Dinner at Mäs

    For what kind of experience would you pay $220? A raft trip down the Wild and Scenic Rogue River, maybe? A really good seat at the Metropolitan Opera? 

    Dinner? Not really. I don't need to pay that much for a good meal, especially if I had to pay extra for wine. So when my friend Cheryl suggested we have dinner at Mäs, a restaurant in Ashland that the New York Times called one of the fifty best restaurants in the country, I said no. The price was beyond my dinner-out budget. 

    Then I remembered that a friend had given me $200 for my birthday. If I used that, I thought, it would be like spending $20 for the dinner, and then maybe I could have wine, too. So I told Cheryl I had figured out how I could do it, so she made our reservation.

    In the meantime, I made a trip Georgia (see post on October 25). While I was in Atlanta, my sister Laura took me to Lenox Square, Atlanta's first shopping mall, with its high-end shops. I was way out of my element, but when Laura pulled a skirt off a rack and handed it to me, saying, "It looks just like you," I tried it on, liked it, checked it for affordability, and bought it. 

    That's what I wore to dinner at Mäs.

    When Cheryl and I arrived at the restaurant, we were shown to a private dining room. I was taken aback. I like the ambience of being among people enjoying themselves at a restaurant. We were alone here. Would this be fun?

    Oh, yes. Right from the beginning, when the chef, Josh—repeatedly a semifinalist for the James Beard award, a finalist for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific, and the owner of Mäs—came in to greet us. He explained that here the chefs were the waiters and that there would be eight courses and did we want wine with our dinner? I did, so Josh returned with a bottle of sake made, he said, in a long fermentation and refermentation process to brew the essence of rice into silk-smooth alcohol. 

    I don't usually much care for sake. This one was superb.

    

Our waiter, a young apprentice chef named Derek, brought in the first course, which was called a tea but which I would have called the most delicious broth I have ever had. The second course was a croustade—a delicate fried cup with a creme-fraiche layer and some other layers I can't remember, topped with trout roe. "Eat it in one bite," Derek advised. "Otherwise, the roe will explode everywhere."

I forgot to take a picture, so this is an online picture
that is almost like it.

    It was a heavenly mouthful.

    After the sake, Josh brought us a white wine that was oh-my-god good. Later he asked if I wanted a glass of the red wine, too, and I'm glad I said yes because I have never had such good wines as I had that night. Like the food, the wines came from special places—the red from the Canary Islands, the white from somewhere in Germany. When I asked Josh where I could buy these wines, he said Mäs had their own sommelier in Bend. These wines were not to be found in the local supermarket.

    The theme of the night seemed to be foods from bodies of water—trout, lobster, tuna, crab, abalone, prawns, duck, scallops, seaweed. 

Third course: lobster, pineapple guava, yuzu, lemongrass, chili

Everything had an origin story—the trout from Lake Helen in Lassen Volcanic National Park (I've swum in it!), the scallops from the Oregon coast, the duck from one place, the tuna from another. In season, Josh uses local produce—tonight's matsutake mushrooms were from southern Oregon.

Fifth course: Chawanmushi (crab, matsutake, abalone jus)

 Everything was cooked with special techniques and equipment. Every course was beautifully presented in its own appropriate and beautiful dish. The cutlery was delicate and smooth to the touch. The wine glass had a stem as slender as a reed and was signed by the glass-maker.

And, of course, it was all indescribably delicious because, as we all know, there's no way to describe tastes except to say that they mingled and melded and separated then mingled again like water winding downstream, like the colors of the ocean, like the opening measures of Beethoven's Fifth. 

Sixth course: trout, blue prawn, chive, lobster blanc

    We were there three hours. Derek's timing was perfect; we never felt rushed to eat faster; we were never impatient for the next course.

Seventh course: duck, dragon's breath, sweet potato, kampot pepper jus

  Everything was as smooth as the custard base of the final course, the dessert: pawpaw, rum jelly, milk crumb, walnut oil.

Cheryl is relishing the tastes of the dessert tucked into the bottom of the vessel.
The "drips," by the way, are a part of the pottery, not spills.

    As we finished scraping the bottoms of the dessert bowls, Josh came in with a port, made, he said, in the oldest port-making facility in Portugal. 

    When I was a student at Cambridge University in England in the sixties, I had some fine port but never have I had any port as good as what I had at Mäs.

     What a very wonderful time Cheryl and I had that night. It was more than dinner out. It was a complete experience—sharing the private dining room, talking with the chefs, knowing where each ingredient came from and the complex and imaginative methods that turned those ingredients into gourmet rapture. And then, of course, eating those incredible edibles. 

    A raft trip down the Rogue is an experience of thrills. A night at the Met centers on music. Both experiences are sensually all-encompassing. So it was with dinner at Mäs—the totality of an experience centered on taste. I didn't spend $270 on dinner that night. I spent it on an adventure unlike any I've had before.

Autumn Miracles in the Applegate

     Very often, in late October in the mountains of southern Oregon, we witness miracles.
   A few days ago I stood by the banks of the Applegate River watching for chinook salmon. The river lay tranquil in the pale afternoon light.

                                                                                        photo by Diana Coogle

Kingfishers flew upstream. Riverside trees and bushes reflected in the water. And the salmon were bucking upriver, building their redds in the gravelly river bottom. Their fins cut through the river's surface, corkscrewing as the fish made cavities for their eggs.

                                                                                            photo by Sandy Olken
Note the fin just below water's edge, just to left of center

They will watch the eggs for a few days as the males fertilize them. Then they will die.

    In six or seven weeks, the eggs will hatch, and the fry will be swept downstream in a tumultuous welcome to life, then continue to the ocean before retuning to the Applegate three or four years later.

    What a miracle. 

    Like the return of the salmon, the return of autumn color is a glorious miracle.

    The big-leaf maples on the Middle Fork trail were popping with deep butter-yellow hues as I hiked it with a friend one blue-sky autumn day.

When the sun shone through them, they were so drenched with color they rained yellow onto us. The banks of the steep canyon were flowing with flaxen-leaved viney maples, interspersed with the occasional pinks of dogwoods and, even more occasionally, flame-red leaves of viney maples,

which take on, according to their whim, yellow or scarlet and any colors in between or all at once. Burnt umber, bronze, carrot-orange, the greenish yellow of lemon, salmon-pink, burgundy—all those colors and more spotted the woods.

Through all that vibration of color, the black fir trunks rose straight and tall. Awakened by the recent rain, the moss on the rocks glowed emerald-green and the ferns perked up.

    As I walked the last miles, I felt the kind of balm one might feel after a particularly meaningful worship service. As with the salmon, I had given my soul a bath.

All photos on Middle Fork trail by Margaret della Santina

     

Family visits

    Nothing warms my heart more than being with family.  I am so proud of who each of them is.

    I went to Vashon Island, Washington, last week for my son, Ela's, talk at the Vashon Center for the Arts, describing the process of building the sculpture-skeleton of Singer, the gray whale who had beached on Vashon two years ago. (See posts on June 17 and 19 for more details.) A large audience sat under the sculpture as its tail waved over their heads with the same motion it would have used to propel the body through the sea.

It's not the only articulated whale skeleton in the world, but it is the only one with a sculptural outline and a tail (half the skeleton) that moves. The audience was enthralled with Ela's explanations of his work.

    And I am proud of my grandchild, Kairos, who graduated from high school last June and who will be working as photographer for a dance company in Atlanta in December. We had a brief but thoroughly satisfying visit.

     After a few days on Vashon, I flew to Georgia for a siblings reunion with my sisters, Laura and Sharon, and our brother, Lee. Five years ago last spring Lee sustained traumatic spinal injury in a bicycle accident (see post on June 25, 2021). Now, thanks to a new high-tech device he wore around his waist that kept his feet pointed forward and his legs walking straight, Lee joined us for a hike through the woods in the north Georgia mountains—not only joined us but hiked right along with us.

l-r: Laura, Sharon, me, Lee, at Amicalola Falls
                                                            photo by a passerby

              

It did my heart good to see his continued enthusiasm for athletics (he was a rugby player up to his accident and, of course, a bicyclist, as well as a skier, hiker, etc.) by embracing his new identity as a disabled athlete, hiking with us and entering bicycle races. What an inspiring example of perseverance.

    As for my sisters—one of the reasons for going to Georgia was to see their combined art exhibit at the Blue Ridge Mountains Art Center—

From the poster for the exhibit

Sharon's calligraphy pieces based on nature subjects and Laura's botanical drawings of endangered plants of the Southeast. It was a stunningly beautiful exhibit. What fine artists my sisters are!

   Another reason was to attend Laura's lecture at the arts center on those endangered plants, based on her book, published by the University of Georgia, due out next April. Laura is an excellent public speaker and storyteller; her informative and entertaining lecture received enthusiastic applause. 

    Their talents aside, I enjoy being with my family just because we like each other's company so much. We shared good meals from restaurants, pubs, and Sharon's kitchen. We worked a jigsaw puzzle together, and one evening we watched the digitized versions of family movies Lee had brought to show us. And, of course, we shared stories of our current lives.

    Then it was over, and I flew home, my heart full of gratitude and admiration for the wonderful people of my family.

Visiting a Friend in the Memory Care Unit of an Assisted Living Facility

     The other day I visited a close friend who lives in a facility for people with dementia and other problems. He is in a wheelchair and can't operate it himself, so he goes where people take him. When I got there, he was on the patio, alone, asleep in the sun.

    He does recognize people, though sometimes it takes a minute—me, his family, the many friends who come to visit. He can't follow a conversation, but you can somewhat engage him by sharing a photo book, for instance, or reading short pieces of poetry that maybe trigger good feelings, if not memories. If you put a musical instrument or a ping-pong paddle in his hand, his body will remember—the fingers pluck the strings, the hand makes the paddle hit the ball—moments of engagement. But on his own he doesn't make art or write poems or read—things he used to enjoy—and he never watched television, anyway, so that isn't much of a distraction, either. 

    I wondered how he fills his time, the tedious hours of day after day. 

    But that, I see now, misses the mark.

    He can't articulate his thoughts very well, but he said something extraordinary that day. Looking directly at me, with neither despair nor self-pity, he said, "I don't know what my role is." 

    He had expressed a deep truth. We want to be meaningful in our lives, to have purpose in relation to other people. This man had been a high-school teacher, many years ago; that was a role. He had started a commune and shared in the experiments of life style so important in that era. He was a mentor to young men. He made art and played music with other people. He has sustained many important friendships. He is still a father and a husband, but those roles are meaningless in his day-to-day life situation now, as neither sons nor wife need anything from him. His family and friends come to visit, and they come often, but that doesn't help him understand his role in life. What, now, does he have to offer? 

    Later during my visit he got caught in a loop of statements, as often happens. None of it was clear and direct, but what he said was, "I'm just a guest here." The elaboration was a little garbled, but the gist was, "When you are a guest in someone's house or when you go to church, you respect the way they do things. You go along with their ways." Things like that. 

    Again, I understood. He has no relationship with the other "guests" in the facility, who have the same cognitive difficulties he has. The staff are good. The care is excellent. But his role with them is passive. He gives them purpose, but he doesn't feel his own purpose. 

    "I don't know what my role is”—a simple recognition of his life now and a tremendous effort to come to terms with it.

    I didn't know what to tell him.

    

The House on Merrits Avenue

On Merritts Avenue, in downtown Atlanta, not far from the Varsity drive-in restaurant and Georgia Tech University, squatted a old white-wood house. It wasn’t dilapidated, but it never received a fresh coat of paint, either. This was the home of Eveready Plastics, a laboratory for making ear molds for hearing aids, my father’s mail-order business.
In my teen years, and again, later, I worked in that old house, as my father's employee. After the long drive from our rural home, always leaving early enough to start work at 8:00 am, he would park the old Oldsmobile in the back of the house. We entered through the basement, where a mean-looking German shepherd growled and barked and leapt against the wire of his large cage. This was no pet, but a thoroughly frightening guard dog. I kept my distance.
At first, in my early teens, I worked with Bobby, the secretary, in the small room to the right of the front door. She taught me how to file business papers and correspondence and advised me to learn shorthand as well as typing. Later, when Bobby was gone and I was secretary, I worked in the larger, brighter room to the left of the front door. By now it was my office. I opened and sorted the mail and took the day’s orders for ear molds into the lab, laying the little boxes with impressions of each customer’s ear in a row on the workbench and the order form under each one.

The cardboard mailing box and the plastic box the ear mold went in

I learned how to write a business letter and how to patiently uncoil tangled rubber tubing, and I cleaned out and organized the files. The reward for that otherwise undesirable task was the many letters I found to my father from business associates, praising his integrity.
The large center room of the house was the lab itself, with its noisy electric tools and acrid smell of hot plastic. Everyone in the lab worked on equal footing—my father, the boss; Henry, a black man (at a time in Georgia when such a thing was not done); Woody, an alcoholic until my father urged him into AA; the Georgia Tech students, working part-time—six or seven employees at the height of the business. They were a jovial bunch, laughing and easy with each other. There were no women in the lab, but sometimes, if time was tight for getting all the orders out by the end of the workday, my father would call me in for the final step: buffing the ear molds to a glowing shine. The machine I used shined my fingernails at the same time.
Behind the lab was the kitchen, with a tiny screened-in porch at its back side, one story above the Oldsmobile parked below. The refrigerator was fully stocked with Coca-Colas, in glass bottles, for anyone to have at any time. We ate our lunches at the wooden kitchen table, all of us together. Sometimes my father sent me next door to pick up a lunch for us from what he called the Greasy Spoon. Sometimes we all had steak, which Henry cooked, smothered with onions and gravy.
At one point in my growing-up years, my father bought the Atlanta Stationery and Printing Company and moved the printing presses into the basement of Eveready Plastics. One of those presses was a machine for printing numbers onto hard plastic disks. When an order for these came in, the job fell to me. As I pressed the handle of the machine, repetitively, to burn a series of white numbers onto a black disk, I forestalled boredom and practiced my French by saying the numerals in French.
The house of Eveready Plastics was musty and old. It smelled of hot plastic, smoke from fried foods, old wooden walls, decades of papers. The basement smelled of dampness and dog and printer’s ink. I liked the old house and my work there. I knew I would never be a career secretary, Bobby’s mentorship notwithstanding, and maybe I was given a break with the work because I was the boss’s daughter, but I was learning skills that would stay with me the rest of my life—typing, filing, business relationships (but not shorthand, which I quickly forgot). My boss didn't mind if I read a book when work was slow. The employees were polite and mildly deferential to me. 

    Most of all, those were years of getting to know my father, aspects of him outside the family, his relationships with other kinds of people. I saw the traits he deliberately tried to instill in his children—respect, equality, generosity, honesty—manifested in the ways he behaved in the real world. Whatever has happened by now to that old white house on Merritts Avenue, it is in my memory a house of merit.

Backpacking in the Trinity Alps of Northern California

     My friend Sarah and I didn't get started on the Long Canyon Trail in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area until 2:30 in the afternoon, but we were only hiking 5 1/2 miles and figured that even with full packs for this seven-day backpacking trip, we would have plenty of time to get to our proposed campsite at Deer Lake.

    Oh, how wrong we were! Long Canyon kicked our butts! It was a relentless uphill trail for three and a half miles and steep, steep, steep for the last mile and a half. Late as it was getting, I called for a rest two or three times in that last climb. On the last rest stop, I saw my calf muscles twitching with tiny movements, like a sparkler under the skin. 

    Nonetheless, when we rounded the pass and started downslope to Deer Lake, I wasn't too tired for the majestic sunset over the mountains and lake.

Me, on the way to Deer Lake

    I was, however, too tired to eat. As soon as the tent was up, I crawled in and fell asleep,

    The next morning I was as enthusiastic and ready as ever. The pattern had been set—steep!—but my muscles never threatened to quit on me again. We made some awesome ascents and hiked through gorgeous county—peaks as sharp and rugged as they come (the Sawtooth Ridge was especially impressive)

meadows rich with autumn colors

creekside campsites, more glorious sunsets seen from rocks we climbed for the sight (a "tequila rock" as the camper we met at Horseshoe Lake called it), 

and beautiful green lakes tucked under peaks, perfect for swimming.

At Summit Lake, after a swim

    Dragonflies by the score. Tadpoles crowding the water's edge at Luella Lake. Tiny frogs leaping ahead of us at Bear Creek, so many it was hard not to step on them. A long entertaining show of fish jumping for flies at Summit Lake. Hawks. Darlingtonia. A ferocious windstorm at Summit Lake that had us sleeping fitfully, and, otherwise, perfect weather. One hardship was that I had somehow left my hat at home, but, as luck would have it, at the second campsite some previous camper had left a deck of cards and a hat sitting on a stump. I didn't take the cards, but the hat was a godsend.

In my "borrowed" hat

    Of course, all the wonders of the trail and the mountains are only the augmentation of good companionship. Sarah lives in Pennsylvania, where the hiking is steep but nothing like in the Trinity Alps (as for that, I live in the Applegate, where the trails are often steep but nothing like the Trinity Alps). She loved the steep granite landscapes, the beautiful lakes and streams (did I mention that the meadows were mostly still fed by lovely gurgling meadow streams?), the strenuous demands of the trail—the hardest hiking she had ever done, she said—the bright cold water for dips in creeks and lakes, the autumnal meadows, the big trees. 

                                                        photo by Diana Coogle

Half my age and strong and fit for the trail,

she never complained that I was slow on the trail or snored in the tent or cramped her style. In fact, our styles, like our tempers, meshed well. Nor did she seem to mind that I depended on her greatly superior map-reading skills. It was she who kept us on route (and not her fault when we missed a trail turn-off and hiked one and a half extra miles on what was already our longest day with one of our steepest ascents), and it was she who kept the stats. For anyone interested, I've listed them below, along with our route, after I sign off with a selfie of two very happy Trinity Alps hikers.

(All photos by Sarah Bay Nawa unless otherwise noted.)
 

Day 1—Long Canyon TH to Deer Lake (no other campers)

    5.5 miles

Day 2—Deer Lake to camp on the confluence of Bear Creek and Swift Creek (no other campers)

    8 miles

Day 3—Swift Creek to Ward Lake (no other campers)

    5.8 miles

Day 4—Ward Lake to Horseshoe Lake (one other camper)

    1.5 miles

Day 5—Horseshoe Lake to Deer Creek Camp (no other campers)

    Up Mumford Pass (!)

    9.9 miles

Day 6—Deer Creek Camp to Summit Lake (3 other tents of 2 people each)

    4.5 miles

Day 7—Summit Lake to Long Canyon TH (2 sets of 2 hikers at Deer Creek Pass)

    6.3 miles

Total elevation gain: 10,130 feet

Totall milage: 41.7

Passes climbed: 

    Bee Tree Gap—7400 feet

    Deer Creek Pass—7485 feet

    Black Basin Pass—7150 feet

    Mumford Pass—7200 feet
    Siligo Pass—7500 feet

Four lakes, 9 swims

Seven glorious days

Internet Woes

     When I came home from Scotland in early July, I had no internet. When at last the technicians came out, they looked around and fiddled with their computers and finally told me they could no longer bring me service. I live too far up the mountain. 

    Now what? My son googled the problem (I had no internet, remember) and discovered that Starlink was the only company that would service my little spot on the planet. So I made an appointment for a Starlink installation.

    By the time the installer got here, I had been without connection to the cybersphere for a month.

    It was an interesting hiatus. 

    I quickly learned that it's not necessary to look online for the weather every day. Sometimes an idle thought would suggest a google search before I remembered I couldn't do that. The thought slipped by, easily enough. And I found out that I could, after all, overcome my daily obsession with New York Times games. 

    But I couldn't access Google Drive to work on documents for a book I'm co-writing. I couldn't check email, so I got behind on important work (book editing, board meetings, Applegater). Consequently, I spent a lot of time at the Applegate library, indoors when it was open, sitting on its front-porch bench to use its internet when it wasn't open or going all the way to the Medford library—if it was open. At the beginning of August, inundated with Applegater articles to edit by deadline, I spent three whole days at the Good Bean cafe, where, for the price of coffee and lunch, I could do my work in a pleasant, quietly bustling atmosphere. 

    What I discovered in that month of disconnectedness is that internet at home is, if not absolutely necessary, pretty close to it. The inconvenience was hefty. I don't like Elon Musk and I hate the satellites that cross the sky one after another after another. Nonetheless, I am grateful for Starlink, and, I have to say, the customer service was excellent.

    And now, not only am I back online, but the internet connection is superior to the old system. No more lag while I'm on Zoom. No more computer black-out while I'm doing an online yoga class. And, the biggest bonus of all, for the first time ever I can watch movies. Starting with Ted Lasso tonight.