Remembering my father

I wrote the following in January, 2001, after our first Christmas without my father.

I made pancakes for my family on Christmas morning; it was probably the most important and most difficult meal I’ve ever cooked. Anyone who knew my father knows what I mean.

I learned to cook from my father, although I can’t remember him ever showing me how to cook anything. He certainly never gave me a recipe; I don’t think he ever used one.

My mother was the everyday cook in our family, making sure dinner was on time and school lunches were packed, day after day and year after year. She made the kind of solid, reliable, meat-and-potatoes meals that our generation now calls comfort food.

Dad was the special occasion cook. He would take over when we had fresh-caught salmon or trout; he made breakfast on holidays when the house was filled with relatives; and sometimes he cooked just because he wanted to. Some of his best meals happened when he wasn’t expecting to cook – on those rare days when Mom was sick, or even rarer days when she wasn’t home at dinnertime. He found great pleasure in improvising a meal, taking whatever ingredients were available and combining them into something special. Everyday foods became exotic when Dad was in the kitchen. And cooking for people he cared about, whether it was just him and Mom or a houseful of family, was clearly one of his greatest joys. It was that pleasure and creativity that I learned from him, and I feel his influence whenever I cook, whether I’m making a special dinner for guests or just making something new out of a bunch of leftovers.

Several weeks after Dad died, I had a sudden and stunning realization – that I would never again taste his cooking. It sounds so simple and obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me before, and it took me to a whole new level of mourning. I started to dread the holidays. I asked myself, over and over, Who will carve the turkey on Thanksgiving? Who will make Christmas breakfast? I didn’t have an answer.

The night that he died, Dad was thinking of his mother’s cooking. He had asked Mom to buy some fresh spinach, and the next morning he planned to cook it with scrambled eggs, to recreate one of his mother’s specialties. I’ve wondered, since then, how often in the past 25 years he wished he could taste his mom’s cooking again, to savor her hand-made pasta, her perfect gnocchi, her endless variety of cookies. Nonna told me once that she only prayed for her hands, not for her eyes, her ears, or her voice, so she could continue making things for her family as long as she lived. When I was about 14, she gave me her secret pizzelle “recipe.” There was no written recipe, but I made pizzelles with her, carefully following her instructions and frantically writing notes whenever she turned her back. Like Dad, she never used a measuring cup; everything was done by sight, by feel, and by taste.

It’s been our tradition at Thanksgiving for Mom to cook the turkey and stuffing, and everyone else to bring a side dish. Dad would then carve the turkey at the dining room table. I tried to imagine someone else carving the turkey, but I just couldn’t see it. Nothing I could imagine was acceptable to me. When the day came, and the turkey was cooked, Becky volunteered to do the carving. I think she carved it in the kitchen, but I’m not really sure. I sat at the extra table in the living room, instead of my usual spot in the dining room. It was a relief to have a completely different view of Thanksgiving dinner, rather than the scene I had been dreading – the dining room table without my father.

As Christmas approached, I found myself thinking constantly of our traditional family breakfast. There’s usually a variety of foods, but Dad’s pancakes have always been the centerpiece of the meal. Anyone who was lucky enough to taste them said Dad's pancakes were the best they’d ever had. Family friends have told me they don’t like pancakes, and never eat them – except at my parents’ house. Whenever someone asked how he made them, Dad would just answer that he used Aunt Jemima’s buttermilk pancake mix. Which was true, sort of – he did start with a box of Aunt Jemima’s – but anyone who thought they could get the same results by following the directions on the box would have been very disappointed. Knowing what brand of mix he started with was about as useful as knowing what kind of spatula he used to flip them.

I asked Libby and Annie how they felt about having our traditional breakfast, and they were both in favor of it. Mom also wanted it, but she seemed to want to leave it to chance, expecting a spontaneous meal of eggs and pancakes, without a real plan to make it happen. Eventually I realized that if we were going to have pancakes, I wanted to make them. I didn’t know how my brother and sisters would feel about my taking over, but I was willing to take a chance. 

What I remember of Christmas morning is a collection of unconnected moments. I stayed focused on the pancakes, and I remember beating the eggs, scalding the butter (one of the secret ingredients – don’t tell anyone!), and almost forgetting the molasses. Mostly I remember the family all crowded into the kitchen, cooking the eggs and slicing the ham, and offering help and support while I tried to imitate one of Dad’s most admired creations. I was the one mixing and pouring, but I felt like we were all making those pancakes together. And I remember his presence in the room; I think every one of us felt it.

The pancakes?  Mom said they were great.

Crossing Mesa Arch

Every trip seems to have its defining moment, the one detail that's remembered long after everything else has become a blur. It might be a close encounter with a bobcat, or my first glimpse of a rare species. Or it could be a memorable quote from a local character, like the waitress in Montana who had lived in a tent for three years: "It was the seventies, I thought I was Sacagawea." Or Sam, the tow truck driver near Baker: "I been out in this desert twenty-five years and ain't seen one God-damn flyin' saucer." In Canyonlands National Park, it was Laurie.

Even if you've never heard of Mesa Arch, chances are you've seen a photo of it. It's not the tall, flat-topped one that's pictured on Utah's license plates – that's Delicate Arch. Mesa Arch is long and low, and curves gracefully out over the canyon below. What makes it unique – and attracts a crowd of photographers every morning, each of them planning the perfect shot – is the way the rising sun lights up the underside of the arch.

As a Californian, I've grown accustomed to having my wilderness experience punctuated by warning signs and guard rails, the result of too many people in too little space. But the parks in Utah are different, and nowhere is that difference more apparent than at Mesa Arch. There might be a caution sign at the trailhead, but once you get to the arch you're on your own. You're expected to know what gravity is, and how to avoid getting too much of it.


The arch is located at the edge of the mesa, on a cliff that would make Wile E. Coyote nervous. On my topographic map of the area, all the contour lines between about 5,000 and 6,000 feet are squished together into one solid band. In other words, if you were to stand at the edge and drop a rock held out at arm's length, it looks like that rock would fall about 400 feet before hitting anything, and then roll for another 600 vertical feet before finally coming to rest a thousand feet below you – and still less than a quarter mile away horizontally.

Now that I think about it, if you were to stand at the edge for any reason I'd have to congratulate you, because that's something I wasn't able to do. I've never thought of myself as being afraid of heights – I've scrambled up and down some pretty steep slopes – but whenever the distance from my feet to the edge of the cliff was roughly equal to my height, my legs would just quit working. The only way I could look over the side was to lie on my belly, keeping my feet as far from the edge as they would reach.


Geologically speaking, it's a pothole arch – a piece of rock that is eroding away from the rest of the mountain, and will eventually land in a pile of rubble at the base of the cliff. The south end looks like it's barely holding on, an illusion created by the way it attaches to the cliff face about twenty feet below the edge, leaving a four-foot gap at "ground level." The north end, on the other hand, appears firmly attached, and in fact a person could walk from there right out onto the arch – that is, if a person really wanted to walk across a narrow, uneven strip of slippery rock with a thousand-foot drop on either side.

And that's where we met Laurie.

My cousin Jeff and I had shot a few photos and were mostly just enjoying the grandeur of it all, when suddenly we saw her. She walked from the north end, moving with long, confident steps, neither hesitating nor hurrying. At the center of the arch she paused to look over her shoulder at her boyfriend, and then continued to the south end, where she turned around and walked back. As she turned around, Jeff turned away, saying he just couldn't watch. Meanwhile, I was in emergency shooting mode, running and crouching here and there, looking for the best angle and background for a moving subject. In less than a minute, she was back on solid ground.

Well, what could we say? She was either the bravest or dumbest person we had ever seen, so the least we could do was show her the photo on my camera's monitor (and ask her to sign a release, of course). And for the rest of the trip, whenever our hiking brought us to a particularly challenging situation, we asked ourselves, "What would Laurie do?"

We already knew the answer: She'd go for it.

Déjà vu

I'm always cautious about thinking I can identify an individual animal, especially where reptiles or amphibians are concerned. In the absence of some clearly unique characteristic – often the result of an injury –  two snakes or frogs of the same species and the same age will generally look the same. It's especially hard to tell them apart when they're young, before they've had time to accumulate scars or other differences that come with variations in diet and experience.

But when I revisit a location and find a snake of the same rare species and the same size, in exactly the same spot on the same log – I'm pretty confident in saying I've found the same snake. In this case it happened on Mount Diablo, where an Alameda whipsnake was hunting for lizards on a fallen tree.

Whipsnakes can move with impressive speed when they need to, but rely on stealth and patience to catch their prey. When dealing with a potential predator – or a pesky photographer – a whipsnake will use whichever tactic fits the situation. This one demonstrated the advantages of moving slowly.

As I approached for a photo, I only had a partial view of the snake, without a head or tail to tell me which way it might be going. The lateral stripes and slender build gave me no visual cues, so I couldn't even be sure it was moving – until the tail passed by, at which point the snake just seemed to get thinner until it disappeared. A minute later, it reappeared about twelve feet away, at the other end of the log. I approached again and saw the same disappearing act, followed by another reappearance in the original spot.
  
A week later I was back at the same log – and the snake was still there, right where I had left it.