Lost and Found

In the Summer 2021 issue of Sport Literate, I wrote about a group of feral dogs in Tangier, Morocco, who had welcomed me as one of their own: “They were not really stray dogs but street dogs. Unrestrained and untended. Of all the pack members, current and former, only I am truly a stray. None of my dog friends actually wandered away from her proper home or lost himself in transit from one place to the next. But I have, over and over and over.”

At the time, I’d been living in Morocco for seven years. And now, in the winter of 2022, I find myself on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Though perhaps find is too strong a word. You can read about that transition in issue 14.2 of The FlyFish Journal.

While I was looking for a place to land, a handful of other stories also found their way into print. 

Issue 13.3 of The Flyfish Journal features my story about the most endangered species of trout on the planet: “The Ocean Under the Mountain.”

The spring 2022 issue of Guidefitter Journal offers a look back at my first visit to Mongolia. 

The March 2022 issue of High Country News published my essay, “Hard Lessons from Poker Joe.”

“The Necessity of Success,” in Strung magazine’s spring issue, once again paired my words with the images of artist Frederick Stivers.

Another excerpt from my upcoming book about the 2018 Baikal Expedition appeared in Plants & Poetry Journal. Oddly enough, it is not about a taimen but a porcupine fish. (If you click on this link, be forewarned that it takes a long time to load and you must scroll persistently to find the story.)

And the summer 2022 issue of The Montana Quarterly includes my tribute to the dog who underlies my appreciation of all dogs . . .

The Sixty-Second Martini

At the end of any busy day, I love nothing more than a sixty-second martini. And by this I do not mean the martini that follows the sixty-first. I mean a drink that takes less than a minute to make, from your hand’s first contact with the olive jar to the bracing cocktail’s blessed intersection with your parched lips. With nothing to clean up afterward.

I didn’t become an expert on this topic by doing research or writing a book. I did it the old-fashioned way: by drinking. For weeks, months, years, decades. Through many trials and some near-grievous errors, shaken, stirred, and on the rocks (me, not the martini).

 

 

This recipe bears no relation to what you may have previously encountered in hotel bars or James Bond movies. It requires neither a jigger nor a two-piece shaker. Though fastidious, it is not fussy.

This is what I believe: martinis should be cold and they should be sipped. They should not be blasphemed with vodka or water. One is enough to get you to dinner. (Most of the time.)

I call it the sixty-second martini not because I am in a rush to drink it, but because that’s all the time you need to prepare for its charm. My motto: gin without haste, enjoy in leisure, no repentance necessary.

 Ready to begin? Then reserve a place in the freezer for your bottle. That’s where it should live. Always. Store the olives and the vermouth in the refrigerator. I prefer fresh, green, unpitted olives, each about the width of a thumbnail, and extra dry vermouth. (Later, to reinforce some sense of self-respect, you may wish to experiment with other vermouths, a twist of lemon, or even a slice of cucumber.) You’ll also need a martini glass, preferably stemless.

 

Now things start to happen fast. Place an olive in the glass. Tip in just enough vermouth to cover the olive. Firmly grasp your freezing cold bottle of gin. Pour slowly and steadily, aiming a thin stream of gin at the olive’s rounded edge. (This is easy with the built-in flow regulator that comes with many brands.)

See how the differing viscosities of gin and vermouth conspire to turn the olive like a little green pig on an invisible spit? That’s Bernoulli’s principle in action—and all the stirring your drink needs. Continue pouring until the liquid reaches a polite distance from the rim of the glass.

That’s it. Your first sip will be a revelation: cooling, healing, and invigorating all at once.

Happy Is the Man

For some odd reason, it’s often easier to be grateful in the first week of January than in the third week. Today I’m grateful that the Web is like the Yellowstone in summer flood, roiling with debris, reaching high into the willows to reclaim the previous year’s (or decade’s) parched husks.

I wrote “Happy Is the Man” in 2004, while we were living in the Paradise Valley, and modeled the title character after an angler I met on Western New York’s Oak Orchard Creek. You can read the story on Big Sky Journal’s site, with photos by Ken Takata and Barry and Cathy Beck.

You know you're on a happy island when . . .

even the fish out of water are smiling. [Note the dorsal cactus.]

Pumpkin Pie, Revisited

Last night I tried that recipe again. There was only a half cup of pure eggnog left, but there were a few swallows remaining in another bottle, fortified with rum, and then I topped off the 12-ounce measure with heavy cream. The result was an even better pie: tender yet firm, a steady companion in times of need.

Pie for Breakfast

We cooked together this morning, in a kitchen with a counter the size of a smallish cutting board. Sarah fried bacon on the stovetop, turning each slice with chopsticks until it reached the superbly-crisp-but-not-quite-burnt stage that our son prefers.

Then she used the leftover cubes of Italian bread from last night's dinner of fondue to make morsels of French toast, scented with cinnamon and served with maple syrup from our neighbor's trees. They were very good. So good in fact, and so appealing on the plate, that we predicted that someone would soon be offering them on a menu—or in a frozen-food aisle.


I carried a bowl of pumpkin to the table, a reminder of a warm October afternoon and our brother-in-law Alex Maclennan's generosity. (He grows them for market, along with corn, raspberries, and asparagus.)

We'd roasted the pumpkin, pureed the yellow-orange flesh in a food processor, and frozen it in two-cup batches.

This bowl had been defrosting in the refrigerator, in close proximity to a bottle of leftover eggnog, another gift, from Sarah's brother John. He and his wife make a much-admired organic cheese called Tarentaise. But their eggnog is not half bad either.

So this morning's breakfast represented a complicated convergence of good fortune, culminating in this recipe (with a nod to Libby's, in the can). The pie is fragrant, creamy, not too sweet, and intensely satisfying, with or without ice cream.

Pumpkin Eggnog Pie

one-half cup sugar
one-quarter teaspoon salt
one teaspoon cinnamon
one-half teaspoon ginger
one-quarter teaspoon cloves
two eggs
two cups pureed pumpkin
one and one-half cups eggnog

one waxed-paper package of graham crackers
seven tablespoons butter

Use your fingers to crush the graham crackers inside the package (if the paper seems fragile, dump the crackers into a sturdier bag first). Melt the butter, then mix with the crumbs and press firmly into a nine-inch pie pan.

Mix the spices with the sugar and the salt. Beat the eggs, then add the eggnog and beat some more. Stir in the sugar and spices, and finally the pumpkin.

Pour into pie shell and bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 for another 45 minutes, or until a knife in the center of the pie comes out clean.

Enough about Happiness

Flaubert argued that there are only three requirements for happiness: selfishness, stupidity, and good health. "Though if stupidity is lacking," he said, "all is lost."

I was happy to watch the Red Sox score five runs in the bottom of the eighth, so there's hope for me.

Clarification

I don’t necessarily endorse Csikszentmihalyi’s theories, although I think I understand what he means by flow. Intense absorption in a task is a real pleasure. And, thankfully, that pleasure seems to have little relation to one’s level of skill or ability.

For instance, I am middle-aged and of middling height; I can’t jump, or drive to my left. I also have one bad knee. And yet I have enjoyed (brief) states of flow on the basketball court, moments in which I do only what is absolutely right and beautiful in the game.

Can people be taught to enter this state of happy absorption at will? Or any of the other myriad happy states of which humans are capable?

In January 2007, D.T. Max published Happiness 101 in the New York Times. In this article, Mark Linkins, curriculum coordinator of a school district that mixes positive psychology with ninth grade English classes, says, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who flinched upon reading this statement. This is Orhan Pamuk in his 2006 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

"I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."