Mainer Potatoes, Baked

 

Ingredients:

 

1 13’ Whitehall Pulling Boat, with anchor

2 oars

some tinfoil

1 match

couple potatoes and a chunk of butter; salt

 

Mise en scene:

 

1.      Go down to my shore and shove off in the boat.  Row to the island.  Anchor the boat so she stays afloat.  (Tide is falling, at half.) Oh, yeah, bring along a heavy coat because it’s December, three o’clock, and clear.  Also a blanket, a hat.

2.      Below tide line, dig a shallow depression, and ring it with stones.  Find some down wood and sit by the pit stripping the wood with your knife until you have a few feathery pieces and some other small stuff.  Watch the sun set.  Don’t think about it; just watch. 

3.      Construct a fire…a careful cone of dry twigs with the feathery bits inside.  Lie down real close to the sand and the shale, so you can smell it, even in the cold, and, while protecting the wood with your body, light your match.  This is a test.  You are twenty-nine and mythic.  Intentionally, you’ve brought only one match.

4.      If you fail, go home and try this test another night. 

 

Method:

 

But this turns out to be the right night.  Some things you can do well. 

 

1.      You keep feeding your fire with small stuff and then bigger stuff.  It’s dark now except for a sheen on the sea—we have a quick twilight in winter.  Wind’s from the west and steady.  Low waning moon chasing the sun.  Faint, lambent shoreline: one gull patrols and then settles for the night. 

2.      You listen to the cold sea water gurgling in over rocks and snails, gurgling out over rocks and sails, gurgling in, gurgling out. 

3.      The fire tends itself now, and the sky darkens.  The moon is yellow then gone.  Overhead is an appearing of stars. The meander of the Milky Way is a pathway between here and the other place.  Mostly by feel, you cut your potatoes in half, smash some butter between the parts, salt them, close them, wrap them in foil, and push them into the coals with your stick.  You clean your hands on your pants, wrap the blanket around your legs, tug down your cap, lie still. 

4.      Alone; no muddle. 

5.      In, you breathe, and out again.  In, and out again.  You feel your chest as it fills with air and empties.  In, you breathe, and out again.  In, and out again.

6.      There’s a woman you want to marry, but you’re scared.  No real snow yet.  Ground’s not even frozen.  The last marriage hurt.

7.      Alarmed at your fire, a squirrel chitters from the wood behind. 

8.      Your imagination enters into the earth, and you feel the to-ing and fro-ing of all her parts.  The tug of tree roots in soil as their limbs swing back and forth in the wind.  The tide’s pull on the swirling rockweed as it swishes across stone.  The flicker of barnacle webs sweeping plankton in. 

9.      Then your imagination rises.  The cold steam of your breath, invisible now, blows eastward on the air, over meadow, over shore, over sea.  It takes you to an island that is further out than ours. 

10.  Out and out, you spiral through tree and stone, through squirrel and gull, through earth and sea—from star to star—until you find of the entire awesome ponderousness that is God.  Devil and angel, you find, devil and angel there.

11.  Shall you ask her?  Shall you not? 

 

Chef’s note:

 

Don’t burn your fingers when you grub the potatoes from the ash, open them, and, dripping with butter, eat them in the dark.