How to Cook a Moose (14 page)

And then the weather changed again.

One day in late April, back in the farmhouse, the sun was fiercely bright, and the sky was a mad, deep blue. We emerged from the house blinking like underground rodents in sudden klieg lights. The air was so mild, I stripped down to a T-shirt by the end of our walk. My snow boots sank into the soft, mushy, wet skin of the road. The streams were all running again. The air smelled like water; that dry-ice quality of deep winter was gone. The remaining snow was all porous ice from melting and refreezing and melting. Dingo's fur looked mangy, clumpy; he was about to blow his thick winter undercoat.

There was a kind of bird I called the taxi bird—because they were as ubiquitous as taxis in New York—and when I first came to the White Mountains and was so urban I couldn't identify a single bird or bush, that was my primary point of reference. And now the taxi birds (phoebes, I now know) were back, singing their two-note descending call from treetops all along the dirt road.

Right outside the window by the table where I spent the afternoon working, the little maple tree had buds on it, very little and very hard, but buds nonetheless. I looked out at them frequently and smiled. In the late afternoon, I knocked off work and went out with a glass of wine and sat on the porch in my jeans and socks and T-shirt and bathrobe, my winter writer's uniform. This had always been my favorite time of day, but today was especially nice. Dingo lay next to me, ears and nostrils all aquiver, but there was nothing going on for him to bark at. The sun was setting and the air was absolutely still.

After days of howling winds and lowering fog and dripping eaves, the serene silence felt as shocking as the sudden warmth. The grass was turning a soft young green; crocus spears were finally poking out of the dirt.

All day, in my head, I'd been reciting the e. e. cummings poem that starts,

       
in Just-

       
spring when the world is mud-

       
luscious the little

       
lame balloonman

       
whistles far and wee

       
and eddieandbill come

       
running from marbles and

       
piracies and it's

       
spring

       
when the world is puddle-wonderful . . .

I couldn't stop thinking the words
mud-luscious
and
puddle-wonderful
over and over, and the rest of it sort of filled in chockablock with a galumphing joyful rhythm around those two words, along with “far and wee.”

Two or three weeks later, the mania of full-on spring infected our hermetic little threesome. Dingo bounded around outside all day like a humpy rabbit, barking at snow drip-melting off the roof and fluffing his copiously shedding fur in the breeze and sunlight. After an uncharacteristically studious, intent winter of hard work and concentration, Brendan and I reverted to our punchy and goofy and amorous selves. I felt scattershot and addlepated with unfocused disorganization: What was I working on, again? Eight different things, it turned out.

All night one night, the full moon blazed in through the bedroom window and lit up the long fields of snow and dark, shaggy woods with its silver, dramatic glow. The fact that wild solar flares were hitting Earth made sense; my dreams were absurd and rich with peril, upside-down logic, and Loki hilarity. And the next morning, the air had turned suddenly warm.

I woke up very early, let Dingo out into the sunny snow-blind morning, and fed him. While I drank an enormous cup of strong coffee, I sat blinking over my correspondence, unable to write anything coherent to anyone. At eleven a.m., creatures of clockwork habit, we three took our usual four-mile fast walk up and down the hilly dirt road, which streaming with runoff, was muddy. The lake and much of the snow had melted. The soft dirt road was strewn with squished baby frogs who'd gotten in the way of the ten or twelve cars, mostly Subarus, of course, that drove along the road each day. The lake was a
rich steel blue, choppy in the fresh breeze, shading to black around the edges. The mountains were cobalt hulks under a cloud-dense, abruptly sunny sky. Down at the beaver pond, we counted two new dams, making a grand total of five; their population was thriving, exploding even. A gosling swam behind its parents as they came bustling over to check us out. The little protruding hummocks near the shore had newborn, spindly stalks and greening moss.

We came home with wet feet; Dingo's entire undercarriage had to be toweled off. While I rubbed the grit and sand and snowmelt from his stomach and legs and hindquarters, he smiled goofily at me and panted in my ear and leaned against my shoulder in a manner I can only describe as flirtatious.

The best thing to do in these transitional seasons, winter to spring, especially, is to give in to animal instinct. In early spring, that means acquiescing to any and all seductive urges, sleeping a lot, drinking all the wine you want and plenty of water, and going outside into the sunlight in short sleeves and moving around. It's good to eat lightly but decadently, food that's good for you (because the change of seasons is a shock to the system) but which also satisfies a sudden intense itch for variety, change, novelty, adventure.

Instead of deeply flavored stews, root vegetables, and potato-based fry-ups, my appetite was suddenly laser-focused on ruffled fresh green lettuces and—it pains me to say this out of compassion for my vegetarian friends—baby lamb. It's a frank hunger for the sweetness of new life—little leaves shaking off dew and standing upright, the tender savory flesh of very young animals.

Popcorn Cockles and Asparagus with Fenugreek Sauce and Mango Salsa

This is the perfect antidote and accompaniment to spring fever. Cockles are better than clams for this dish, but very small, tender clams will do if no cockles are available.

Steam 20 young asparagus spears until just soft. Plunge into ice water, remove, and pat dry. Drizzle with the following mixture:

2 T mayonnaise

1 T lime juice

1/8 tsp ground fenugreek

Steam 3 dozen very fresh cockles in their shells just until they open. Remove the cockles from their shells (they will be wet with their own liquor) and immediately coat them in finely ground cornmeal. Heat 1 inch of peanut oil in a skillet until it spits when you flick a drop of water at it. In batches that just cover the bottom of the pan, fry the cockles, covered to minimize spatter, for several minutes, till their crusts are golden. Remove and arrange alongside the asparagus. On the other side of the cockles goes a mango salsa:

In a bowl, mix:

1 ripe mango, chopped small

1 to 2 T finely minced cilantro

2 T lime juice

1 minced medium or large garlic clove

1 to 2 jalapeno peppers (depending on how hot you want it), minced

This recipe serves 4 as an appetizer, in theory, but has been known to serve 2, just barely.

One late afternoon in May, we decided to go up Foss Mountain.

Going up Foss is a very old ritual for Brendan, one that long predated my arrival in the White Mountains. In a small knapsack, we packed a cold liter-bottle of hard cider and a bag of roasted cashews, as well as water and a treat for Dingo. We all got into the car and drove a few miles back through the woods on dirt roads, through the tiny mountain hamlet of Eaton with its clean lake and nineteenth-century town hall, and then we headed upward.

Foss Mountain Road has a few isolated houses with old barns and a working llama farm. The road is so steep, the car occasionally tipped and jolted upward as the engine strained to heave us over the hump to the next flat spot. It was rutted from frost and snowmelt, as grooved and corrugated as a dry streambed in places. We jounced slowly up through dense woods for a good long time. When we came to the tiny turnoff, we parked and got out of the car and hiked up through a big, scrubby privately owned blueberry field (
PLEASE DO NOT PICK THE BLUEBERRIES
, said many signs posted along the way) that took us to a narrow path through a small birch wood. This path is studded with boulders, and on this afternoon, was slick with fallen leaves and wet from an underground spring, so we had to tread carefully and occasionally grab a branch or walk on higher ground. Above the wood, we hit the huge granite outcropping and scrambled up it to the top.

The summit of Foss affords a 360-degree view of the White Mountains and their valleys and lakes and woods. It could be 1802 up there, or even earlier. There are three or four houses visible in valleys far below, but no roads, no traffic sounds, no other signs of civilization. Once in a while you hear the distant
thwack
of a hunter's shotgun. Otherwise, it's pristine and silent on that granite roof, just the wind rustling in the blueberry shrubs, the giant rushing peace of wilderness, the imperceptible ticking of sunlight on the rocks.

Every time we go up Foss, it's a different landscape, depending on the season, the weather, the mood of the place. Sometimes on a hot, sunny summer early evening there's a small crowd, kids picking ripe blueberries, running in a pack down the paths through the meadow, dogs forming their own pack and milling around, drinking from rain pools in the rocks and sniffing one another, adults gawping at the view, mostly silently, sometimes with quiet talk.

On this late afternoon in May, Brendan and Dingo and I were the only ones there. It was a chilly, lowering sort of day, with a brisk fresh breeze and thick low clouds, but we could feel summer coming, just around the bend. When we got to the top, we were quiet for a moment, in frank awe. The land had a blue tinge, a strange cast, almost like an old photograph of itself. Suddenly, a sunbeam slipped through the clouds and lit the slope below Mount Washington with a powerful shaft that made a distant lake shine like mica.

It felt like being in a giant cathedral, a reverent hush, an indrawn breath, mystical and strange.

We sat on our usual outcropping and opened the backpack and popped the cork out of the hard cider and had a swig each.

“I've never seen it this beautiful here,” I said finally.

“Me neither,” said Brendan, who'd been going up Foss for thirty years.

Dingo lay at my side, not saying anything.

The cider we'd brought was made from local apples, similar to the apples that grow on the old, gnarled little trees in the orchard around the farmhouse, sour, flavorful, tiny things that look like weird stones. The dry, deep, tart taste of that cider always reminded me of Foss; or rather, that was the only place we ever drank it.

(Someday, during a year of sufficient bounty, we plan to make our own cider from the apples that grow on the dozens of apple trees around the farmhouse; there's an old cider press in the barn. Some of
the trees in the orchard were planted over a century ago. They're gnarled, and most of their apples are as small as gumballs, but according to Brendan, they're fantastic for regular cider. His attempt to ferment the cider last time he made it, years ago, didn't work so well, but there's always next time.)