Giving Thanks

Team Blue,

Here it is, Giving Thanks Day. 

I am thankful for the land. In particular, the 71.1 acres of Twin Crix. I’m thankful for all the eons that have come before, the glaciers and their absence, the broad and shallow seas in which these rocks were laid, particle by particle, the way the shifting skin of the Earth bumped into itself just so, over and over and over, and yet still, to have made a land of milk and honey such as it seems to me today. 

I am thankful for the sea, where I was born and raised, the mighty Pacific and the nervous little Atlantic, and those other parts of the one big puddle, whose names I know, but who I have never seen. Presumably I have been brushed by a water molecule that has been there before.

When I left the ocean, and traded it for the river, the sea offered me a parting gift: a small, dead seal, lapped upon the shore at the very spot where, witnessed by California friends, I had immersed myself, with symbolism and intention. My witnesses, predictably, thought it a bad omen. I, however, recognized the gift of life, of a beginning, for this compact body of protein and fat, nutrient and bone, would feed one thousand crabs, one billion bacteria, and some lucky birds. This bounty, this feast, slowly lapped up to me on the shore behind the Long Beach breakwater - no churning, crashing, booming waves here. It occurs to me now that the great, perhaps greater, though not greatest, cycles of the planet, of the ties between it all, were embodied in this act. We grind up rocks in Morocco for fertilizer, spread them on farm fields in Wisconsin, and stand by with some regret, ecological or financial, as those atoms make their way into the streams, and then the rivers, and then the gulf of the ocean, lost.

But not lost - they will return. Perhaps these atoms will be absorbed by an ocean plant, to be consumed by an ocean animal, to be reconsumed by the great chain of ocean animals, and will one day end up in the body of a seal deposited on the shore.

Or perhaps they end up at the bottom of the ocean, and over the next hundred million years harden into rock, under immense heat and pressure, changing chemical composition, rising and falling as the skin of the Earth shifts and bumps into itself, subducting into the mantle to re-emerge elsewhere, fully transformed and abstracted, or rising up as a rocky outcrop in some distant time and place to be eroded out by rain and wind, freeze and thaw, into a forest below, to rejoin the more active, more dynamic part of the cycle.

I am thankful for the land and for the sea, for ever the twain shall meet.

I am thankful to have had the opportunity to purchase this farm last year, on December 10th. I am thankful for the Farm Service Agency, and by extension the United States Department of Agriculture, and by extension the United States Federal Government, and by extension the continued structural integrity of the complex civilizational order that we inherit, reenact, change inchoately, exist within, can hardly influence, and must accept, provisionally if nothing else, for though there is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, there is also today and today and today.

I am thankful to the Farm Service Agency et al for the Beginning Farmer Loan Program, which enabled me to enter into a contract to purchase this farm with no money down. In fact, I received a small check at closing, something about proration of property taxes. I've never had any money, so zero-down was the best I could do. The rates were favorable too - isn't this the sort of thing we expect, with some trepidation, our relatives may discuss around the Thanksgiving table today? - a subsidy from the magnanimous will of the public to me. Thank you for your support, People of America. I will endeavor to make good on it. 

I am thankful to Gary and Rosie Zimmer, my great uncle and very great aunt, for buying this farm eleven years ago to protect Taliesin’s viewshed, and letting me move in, California boy that I was, am and will be, and letting me become a Wisconsin boy as well. Thank you for introducing me to this land and these people, these times and these seasons, and for selling me this farm at a fair and appraised price, and on generous terms.

I am thankful for John Lloyd Jones, who built this house and barn, and for Warren and Laurel Hoyer, who lived here for three quarters of a lifetime, and who named the farm Twin Creeks - pronounced but not spelled as it is today. 

I am thankful for this barn, and for its builders. Local sources suggest that it was Robert Larson that laid the foundation, sometime in the early twentieth century. My genealogy enthusiast uncle once traveled to a small town in Norway where some Wisconsin immigrants had originated, and was invited into the old family home where he saw carved on the central pillar of the oldest part of the house two names, Hans Larson and Lars Hansen, alternating back-and-forth for five centuries. Perhaps Robert Larson and I are related.

I'm thankful for this barn, and for its saviors, Warren and Laurel Hoyer, who had not used the barn in many years, but knew that when a hole developed in the roof in the nineties, the barn would soon go. They patched up the sagging timbers and put a new roof on the barn, that we may enjoy it today. 

I'm thankful for the wood of the barn, the walls and floors and structure that, despite not being in any way intended for this purpose, neither the human action of cutting and milling lumber nor the plant action of lusty photosynthesis, can so well absorb and reflect and contain sound. A happy accident.

I am thankful for this wood-fired oven, and for Lew Lama who built it twelve years ago. As the story goes, Lew Lama built a wood fired pizza oven and donated it the 4PeteSake auction, where it was bought by Gary Zimmer. Gary set it up at his farm in Clyde just as I was moving here. We cooked pizzas on occasion.

A year later, Lew did the same, and this time the auction was won by Eric Ferguson. Eric brought it to the White School. That fall, I met Katie Wyer. We fell for each other, and she decided to stay for the winter. Hardly a week later, Katie, Eric and I started Pizza Night.

I am thankful for that next year, for the camaraderie and triumphs of Pizza Night, for meeting and feeding all of you. Although truth be told, I almost never cooked a pizza - though I sliced them all. 

Two years later, out of the blue, we received some unfortunate news: someone had called us in to the health department and we were getting shut down. The White School had been an unlicensed kitchen all this time.

It was a Wednesday, a now-canceled Pizza Night two days off, and we hatched a plan and sprung into action. Before you knew it, Gary's oven had been loaded onto a trailer headed to my house, and I had to quickly make the not-quite-permanent-but-incredibly-hard-to-alter decision about where exactly to put the oven. We sent out the bat signal, lit the fire, and hosted a Pizza Night in my backyard.

I wanted to take advantage of the moment, to announce some cockamamie scheme to invest as a community in Pizza Night, in the White School, and this here farm but, cautioned by the better angel of my nature, Katie Wyer, who was not comfortable with financially entangling herself with everyone she knew, I did not.

The White School was closed for a year while Eric added the necessary elements to allow the kitchen to be in good standing with the authorities. In the meantime, Katie and I had closed our business - Large Batch Scratch LLC, from her famous phrase “large batch scratch cooking is the wave of the future”. We mopped up the floors of the Kitchen at Arcadia Books one last time, ran one last cycle on the dishwasher, and walked out the door together, into a two-month-long road trip to California, beginning of another greatest year of life.

The oven, though, sat cold and empty, dark, uncared for, uncovered, buffeted by the wind and absorbing the rain, freezing and thawing, mortar eroding away like stone from an outcropping a hundred million years off that it will once and future be.

The chimney collapsed, the floor heaved into unevenness, the stucco chipped one thousand times, the front arch lost its magical integrity of stone suspension and gave way, and there it sat for lo these many years, exactly where I left it, sinking unevenly into the ground, at some point covered by a punctured tarp, not so much to protect it as to remove it from my sight as best I could.

This past spring came The Event: the after party for the Savor the River Valley Farm and Food Tour, on the most glorious day in April. Six hundred people visiting local farms, eating every food vendor out of house and home, all to descend on Twin Crix for the after party. The plan had been made: wood-fired pizzas by Kyle Beach and Leah Spicer of Homecoming and Reunion, natural wines by Anna Freundl, and music by yours truly. I diligently prepared the barn and the grounds, created a parking lot in Cousin Nick's field, anxiously removed the dangerous nails poking inward on the barn walls, and prepared for the first Event of what I hoped to be many. 

My oven was, of course, in no condition to be featured on this day. Placed wrongly in the backyard, dilapidated and collapsed, floor uneven, brick corners exposed to the flat peel. One could still cook in it - the uneven floor is a pain but surmountable, the chimney is, strictly speaking, not necessary - but I was embarrassed and ashamed of the oven. And anyway, it was too small for such a gathering. We decided to rent Lew Lama’s mobile pizza oven for the occasion.

On that morning, I received a text message of a photo from Lew Lama that prompted a double, a triple, a quadruple take. Is that the oven, on its trailer, flipped over on its back like a turtle, bricks strewn everywhere? It had gotten away from Lew that morning as he prepared to move it to the farm. It had rolled down his driveway, crossed the road, and flipped over into the ditch. It was done. Gone. There was no hope. 

My thoughts raced. What is to be done? Should I light my oven? Center my shame on this day, my good idea abandoned and left to sit as a monument to its own self? No, I couldn’t. In frantic phone calls, we decided not to cancel - wise though that may have been - but to buy a couple of Ooni pizza ovens, a small pellet-fired device that is more suitable for a backyard get-together of friends than for 600 descending hungry mouths. But I foreshadow.

The plan was laid, yet more bad news came. The musicians that I had invited to the barn had suffered all manner of calamities - car breakdowns on their way, sudden family emergencies. 

The Oonis arrived late, we barely had a chance to read the manual before the first guests began to arrive, first a trickle then a stream then a flood, parking at the blueberries, walking the path, and approaching down the driveway. I raced to the parking lot and saw a budding scene of confusion and leapt into action, directing cars until I called over Grant Chitwood - another hoped-for musician on the night - to run parking for the next several hours.

If I were an ancient historian, a chronicler, writing in the deep past, I would have described the horde as innumerable. Were they firing arrows, they could blot out the sun. A host of millions. In reality there were at times two hundred cars parked by the blueberries, and I estimate that six hundred people made their way down the driveway, most quickly turning to leave (on what I hope was at least a nice walk) upon seeing that the event was going down in flames - or rather, going down for lack of flames. 

The barn was quiet, busy as I was putting out more metaphorical fires, until Ben Mulwana, former Spring Green Musician in Residence and ongoing friend for life, arrived. I stopped to listen as he played in the barn, centered myself, accepted the unexpected state of things, that I could - and should - do no more, and when Ben left I sat down to the drums to play music with friends I knew, strangers I would meet again or not, with children, grinning from ear to ear at the opportunity to swing a stick or sing into a microphone. At least the wine flowed freely, the one success on what I thought then, thought later, and think now to be a failure.

The next day, in the clear light of morning, the obviousness of it all struck me, the “shoulda”s, the “coulda”s, the “woulda”s. I should have fired up my oven. It would have worked - better than the Ooni’s, certainly. It would have been the most symbolically rich thing to do, not just to have pizza on the farm as I had imagined all those years ago when the oven was first moved here, but to cook in that very oven, to use it to the best of its ability. The shoulda’s compounded - I should have fixed it years ago. I’d had half a mind to do it over the years, even pestered Lew Lama a time or two, knowing that I needed his help, for I am no mason. 

How else to begin this new season of life, this new season of intention, of invitation, than to use this very oven, on this very day, at this very time, for this very reason.

But Lazarus had not yet risen from the dead.

That's the name that Lew has given the oven as, these past two months, I have endeavored to bring it back to life. I fully replaced the floor, leveled it with sand, re-pointed the existing masonry and applied several layers of stucco to fortify the dome. I rebuilt the chimney. As I was about to rebuild the arch, I had a last minute epiphany to put intention into the keystone, to place there not a suitable brick, but a symbolic stone. I selected a piece of petrified wood, picked up on one of many road trips to California, red and complex, long and pointed, hanging now as a stalactite, in pride of place in the center of the oven arch. I am thankful that I recognized the opportunity before I had literally set my regrets in stone.

I lit a small fire so that the mass might reacquaint itself with heat, and then a hotter fire, and a hotter fire still, til the bricks reached one thousand degrees and the dome was warm to the touch, on the first day of winter, as a cold front blew in, the promise of snow and zero degrees appearing on the on-rushing horizon.

Every year for Thanksgiving, I make “Patrick's Famous Green Beans”, named in jest by my family. I made them adequately at one time or another, likely under the watchful eye of my mother, but, non-food motivated as I am, I could never quite remember what I was doing. Half the time they came out terribly. I suppose that's part of what made them famous, their erratic and unpredictable nature. 

The combination is simple, green beans, garlic, and chili flake, perhaps with some salt and pepper and lemon juice, the universal complements and enhancers. I wanted the beans blackened, charred. I might cook them in a wok or a heavy cast-iron pan, but I could never get the char right, the fresh and stiff beans would not sit flat along the pan, curved as they were. Should I blanch them, make them soft and cooked? No, it turns out. That just makes them wet, water that they must boil off. Many of the failures sprung from myself asking this same question anew each year.

But in the wood-fired oven… I would have heat from the pan and fire from all sides. Now that just might do the trick. 

I was wondering to myself what should be the first food I cook in the oven, and here, mere days before Thanksgiving, the answer became obvious: Patrick's Famous Green Beans. I cook them now, as I talk to myself to write this message, to bring to Kyle and Leah's for Thanksgiving.

And so I give thanks to the oven, to the fire, to the very concept of a dome and a hearth, to those humans who invented all of this many moons ago. I am thankful for the land that grew the wood that I now burn, for the oceans in which were laid the mineral deposits that became this mortar and stone. I am thankful for Katie Wyer, and for our years together, for revealing to me the truth that food brings us together, and is core to what makes us the social human animal that we are, whether I personally care about food or not. I am thankful for Anna Freundl, and for our year together, for insisting upon the importance of giving thanks, verbally, uncomfortably, ritualistically. I am thankful for my parents, Tony and Claire Michaels, for bringing me into this world and supporting their son as he has followed his heart on an unexpectable journey to Wisconsin. And I am thankful to all of you, who have participated in some way in the great chain of being that I have been privileged enough to participate in too.

I’ll be firing up this oven routinely this winter, roasting vegetables, baking bread and, yes, cooking pizzas. I hope you’ll join me.

Thankfully,

Twin Crix