Three Coasts

Ok, I will admit I have a bread machine, which may not be the most frugal thing to admit having. It's just that I'm lousy at making bread, but I like bread, good bread, and I don't like to fork over the money for good bread if I can make it myself. Which I can't. So this mental loop led me to ask for a bread machine for Christmas. My mother-in-law obliged and also gave me a giant jar of bread machine yeast. I have faithfully followed directions and have been very successful.

But I knew the yeast jar would eventually run out and the price of yeast in a jar (which of course the bread machine makers claim is the only type you should use) would make homemade bread more expensive than I wanted it to be. I had read about sourdough and thought maybe I could catch some wild yeast in a starter and plunge into months of experimentation.

Didn't have to--a friend passed on a bag of "Amish Friendship Bread" starter and I was off to the races.

I made some Amish Friendship Bread, which, with its package of vanilla pudding as an ingredient, probably isn't very Amish. Then I separated and set aside some of the starter I'm supposed to pass on to someone else (hence, “friendship”), and hoped for the best.

So yesterday I set out a bowl full of 1 cup of starter, 1 cup of flour, and some water to make it thin. I came back to it today, combined it with flour, salt, a little sugar, some oil, a little water, in the bread machine container and set it to "dough". Then I let it rise a while, and lastly, cooked it on the french bread setting.

It is “slow food” to the max. All told, from yesterday's proofing to actually eating bread today, there was a 28 hour process. Of course, only a couple of minutes at the very beginning, and then a few more to put it in the machine, and again to make sure it was a dry enough dough (it wasn't: I am still learning, obviously), and then walk away. So it wouldn't be anything I'd suggest for spontaneous use, but far less labor-intensive than “28 hour” sounds. Just like, actually, the idea that “52 hour labor with Maeve” sounds like a frighteningly long time, but it isn’t—just in fits and spurts. Not to compare yeast bread with my second daughter’s labor.

And oh it was good bread. A little dense (I think the dough was too thin this time--next time, less water), but smelled like beer and the crust was awesome. Tiny little burst bubbles on the surface, crunchy, chewy, hearty, delicious.

Now, of course, I have a bowl of fermenting flour on my countertop. But, for those of you who know me, that would just like me.

I’m back from my honeymoon. Having spent two weeks in Belize and Costa Rica, I will be centering my next few posts on my experiences there. My first observation is on the food. I’ve been to Belize before and absolutely adore the cuisine even though some travel books disparage it. It’s a very interesting mix of Mayan, Mexican, and Caribbean flavors and cooking techniques. Add in fresh fish and seafood, and one can have something prepared literally ten different ways: blackened with Mayan spices, baked in a banana leaf, deep-fried, etc. My favorite dish was at a Mexican restaurant called Caliente! in Amberbris Caye. They served red snapper in coconut milk with bananas. The subtle flavors of the snapper matched perfectly with the coconut and the sweetness of bananas.

My wife was on a conch kick. For those who don’t know, conch is mollusk that lives in the shell that the boys used to call meetings in Lord of the Flies. Dishes such as conch fritters and conch chowder are staples of south Florida cuisine. I’ve never had conch as a main course because I always found it tough and chewy. But it was conch season in Belize, and the meat was tender and delicious, similar to calamari. Our favorite dish was conch breaded and sautéed in white wine at a beautiful restaurant called Capricorn, north of San Pedro.

Then there’s the stewed chicken. It’s a Belizean staple, like a burger and fries here in the states. Quarter chicken, dark meat, stewed in spices and served with rice and beans was a common lunch for me, smothered in Marie Sharp’s—a habanero hot sauce made with carrots that is the Heinz 57 of Belize. It’s on every table and went on every meal.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the same accolades for Costa Rica’s cuisine. It was very simple and lacked a lot of the interesting techniques and flavors of Belize. For example, although bananas are prevalent in Costa Rica, I never saw dishes using banana leaves to steam things in. It’s an excellent way to ensure meats and vegetables are moist and succulent, and it is used around the world. Yet I never saw it on a Costa Rican menu (not that it wasn’t there; I just don’t remember seeing it). This lack of creativity was probably the major hindrance to their cuisine because they have very fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables. Beef, tuna, sea bass, snapper, and mahi mahi were always fresh, but their preparations were either very basic, or they wholly incorporated another culture’s technique, such as serving tuna sashimi or teriyaki. The other oddity was the prevalence of Italian dishes on menus. Entire pages were devoted to pasta dishes on otherwise traditionally Costa Rican menus. And pizza joints were everywhere, even on top of mountains.

This is not to say I didn’t have great meals in Costa Rica. My favorites were casados, home-style plates of a protein, rice and beans, fried plaintains, yucca, and slices of avocados and tomatoes. Great, simple stuff. And dirt cheap! My wife and I had two plates and two diet Cokes for ten bucks, tax and tip. Now that’s budget traveling that beats a burger and fries at Denny’s (yes, senor Denny is alive and well in Costa Rica).

They're making a movie about Bettie Page.

You know, the pinup girl from the 1950s, the one whose bondage photos are synonymous with kitchy kink. Bettie's had an interesting life: She was born into poverty, the 2nd of 6 children. Her father molested her. Her mother mistreated her. Still, Bettie as a young woman was smart, studious, even a bit of an overachiever. She's been married and divorced three times. After a life of pin-up stardom that ended in a congressional investigation targeting the pornography industry, Bettie found religion. Then she spent 13 years in seclusion.

But what she's most known for are her dimensions: 36-23-35. At least that's what CMG Worldwide, which markets Bettie's image, says her dimensions are. Or were. Bettie's 82 now and no longer wishes to be photographed.

Looking at Bettie's photos, I wonder about the nature of myth-making and about who Bettie Page really was and is.

First, was her waist really only 23 inches in circumference? Is that humanly possible? We're talking about a wasp-waist here. Go ahead, I dare you to measure your own waist and compare. Get a measuring tape and take a look at 23 inches.

In her photos, Bettie looks refreshingly voluptuous compared to the emaciated images that permeate visual culture in the U.S. today. By current standards, her thighs are too large, her arms not toned enough. She does not possess flat abs. Heroically, she stands for another era, one that valorized and not condemned curves.

Second, it is interesting that Bettie is up-front about the incest. That history raises all sorts of questions and complications, for our culture, our literature, tends to paint such wounded girls as either promiscuous or frigid. Bettie could easily fall into the promiscuous camp although none of the material I found on her mentions her sex life. Posing provocatively does not necessarily mean she lived what she portrayed. Even the bondage photos she talks about in a sort of bland professional diction: "The only person I did bondage for was Irving Klaw and his sister Paula. Usually they would shoot four or five models every Saturday. He wouldn't pay for the regular pictures unless we did some bondage. So I did bondage shots to get paid for the other photos." *

Bettie's photos are striking. She seems self-possessed, even joyful. Far from the damaged young girl whose sexuality is stolen from her and equally far from the victim who repeats her victimization in a numbing pattern of abuse (incest-victim-turned-sex-worker), Bettie's photos stand out as rejecting both extremes.

Or do they? Bettie says in interviews that she liked the freedom of nudity, of sunning herself or walking around the house naked. But this information strikes me as merely titillating, not terribly different from the stuff of male-oriented fantasy that could accompany a photo shoot in a porn mag. What if the detail about her father's sexual abuse is meant as another titillation? Bettie's image and story have been hugely commodified, packaged, sold and now re-sold. Will the movie tell her story with dignity and honesty? We will have to see.

* quote from the Bettie Page Web site, www.bettiepage.com

I attend a Catholic Church in south St. Louis City named St. Pius V. Pius was a pope, and he is mostly remembered for not being St. Pius X. Actually, he was elected pope after the Reformation, when the Church was in a state of chaos. He kept things together and struggled tirelessly against the Protestants and the Turks. Pius V was integral to the counterreformation and excommunicated Elizabeth I, encouraged the new Society of Jesus (that would be the Jesuits…), and did any number of good works and, well, pious things. All fine and good; it was a long time ago and, frankly, St. Pius V in St. Louis doesn’t have real strong ties to its namesake. The front façade of the building has a carved stone mural of his good deeds (freed 10,000 Christian slaves from the Turks, for instance), but when I taught at the school, it wasn’t like Pius came up very often, as a St. Patrick’s or Our Lady of Mt. Carmel School might honor their patrons. He is kind of an underdog in the saintly world. The patron of Malta, for goodness sake. Not doctors or firemen or bullfighters (he outlawed bullfighting in Rome). Malta. You can’t walk into Catholic Supply and get a medal of St. Pius V, probably for good reason: even the depictions of him in paintings—short, hunched over, bald, with a beak nose and a long beard—make him look like an evil wizard, not a pope.

An underdog in the archdiocesan world, our church was slated to close two years ago when they came up with the new plan for the south side. There are, frankly, too many parishes, most with segregated roots (meaning that the Germans, Irish, Italians, and Poles all were Catholic (meaning “universal,” ironically), but they weren’t about to go to church together). St. Pius’ territory was carved up into two pieces, half given to Holy Family, and the other half to St. Wenceslaus. The Holy Family, on a side note, is the patron of Reno, and Wenceslaus pays attention to Bohemian brewers (like our hometown Anheuser Busch, for instance).

Obviously, we were saddened and a bit enraged, and we submitted a counter-proposal to the archdiocese. In some ways, from an outsider’s point of view, it made sense: we no longer had a parish school, having merged with the school that is on Wenceslaus’ property (and supported by 7 or more parishes). Our attendance was low, we were relatively poor, and we straddled Grand Ave, which would, perhaps, be a natural boundary for parish lines. When I’d taken the job at the parish school 6 years ago, my ex-principal told me, “well, I hope they stay open long enough for you to get a couple years in.” We are definitely urban in appearance—a big blacktop parking lot serves as a cut through for the drug dealers who live across from the old school building. There’s a broken gate between the lot and a dirty alleyway. No trees, very little landscaping at all. Rundown—sagging, perhaps.

In other ways, though, the archdiocese hadn’t looked very closely: we support immigrants and refugees, we have an active food pantry, our school was successful now that it was merged, and there was some underlying animosity between Pius and Holy Family that meant that our numbers probably wouldn’t “shore up” Holy Family’s decline like they’d hoped. We were also right on Grand Ave, and our church building, unlike the school and lot, was visible and striking. It probably wouldn’t look so good with a plastic banner over the stone mural reading “Joe’s Church of the Living God” if the building was sold, or, as would probably happen in this city, as an empty building, finally razed and replaced with another Walgreens.

The committee listened and agreed, amazingly. It was almost like being in a democracy. We stayed open, as did Wenceslaus. Holy Family closed, St. Francis de Sales became a Latin church, St. Agatha’s became a Polish center (don’t get me started on the Polish church in St. Louis and the archbishop right now, that’s for another day). Shocked by our good fortune, we welcomed some new people, watched as our parish grew just a tad, and started thinking of ourselves as a new parish, one with opportunities and potential instead of unmet needs, seedy neighbors, and dilapidated buildings.

Sr. Mary Henry decided it was time to start up the fish fry. Fish fries in St. Louis are a Lentan ritual. Every Friday, hundreds of families line up at their parish cafeterias, mostly in stale church basements or school gymnasiums reeking of bleach and government cheese, to consume blocks of fried cod and a variety of meatless sides: potato salad, spaghetti, green beans, flourescent yellow macaroni and cheese, applesauce, cole slaw. Some parishes go for french fries and fried shrimp; others serve cheese pizza to the kids. We hadn’t had a fish fry in 4 years, and at the time it shut down, it was a pathetic mockery of what a parish event should be. Bad food, low attendance, stinky church basement with bad lighting. My family went a total of one time.

Mary got a committee together. They in turn got volunteers. Norma made the menu: real fish, hand-breaded. Green beans with tarragon. Potato salad not from a can. It sounded great. Katrina asked for desserts. I don’t like to work with raw fish, so I went with Katrina and baked. I cut cakes and brownies and put them out on plates the morning before our first Fry. Mary was hoping to serve 250 dinners that night. She had no idea what to expect, and the nervous energy in the kitchen was palpable. Everyone was working hard at a new venture, one that could fail miserably as before, or could fill, as Fr. Mike said, “the fish fry gap in South St. Louis.”

I showed up to eat at 6, with husband, daughters, and friend Brian in tow. We stood in line for 30 minutes and then ate the best fish fry food I’ve ever had. Mary wanted 250 to come. We saw over 500. Then the second week, having learned our lessons, we had more food in reserve, more desserts. We set up a second line. We streamlined many things and got more volunteers. And we, again, served over 500 dinners. Fr. Mike mentioned at mass this morning that we had our first Fish Fry convert—someone picked up a registration form on Friday night while listening to our live Irish music and eating Peggy’s rum cake, and decided this was the church they’d been looking for.

So here we are. You might say we are surprised by our success. Having been, frankly, the low man on the archdiocesan totem pole for so long, we find ourselves in the wonderful position of popularity. We have arrived—debuted, as it were. I know, it’s only a fish fry. We still have bills to pay and poor to serve and buildings to repair and there’s always the specter of church closings in our future. We have a new pastor coming in June, and many things will change. It is hard to shift from underdog to top of the heap, to trust that things will work for us, after so much hasn’t worked for so long. I feel a magnitude of energy and happiness at Pius that hasn’t been there in the 8 years I’ve been attending. For the first time, I think I may be living in the “good old days.” Simply amazing.

I’ve been planning my family’s trip to California. We’re leaving in September and staying away for 2 weeks. It’s sort of to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, but more than that, it’s because, damn it, we haven’t done anything like this since the honeymoon and that’s a long time to stay put. Of course, we don’t just stay put—we do travel, to exciting locales like Cairo, Illinois, where my in-laws live, or Columbia, Missouri, where my sisters live. A couple of trips down to Houston (my brother) and Chicago (Mike’s work takes us there occasionally) and you have a solidly boring travel log.

I tend to obsess, and so I’ve planned out our route, down to the hour on some days. I have hotel reservations where appropriate and cabins reserved in various national parks. I am becoming an expert on our trip to California. Most of my evenings are spent with guide books, the internet, and a beat up atlas.

One such guide book that I grabbed from our local library right before closing time, and therefore didn’t really look at what was inside, is Lost America, by Troy Paiva. It was shelved with the Southwest travel books, and since we are driving through Nevada, I figured I’d find something worthwhile, some tidbit about a ghost town on US 6 at least. I got it home and stayed up long past my bedtime perusing its pages. It is a photographic exhibit, full of ghost town images, old drive-in theaters, salvage yards, and the Salton Sea. Paiva takes pictures at night, using a long exposure, sometimes up to 10 minutes. But during this exposure, the pictures aren’t just lit by the moon, but also by eerie strobe lights covered with theatrical colored gels, thus producing strange glowing images in otherworldly colors. This enhances the creepiness that is already present in images of broken down junkyards and decrepit movie theater lobbies. There is a post-nuclear feel to many photos.

The Salton Sea chapter, though, is the one that stuck with me. See, I lived just north of the Salton Sea, in Palm Desert, when I was 5. Granted, I was only 5, and not expected to know much geography, especially not of abandoned resort spots. Still, though, I had never even heard of this place. Now I figure, it was because by 1979, this place was an unclean embarrassment for Southern California.

The story goes, accordng to Paiva, back at the turn of the 20th century, a private company diverted water from the Colorado River down into what became the Imperial Valley, trying to irrigate the area. It wasn’t too successful at first—the canals broke down a few times, and then in 1905, the Southwest had this really wet winter, the wettest on record up to that point, and the Colorado overflowed its banks. Well, there was this canal to flow right into, and flow it did—sometimes at the rate of 100,000 cubic feet per second. This went on for two years. The end result was the Salton Sea, just north of the Imperial Valley.

Throughout ancient geologic history, this area flooded and dried up again on a (geologically speaking) regular basis. But this time, the Salton Sea didn’t leave, due to runoff from fields in the Imperial Valley. So while it evaporated, the runoff replaced it at the same rate. Suddenly, in the middle of the California desert, there was this beautiful salt lake. Developers started thinking about it as a desert resort, and rushed in to build up golf courses and hotels along the northern edge. Sure, it was hot as hell, but it was beautiful.

This area boomed in the fifties and sixties, but starting in the late sixties, the Salton Sea started to have some problems. That runoff, for instance, was filled with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It wasn’t simply new clean river water—so as water evaporated, the sea became saltier, and then new water arrived, but it was laden with chemicals. Then more water left, and more chemicals arrived—the sea began to grow murky, and algae moved in to eat the fertilizer. I'm sure it was lovely.

But wait, there’s more. In the late 70s, the whole place flooded two years in a row. When the waters receded, there was this gross salty crust on everything—the resorts, the golf courses, the beaches. Then in the 80s, the fish started to die, and then the birds started to die. In the 90s, 7.6 million tilapia died, and according to Paiva, their corpses still ring the beach. The latest news I can find about it involves pet food companies considering harvesting fish from the sea to feed to our cats.

The California government runs a website dedicated to the debunking of myths about the Salton Sea, but, ironically, confirms everything Paiva says in his book. The website’s pictures, however, are of happy vacationers in hip boots fishing on the shore. It downplays the smell and suggests that the bird deaths are due to the tilapia carrying infection. Then it goes on to suggest that more people should come on down to the Salton Sea and fish those tilapia out! The idea is that fewer fish would make a healthier place, which, based on my experiences with fish tanks, sounds about right. But then, do I eat the poisoned fish, or just feed it to my cats?

Paiva’s photographs of crusty trailers (in a spooky yellow-green light) and dead fish almost make me want to take a side trip and see this place for myself. That’s a big almost, however. I don’t think my daughter the pretty princess would take too kindly to an afternoon in a resort ghost town filled with crusty trailers and fish remains.

Responding to Corrina's tribute -- I was saddened by losing Octavia Butler when she was only 58 -- sad for the novels she had yet to write. Kindred is a deeply compelling psychological treatment of slavery. I remember being skeptical of the book because after reading slave narratives and countless post-colonial treatments of slavery, I thought, what more could be said? And then came Butler's brilliant sci-fi story of a woman of today getting sucked back into the antebellum American South. We get sucked there along with her and experience the rebellion of spirit and awful, seductive coping mechanisms with her.