Category: Culture

Tuggle's Gap: a nice idea, but …

One of the many reasons I don’t eat out much is that there aren’t many places to go. One comes across places that you really want to like — like Tuggle’s Gap restaurant near Floyd, Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Parkway — but almost always you’re disappointed.

As late as the 1970s, there were still good roadside restaurants. They had honest foods cooked from scratch. Some of them are still in business. They’re nothing like they used to be. I’m not sure why this is. One possibility is that the food service industry has pushed a lot of labor-saving institutional food off on them, and now every place is the same. The individuality and adventure is lost. Another reason, I think, is that in these parts restaurants compete on price, not quality. When I was in San Francisco, friends visiting from back east were often shocked at the cost of eating out. But there is a big difference. In a good food city like San Francisco, restaurants compete on quality, not price. Price doesn’t matter. In these parts, that’s too small a niche. Take pizza, for example. I had a visitor in San Francisco who, upon taking the first bite of home-delivered North Beach pizza, raved about how good it was and said she’d never had such good pizza in her life. Yep. That pizza probably cost 22 bucks. Around here, pizza is worse than pathetic, because the price point is closer to 10 bucks that 20.

Southern eateries rarely — very rarely — produce edible homestyle Southern cooking anymore. Again, I think this is partly because of the intrusion of the food service industry, partly the fact that they have to keep prices low, and partly because there just aren’t as many good cooks as there used to be. One exception is Hillbilly Hideaway near Walnut Cove, which has done a pretty good job of keeping its standard up. I’ll review Hillbilly Hideaway sometime.

But back to Tuggle’s Gap. Tuggle’s Gap ought to do better, because its closeness to the tourist traffic on the Blue Ridge Parkway allows it to get away with charging higher prices. But I had an enchilada plate there yesterday that was pathetic. The enchiladas were hard and bland. The plate was decorated with sorry-looking iceberg lettuce and sorrier tomatoes. The rice wasn’t seasoned, it was just red. Have I mentioned that Southerners are terrified of spices other than pepper and cinnamon? And you’d think that they’d at least be able to do pinto beans right, but the beans were undercooked. Doesn’t every Southern cook know the blow test? If you blow on a spoonful of beans while they’re cooking, if any of the skin curls, the beans are NOT DONE. The skins must be completely softened, and there will be a soupy broth that is starting to thicken. How thick you make the broth is a matter of personal preference, but it absolutely must not be watery.

I should have known better than to order Mexican, but I was deceived into thinking that because Tuggle’s Gap aims at a fancier standard, they’d know what they were doing. Wrong. It is a common syndrome in these parts. You can get Chinese food that obviously was cooked by someone who has never eaten Chinese food. And you can get Mexican food cooked by someone who obviously has never eaten Mexican food, someone who has never eaten more than 20 miles from home. So what you get is a kind of white trash concept of what those foods would be like. At $9 a plate, there is no excuse.

By the way, when I use the term “white trash,” I speak proudly of my own ethnicity. I’m also thinking fondly of the White Trash cookbook, which I fondly recall was part of the countertop reading at the Lighthouse Restaurant in Sausalito, California. The lighthouse usually had cooks trained at the Culinary Institute of America (or, CIA cooks, as they call them). If you know your stuff, you probably also know stuff about white trash cooking.

Anyway, if you go to Tuggle’s Gap, order a burger with fries or onion rings. They can understand that. They weren’t trained by the CIA. They don’t understand anything else.

Fried squash

Last summer, I somehow resisted the temptation to make fried squash, partly because it makes a mess in the kitchen. But tonight, after coming home peckish from a county commissioners’ meeting and needing a snack, I opened the refrigerator, saw one of those beautiful yellow squash, and decided to fry it.

Fried squash is a Southern classic. Some people fry it in batter; some people roll it in a beaten egg and then in seasoned flour. Some people add their secret mix of spices; some people use just salt and pepper.

The mess in the kitchen wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Yes, I fried it. And I’ll probably do it again.

As for the county commissioners’ meeting, there’s a whole nother issue we’re now fighting here in Stokes. Someone in the western end of the county wants a permit to start a “bioremediation” facility for toxic waste. Why would we allow that, in a beautiful county like Stokes in which tourism is an important part of the economy? People are drawn to the county’s mountains, state park, and rural beauty. Toxic waste doesn’t fit in with that plan.

If you set out to fight evil in this world, there’s plenty to keep you busy. Fried squash is as good a compensation as any.

Magic always moves on …


Above: From an Armistead Maupin status update on Facebook

So Armistead Maupin is leaving San Francisco. For those of you who have read his books (Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, etc.), this is a big deal. That aura of myth and magic around San Francisco was partly created by two very important writers, both of whom published in the San Francisco Chronicle (from which I retired in 2008).

The other writer, of course, was columnist Herb Caen, who died in 1997. Both Maupin and Caen loved San Francisco passionately. Both wove webs of magic around San Francisco’s places and people. Armistead Maupin’s magic was a more personal magic, contained in the lives and loves and heartbreaks of the characters he created. Caen’s magic was more extraverted. It was largely to be found in places — bars, eateries, hangouts — often lurking in the fog. Caen once said, “One day if I do go to heaven, I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.'” Caen’s magic was easier to find. Even visitors could find it, just making the rounds, living well, soaking up the atmosphere. Maupin’s magic was much more elusive. For Maupin’s magic, you had to have a life, even if that life wasn’t what you always thought it would be. And you had to have people in your life who understood how to help each other create magic out of everyday materials.

The center of the universe

I have thought a great deal about a magical power that writers have. They can cause the center of the universe to move. Pick a setting, any setting. It might be San Francisco. It might be a shack in Mississippi. It might be a beat-up old car rolling down a highway in Tennessee. It could be a hospital room. It could be a back yard in suburbia. It could be an imaginary place, out among the stars. But wherever that place is, if a writer can tell a true and beautiful story in that place, then that place becomes the center of the universe.

There is a wonderful line in George Lucas’ Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is a bored, dreamy teen-ager, living with his step parents, doing chores on the desert planet of Tattooine. One day two droids show up — R2D2 and C3PO. While Luke is repairing the droids, C3PO says, “As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure what planet I’m on.” Luke Skywalker replies, “Well, if there’s a bright center of the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”

To feel ourselves far from the center of the universe contains more existential pain than we ever admit.

But what Luke Skywalker doesn’t suspect is that, at that very moment, he is at the bright center of the universe. That is because a true and beautiful story is being told — Luke’s story, partly — but Luke doesn’t know it. It’s a secret for only the storyteller and the reader to know. But a good storyteller also knows some things about the reader that the reader doesn’t know.

It has been my good fortune to have known lots of good writers. One writer I knew back in the 1980s, at the time he published Ender’s Game, is Orson Scott Card. He used to say that the key to the best stories, to the truest stories, is that the storyteller is telling the reader’s own story. But the reader, who is unable to tell the story himself, doesn’t know it.

That was certainly true of Armistead Maupin’s stories. Maupin showed people a whole new way to live — simple, sweet, kind. He taught people how to not be too hard on themselves, or on each other. In his stories, the most ordinary events could contain a world of meaning and bring us to tears. His stories changed people’s lives.

When we are the center of the universe, we feel happy. We feel that life has meaning. Orson Scott Card would say that this is why people are so hungry for stories. Stories — good stories, at least — help us find our place in the universe. When we can’t do that, we become depressed, miserable. It’s hard to find meaning in our lives.

A friend from my San Francisco days now lives in Sacramento. He has to deal with a recurring sadness: He is having a great deal of difficulty creating magic in Sacramento. He pines for San Francisco. As any writer knows, settings do make a difference. Some kinds of stories just can’t be told in some kinds of places. A shack in Mississippi is the natural setting for only certain stories. The same is true of San Francisco. Stories certainly could be told in the suburbs of Sacramento, but to find that story may require a very difficult existential struggle. When we feel ourselves beaten down by that struggle, we instinctively turn to storytellers for help.

Most psychologists would say that living too much in the imagination is not healthy, that human beings function best when they are well-adapted to their actual environment, that excessive mythologizing can even be kind of dangerous. Maybe. But I don’t think so. I have long understood that I was happiest when I felt surrounded by magic, even when sustaining that magic required a certain level of delusion. That was one of the reasons I moved to San Francisco, more than 20 years ago. I could no longer sustain a sense of magic where I was. I needed a change of setting if there was to be any hope of finding magic.

To leave San Francisco is frightening, in a way. One has fears and dreads about what kind of magic — if any — exists outside of San Francisco. I remember telling my sister, when Acorn Abbey existed only in my imagination, that I wanted a place that felt as though magic was possible there. Settings matter. One feels one’s setting in one’s everyday life. Other people might feel it too. It’s possible to create magic alone. Magic also can be a co-creation. Even groups can create magic, though group magic is likely to be unstable, because people change, and people come and go. San Franciscans have created a powerful magic, as a group. But in 1997, when Herb Caen died, a powerful source of that group magic was lost. As my friend Rob Morse wrote in the San Francisco Examiner the day after Caen died, “We’re on our own now.”

And now San Francisco must make its magic without Armistead Maupin.

Just don’t forget: The center of the universe can be absolutely anywhere. It’s all in the story you tell.

Postscript: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is being made into a movie starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford. It will be released in 2013.

The delocalization of religion


Watch this first, to better understand where I’m coming from

Once upon a time, the gods were in your own back yard. To get an idea of how that might have felt — the wonder and magic of it — watch the video above. Or think of the world of fairy tales. Fairy tales, of course, are some of the very few remnants of that old world. In the West, it was Rome, and the Catholic Church, that stamped out that world. I don’t claim to know a great deal about this period of history, but one area of this history in which I have done some reading is in the history of my ancestors, the Celts. The Celts, of course, held some of the finest real estate that the Roman armies took — much of Spain, all of France, the British Isles, and Ireland.

After the Roman conquest of the Celtic lands, it literally took centuries for the church’s priests to exorcise the old gods from the woods and fields and rocks and streams. There were special rituals for it, and there were severe punishments for any peasant who was caught in the woods communing with the old gods. Even in Joan of Arc’s time, in the 15th century, there were still fairies in the woods. At Joan of Arc’s trial before the Inquisition, much was made of charges that she, like the other children, had danced around the fairy tree in some magical woods near her childhood home. In the remote highlands of Scotland, the old ways actually persisted into the 19th century. The localization of religion had come to an end.

The work of keeping religion centralized, where it can be controlled by its priesthood and milked for power and income, is never done. Why, if there were gods in the rocks and trees and stars, then anyone could commune with them for free, and no one would be able to skim a profit from that, or claim to speak for such local gods. And it isn’t just the Catholic church. In the U.S. today, there are a host of protestant preachers who fly around in corporate jets, live taxfree in multiple multimillion dollar homes, and suck in millions of dollars from people who see god in the greasy, unctious preacher on their television screen rather than in their own back yard.

As I go about my daily business of sifting for information about the state of the world (I’m trying to stop calling it “news,” because “news” is a centralized corporate product), it’s alway enormously fun to come across pictures and quotes from the old fools in dresses who run the Catholic church. Just this weekend, for example, we learn that some American nuns, who have gotten in trouble with the Inquisition for acting like Jesus and actually caring about the poor, have been called to Rome to be scolded by Cardinal William Levada, who currently heads the Inquisition (formally called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — very centralized, you know). And let’s not forget that the current pope was the head of the Inquisition before he became pope and the title went to Levada.


Cardinal Levada, with the nuns he’s about to scold

A couple of days ago, driving back from a trip to town, I passed five or six acres of woods, newly bulldozed. It’s now a gash of red dirt and gullies. The church next to it, which has the words “Living Waters” in its name, apparently has outgrown its prefab building and is building something bigger. To them, the woods mean nothing. There are no gods in the woods anymore. And besides, what could gods be worth anyway, if they’re free? No, those folks need a building, and a praise band, and lots of taxfree contributions, and someone paid to shout at them about their centralized god.

Who is crazy? Them or me?

Probably me. I do know, though, that I would go crazy if I didn’t have a tiny refuge from a world raped and globalized and delocalized to the breaking point, a world in which ridiculous old men in Rome, wearing dresses, are outraged that not everyone — even nuns! — will do as they say.

But really there is no escape. Ken reports, after a four-day hike in the Smoky Mountains, that visibility from those mountaintops is ruined by smog and haze, and that the park service has posted signs explaining that the smog and haze is pollution from Midwestern and Southern cities. As for my tiny refuge, the corporate puppets in Raleigh, thanks to money from the oil and gas companies, are about to make it legal for corporations — not the government, mind you, but corporations — to take my land if they say they need it, to drill underneath it, and to inject poisons by the millions of gallons into the underground aquifer that feeds my well and upon which all the life around me depends.

Sometimes I’m afraid that this is hopeless. They have won. There is no local anymore. There isn’t anything they can’t take. They even claim the gods. We let them do it. And every step of the way, they said it was for our own good, and we believed it. They threatened us with hell. It’s odd that they can so vividly imagine such a place, but can’t imagine themselves in it. I can.

Where to start?


The garden, this morning

It’s been over a month since I posted. The abbey has been caught in a whirlwind of spring projects, spring farm work, and community organizing. I really appreciate the emails from those of you who have written to make sure everything is OK. Retirement is not supposed to be like this.

I think I’ll try to catch up with a bulleted list of items, stealing a bit from the way the late Herb Caen used to do things in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  • By far the biggest time sink in the past month has been getting involved with the group of people in Stokes County who are organizing to resist fracking in Stokes County and in North Carolina. Fracking is now illegal in North Carolina, but right-wing members of the North Carolina legislature are working hard to fast-track legislation to permit fracking. I was aware of what the legislature was up to. But I did not know until Ken and I went to a county commissioners’ meeting (to speak against a county resolution supporting North Carolina’s marriage amendment) that there is a potential fracking area here in Stokes County. There were people who came to the meeting to speak against fracking, and Ken and I immediately got involved with that group. Ken started a Facebook group (No Fracking in Stokes County), and I started a web site for the group (nofrackinginstokes.org). We helped set up a community meeting at the Walnut Cove Public Library, which almost 100 people attended. This isn’t over, because the legislature just reconvened in Raleigh, with right-wingers in the majority and ready to continue with all sorts of corporation-coddling, the-people-be-damned evils. The abbey — normally quiet and peaceful — has been noisy and busy, which leads me to the next bullet item.
  • The abbey does not have a land line telephone. Rather, we have two Verizon cellular phones with oversize antennas and 750 shared minutes a month. Normally we come nowhere close to using all those minutes, but this month we’re having to check to see how our minutes are holding up and budgeting the minutes out according to our needs. Yesterday Ken and I were on the phone at the same time. I was in a conference call with a consortium of North Carolina anti-fracking organizers, and Ken was doing interviewing for an article he’s writing. He also has calls to his literary agent in New York, his publisher, and his publicist. How did this happen? It’s temporary, but I told Ken yesterday that I feel like we’ve both been yanked out of the abbey and cast kicking and screaming back into the corporate world.
  • I finished with my book project. I did the editing, typography, and prepress work for People Skills Handbook: Action Tips for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence. The book is now being printed and should soon be for sale. It’s a corporate training manual, and it brought in some extra money that has been very nice for getting some projects done (which I’ll mention in later bullet items).
  • Ken sent the manuscript for his book to his publisher. He had edited it through eight drafts, and of course the book got better with each draft. He has worked like a dog. The book will be published in May 2013. Now that Ken is no longer tied down with writing and editing work, he’ll be leaving soon to work on his next projects (later bullet items).
  • The irrigation project ended up taking way more time than we expected. It also cost a great deal more than expected. Ken spent many days wearing waders, building a dam in the small stream below the house. At last the dam is holding and is impounding a generous amount of water. The first pump I bought was underpowered; the second pump is working great. Now we just open a couple of valves, and branch water flows into a drip system down each row of the garden. This has made a tremendous difference in the garden’s yield. The garden is picture perfect. We have eaten so much lettuce that it’s a wonder we haven’t turned green. The broccoli is starting to come in. There will be cabbages — and possibly spring sauerkraut. There are two rows of very fine beets coming along, and two rows of sweet Georgia onions. Ken planted the first round of corn and my family-heirloom green beans on Sunday. The tomatoes and such are still in the greenhouse but should be ready to transplant soon (Michael Hylton of Beautiful Earth Garden Shop at Lawsonville is starting our plants for us this year).
  • The trees in the orchard are three and four years old, but they’re going to bear fruit this year. The orchard has never looked so good. We have observed that, if the orchard grass looks good, the trees look good. My theory is that all those organic soil amendments that we’ve spread on the grass is getting down to the tree roots. And credit for that, no doubt, has something to do with our rising population of earthworms.
  • Using the nice money from putting that book together, we’ve gotten two other important projects done in addition to the irrigation system. We poured the basement floor, and we had the attic floored. Both were jobs that I didn’t have the budget to do when the house was first built. There’s a good-size basement down there, but the floor was dirt, with all the dampness, cellar crickets, and ickiness that that implies. Now the basement is dry and snug with a concrete floor as smooth as marble. There’s shelving for tools and canned goods. Upstairs, the attic floor has opened up a tremendous amount of new storage space. It’s amazing that a house so small contains so much space. It’s on five levels — basement, first floor, second floor and two levels of attic. There actually have to be steps in the attic to get from the lower level to the upper level. The roof is so steep that there is standing room even on the upper level. Both these projects created a lot of fuss and disorder, and each ruined a week of peace and quiet at the abbey.
  • I’m going to learn to can this summer. I got an All American pressure canner. My first effort probably will be pickled beets. And later this summer I want to can as many tomatoes and green beans as possible. I’m really counting on that irrigation system to not only maximize our yields but also to make yields more predictable.
  • Now I have to buck up and prepare for Ken’s departure. I often marvel at how absurdly optimistic I was with my dreams for this place. I bit off more than I could chew. One person working alone can’t start a tiny farm, no matter how tiny. One person can maintain, barely, but there is no way that one person could manage all the start-up projects. Without help, I would have gone under. But not only did help magically appear, the magic was powerful enough to bring Ken Ilgunas. Ken Ilgunas! I sometimes find myself writing little Visa commercials on my morning walks. They go something like this: “Garden and orchard, with fence and hawk net: $2,208. Chicken house and chicken infrastructure: $1,422. Irrigation system: $1,088. Stone and sand for stone walkways: $792. Five hundred dinners with Ken Ilgunas: Priceless.” Ken is brilliant. Ken is modest. He is polite. He is quiet. He is tireless. His self-awareness, and the Socrates-level refinement of his character, often make me feel like a crank and a curmudgeon. Ken is a born writer.

    But in the important ways, I don’t think I have ever misunderstood Ken or the deal we have: Acorn Abbey is about leveraging his freedom, not about tying him down. It’s a place to write, a place to winter over, even a place to be needed — but not needed so much that leaving feels like shirking a responsibility. Ken is an adventurer. I have always understood that. I believe his next project will take several months and stretch into the fall. I’m sure he’ll talk about that on his blog when the time comes. But I do hope he’ll be back and that Acorn Abbey will be his home base as he starts the publicity tours for his book after Thanksgiving.


    Chioggia beets, red beets, lettuce


    The first broccoli


    The spring chickens


    Peaches


    Apples


    Patience starts her morning stroll. Note the lushness of the orchard grass. It’s all about feeding the earthworms.


    New rose trellis (built from scratch by Ken and David)


    The first day lily stalks. They’ll start blooming soon.


    The water tank, which contains branch water for irrigation


    The basement project


    Two spring chickens


    At the anti-fracking meeting


    The virgin pressure cooker, waiting for beets

    • Babbling and strewing flowers


    The pear trees up the hill from me. Click on photo for high-res version.

    I think it’s time for the annual posting of a poem about spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

    Spring

    To what purpose, April, do you return again?
    Beauty is not enough.
    You can no longer quiet me with the redness
    Of little leaves opening stickily.
    I know what I know.
    The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
    The spikes of the crocus.
    The smell of the earth is good.
    It is apparent that there is no death.
    But what does that signify?
    Not only under ground are the brains of men
    Eaten by maggots,
    Life in itself
    Is nothing,
    An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
    It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
    April
    Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

    — Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921.


    Click on photo for high-res version

    San Francisco comes to Mayberry


    Allen, at Mayberry’s Ground Zero — Snappy Lunch in Mount Airy. We did not eat a fried pork chop sandwich.

    It’s not often that I get visitors from San Francisco. They get the full tour of Mayberry country. Allen Matthews, a former colleague at the San Francisco Chronicle, was here last weekend. He was in North Carolina on a business trip to Charlotte and came up to Mayberry country. We made a wide loop — Claudville, Virginia; Mount Airy, North Carolina; Laurel Fork, Virginia; and Floyd, Virginia.

    Allen says that I have quite a few readers in the Chronicle newsroom. So these Allen pictures are for y’all.


    A country breakfast at the Cafe of Claudville


    The counter at the Cafe of Claudville


    Concrete casting for yard art is a big business in Mount Airy


    Downtown Mount Airy


    At the Marshall homeplace, Laurel Fork, Virginia. The Marshalls were neighbors of my great uncle Barney Dalton. This house was built by my great-grandfather, Henry Clay Dalton.


    Floyd, Virginia — now a center of country music and hippy culture. For you San Francisco types, Floyd is a little like Bolinas.


    Not sure you can cook up to San Francisco standards? Then make ’em cook for themselves.

    Update: The Winston-Salem Journal has a story today about the Earle theater. Note that grants now help keep the theater operating.

    Ken gets a book contract


    Ken Ilgunas, writing

    Those of you who also read Ken’s blog are aware that he has landed a book contract. I’ve read his first draft of the book, which will be published early next year, and y’all are in for a treat.

    I’m proud to say that Ken did all this writing (and editing) here at the abbey. It’s a book about student debt, it’s a book about Ken’s adventures, and it’s a book about the problems that young people face in getting a start in our screwed-up world. But I believe that Ken also is launching himself as a philosopher cast in the same mold as Thoreau, and as an adventurer and travel writer.

    It’s what monks do, after all — make books — in addition to the farming and baking. I’ve started a sideline business — Acorn Abbey Books. A book for which I did the editing, typography, and prepress work will be printed later this year. I also have other projects up my sleeve. Ken is very fortunate to have gotten a good contract with a rich commercial publishing house. Acorn Abbey Books will go the self-publishing route, with print versions as well as digital versions.

    Also, later this year, I plan to redesign this web site and blog in a new domain — either acornabbey.com or acornabbey.org. Right now I’m a little too bogged down in monk work. When Ken and I seemingly vanish from our blogs, that’s usually what’s distracting us — the monk work of writing and publishing.

    Fertilizer run


    WoodCreek Farm and Supply

    It’s surprising how difficult it is, at least around here, to get organic fertilizer in 50-pound bags. Hardware stores such as Lowe’s sell some organic fertilizers in small packages, but the price per pound is far too high. The nearest source I’ve found is WoodCreek Farm and Supply at Cana, Virginia. That’s almost a hundred-mile round trip from here. They’re open only on Saturdays. I made a run to Cana today and came back with 500 pounds of Harmony fertilizer (based on chicken manure) and 50 pounds of dried kelp. The dried kelp is very expensive, but I figure there’s no better source of trace minerals for the garden.

    As I’ve often mentioned, there are no straight roads into northern Stokes County. That’s particularly true if you need to go east or west. The best route from here to Cana, Virginia, is on N.C. 103 and Virginia State Route 103. That goes through Claudville, Virginia, and some very nice foothill farm country, then to Mount Airy, North Carolina.

    I stopped for breakfast at the Cafe of Claudville and found some honest old-style diner atmosphere, with a proper front counter and rotating counter stools. They even have wifi.


    Foothills near Cana, Virginia


    Foothills near Claudville, Virginia


    The Internet antenna at the Cafe of Claudville