It’s true I shamed him into taking me fishing. He tried to cancel the trip only a few hours before we were scheduled to depart, as I was the only taker for the afternoon excursion.
But I was not to be dissuaded.
I cajoled, reminding him conditions were ideal: the tides were right, and the calm seas now shrouded in a gauzy sheath of fog, providing a natural awning from the late summer sun. I bribed with bottles of Burgundy, a universal currency. I appealed to both his sense of guilt and decency, telling him of my long drive to reach the Mendocino coast, and noting his five-day cancellation policy.
Certainly I didn’t mention that fishing is actually the rum-soaked cherry on the sundae that is a road trip through northern California. The tangy aromas of fermenting grapes, resinous green bud, and pressed apples were woven into the quilt of colors from the many valleys: Napa, Knights, Alexander, and deep into Anderson Valley. Having newly birthed the grape harvest, the cooler clime hillside vineyards glowed wanly in the afternoon light, their floors littered with orange and red; the gnarled centenarian arms of the head trained vines bidding adieu to the year’s growing season. Trucks heavy with overflowing grape bins rumbled past an ancient apple orchard, where a lone fawn slept under the shade of a bearing apple tree, her legs cradled under her, surrounded by fallen fruit. In the far distance, a mountaintop is crowned in the ashen plumage of smoke, a sovereign fire’s dominion over drought-plagued lands.
A stop into the hip-hick town of Booneville yielded powdered Espelette peppers, an expensive linen apron, wheels of aged goat cheese, and paper bags of red purple barley, all produced on nearby farms by men and women escaping sub-urban life. A little further west resides The Apple Farm, a necessary autumn pilgrimage. The organic orchards grow dozens of varieties of apples, each piled in wooden boxes and laid with a knife for proper sampling. The tiny Wickson, of which I filled a bag, was a sweet-tart delight. The Baldwin, its seeds originally from the east coast, had a big crunch and bright acid. The cooler now loaded with quarts of hard and sweet apple cider, my old wagon was blown towards the coast in a blinding snowstorm of color, a gust of wind off the Russian River rushing through the trees.
Stretching my legs meant
pulling off from a road as meandering as a morning glory vine, and parking under
the dense canopy of an old-growth coastal redwood forest. Found from southern Oregon to central California,
and no more than 50 miles inland, the tree’s survival is dependent upon a
moderate maritime clime, the fog nourishing and protecting from drought. Astonishingly tall, the redwood’s treetop
needles, having greater exposure to sunlight, are tightly spiked to conserve
precious moisture, while the lower branches,
which hang in the shadows, grow flat needles to catch additional light. Their shallow root systems extend over one
hundred feet from a thick base, intertwining with the roots of neighboring kin,
increasing stability during strong winds and floods.
Within this most unsectarian of cathedrals, its daytime parishioners the squirrels and deer and birds squawk their gospels and tap their seeds against the thick boughs like a fevered Santeria chant. It was under this dreamy spell I walked, the sound of my steps muffled on a thick carpet of pine needles. My thoughts flashed to an auction catalogue through which I’d recently paged. Listed was a series of black and white photographs taken by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) documenting logging and lumbering operations at the Red River Lumber Company in Northern California in the 1940s: men cutting gigantic trees, the redwood limbs sawed into lumber. The following few lots up for auction were a jarring juxtaposition: photographs from Ansel Adams (1902-1984), also depicting the mighty redwood tree, but its stunning form was instead celebrated and mythologized in a crisp black and white landscape.
Captain Kurt kept his word, even inviting a few of his buddies to join me for an afternoon of sinking weights, telling tall tales, and pulling up fish. A dizzying array of shimmering rock cod landed on the deck: enormous neon-orange Vermilions, the placid Blue and slimy Black Rockfishes; there are more than 75 different types living in our seas. A couple of large, greenish-hued lingcod, an ugly fish with great culinary pretentions, went home with each of us. The Point Cabrillo lighthouse never out of sight, we caught our boat’s too-generous limit in just a few hours. Even with a deep freezer in the garage, limiting out on anything harvested in the wild always feels greedy to me. Surrounded by dozens of fish, it’s too easy to treat them as commodity rather than precious resource.
Apparently, I’ve become the kind of girl who buys bags of ice and lottery tickets in small backwoods towns, my car loaded with the detritus of foraging trips: sweaters and sweatshirts, hiking boots, knives and salt, coolers, a few bottles of wine, pine cones, bags of sand shoveled from the beach for our strawberry plants, Arnica oil to soak my wearied bones, all-weather gear for fishing. At the Sea Gull Motel, my room’s doors and windows were opened wide to the grey evening, quiet but for a foghorn rumbling its warning to the unseeing. Laying newspaper on the linoleum floor of the tiny bathroom, I cleaned each fish, rinsed each filet, patted them dry, and laid them flat in plastic bags on a bed of crushed ice, the bones and heads lining the bottom of the cooler. Thankfully, the motel’s garbage cans were lined up on the curb for the early morning pickup; my crime of fishmongering en suite to go undetected.
Cleaned and scoured of scales, I pinched a lemon from the barman’s tray, rubbing it vigorously over my hands, trying in vain to remove eau de pescado from my fingertips. All afternoon, I watched with fascination as my new fishing buddies ate cold, fast-food hamburgers from an oil-stained paper bag. Eating even on the calmest of seas has never agreed with me, but now was I was ravenous. Offering the bartender a glass of the ‘96 Sanford Pinot Noir from the Rinconada Vineyard, which I’d been hording for my supper, I asked for his recommendations. The notion of fish for dinner utterly preposterous, a steaming bowl of deconstructed chowder was instead set before me. Tiny manila clams in their shell, hunks of chewy pancetta, tender cippolini onion, and the last of summer’s corn kernels and squash blossoms floated in a shallow broth of sweet cream and clam jus. Finished with chive and garlic flowers, the lipstick and handbag of the culinary world, I dunked crusts ripped from the too-doughy housemade bread until every bite was gone.
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