Category Archives: cabin

Mountain Sourdough

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When I was getting ready to come up here to my high mountain cabin for several days, I didn’t like the idea of leaving my sourdough starter at home with no one to feed it for most of a week. Then I realized, I could bring it with me. That is what is great about road trips — you have lots of flexibility and options. Every experience of air travel makes me love road-tripping more.

So I did bring my jar of starter, and along with it the likelihood that I would cook something with it, too. Because even if I only fed it every other day, it might outgrow the half-gallon jar I use. I didn’t want to have to throw out, or actually discard, the discard.

I really dislike the thought of throwing away good food such as sourdough starter, which is one reason I keep mine in a big jar, and why I have developed my current bread recipe so that it uses 1 1/2 cups of starter for one loaf. Many people use their discard to make pancakes or biscuits in between bread-bakings, but that is not convenient for me.

I didn’t have a plan for what I would cook, but I knew I could accomplish something like pancakes or even a loaf of bread without reference to a recipe, because I’ve had lots of experience adapting or creating recipes, and nearly all the results were at least edible and nutritious. Last night when I was browsing ideas for sourdough biscuits (which I made a lot of for a big family, but long ago), I ran across a recipe for flatbread, and as I’ve been wanting for a long time to experiment with flatbreads, I went with that.

Last night before bed I mixed the simple dough, of 1 cup starter, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 cup of milk. I covered it to further ferment overnight, and this afternoon made eight flatbreads with it, in a cast iron skillet. There was frost on the deck this morning, and it was 32 degrees when I checked at 7:00, so it was a good day for baking, whether in the stove or on top. And the first day of autumn. ❤

First I cooked them with a little olive oil in the pan. Then I tried each one in half a pat of butter, and the last few lumps dough I sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar as I folded and rolled them out, so that I ended up with a cinnamon sourdough flatbread. If I were to try this again, I might use water instead of milk, and hope to get a chewier bread; the cinnamon-sugar version wasn’t worth repeating. I’m already half-planning, though, that next summer I will bake a simple loaf of sourdough bread in the Dutch oven I saw in the cupboard.

Other than one pie I baked at the cabin, I have little experience baking at high altitudes; my son-in-law made a great pizza here at 8200 feet. Is it mostly cakes that are tricky, up where water turns to steam at 195 degrees? If any of you has personal  experience you’d like to share, I’d be interested.

 

Blue lake and golden squirrels.

cabin, mountains, nature, , , , ,

I stood on the cabin deck watching the critters on the slope below, where they scrambled about, doing their work. After a while I pulled up a chair to the railing and watched some more. Squirrels and chipmunks had found the recent offering I’d made, seeds scattered in the little neighborhood as though from their heaven.

For several days I’m enjoying the mountain air at the family cabin in the High Sierra, over 8,000 feet in elevation. It’s cold this week, and the animals are no doubt storing food in their winter homes.

Right away I noticed that two species of small animals were present there, and I remembered the name of one, because of the many times my children and I had studied about them in the nature guides; any time our yearly camping trips took us to these Sierra Nevada Mountains, we would encounter them. The Golden-mantled Squirrel is the larger of the two, and the smaller is the chipmunk, likely the Lodgepole or Sierra Chipmunk.

Even after they discovered the seeds, the chipmunks spent time in the middle of the gooseberry bushes, hidden from view but making the branches rustle and sway. They must have been eating the dried remains of the berries. And the chipmunks especially like to play chase over and around the boulders, occasionally stopping for a second to tempt me to take their picture. I did get one blurry shot including both species.

Other than watching their fun, I’ve been taking in the cloud show that is ever fascinating, and I succumbed to the requisite first-day-at-the-lake nap. I’ve already thought of more things I want to share here, from my thoughts and observations, so probably you will hear from me again soon.

A strange forest bathing.

cabin, smells, trees, work, , , ,

I was surprised to become personally involved with the tree thinning work here at the lake.  My second morning here, after my sister had arrived to spend a day with me, we got a knock at the door from one of the leaders of the fire safety project here in our cabin community. She wanted to review with us the recommendations from the primary agency toward the goal of “fuel reduction” and of making us a “Firewise Community.”

Fifteen workers from outside have joined dozens of property owners in the effort. Weeks ago many of us cabin owners had begun to cut small trees on our own lots and haul them to the roads, to increase the efficiency of the work crews who would join us this week, consisting of two state conservation agencies and a tree service.

If I had known further in advance about this project, I would have timed my visit to avoid it, but now I am really happy it worked out this way. Normally I am the least involved of us siblings in everything regarding our cabin because I live at such a distance compared to them.

But after Nancy was handed a can of orange spray paint, she and I walked around the property to decide on and mark trees that could be easily sawed down by a couple of our fellow residents who were about that business. And we had a consult with the tree service guys about the beautiful tree that features in several of my photos over the years, that unfortunately is one of those that poses a great fire risk by snuggling up to one side of the house.

Until recently, lot owners in our little group of cabins were forbidden to cut trees even on our own property. The expectation was that eventually permission would be given on a case-by-case basis. For many years there has been controversy about how to manage national forests and disagreement among government agencies; increasingly people understand the need to minimize wildfire danger by reducing fuel in the form of crowded forests, dead trees, and thick underbrush.

It was decided that they would take down that tree, and within a few minutes it was lying on the ground and being de-limbed.

While the chain  sawyers were working in front of our cabin, the noise and the exhaust fumes pretty much overwhelmed the senses. The last minutes of our big tree’s life, it was trembling under the repeated shocks of the hammers against wedges that had been squeezed into the initial cut. Nancy and I were standing off to the side taking videos. Then, down it came, and after a while the tree cutters moved on, the fumes dissipated, but the cut trees continued exhaling the last breaths of their essence.

The workers must necessarily be housed and fed by the property owners during this week that they are helping us, and a feeling of camaraderie was palpable. Workers and residents alike, nearly all of us have ties going back generations to small Central Valley communities, and many had been infused with a love for the mountains and the land by our parents and grandparents.

Usually when I am up here, I meet one or two of the other “summer people,” and am frustrated because I never get to know them and often forget their names. Rarely am I around for a work day, and as I most often come in September I miss many of the people who have stopped using their cabin when school starts. This week was different, and I’ve had the chance to talk with people from all the four parts of the group that has formed for this short project.

One cabin up the road is the sort of work center for the crews, and every night whoever wants can join them to eat and sit around a campfire. While I was there for a few hours last night we were often chatting about the wildfires that even now are blazing in the foothills below here, where several cabin owners have their first homes. Cell phones were often used to check for updates, especially regarding the brother of one of our company, who sent a photo of  the dark smoke billowing just behind his house.

When by the light of my little flashlight I walked away from the  smell of the campfire and back to my cabin, I immediately entered an atmospheric bath composed of those aromatics I’d enjoyed in smaller doses earlier. It was some kind of therapeutic essential oil experience! My musings since have prompted me to read about just what makes that heady aroma, and I found an article about Forest Bathing, and speculation about how the chemicals in tree sap are good for you: Terpenes and Health.

The piney scent of the forest is intensified when hundreds of trees are cut down and fed to ravenous chipping machines. The molecules of tree begin to be released as soon as the logs and branches are pushed in, and after the chopped up tree is spat out at the other end of the chute, the emanations continue for hours and probably days.

The products of all this chipping are left in piles along the roads, and there were several of these tall mounds along my path home last night. This morning several more had been deposited along the road in front of my cabin. They won’t be there long; one resident has equipment to take the chips away, and we have plans for using them right here in our mountain neighborhood.

This afternoon the weather I’d been wishing for arrived: claps and booms of thunder woke me from a nap, and soon a downpour of rain was clattering on the roof. And through the window wafted another, more humid dose of piney medicine. This highlighted experience of the trees and their yummy healthfulness seems like it might be an added reason to get myself to the mountains more often in the future, and practice forest bathing. But I won’t be disappointed at all if the aromatics in my bath are from trees still alive, with their roots intact and their branches in the sky.

 

Meeting the black night’s face.

cabin, nature, poetry, , , , ,

This week so far I have seen patches of the starry sky through the window from my bed, and through narrow gaps in the tree canopy as I walked along the gravel road coming back from a campfire.

Those glimpses are lovely, but not as powerful as what I experienced a few years ago when I was alone here in the High Sierra, standing on the deck at night, looking up: I was aware of the stars as somehow sentient beings that were intently and personably crowding and pressing down on me. The poem below expresses the thrill of such a meeting as I had, with added feelings that I didn’t experience.

The composer Tchaikovsky, in a letter to the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, wrote: “I place some of his poems up there with the very highest that there is in art. In this respect there is one which I am determined to illustrate musically some day.” This is the poem he copied in:

UPON A HAYSTACK ON A SOUTHERN NIGHT

Upon a haystack in lands of South,
I lay, while facing skies of night,
The choir of stars, alive and couth,
Was trembling, spread at every side.

The earth, mute as a dream half-hidden,
Was fast receding into space,
And I, as if the first in Eden,
Alone met the black night’s face.

Did I race to the depth profound,
Or did the stars race straight to me?
In mighty hands, it seemed me how,
I hanged above abysmal sea.

With heart, so sinking and bewildered,
I measured with my look a depth,
Into which, every moment sighted,
I sink, and nobody helps.

-Afanasy Afanasevich Fet, (1820-1892)

One odd thing is, the way Luis Sundkvist translated the letter from Russian, the second line of the poem reads, “I lay with my face towards the ground…”  How this happened I can’t imagine, because of course the poem makes no sense like that.

Golgol and Tolstoy also thought Fet’s poetry was stellar. The writer and publisher Nikolay Nekrasov wrote: “Not a single poet since Pushkin has managed to give such delight to those who understand poetry and readily open their soul to it, as Fet does.” 

The surname of Fet was assigned by authorities to Afanasy because of some question in Russia about the legitimacy of his birth; his parents’ marriage had been registered in Germany. In his later years he wrote to his wife, “You cannot even imagine how I hate the name Fet. I implore you never to mention it… If someone would ask me to give one single name to all the trials and tribulations of my life, I’d say without hesitation, this name is ‘Fet'”. Later still he was able to get back the name of his father, Shenshin, but as his poems were all published under the name Fet, so he is known. Evidently not much of his work has been translated into English, which makes this one even more special.

Another poem by Fet.