still hard to identify actual specimens. Sure, one kind has nine “teeth” and one kind has only seven, but does that little thing next to the eye count as a tooth? How about that last little indentation by the claw?

People who know about the creatures in our local seas tell me they’re rock crabs, but I’m not so sure. For starters, there are a zillion kinds of rock crabs – red rock, brown rock, Pacific rock, pygmy rock – and they’re almost impossible to tell apart. Some people say the rock crab and the peekytoe are the same species; others insist that they’re different. I never found a picture of a rock crab that looked exactly like the crabs we caught.

The Jonah crab

My money’s on the Jonah crab, which is reportedly a relative of the Dungeness. Not that I found a picture of one of those that was an exact match, but I think it was closer.

What I really need is a carcinologist – that’s the formal name for someone who studies crustaceans. For obvious reasons, they don’t use the frowned-upon but still correct “crustalogist,” which sounds like someone with a baking sub-specialty, or maybe someone who can tell me about those little hard scabs our cat gets in the fall.

But the crabmeat was delicious, and a Jonah crab by any other name …

As my regular readers (both of them!) know, our lobster pots have been languishing at the bottom of Cape Cod Bay for over a month. We’ve been prevented from retrieving them by a combination of bad luck, cowardice (mine), and an inexorable north wind.

Yesterday morning was a window of opportunity and, since I’m in Albuquerque, Kevin recruited our friend Bob to go out with him and take the traps in for the season.

You know who your friends are when you start asking for help pulling lobster pots. You have to haul them up from the murky depths, pile them precariously on the boat, where they take up all available space and constantly threaten to fall overboard, and then motor in with a boat so heavily laden that the water comes much closer to the gunwales than any reasonable person would be comfortable with.

The lobsters that should have been Bob's

It’s hard work, and it’s dangerous. The water is cold, and the motion of pulling a 50-pound trap out of the water and into the boat is just the kind of thing that can send you tumbling overboard. Lucky for us, Bob is both a true friend and an excellent seaman, and he and Kevin got the job done before yesterday’s weather turned dirty.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don’t like to have Bob do what should, by rights, be my job. On the other hand, I’m delighted to come home to pots that are high and dry. What tips the balance and makes me wish I’d been there was the catch.

I expected empty traps. The bait was long gone, and I couldn’t think of any reason anything edible would wander in. But Kevin came home with fifteen crabs and two lobsters, one of them blue.

The crabs that await me

The lobsters had Bob’s name on them, and not just because he earned them with back-breaking labor. Back in the spring, Bob and his wife, Mad Dog, gave us not one but two whole striped bass, which means we’re running a significant seafood trade deficit. A couple of lobsters wouldn’t bring us back to even, but it would be a start. Bob, though, refused them, on some flimsy pretext of going out of town.

Kevin and his daughter, Fallon, who’s visiting us, ate the lobsters. The crabs, though, will still be there when I get home tomorrow, and I’ve been thinking about what to do with them. Since I’m in New Mexico, I’ve got chiles on the brain, and I’m thinking of roasting some mild green ones and cooking them with the crab and some shallots in smoked chicken stock and coconut milk. I’m not tied to it, though, so if anyone’s got a better idea, pass it along.

I missed the adventure, and I missed the lobsters, but I certainly can’t complain about what my husband does when I’m out of town.

Our lobster pots have been sitting out in Cape Cod Bay for weeks now, rendered inaccessible by the weather. Well, not for that first week; that’s when we they were rendered inaccessibly by trailer trouble. But for the three weeks after that a relentless north wind and daily small craft advisories have kept us from venturing out beyond Barnstable Harbor.

We tried, once. We thought we’d have a window of opportunity, and we launched the boat at Millway. We motored out through the harbor and rounded the point into the bay. As soon as we got out of the channel, the chop was too much.

Too much for me, that is. Kevin probably would have braved it had he been with someone braver. Luckily, my husband is philosophical about my fair-weather boating fortitude, and he’s always willing to turn back the moment my knuckles turn white.

Back we went, into the shelter of the harbor. There, it was beautiful. The water was smooth, the day was sunny, the temperature was unseasonably warm. We tootled around the flats, with their islands of eel grass, idly casting for stripers. There didn’t seem to be any sign of them, though – not a splash, not a bite – so we anchored in what we thought was a likely spot and waited for the tide to bring the fish to us.

There wasn’t another boat in the harbor, there weren’t any fish to be caught, the sun was warming us, and pretty soon we found ourselves engaging in some very unseamanlike behavior.

Is there a nautical equivalent of the Mile-High Club? The Sea-Level Club, perhaps?

Oh come on, we’ve all done it.

Anyway, we were right at what I’d call a critical juncture when we both heard the noise. The splash. The kind a fish makes. And then another.

What does it say about us that we stopped, disengaged, and reached for the rods?

Either the thrill is gone, or we’ve become fishermen.

It was ten days ago exactly that our trailer accident beached us. Kevin has spent an unconscionable proportion of those ten days, and I’ve even spent some time, getting us up and running again. We have the Trailer Cabal to thank.

It should have been a simple repair. Two 26’ leaf springs (only one was broken, but you always replace both), one new 26’ hanger (that’s the piece that attaches the leaf spring to the frame), and some assorted nuts and bolts should have put us within hours of restored function.

But no. It turns out that there’s twenty-six inches, and then there’s twenty-six inches, depending where you measure from. Different trailer part manufacturers make it a point to measure from different spots so that, once you use their parts, you’re locked in to their scheme. Our 26’ springs fit neither the one functioning 26’ hanger still on our trailer nor the new 26’ hanger we bought to replace the mangled one.

I was this close to calling for a congressional investigation, but I figure, what with health care reform, the economic crisis, and the Afghanistan situation, our legislators have their hands full.

We solved the problem with brute force, by chopping up our hangers.

A hanger is a bar with a bracket on either end. The bracket holds the spring, and the bar spaces the brackets. We cut off the brackets, positioned them to fit our 26’ springs, and planned to weld them to the frame.

What you need to weld

If you’re going to weld, you need a welder (the piece of equipment) and a welder (the person trained to use the equipment). Neither Kevin nor I has the first or is the second.

Our friend Dan, though, has one and is the other, and today he brought both to our house.

Over the past year, I have learned to appreciate power tools, and have been come tolerably conversant with things that saw, drill, and nail. But welding takes power tools to a whole new level. The spark-generating level.

What you need to rule the dark side

Your fist clue that a welder (the equipment) is a breed apart is that the welder (the person) has to wear a Darth Vader helmet to use it. Your second clue is that, before you fire the thing up, you check that the water is turned on and your hose is working. And your worst suspicions are confirmed when the sparks start flying. All over.

I am assured by people who can weld that it’s a pretty cool thing to be able to do. Our friend Jeannie’s eyes light up when she talks about welding, and she jumps at the chance to permanently fuse one piece of metal to another. Let her loose with a welder and the next thing you know you can’t open the refrigerator.

Even so, I was content to watch Dan from a safe distance.

I'd like to tell you that was me welding ...

Once our hacked-off brackets were welded to our trailer frame, and the leaf springs seemed to be doing their job, we reclaimed the boat from the pond. There was a certain satisfaction in having defeated the Trailer Cabal and repaired, for about $250., what would have cost over $2000. to replace. It was particularly satisfying for me, since Kevin did all the work.

Kevin says next time he’s shelling out the two grand.

We are now, once again, afloat. We’re going to check our lobster pots in the morning.

Kevin anchoring the Queen Mary in our backyard

Thanks to our trailer mishap, our boat is now anchored in our backyard; it may be the largest boat ever to grace the waters of our 110-acre pond. The fishermen who motor by, casting for bass, point and laugh, like it was the Queen Mary or something.

Since it was in the water, Kevin figured we might as well make use of it, and he decided to take it out for trout yesterday. There’s a 10-horsepower limit on the pond and the boat has a 70-horsepower outboard, so he attached our electric trolling motor to the transom and set out.

How, you must be wondering, does a trolling motor power a 19-foot fishing boat that weighs some 1600 pounds? Very slowly.

That’s okay, though. It’s even desirable. According to Dominic, the Zen Master of Trout who has pulled as many as thirty-seven fish (he keeps count) out of the pond in one day, slow trolling is the key to trout fishing. Yesterday, it worked. Kevin came home with a nice, fat, 16-inch fish. Smoked trout for dinner!

I planned the menu as Kevin cleaned the fish. He stood at the sink and sliced open the gut, and I heard a loud “Hah!” of surprise.

“What is it?” I asked from the living room.

“Come see.”

“Is it a good surprise or a bad surprise?” That’s what King Friday always used to ask on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and I’d always thought it an excellent question in the proper circumstances.  And you never know what might come out of a fish.

“Just look,” Kevin said, and held out the fish. It was filled with bright orange beads of roe.

A good surprise! A very good surprise.

Before ...

Now, I am not new to fish eggs. I’ve eaten the expensive black kind that come in a tin and the less expensive orange kind that come in a jar. I’ve eaten sushi rolled in the flying fish kind and omelets topped with the deep red kind. But this was the first time I’d seen eggs in situ.

The first step was obvious. I removed them from the fish and put them in a bowl. Step Two wasn’t so clear. I had a bowl of raw fish eggs, still attached to the membrane that had kept them from rolling around inside the fish, but no idea what to do with them.

A bare minimum of research indicated that I could do almost anything. You can eat fish eggs fresh, or salted, or brined, or cooked, or dried. The world was my oyster.

Although I include the occasional recipe on my daily food posts (listed on the calendar on the left over there) I don’t usually write in detail about the food I cook. There are many excellent cooks who do that very well, and I prefer to think my readers come here for my priceless insight and deathless prose.

This time, though, I’m going to tell you what I made for dinner.

I’d thought about making the smoked trout into a kind of fishcake, with mashed potato and sautéed onion, and I figured the eggs would be a fine topping. I did the best I could to separate the roe from the membrane (this is a tedious and awkward business – if anyone knows how to do it properly, please tell me), and then brined it for twenty minutes in a mixture of 1/3 cup kosher salt and one cup cold water.

... and after

Kevin smoked the trout and I made the trout cakes and put them in to pan-fry. When they were almost ready, I heated the roe, with a few tablespoons of sour cream, in a small saucepan. As the mixture warmed, I crushed some of the eggs with the back of a wooden spoon to give it a slight orange tint.

It was the simplest possible sauce, and it was creamy and salty and fishy and quite delicious. I was awfully pleased with myself. The trout cakes were even pretty good (the recipe is on the daily post), but the sauce was better.

And, after all, you can’t eat deathless prose.

When it comes to eating, bluefish is nobody’s favorite. You’ve probably heard some variation of the joke about how to prepare it: fillet it, brine it, and cook it on a plank over a low fire for an hour – then throw away the fish and eat the plank.

Ha ha.

When it comes to fishing, though, bluefish are more popular.

We had guests this past weekend, and they left on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday morning, we went out in Nantucket Sound to see if we couldn’t get some blues to show our friends a good time.

Fish were out there; we saw them. We followed them, we cast into them. We cursed and cajoled them. We did not catch them, and then it was time for Russ and Mylene to leave for the airport.

I'm improving

Kevin and I went out again in the late afternoon, and we struck bluefish. We were right outside the Cotuit cut on the west end of Sampson’s Island, and there they were. They were milling around in small groups, occasionally breaking the surface here or there. Over the course of an hour or so, we landed fourteen fish, about two pounds each.

They’re only two pounds, though, once you get them into the cooler. While they’re still in the water, they’re ten or twelve. Or that’s what you think they must be when they take your lure. These things fight as though their very lives depended on it.

Oh, wait a minute …

Catching bluefish is a grand afternoon’s entertainment, but it’s different from other kinds of entertainment – golf, say, or parasailing – in that it leaves you with a cooler full of a fish that’s nobody’s favorite.

I’ll certainly eat grilled bluefish, and there are ways to bake it (usually involving butter, mustard, and herbs) that make it downright tasty. But, to my mind, the best thing to do with bluefish is to smoke it. The oily, fishy taste that can be a liability when it’s fresh is an asset when it’s smoked; bluefish can handle brine and wood smoke.

Kevin prepping the makeshift smoker

The best way to smoke bluefish is – surprise! – with a smoker. We don’t have one, though, so Kevin has rigged our standard-issue Weber kettle grill to stand in. We’re still perfecting our technique, but I think we’re getting there.

I filleted the fish and soaked them in brine for two days. (The brine was one cup of salt, a half cup of sugar, and two tablespoons of lemon juice in a half-gallon of water.) Then we laid them out and let them dry until a pellicle formed.

A pellicle is kind of skin that develops as the fish dries, and it’s supposed to keep in moisture and prevent fats from rising to the surface of the fish (where they’re more likely to spoil). I harbor a suspicion that the importance of the pellicle is an old wives’ tale. One day, back in the Dark Ages, some poor fisherman left his fish out too long before he smoked it, and it came out great. The next time he caught fish, he did it again, but paid more attention and noticed the shiny skin. “Hmmm,” he said to himself, “Do you suppose that shiny skin keeps in moisture and prevents fat from rising to the surface?” And here we are, a thousand years later, still doing it.

If anyone knows about any rigorous double-blind controlled studies that compare pellicled and non-pellicled smoked fish, I would very much appreciate the reference.

Meanwhile, I, like every other fish smoker of the last thousand years, am unwilling to risk a batch of bluefish by disregarding the wisdom of centuries.

Cover, and come back in three hours

Once the pellicle forms, we coat the fish with some cracked black pepper and put it on the jury-rigged smoker

Kevin sets it up by lighting a chimney of charcoal, putting it in a pile at the bottom of the grill, and then adding several handfuls of soaked wood chips. Over that, he puts an aluminum roasting pan with holes cut in it so the fish isn’t exposed to the direct heat of the charcoal.

On go the fish, and he covers the grill and keeps the air flow to a minimum. We put a thermometer through a vent in the top, and try to keep the temperature under 150 degrees. It takes about three hours for the fish to smoke, and about three hours for the fire to die, so it’s a convenient arrangement.

I’m still tweaking the brine – I think it’s a bit too salty – so if anyone has suggestions, please chime in.

And I’m serious about the pellicle research.

Yesterday, we checked our lobster pots for the first time.

The day before, though, we tried to check our lobster pots for the first time.

We consulted the weather forecast in the morning, and it looked like the wind, which was blowing out of the north at about eight knots, was going to pick up as the day went on. We figured our best bet was to get out early, so we headed out as soon as we figured it, at about 7:30.

Barnstable Harbor

When we got to the boat ramp, which is about two miles west of the mouth of Barnstable Harbor, it seemed pretty windy already, but there wasn’t much chop in the harbor and we started out.

We turned the corner into Cape Cod Bay, and it got considerably choppier, but still manageable. We can pull pots in this, I thought to myself.

Then we came out of the channel into the body of the bay, and everything changed. The waves were a good five feet, and they tossed our boat around in ways which I understand are to be expected in a boat the size of ours, but which scared the bejeezus out of me.

After we’d come crashing down in the third or fourth trough, I found myself hanging on to the rail of the console with both hands, bracing for the next impact. It came in short order, as did the one after that and the one after that. Waves were breaking over the bow, and the boat seemed to always be pointing either up or down at an alarming angle.

Terror was occupying all the parts of my brain that ordinarily do the thinking, so it took some time for an idea to penetrate. Eventually, though, it occurred to me that we didn’t have to do this.

I hadn’t even finished having the thought before I communicated it to Kevin. “Honey,” I said, “I can’t do this. I’m too scared.”

I don’t believe words to that effect have come out of my mouth since I was eight years old. I didn’t like the sound of them, but I really was too scared to do this, so there wasn’t much point in beating around the bush.

Kevin didn’t try to talk me out of it; he turned around immediately. In part, this was undoubtedly because he knows I would never say anything like that unless I were beyond discussing it. But, even at the time, I understood that many a reasonable person would decline to pull lobster pots in water like this in a nineteen-foot boat. It wasn’t a fanciful request.

That didn’t stop me from feeling like a lily-livered, yellow-bellied, sniveling weenie. We’d gotten within a quarter-mile of our pots, and I made my husband turn the boat around because I was afraid. As glad as I was to be back on dry land, I was not happy with myself. Fishing is a big part of what we’re trying to do here, and if I’m too chicken to go out in the boat in anything but a dead calm, that’s a problem.

Luckily, it turned out that I wasn’t a lily-livered, yellow-belied, sniveling weenie; I was merely an imbecile. Later that day, we discovered that the conditions had been bad enough that the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the ultimate authority on all things wet) had issued a small craft advisory for Cape Cod Bay. You just don’t go lobstering in a nineteen-foot boat when there’s a small craft advisory in effect. You just don’t.

Unfortunately, the NOAA doesn’t issue imbecile advisories, and so people who don’t know there’s an active small craft advisory blithely head out in their small crafts. Because nobody called us on the phone and said, “STAY HOME, YOU IMBECILE,” out we went.

I can assure you that this will never happen again. A mistake like that has compelling instructive power.

Which brings us to yesterday, a different day altogether. The wind had shifted so it was coming out of the south, and had died to almost nothing. The NOAA website, which I checked, said that seas were less than one foot. Nevertheless, I felt a trepidatious flutter as we motored out into the harbor.

Trepidation is unsustainable in a dead calm, though, and I felt just fine as we pulled up to our first lobster pot.

Russ hauling a pot on to the gunwale

We have friends visiting from San Francisco, and Russ and Mylene had come out with us. Russ took the helm as Kevin started pulling up the rope, hand over hand. I had been very worried about the difficulty of pulling heavy traps off the seabed, but it didn’t look like he was straining.

“Is it hard?” I asked.

“Not too bad.”

That was good to know, but the fact that it wasn’t too bad for Kevin didn’t necessarily mean it was possible for me.

It only took a minute or so for him to get the pot out of the water and on to the gunwale, in clear view. We all stared in wonder.

There was a lobster in the trap.

We measured it, but I could tell by looking that it was big enough to keep. Our first pot, our first pull, our first lobster.

And it wasn’t just a lobster. It was a small triumph. After fishing trips where we came back empty-handed, boat and trailer problems that kept us out of the water, bugs in our collard greens and blight on our tomatoes, here was a tangible, hard-shelled, two-clawed success. I felt something embarrassingly close to elation.

That made pot-hauling easier, I think. I took hold of the rope on our second trap, and found that I could pull it up without too much difficulty. It was heavy, and I needed Kevin’s help to lift it up on the gunwale, but I could get it from the bottom to the surface.

Kevin and dinner

Second trap, second lobster. Astonishing.

Russ and Mylene took their turns hauling, and I went again, but the next few traps came up empty. One even had a missing bait bag. But it was okay, because we had two lobsters in the cooler, and dinner was assured.

Then, on the sixth or seventh, Kevin pulled up the motherlode: two legal lobsters, one of which looked like it was nearly three pounds.

All told, we came home with five lobsters weighing a total of ten pounds, and a renewed sense of enthusiasm.

Ten pots, just barely

In order to discover which of the plants and animals around us are good to eat, some brave soul has to go first. Fortunately for us, most of the testing has already been done, and we can find out what’s edible by checking Wikipedia. Our ancestors, though, had to bite the bullet and go with trial and error, hoping that the errors would be few and non-fatal.

Starvation is a powerful incentive to risk those errors, but even the prospect of a slow, lingering death wasn’t enough to convince some of Cape Cod’s earliest British settlers to try the lobsters, which you could apparently pluck right off the beaches. There were members of the Plymouth colony who preferred eating nothing to eating lobster, and expired dreaming of steak-and-kidney pie.

Now, I can understand an unwillingness to cook up something that looks like a giant cockroach, with menacing claws and a bad disposition, but if the alternative is death? Come on.

Fast forward four hundred years, and you’ll find an Irishman and a Jew (no Mayflower roots here!) heading into Cape Cod Bay, braving water and weather in the hopes of pulling a few lobsters up from the depths. As we speak, there are ten lobster pots at the bottom of the bay with our name on them – well, with our license number on them, at any rate. With any luck, some lobsters have spent the last 48 hours crawling in and not crawling out.

Kevin baiting a trap

Kevin and I are well-fed, and we have access to a wide variety of food at the supermarket down the road.  We are nevertheless going to spend the morning taking an open boat out on some serious chop and hauling fifty-pound traps up through fifty feet of water in the pursuit of something that looks like a giant cockroach, with menacing claws and a bad disposition.

Recreational lobstering, this is called.

If the Pilgrims had starved just a little longer, maybe we could still pluck them off the beaches.

Do you know what a leaf spring is?

I didn’t, until ours broke.

A leaf spring is a piece of metal, in a flattened U-shape, that suspends the body of a trailer above the axle and cushions the ride by acting as a shock absorber. When it breaks, the trailer and its contents (in our case, a boat) drop down on the axle, rendering the trailer unusable.

A functioning leaf spring

Had we not moved here, I suspect I would have gone my entire life without ever learning about leaf springs, and that would have been okay.

I thought that we’d be simplifying things by moving to a shack in the woods, and growing and gathering our own food. Now I understand that, if you want a simple life, you buy a condo in Manhattan. Once you have that, all you need is a cell phone and a Metrocard.

The list of things you don’t need in Manhattan is much longer than I ever imagined. You don’t need a car or a boat or a trailer or another trailer (one for the boat, one for everything else). You don’t need a string trimmer or a rototiller or another rototiller (one works, one doesn’t). You don’t need a chop saw, a circular saw, a table saw, a reciprocating saw, or a chainsaw. You don’t need a compressor, and you don’t need nail guns. You don’t even need shovels, rakes, or a post-hole digger. And you sure as hell don’t need leaf springs.

The simple life, though, requires all this stuff. If you want to fish, you need a boat and a way to get it to the water, into the water, and out of the water. If you want to grow food, you need tools to move earth. If you want to keep chickens, you have to be able to build a coop and a run. If you want to burn your own wood, you need a way to chop it down and chop it up. If you simply want to own exterior space, you need to be able to cut grass, trim trees, and top-dress the driveway with crushed bluestone.

Unfortunately, the paraphernalia that enables you to do those things also gives you more things to do. Vehicles have to be registered, licensed, and maintained. Tools have to be oiled, sharpened, and charged. And that’s before anything breaks. And things do break. And you can’t call the super.

Our shack in the woods

Over the last year, we have fixed the exhaust system and the wiring on the truck, the cooling system on the car, the gas tank on the boat, and the hub on the boat trailer. And those were just the major items; I won’t bother you with the broken oarlock on the skiff or the slow leak in the compressor or the perpetually deflating tire on the utility trailer.

And now it’s the leaf springs.

For a while there, I was starting to feel overwhelmed. So I did what many of us do when we’re not at our best. I complained to my mother.

If it’s sympathy you’re after, don’t ever complain to my mother. She will give you constructive suggestions, she will quote a relevant poem, she will offer you some lunch, but there will be no poor-dearing or there-thereing.

My mother is on the evenest of keels and, because she takes everything in stride, it’s natural for her to think that everything ought to be taken in stride. The only things that really get her attention are death and serious illness, and serious illness is chancy. My sister-in-law Lisa calls her “the mother who fell to earth.”

When I told my mother about our never-ending to-do list and the last-straw nature of the broken leaf springs, she nodded her head in perfect understanding and told me about what Uncle Frank and Aunt Dag, on whose farm she spent her childhood summers, used to talk about at breakfast.

My great-great-aunt Dagmar Dahlquist came late to farming. She’d been brought up to work in her parents’ grocery stores, and that was what she did. In 1925 she was 43, and everyone assumed that she would live out her life a spinster, behind the counter in the grocery in Carlos, Minnesota.

Then one morning a recently widowed farmer named Frank Palmer came into the store. Dag had known him for years; he came in regularly and was a fixture in the community. On this particular morning, he had clearly dressed carefully, and seemed intent on a purpose.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Palmer?” Dag asked him.

“You can marry me, Miss Dahlquist.”

She did. And, at about the age I am now, she entered into a life that required a slate of skills she didn’t have. She didn’t know the first thing about chickens, or horses, or cows, or sheep, or pigs, all of which were resident on the Palmer farm. She’d never had so much as an herb garden, and had no idea how to grow things. She couldn’t even cook. (She could fix a truck, but Frank didn’t have one.)

She took this in stride and did what any red-blooded, self-respecting, middle-aged woman would do. She learned.

Okay, she didn’t have leaf springs, but she didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing either.

Every morning, at breakfast, Frank and Dag would talk about what needed to be done on the farm. A fence needed mending, the wheat needed sowing, a chicken needed killing, potato bugs needed to be picked off the potato plants. The honey had to be collected. The eggs had to be gathered and taken to the co-op.

Whatever it was, when breakfast was over they went out and did it, with care and good will. They prospered, and built a life that made both of them happy.   It’s that simple.