Earth and Sky

It’s hard to say for sure, but I’m starting to believe that the minute I go into my writing cave — I’m at work on my next memoir which is due out from Berkley Books sometime in 2015; the “cave” is what happens when I hit the place where I think, 24/7, about nothing other than what I’m writing. I go to bed thinking about it, I wake up thinking about it, and I think about it every waking moment in between — the world laughs at my pathetic attempt to control my own schedule. Which means that if I block out a solid month for nothing but work, the gods roll their eyes and suddenly my dance card gets slammed, and what began as uninterrupted writing time ends up being small threads and tiny snippets into which I have to glue my ass to my chair and take the phone off the hook. Even if it’s for two hours.

Which has been no easy feat lately: my mother, a former television and cabaret singer and model who lives alone in Manhattan, has taken to calling me five times a day to regale me with stories of her days in front of the camera, and to wonder whether she should call William Morris to set up a meeting — they represented her some time ago — or should she just walk in and ask the security guard to let her upstairs. There are long conversations about why it doesn’t seem right that she’s so obsessed with Perry Mason because 1) he was played by Raymond Burr, who was gay, and 2) he isn’t real, and other conversations about why it’s not okay for her to defrost a bucket of chicken soup on the counter for three days, even though that’s the way her grandmother did it in 1943, and nobody died. There was the small issue of her colonoscopy appointment which she had written down on three different dates in three different calendars; she ate the tiniest smidge of roast chicken during the 24-hour/clear liquids-only period because she was sure the doctor said she could. There’s also the new Facebook page that she’s launched, which offers readers daily tips on living and life as she knows it; she sleeps only two or three hours every night, so she has a lot of time to think about these things, she says.

And honestly, this is who she is; this is who she always was, forty years ago, and who she is now — this isn’t some weird manifestation of time — and I love her for it. Even though I’d like to take a Valium the size of a steering wheel.

Beyond dealing with the worry, the hand-holding, the constant calls, and the moving from crisis to crisis throughout the day while trying to write on a hysteria-inducing deadline, there was the issue of Susan’s long-awaited sabbatical from her job at Random House. This would mean that, in the throes of writing around my mother’s schedule, Susan and I would be traveling out west (the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest won out this year over Paris. Sorry, Paris.) for three weeks, driving from Santa Fe up through Utah, Idaho, and Oregon, and finally arriving in Seattle where we would perch for ten days before spending another four in Friday Harbor, in the San Juan Islands. With my mother calling. And me scribbling writing notes before sunrise and again very late at night. And generally trying not to have a stroke while remaining calm and cheerful and a pleasant travel companion for Susan, who has worked mightily and brilliantly for ten years.

I was a complete wreck when we left, but I quickly learned that a road trip through the west is actually the ideal thing for a mind that is clogged with the debris of life like a hair-packed drain; before we hit the road, I had been feeling existentially warm and sticky, as though I’d rolled around in vat of honey and then put on a sweater. But when the earth opens up long and quiet and the sky feels so close that it seems like a ceiling of blue; when you realize the years that it took for nature to carve the Arches outside of Moab, and what those Arches bore witness to as the centuries and the millenia rolled by, you then also realize that all of the aggravation and the worry, the hand-holding and the constant calls, and the crises that keep you from writing the book that you are certain will win you that MacArthur you so obviously deserve —- when you see the west unfold in front of you, you realize that you and your problems and worries are nothing but, as my late father would have said, a speck of fly shit on the great windshield of life.

 

 

So, there was The West, and Santa Fe, and seeing dear friends who feel more like family every time we’re together, which is a rare occasion; there was the farmer’s market down by the old rail yard, and the guy who roasts Hatch chiles while proclaiming his to be the real thing: Organic and Hispanic. There was Moab, which looked like the set of a 1950s spaghetti western run headlong into a creature feature about Mars. There was Salt Lake City, where we watched the Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearse before visiting a bookstore I thought was just another wonderful local indy (the lovely and kind folks at Deseret Books were as confused about our being there as we were; I expected to see stacks of Gone Girl. The racks of Jesus coloring books should have been a dead giveaway). There was the endless drive through southeastern Idaho, which was the color of a baked potato, straight through to Pendleton, Oregon, where we landed on Kol Nidre and, in the shadow of the Pendleton Roundup ate Thai food before the sun went down, and I quietly pleaded to God/Jesus/Buddha/Whomever to forgive the sins I’ve committed, knowingly and not, against people I love and people I don’t, and to please, please bless me with patience and compassion for my aging mother despite wanting to stick my head in the oven after her fifth call about the William Morris Agency, and how handsome Raymond Burr is if he’d only lose some weight.

(He’s probably very thin at this point, Ma. He’s been dead for years.)

We had traveled for days on end without seeing or smelling the water, so when we eventually arrived in Seattle and moved into the tiny Ballard bungalow we’d rented, it was a (gorgeous, gray) relief. Our first night there, after arriving late, we ran out to the local supermarket and bought a thick, fatty Coho salmon filet caught in local waters, and roasted it slowly alongside tiny new potatoes and a handful of fresh chanterelle. We expected days of relaxing and reading, of my squirreling myself at the basement desk we’d set up so that I could keep writing, but every day and every night we saw friends we never get to see across platters of some of the most remarkable, fresh, simple food I’ve ever eaten. When Jess Thomson, co-author with Renee Erickson of Renee’s brilliant new cookbook, A Boat, A Whale, and a Walrus told us about Renee’s author dinner at our friends’ Brandon Pettit and Molly Wizenberg‘s restaurant, Delancey — one of my favorite places in the world — we splurged, and went, and laughed and drank and ate copious amounts of Brandon’s remarkable food, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the packed dining room, shouting over the din to be heard, and woke up the next morning in a bed that wasn’t ours in a cottage we didn’t know with sore throats and hoarse voices and feeling like maybe we should move. Maybe this was really home.

Or maybe we were just running away.

Slow Roasted Coho Salmon

Ordinarily, I buy my fish — wherever I am, but especially in fish-forward communities — from small fishmongers, but when we arrived in Seattle very late one day, famished from the road, it was all I could do to get myself to the Interbay Whole Foods, not far from our cottage in Ballard. Yes, it really did look like this when I had the fish guy slice me a filet from the center of the fish; October is Coho season in Puget Sound, and with salmon this fresh, the less you do to it, the better. Which meant that I turned to a tried-and-true method by Alice Waters, which she mentions secondarily in her wonderful The Art of Simple Food: slow roasting. I find her recommendation to serve the fish with a drizzle of vinaigrette far too rich for such an already-rich fish. Instead, I melt a tablespoon or two of sweet butter together with the juice of a whole, very juicy lemon, which cuts the fat while remaining silky. Nothing could be simpler, or better.

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 very fresh Coho salmon filets, about 6 ounces each, skin on, preferably at room temperature

Extra virgin olive oil

fresh herb sprigs (I prefer rosemary; rosemary and salmon is an unbeatably earthy combination)

1 tablespoon sweet butter

juice of one whole lemon

Lightly season the fish with sea salt and pepper.

Preheat oven to 225 degres F. Lightly grease a rimmed baking sheet, and cover it with a layer of fresh herbs, placed roughly in the same dimensions as the salmon. Set the salmon down on the herbs, skin-side down. Drizzle the salmon with a bit more oil, and bake at 225 degrees F for 30 minutes.

Two minutes before it’s done, warm the butter together with the lemon. Plate the salmon and drizzle with the sauce. Serve immediately.

Tagged as: Brandon Pettit, Delancey, Jess Thomson, Molly Wizenberg, Renee Erickson, seafood, Seattle