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Northeaster! Frasier Arctic Outflow

When I was a kid, Northeasters were exciting. If we were lucky enough to have a real rip-snorter, school closed and the kids would have a day or two to slide on the ice, sled, build snow forts, snow men, and throw snowballs.

If we were really lucky, when the thaw came, the county engineer would close most roads to heavy vehicles. No school buses! Another day off or at least a chance to walk a mile to heavy duty pavement.

Adults don’t understand the pleasure of a few days of disruption. They shake their heads. It’s cold. Brruuhhh! The wind is a danger: trees blow down, power goes out. Water pipes freeze.

But for a kid, it’s fun. Our grandson, Dario, came over to visit this afternoon, wound up like a top, excited by the Northeaster, delighted to be knocked over and blown away by the wind, and exulted to experience a day unlike any other.

This morning, I was up at five. Good thing I was. The northeast wind was howling and the windchill readout from our backyard weather station was only five degrees. I can’t count the number of mornings I have got up to the roar of the Northeaster to discover frozen pipes or and frozen pumps.

First thing, I turned on the water in the kitchen sink. All I got was a trickle. But I kept the valve open. Within ten minutes, the ice dam dissolved, and the water ran freely. Crisis averted. For a while.

I don’t know why, but one of my cherished moments was a Northeaster in the 1980s. Rebecca and I were living in a house that shared a well and pump with my cousin Steve.

I woke up around five, the usual for me, discovered that we had no water, and went out to the pumphouse: a damp, half underground chamber. Sure enough. The pump had froze up tight. I took a minute to figure out what to do.

Before half an idea hatched, my cousin Steve came down the steps and entered the pump chamber. My cousin was a big man, both in spirit and girth. He was puffing on his pipe and he brought a propane torch.

The pumphouse filled with the sweet Cherry Blend pipe tobacco smoke Steve favored as he lit his torch and began to play the blue flame over the pump. It wasn’t long before the pump started up and we could return to our respective houses and resume normal lives before our wives woke.

What am I supposed to say about that moment? Steve and I faced the Northeaster and brought our families back to their accustomed normal. Spontaneously, each driven by our responsibilities, we worked together.

Why this makes me profoundly happy, I do not know. But I shake my head and hold back tears when I think of it. Steve died a few years ago.

In my dad’s day, keeping the dairy herd supplied with water was paramount. Milk is mostly water. Dairy cows who can’t drink their fill, don’t give their full share of milk, and milk in the tank kept the farm solvent.

Dairy farmers get to know their water supply. When the Northeaster hits the water pipes, a farmer soon learns what has to be done to keep the water flowing. I well remember holding a flashlight for Dad as he warmed the pipes with a propane torch to get the water moving into the drinking cups in the milking barn before the cows noticed they were getting thirsty.

Tedious stuff, holding a flashlight. Not a bit of romance or excitement in it for me. But I’ll bet that was not what my dad thought. My dad was not one to be scared or threatened by anything, but I think those early morning struggles against the Northeaster were for him, high drama, not tedium.

Back to reality. Never mind the drama. I neglected to keep a trickle of water flowing and somewhere between ten and twelve in the morning, while the sun shined and the Northeaster blew, our water line froze solid.

I’m working on it. Our son is working on it. Dario is having fun with it.

 

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Outrageous: How To Sharpen a Kitchen Knife

Outrageous. I am outraged by well-intended advice. Twice.

outrageous-lenticular-sunrise
Outrageous lenticular clouds over Mount Baker at sunrise.

Yesterday I read a well meaning but outrageous bit of advice on blogging: have a theme and stick to it. None of this some nostalgia, some book discussion, some social commentary stuff. Choose a theme and stick to it. Anyone who knows me well, knows I wander all over the map. I never stick to routines for long. If you are as old as I am, you might remember a plastic surgeon back in the 1960’s who claimed all you had to do was repeat something 20 times and it became a habit. What rot! If I do the same thing 20 times in a row, it’s time for a change.

Good advice, this sticking to theme. I’m sure many readers want blogs to be predictable, but for me, no thanks. I’m not following it. Can’t follow it. I can’t even stick to bad habits. Hence, this post.

This weekend, I read an item in the New York Times, Improve Your Life With These Tiny Chores. Very sensible. Wash your sheets, throw out expired prescription opioids, unclog your sink. Yeah. Sure. Fine. I do these things whenever I am forced to. Who doesn’t?

One outrageous task sent me into low earth spitting orbit: sharpen your knives.

I know something about sharpening. I got my first jack knife from my grandpa when I six. And my first sharpening stone. The NYT article mentioned that a sharp knife is safer than a dull one. My left hand is covered with scars from dull knives that skipped off of the piece of wood I was whittling on and into my hand. These are old scars. I’ve learned to sharpen knives.

Dull knives are dangerous

The article starts with a modern nod to the counter-intuitive danger of dull knives. Good start, I said to myself, glancing at my scarred hand.

The rest was drivel

The rest of the item was drivel. It suggests sharpening knives once a year. Once a year? Piffle. Sharpen your knives the instant they loose their bite. It depends on the knife and how you use it.

How I do it

I sharpen my knives every time I use them, once or twice a day for my chef’s knife. Treat your knives with the care they deserve. Sharp edges are delicate and fragile. Don’t throw a good knife in the dishwasher to get rattled around, dented, and nicked.

After I use a knife, I clean it, and sharpen it on a steel, a dozen or more strokes on each side of the edge. Sharpening on a steel removes little or no material from the blade. Instead, it reshapes the metal into a sharp edge. A steel can’t get rid of a nick in an edge or remove a blunt spot, but it will return an undamaged edge to keen slicing form. The duller the edge, the less effective the steel.

You can’t reshape forever. Eventually, you have to grind the edge, which might amount to once a year, although once every few months is more realistic for knives you use daily.

You must be judicious in grinding, which removes metal from the edge. Grind too often and your knife disappears or morphs into an unusable shape. But if you don’t grind often enough, you have a dull and dangerous knife.

Trial and error

I won’t get into tools, angles, and techniques here. My best advice reflects my experience. Trial and error, grasshopper. Trial and error. There are many techniques and they all work, but not necessarily for you.

The blunter the angle of a blade, the less keen the edge, but the longer it stays sharp when cutting is tough. My perfect edge is not your perfect edge, but when an edge is not perfect, sharpen it. Use the steel often, a grinding stone only when needed. Power grinders are fast, but require expensive guides or great skill. Hard stainless steel blades are bears to sharpen, but stay sharp longer. Good carbon steel requires frequent maintenance, but with proper attention, it cuts like a dream. I have a cheap Chinese cleaver that looks like a mess, but cuts cleaner than its much more expensive German stainless brethren.

As an aside, most kitchens have too many knives. Learn to use and treat a few good knives well. Give an impoverished homicidal maniac a break and send the clutter to goodwill. Your life will be better. Ask Marie Kondo.

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The Dread Effanem Crusher: Pioneer Fashion Accessory

Ah, the Effanem (pronounced “F & M”) crusher. On the farms and hills of Whatcom County, baseball caps are de rigueur these days. Men, women, and children all wear them, but sixty years ago, county men and boys favored Effanem crushers, Maine hunting hats they are sometimes called, but I don’t see that Maine has any special claim to them.

Ball caps vs. the Effanem crusher

I used to wear a ball cap, but I’ve gone back to wearing an Effanem crusher most of the time. Rebecca, my wife, who I finagled into giving one to me for my birthday, doesn’t like it, and I imagine I get a few odd glances, but I don’t mind.

The Dread Effanem Crusher
The dread Effanem crusher hunting hat

To swing the deal, I had to compromise with Rebecca. The traditional color for a hunting hat is red. During the last flash of crusher popularity, blaze orange was common. The one I wear now is black, a compromise choice.

Red hats

The red hat was to ensure that hunters did not mistake your head for a deer, pheasant, or duck and blast away. Blaze orange was the same idea, raised a notch.

I was never much of a hunter, but I like a red hat. In the late 1960s, I hiked all over the North Cascades with my cousin Ed. He was a photographer and wannabe prospector who said mountain pictures always came out better when somebody wore red. I went along with him and wore a red hat.

In the 50s and 60s, you could buy a hunting hat at any sporting goods store in the county. I got my first from Ira Yeager’s store, which started in downtown Bellingham near the YMCA.

Angling for a crusher

Last fall, angling for a crusher as a birthday present from Rebecca, I checked out the availability at Yeager’s new store on the Northwest, which can’t have been located there much more than fifty years now. The girl in the clothing section was polite when I asked where I could find an Effanem crusher, but I could tell that she thought old geezers would be better off if they stayed home more.

Since this is 2020, I went online and found three sources for genuine Effanem crushers in red, blaze orange, hunter green, and black. One was a place in Maine that sells aged coyote urine with a Maine hunting hat sideline. I know Rebecca will never order anything from a place called Predator Pee Store, so I passed on it.

Johnson Woolen Mills sells the hats, but nobody owns up to manufacturing them. The obvious candidate, F & M Hat Co., looks genteel and probably shares Rebecca’s attitude toward the Predator Pee Store. Amazon sells them too. I took the easy way and put a red Effanem crusher on my Amazon wish list.

That’s how I got a black one.

Opening day

Now days, there’s not so much hunting in lowland Whatcom County. When I was a kid, the first day of hunting season was an occasion. Mom made me stay close to the yard and Dad avoided going into the woods more than he had to.

Dad always said the first couple days of hunting season were dangerous—early on, game was not as wary as they became after a few days of random gunfire. The easy hunting attracted less experienced and excitable hunters who didn’t know how to handle guns like the steady old hands. Getting a gun permit and hunting license sixty years ago was easier and cheaper than it is now. In the country, it seemed as if almost everyone had a gun of some sort around for shooting pests.

And, as I once overheard someone say, the first day of hunting season was as good a reason as any to get drunk. News of relatives and neighbors killed or wounded in hunting accidents was common.

Pothunters

You don’t hear the word pothunter often, but that is exactly what my grandparents and many of our neighbors were. They hunted for food, not sport. And they did not hunt like sportsmen, who, as their name implies, generally prefer to give game a sporting chance. To my practical grandpa, giving game any chance at all was a waste of time and ammunition.

According to my dad, Grandpa would watch deer carefully during the summer to get to know their habits and quirks, passing out samples from his garden to get them used to him. Toward fall, he would go out early in the morning, just before dawn, where he knew his nearly tame deer would pass, set out a spread of vegetable to get their attention, and wait. He had his rifle ready, a measly little twenty-two because the ammunition was cheap.

When a deer sampled the bait, he would shoot it in the head from close range with a single shot, no messing around. He could make one box of cartridges last several years. Dad said Grandpa took pride in quickly hanging and bleeding out the deer he shot to avoid the off taste of typical sportsman’s venison.

Dad also told me Grandpa didn’t pay much attention to hunting season. In those days, before my time, shooting a deer out of season for the smokehouse on your own farm was your business, nothing for the game warden or the sheriff to fret over. Whether it was the law or not, the season did not affect pothunters on their own land. You might as well try to tell them to thrash their grain or slaughter their hogs by the calendar instead of the weather. For a pioneer farmer, hunting season was nothing more than an annoyance that egged strangers on to trespass.

Times change

By the time I was around, that had all changed.

Throughout hunting season, we often heard shots in the distance and saw hunters wandering through the fields and woods. Today in pandemic 2020, we are in the midst of deer, upland game, and small game seasons. With the exception of regular booms from the trap shooters at the gun club down on the Larson Road, I have not heard shots or seen hunters this year.

I can’t say exactly when the hunters disappeared. I imagine there must still be a few around and there are deer all over, but with houses so close together now, shooting that was merely dangerous sixty years ago is now reckless.

The hunters I know today, cross the Cascades to eastern Washington, Idaho, and beyond to hunt. They hunt to fill their freezers, but with the cost of travel and all, venison is an expensive cut of meat. And, if you ask me, some of these sportsmen could take a lesson in butchering from my grandpa.