Evening notes

Almost 7:00, glass of wine, on the steps outside the cafe, Brandi Carlisle on the iPod. Steve is on the mainland, delivering, farmers’ markets.

It was a co-op order day, which means I’m down on the Town dock at 3–the cafe is still open, and whoever I’ve left in there seems willing enough to tell anyone else who comes in that I’ll be back as soon as I can. Today, it was the island school teacher, Pattie, and her aunt, contentedly sipping iced coffee and nibbling on a lemon-raspberry muffin.

When I return, truck laden with boxes of supplies–sugar, tea, flour, raspberries, blackberries–the cafe is packed. Renters, yachters, a woman I recognize from just across the water, locals. Pattie and her aunt are gone, but the locals know the drill: they’re sipping coffee and checking their email. The boaters and renters seem perplexed, but admirably going with the flow. I sell a pie, 4 boxes of chocolate, and the rest of my homemade strawberry ice cream.

Serena, my 16-year-old neighbor, shows up for her summer cleaning job and gallantly jumps into the fray–washing up mugs and glasses, bussing tables, talking to the renters’ kids that she was babysitting earlier that day. They have plastic containers full of island blueberries that they are eating with their icecream. They speak French–and maybe something else. They are so beautiful–all foreign, eating truffles like only Europeans can–as if they were born knowing what ganache and couverture are.

Hours later, after Serena has left a gleaming kitchen and cafe, chairs stacked on tables, floor drying, chocolates put away, I’m out here, slathered in mosquito repellent, enjoying the sudden relief from humidity. Ten feet away, a doe wanders out of the sweet fern, munching on the huckleberry coming in just alongside the Black Dinah trail. I say hello and tell her to stay away from the flowers outside the cafe door that Louise brought over last week. She considers me, non-plussed, chewing. I’m close enough to tell that she’s nursing a fawn somewhere in the forest outside my back door. Brandi Carlisle is still singing from the iPod, and I wish so badly that Steve and my friends Mike and Jackie were sitting here sipping wine with me, and not back in Santa Cruz.

Come visit. I miss you.

Lobster for Chocolate

Well, it was bound to happen. The summer just got busy over night. I’m not complaining. It was a pretty lean spring around these parts, and it’s nice to have some cash coming in. The cafe is steady, the Rockland and Stonington Farmers’ Markets where Steve vends Thursdays and Fridays are starting to fill up, we’ve got lots of new, shiny wholesale accounts, I have cake and pastry orders, and everyone around the island seems to find a reason to buy chocolate.

And as much as I’m happy to see business pick up again, the beginning of the season always takes me by surprise. Yesterday, Steve hauled off hundreds of boxes for delivery and markets and we were scrambling until the second he headed out for the last boat of the day. It’s Thursday, and I suddenly realize my cafe chocolate stock is severely depleted, so I’ve fired up the melter and as soon as I’ve got our dark into temper, I’ll be chocolating for the rest of the day. And, I’m behind on billing, ordering, returning emails, laundry, etc.

And all this buzzing sometimes seems extraneous. The ads, marketing, networking–all of it. A lot of fuss over a little chocolate.

Yesterday, an entourage from Yankee Magazine stopped by with our neighbors Lynn and Seth. They’re out shooting a story the magazine is running on Lynn next summer, and they came by for some sidebar ideas.

We were happy to oblige, of course. They snapped some pictures of the chocolate asked some questions, including the one most frequently asked: Why the hell did you decide to try making chocolate on a tiny little island in the middle of nowhere?

We, of course, have an answer for this. And it’s a good one, gets the point across, and it’s true and if you want to see it, you can go to the website. It’s the same answer I gave to those folks from Yankee, and everyone else who calls. But maybe it’s this gloomy weather we’re having, or the hectic-ness of the start of the season, or a 30 second conversation I had with 12-year-old Eddie Liu the other day, but the real answer is longer than that. And it’s not something anyone could put in a sidebar, or in a brochure, or on a business card. It’s not interesting enough to be a marketing or networking commodity.

It’s just this: I make beautiful, delicious chocolate in the place that I live because I can. There’s not much I know how to do, but I feel very lucky that this thing–this trivial, extraneous, luxury item–is something that people value.

And I guess, for me, that’s what work is all about. Putting something out there–a service, a product, a gift–that people value enough to give something in return. I feel like sometimes this very basic exchange of goods and services gets lost in our scramble to get noticed, to win more customers, in a world where we all have decreasing attention spans. Even our values become marketing opportunities: fair trade, sustainably-grown, locally produced. What matters is how you package yourself, how efficiently, and with how much flash. I can’t tell you how many times “experts” have told me that quality isn’t even half of what makes up the value of a product. The rest is where you are, who you know, what color ribbon you use, what certifications you have.

Not that I’m against this. Let’s face it, I’m no purist, no Luddite, and I admit that I do like the spotlight at times.

But mostly, I see my chocolate as a commodity. Something I make, that I can, in turn, exchange for something else of value. And sometimes it takes an 12-year-old kid to remind me of that.

The other day I ran into Eddie Liu and his mom, Kassie. Eddie hauls a string of traps from his skiff all summer for spending money. He asked me if I would consider trading chocolate for lobster later in the summer. I’m not sure that I’ve felt prouder of my product than I did at that moment. More than money, more than any ad or brochure or picture could communicate; all of the sudden my chocolate had a value that I could understand. This is why I do what I do in the place I call home. Because I can.

The cafe is open…plus Garden Fair, classes, and a magazine article

Here’s sort of an update of the day-to-day goings on around here lately. I’ll get back to some of those stories I’ve got in the hopper–from those Captain’s logs I found in the woods, to what’s been going on around the island–sometime next week.

I’m happy to report that the cafe had a successful opening on Memorial Day weekend–I think we had close to 100 people come through and munch on my Raspberry-Cream Cheese Scones, Banana-Coconut Bread, Orange-Glazed Cinnamon Buns and chocolate chip cookies.

We’ve been open every weekend since and as the locals get used to coming round for their daily cup again, I’ve had some time to work on some new truffles for our upcoming Farm Market Collection. Steve and I dreamed this one up sometime this past winter, no doubt while we were fantasizing about longer, warmer summer days. Each truffle in this 8-piece collection will feature an ingredient grown or produced on a small farm on the Blue Hill Peninsula. Cardingbrook Farm had a fabulous sugaring season this spring, and I’m currently working on a “tree to sea” caramel featuring their syrup and Maine sea salt. I’ve just finished recipe testing for a truffle featuring Stoneset Farm blueberries and zippy lemon zest. He looked at me real funny when I suggested it, but Bob Bowen of Sunset Acres Farm seems game to let me experiment with his wife’s soft chevre I dream of incorporating in a silky dark chocolate truffle. Rhubarb, strawberries, mint, pumpkin and Pete and Kim Lindley’s island-grown Wolf River apples are all on the list for testing. One of the most exciting new ingredients I’m playing with is Elena Bourakovsky’s Creme de Cassis–made with her own currants she grows in her beautiful garden in Blue Hill.

Meanwhile, we’ve just come home from a gorgeous event at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens where we were one of 21 vendors at a 4-day Garden Fair. Though the weather was far from ideal for chocolate (freezing and pouring rain one day, sweltering hot and humid the next), Steve, Lisa and I met lots of great folks, including our great tent-mates from Fish in the Garden, Stillwood Pottery and Courtney Design jewelry.

So, last week found me in high production mode for the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens Garden Fair, teaching 2 cooking classes to some great kids from Rutland High School in Vermont, and a chocolate making class as part of the Inn’s Island Gourmet Girls weekend. Innkeeper Diana Santospago blogs about the weekend on Maine Food & Lifestyle’s blog, Plating Up. Check it out!

Also make sure you check out the new issue of Maine Food and Lifestyle Magazine–hitting the stands this week. In it you’ll find some great stories about summer food in Maine, schooner trips and a story about the island by yours truly.

From the earth…

It’s hard to believe that just over a month ago spring had barely begun.  In fact, according to Kristen (who you met in Chickens, hawks and French chocolate), at around mid-April the ground temperature reached 40 degrees, making it possible to 1) plant potatoes and 2) finally bury Hawkeye who has been waiting in her freezer, wrapped in the same Hannaford shopping bags I packed him in after his unfortunate rendezvous with a hungry hawk in March.  She buried him in a deep hole she dug in her garden where she had found a large, obelisk-shaped stone she found in the spot, ejected from the frozen ground this past winter.

These regurgitated objects are some of the stranger phenomena I’ve seen since moving to a cold climate. Apparently, when the ground freezes, the moisture therein expands (like liquids do in your freezer) and this causes objects in the ground to move. This results is the dreaded frost heave on winter roads. But it also causes objects in the ground to move around, as the increasing mass of freezing ground competes for space. Here on the island, because we have so little soil and the bedrock is so close to the surface, objects tend to move in the only direction available to them: up. This results in the discovery of things like Hawkeye’s grave marker. But sometimes the earth spews out something a little more unusual.

The island has been populated for several centuries–first by indians, and then by non-native settlers who came here in the late 1700’s for the rich fishing grounds. In fact, the descendants of these first settlers–the Bingham family–still live here on the island, and are still fishing today. In its heyday, the island boasted a year-round population of several hundred, plus a healthy summer community. But that was somewhere in the 1800’s. Since then, the population has waxed and waned–mostly waned–reaching an all-time low sometime in the 1950’s. Today, there are 52.

Islanders are an industrious and enterprising people, and so have mastered the art of re-using old stuff. But such a large exodus of people in a single century means that a lot of junk is left in their wake. Today, we have a very organized system of trash collection and recycling. But before the invention of the gasoline engine, getting things off the island was not so easy, so, for better or worse, people tended to either 1) throw their trash overboard, or 2) bury it “out back.” Evidenced by some of the rusty old things I’ve found in the woods here, this latter option was a popular one.

Sometime last month as I was walking to town to collect the mail, I stopped to say hello to Denise, who was laborously turning over the soil in her garden. Come mid-summer her garden is one of the most beautiful and bountiful on the island–a living maze of tomato vines, trellissed peas and beans, virtual bushes of lettuce, chard and basil, calendulas and sunflowers, and a single monster of a rhubarb plant right smack in the middle. But in early May the beds were dormant, the tomato cages empty and the pea trellisses exposed for what they really are: old rusty cast-iron bed frames, their legs buried in the dark soil.

Which got me thinking in the first place about the whole frost heave phenomena and the things I’ve found in the woods out back from my house, and the memory of something I saw the previous spring that Denise’s bed frame trellisses kicked up.

When I got home from the post office, I immediately pushed myself through the feathery spruce saplings that conceal the little path that leads up Black Dinah Mountain. Denise’s bed frames had reminded me that, on a walk the previous fall, I had seen a rusty knob poking up out of the ground nearby the old, crumbling stone foundation between the Black Dinah trail and Wes Bingham’s camp. It had just occurred to me what that knob must have been attached to, and spurred on by my curiousity (and my need for a pea trellis myself), I went to see if the winter freeze had pushed it further up out of the ground.

It had. In fact, nearly all of the head of the frame was exposed. I dropped my mail (which I was still carrying) right there, and tested the hold the ground still had on my trellis. One leg of the frame was lifted just above the ground and I grasped it and gave a tentative tug. The soft spring earth gave way easily, and heartened, I gave another pull–quite a bit stronger this time.

Much to my surprise, the ground resisted very little and I went flying backwards with the leg of the frame in my hands. My surprise quickly turned to dismay when I realized that the ground hadn’t loosened; rather, the frame had. The bulk of the bed frame still lay buried in the dirt, and I held merely the useless broken end of the leg.

I continued to tug and pull and kick at the buried frame to no avail. Decades of spruce growth had the thing tangled up in their shallow roots. I gave the frame one last frustrated kick before I decided to give up for good, when a small clunk made me stop from turning away. I crouched over where the leg of the frame had so easily broken away, and there, out of the hollow of the rung, had fallen a tin tube.

The tube was almost the exact diameter of the rung and so extracting the rest of it was a slow process, but eventually the thing came loose in my hands–and I did what any other sane person would do: I opened it.  Inside, rolled in leather and tied with string, a virtual ream of perfectly preserved paper, every last inch of it written upon in every direction.  And at the top of each page, in larger letters, as if written ahead of time when the pages were still blank, “Log of Capt. Dinah Bride,  The Eos.”

Chocolating…

  1.           2.        3. 

When my friend Gwen returns to the island in the summer to work at the gorgeous Inn on the east side, she often stops in for a cup of tea and a chat. 

Gwen is an island girl, through and through.  She was born on a boat right here in the thorofare and if she had fins instead of legs, her beauty, wild hair, and general otherworldliness, would easily land her in the family of silkies. 

Her visits in recent summers have often found me in the middle of chocolate making–an act that she has aptly dubbed, “chocolating.” I have adopted this term with gusto.  So much better than “making chocolate today.”  What will you be doing today, Kate?  So glad you asked.  Today I will be chocolating.  I could easily be saying fencing, or sailing, adventuring, exploring.  And in many ways, chocolating is much like these things–a dive into the unexpected, subject to our fickle environments, a battle of wits and skill, an all-consuming journey into the unknown.  Okay, maybe I’m romanticizing just a bit.  But it is alarmingly easy to wax poetic about chocolate. 

Anyhoo, Mother’s Day is right around the corner, and here at the shop we’re in major production mode.  For the past week, I’ve been putting in 12 hour days–infusing, emulsifying, enrobing and moulding.  Normally, I wouldn’t be in such high production all at once, but it so happens that I will be attending a master chocolatier course in Canada the week before Mother’s Day, and so must have everything done before we turn the shipping operation over to our friends Amy and Meagan on the 1st.

Despite the long days, I love what I do.  Chocolating is a delicate balance (some say battle) between science and art.  And sometimes, lets face it, not so delicate (I say as I inspect a spectacularly chocolate-smeared apron before a throw it in the wash).  Each step of the process is beautiful to look at; from the ingredients of a particular infusion (picture 1., above: ingredients for the Sexy Mexi infusion: Ancho chiles, cardamom pods, whole cinnamon, vanilla beans, heavy cream); the color the cream takes on after the infusion is strained and every last drop is pressed from the spent ingredients (picture 2, above: color of the cream after the ingredients are strained out), the satiny, pudding-like texture of a perfectly emulsified ganache, the moulds ready and waiting to be sealed (see picture 3, above), and of course the finished product. 

The truth is, I have no idea how busy Mother’s Day will be…Cullen at Fairwinds Florist in Blue Hill, who started carrying our chocolates a few weeks ago, says that for her, Mother’s Day is busier than Valentine’s.  Now that’s saying something.  Like be prepared.

Well, must get back to the shop.  Today I’ll be enrobing those Sexy Mexi centers in Venezuelan milk chocolate (which may be the last of the Venezuelan stuff for a while, it seems).  Enjoy this amazing weather!

Things that make you go ‘whoa.’

Some day I will have a kitchen like Michael Salmon’s at the Hartstone Inn in Camden (where I was a couple weekends ago, sitting in on one of his cooking classes).  Copper pots, handwashing sink, and an assistant. 

But until the day some rich (and as of yet, unidentified) uncle leaves me his collection of Mauviel and a kitchen boy, I’ll be schlepping my tag sale saute pans over to the sink and washing them by hand.  A former employer once told a writer from Gourmet magazine  that he wouldn’t want an electric dishwasher in his inn’s kitchen because they don’t gossip.  When the article was published it was one of those quotes that the editors enlarge and set off in italics.  I guess they thought it was funny or quaint or both.  Ha ha.

Not that I’m complaining–I love my kitchen.  It’s big and bright and clean and organized. It always smells good (today, like fresh bread and chocolate) and isn’t cluttered with things I don’t need.  But it is decidedly unglamorous.  Utilitarian, yes.  Even, at times, inspiring.  But glamorous it is not.

So it was with utter jaw-dropping, giggle-inspiring shock that Steve and I got word that our little kitchen and cafe–sans dishwasher–made Down East Magazine’s May issue as an “other eatery worthy of note,” from their cover story “Where to eat now: Maine’s top chefs pick 50 favorite restaurants.”  Who gave us the nod?  Sam Hayward of Fore Street Restaurant in Portland.  Don’t believe it?  I don’t blame you!  We didn’t either!  But we looked and it’s true.  You can check it out yourself online or at the stands.  The very best part about the article?  Great recommendations on where to eat all over Maine.  And if any of you know Sam, be sure to tell him that he made our day. 

When a Caesar ceases being a Caesar

Confession: A few months ago, when my friend Mike D. told me that the Caesar salad originated in Mexico, I called him a liar and a cheat.  I wasn’t wrong, of course.  He is a liar and a cheat.  But, as it turns out, not about that. 

According to wikipedia, source of all things hallowed and true, the Caesar salad was created by Cesar Cardini in a border town restaurant on July 4, 1924.  Cesar was an Italian-born Mexican living in San Diego and working in Tijuana (which might explain some of the confusion), and the salad, like many great dishes, was created in a desperate moment, while Cesar was trying to accomodate a rush of holiday revelers pouring over the border to escape party-pooping American restaurants constrained by Prohibition.

Despite this humbling proof that I know nothing about Caesar salad (and really, much more frustrating, that, in fact, Mike D. does), it turns out I have continued to air untruths about this favorite dish of mine.   

For instance, just this weekend Steve and I found ourselves enjoying dinner in the Old Port with our friends Paul and Zoe.  Zoe is four months pregnant and when I asked her if she had been having any cravings, she confessed (much to my complete thrill) that she needs a French fry fix at least once a week.  SO much better than dill pickles and vanilla ice cream!  I can totally hang with a French fry junkie, so we headed to Bull Feeney’s Pub–home to some of the best potato and sweet potato fries I’ve tasted this side of the Atlantic. 

Zoe and I split an entire plate of them, complete with all the fixings which, at Bull Feeney’s includes not just ketchup, but super spicy curry mayo and horseradish mayo.   We also ordered a Caesar salad with grilled chicken, but when the waitress asked if we wanted anchovies with that, my heart sank.  The question invariably means that there are no anchovies in the dressing which, hello, is where the anchovies belong.   Zoe and I answered no and yes simultaneously, and without missing a beat, our waitress offered graciously to bring them on the side.

I’m quite sure there is nothing more unappetizing than a whole anchovy filet.  Unless of course it’s several whole anchovy filets–which is what arrived in a metal ramekin alongside our salad 15 minutes later.  Anchovies belong in a Caesar.  But even I, an unabashed anchovy fan, can not bring myself to eat whole filets sandwiched between crunchy leaves of romaine lettuce.

Well, anchovies or no anchovies, the salad was delicious–and I told Paul that when he asked.  ‘You didn’t eat your anchovies,’ he observed.  I told him I would have if the anchovies had been in the dressing, where they belonged. 

‘But then it would be hard to order them on the side,’ he reasoned.

‘Then one should not be ordering a Caesar salad,’ I contested hotly, implying, of course, that a Caesar isn’t a Caesar with out them.

Well, as it turns out, a Caesar IS a Caesar with out them.  In fact, some intolerant diehards dispute the authenticity of dressings fortified with the oily filets.  And here I am, wrong again, having a nice little lunch of my own words.

But might I venture to suggest that there exists in this modern world, improvements on original ideas?  Even on original ideas that were good to begin with?  I submit a Caesar dressing, walloped with a healthy dose of MINCED anchovies as one of those improvements.  But I PROMISE that I’ll shut up about it.

 

 

Town Meetin’ time

There is no event more ill-timed, in my opinion, than the New England Town Meeting.  Ours is scheduled for the last Monday in March, and after four months of being stranded on an inclement rock in the middle of the ocean with just 42 other adults–some of whom you wouldn’t necessarily share dinner, much less an opinion–it’s just a bad idea to throw us all in a room together and demand that we decide the future of our town.  Everyone thinks those New England witch trials were borne of fanatic moral-ism–I think it has more to do with long winters spent with too few people.  We all tend to go a little nuts, and, quite frankly, there are a few people I’ve met over the years that I wouldn’t mind throwing overboard to test their buoyancy, if you know what I mean. 

That said, in theory Town Meeting, from afar, anyway, is almost festive.  Here on the island it’s a school holiday, so it gives the event the feel of something celebratory (albeit, deceptively).  This feeling is further promoted by the fact that several summer people often make the long trip out to the island to see how their property taxes will be spent in the upcoming year.  The meeting is an all-day event beginning promptly at 8:30 am, so work is put aside, townspeople are asked to contribute food, Louise brings her 100-cup percolater (and, if we’re really lucky, she also brings her fish chowder), and everything is piled up on a table just below the Town Hall stage.  People help themselves throughout the day and, in return, put whatever they can afford into a jar (that Louise has also brought) to benefit the fieldtrip fund the island school kids.

 This year, the Meeting warrant has a whopping 79 articles, and because our community is so small, and tempers can run hot, all articles concerning the election of town officials (roughly 25) are cast by written ballot.  That’s right: we write it down on a little piece of paper, walk up to the front of the hall, and place the paper in a wooden box.  This, in an effort to keep our voting anonomous–but it’s all for appearances; the votes for contentious elections have been counted up on notepads around dinner tables the night before. 

But secret ballot or no secret ballot, 79 articles is a lot of friggin’ articles, and most people figure, that even though we take an hour break around lunch time, we’re going to need some good food to get through, which is often, not such a great day. 

 Five years ago, on the eve of my first island Town Meeting, I was in the library and stumbled across a tiny book on New England Cookery.  I was thrilled to discover that there are special dishes just for Town Meeting time.  That particular TM eve was also Easter Sunday, which we were having at Alan and Kristen’s house.  We dined on baked ham and a vegetarian pasticcio a la Deborah Madison.  Kristen made a homey, but superb, lemon sponge pudding for dessert, and we ate it with heaping spoonfuls of softly whipped cream.  We shared the leftovers with the rest of the community the next day.

As it turned out, that was the only Town Meeting in the five years since that I’ve actually enjoyed, and so whenever I start to dread the end of March, I remember that Easter meal at Alan and Kristen’s, what it feels like to share a meal with good friends, and then to break bread again the next day with folks whom–though we may not always see eye to eye–we share a deep respect and concern for the tiny place we all call home.

This year I’ll be making smoked pork shoulder sandwiches on home-made oatmeal bread.  And I’ll be crossing my fingers that things go smoothly…

Chickens, hawks and French chocolate

There are lots of things about my life that, in any given moment, make me take a step back, shake my head, and wonder–sometimes audibly and with expletives–how I ever got to be here.   You’d think they’d get less so the older I get, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.  Thank god for that, really, that life–and often the little things in it–still inspire awe and wonder.

When you get right down to it, I can’t deny that if I were still living in, say, Santa Cruz, I might not feel this way as often as I do living on the island.  Moving to Maine happenned largely by accident; I fell in love with a man who wanted to be here.  It was never on my list of places to live, much less visit.  Paris, Athens, Ireland, Venezuela, Argentina: yes.  Maine; not so much.  But you should try it sometime; dump a born and bred suburban California girl in rural Maine and see what happens.  Sure, she speaks the same language, but the culture shock couldn’t  be any more dramatic than if it were another country.

Of course, it’s been almost eight years now–four since we moved to the island.  So the culture shock has long worn off–but not the magic of falling in love with a place and its people that inspired me to stay in the first place.  The little things that I mentioned before–the ones that inspire awe and wonder, the ones that challenge my beliefs, by upbringing, my education, the ones that aren’t just magical unto themselves, but magical also because I have a role in them–they still happen all the time.

 This past Tuesday, after a wild day of running errands on the mainland, I returned home on the afternoon mail boat, loaded up the truck with my purchases, which included several shipments of French chocolate that arrived on the dock earlier that day,  and, instead of going straight home, drove to  Alan and Kristen’s house where I had a date with their chickens. Alan and Kristen, who were away visiting friends in Boston and had asked me to feed and collect eggs for a few days, live on the east side–about 5 miles from the town dock, 6 from our house.  But this time of year, it might as well be in a different state for as often as I get over there. 

I had just been telling Kyra at Lily’s Cafe in Stonington, how small my world had gotten since December. As soon as the temperature dips below the magical 0 degree mark, the roads buckle and crumble in protest.  That, combined with snow and sometimes an inch-thick layer of ice, make driving around an unecessary risk.  So, I don’t.  And it’s not because I’m afraid of sliding off the road (I’ve done that plenty of times, and it’s really not as bad you might think).  I don’t drive unless I absolutely have to because everytime we hit a pothole or a frost heave another piece of the truck falls off.  Usually it’s nothing important, but it’s messy and, let’s face it, a bit depressing.  Currently, we have a nice little pile of various rusted parts and pieces in the back of the truck.  And despite how careful we are, the pile gets bigger weekly. 

 So, in an effort to save my vehicle (and not pay $4.20/gallon in gas–which is the going rate out here right now), I walk. As do many other westside islanders this time of year.  And when the roads are icy, I don’t even do that.  My world exists between our house, the woodpile and the barn. 

 As you might have already guessed, this can make a person a bit crazy.  Sometimes it makes people crazy and they don’t even realize it.  Thankfully, I live with a man who can let me know when I’m beginning to exhibit antisocial behavior–and thankfully, I tend to believe him.  So when I went off-island on Tuesday, got in the car, and started to freak out because 20 mph felt WAY too fast, and the car was making all sorts of weird noises that I swear I had never heard before, I had the good sense to pull over and call, not the mechanic, but Steve.  I told him the problem: something to the effect of “The speedometer reads 20mph, but I swear to god, I’m going 60,” and “The car’s making a weird noise and I think the wheel is going to fall off.”

 To Steve’s credit, he doesn’t laugh.  He even asks me to describe said “noise,” which I do: “I dunno, it’s like an engine noise.”  He’s pretty sure the car is fine, and, somewhat assured, I go on my way. 

 So, back on the island that afternoon, I feel re-socialized and more normal than I’ve felt in weeks.  I am driving the truck to Alan and Kristen’s (a bit too fast, perhaps, because I’ve been driving on the relatively smooth roads of the mainland all day and I totally forget about the frostheave at the Gravel Pit–another piece to add to the collection in the back), up their driveway which I have dubbed the La Brea tarpit of the island, and finally arrive at their house. 

 That people as normal as Alan and Kristen live in this spot never ceases to amaze me.  And I mean normal, like I’m normal.  Regular people that work for a living.  Alan bartered for this land in the 60’s, and built the house here with his own hands.  The floor to ceiling windows flood the entire first floor with light and celebrate the sweeping view of the eastern shore of the island, the sea, and the islands beyond.  At today’s price of real estate, even with it taking a dive, the chicken coop here is probably worth a million bucks. 

 So taking care of these chickens is no big hardship.  I come, change the water, make sure they have food, and collect the eggs.  I don’t even have to break ice out of the water because it sits on top of its own little heater.  How cool is that?  The only real pain in the ass about it is Kristen’s pain-in-the-ass rooster, Hawkeye.  He’s aggressive and cranky and beligerent.  In the spring he has an insatiable libido, endured heroically by the 10 hens he lives with.  My arrival at the house is usually trumpeted by his crowing, and he doesn’t stop until I leave.  When I enter the chicken house, he stays inside to guard while the hens scatter out into the yard.  He pecks and crows and fiercely guards the nests.  He is thoroughly unloveable, and to some degree I dread facing him.

And so it’s surprising that when I got out of the truck on Tuesday I didn’t notice that Hawkeye wasn’t crowing.  It wasn’t until I stepped into the chicken house, and found the hens huddled in the corner–and not racing for the door–that it occurred to me that it was strangely quiet.   I looked for Hawkeye in the pile of softly clucking birds, and couldn’t find his plume of irradescent green feathers.  And why weren’t the hens leaving?  Usually they’re so spooked by me that they can’t get out into the yard fast enough.  And then it occurred to me that the chickens weren’t spooked, they were terrified.  By something way scarier than me. 

 I barely had time to do a quick headcount when I heard  terrorized squawking from the yard.  I ran outside to find a young hawk pressing a fat, rust colored hen into the spring mud.  I banged on the fence and shouted at the hawk, who released the hen in surprise, flew to the end of the fenced yard and promptly got tangled in the chicken wire.  The hen high-tailed it back into the house where I shut her and the rest of her sisters in. 

And that’s when I discovered him; right there where a small ramp leads up from the yard to the little door of the hen house, was the haughty tell-tale plume of the rooster’s tail feathers–and a little beyond that, Hawkeye himself.

 His head had been eaten, all of his neck and most of one wing.  He lay in a magnificent pillow of irradescent feathers, his body still warm and bleeding into the mud.  I grasped him by one of his feet, carried him out of the chicken yard and plopped him rather unceremoniously onto Alan and Kristen’s front lawn.  I still had the hawk to deal with.

Still tangled in the fence, the hawk was complaining in bravely subdued “scree screes” from the far side of the chicken yard.  He was big, looked hurt and sounded pissed.  I stood there in my street clothes, hatless, gloveless, and thoroughly unprepared for this Wild Kingdom drama unfolding before me, and decided I definitely needed help.

The island has no law enforcement, no stop lights or signs and no leash laws.  We do, however, have an animal control officer.  His name is Gerry, and 15 minutes after I hung up with his girlfriend Denise, they pulled up the drive in their truck.  

There were no cages, no leather braces, no special gloves.  Gerry just simply walked into the chicken yard, untangled the bird from the fence, walked out, and after a few minutes of us admiring the fierce raptor up close, he let him go.  The hawk spread his wings, circled dizzily for a few minutes, then found a perch in an island spruce where he, presumably, stopped to gather his wits before embarking on anymore predatory adventures.

After Gerry and Denise left, I packed up Hawkeye in a few plastic Hannaford shopping bags and placed him in Kristen and Alan’s refrigerator.  He wouldn’t be good eating, but I knew that Kristen would want to see her fallen soldier and give him a fitting goodbye.  Because that’s the kind of people they are.

 And for as much as I disliked that bird, I couldn’t help but feel that he did deserve the honor of a decent burial, and not to be scavenged unceremoniously by crows or coyotes.  If he had no other purpose, that rooster lived to guard his flock.  A noble death to die like that–claws out, screaming and fighting, doing the one job he was born to do–and in the end, ultimately, success. 

I drove home, unpacked, and only then remembered the French chocolate I had ordered as a possible replacement for the Venezuelan stuff I’ve been having trouble getting.  I usually don’t dig into my chocolate as soon as it arrives, but something about the day–feathers and blood and mud on my street clothes, the thought of a torn, unplucked bird in my friends’ refrigerator, a small death by violence–I just wanted to come in contact with something fine.  First, an almost palpable wave of chocolate aroma…a small chunk in my hand, then smooth on my tongue, exquisite and utterly delicious.  And, yes, fine.  As fine as life.