Max and I believe, in a kind of Herman Hesse-ean way, that the world is unflolding especially for us according to what is in our hearts. Feeling hungry, for example, we hold out our hands and sandwiches flutter down and perch on them. We also believe, in a kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald-ean way, that you can’t party all winter with your rich friends without it taking a toll on your spiritual luck. You have to cut all those parties with some suffering in the desert, which is what we did this weekend.

We drove to the Deschutes R. near Maupin and camped at the boat launch camp.

After making camp we hiked up the river canyon to the ridge. The arrowleaf balsams were in bloom .

We became calm and alert. Although Max has grown up in the damp and claustrophobic forests of western Oregon, he, like me, feels most comfortable in the spacious camphorous desert. We behaved like desert rams. We took a few steps then stopped to look around, ad infinitum.

We found a good seam to fish. Nothing doing.

The famous Deschutes R. salmon fly hatch was happening, but there were no surface takes. Surely the fish were feasting on the oily-black nymphs on the river bottom. Max and I watched an adult salmon fly emerge from its stiff teenage nymph self.

The canyon warmed up fast, so we laid around in the white alder trees like sloths do.

As fast as it got warm, it got cold, and we put on our wrangler jeans and did some double rock throws.

And baked some biscuits in the dutch oven.

With sausage gravy.

We were glad for the biscuits and gravy and glad for the presence of the big dark canyon all around us.

We listened to the thick darkness and the yipping coyotes and talked about the weird lifecycles of insects.

If you spent a fair bit of time in Mormon households as a child like I did, you were left with the following principle impressions: first, you were struck by the unearthly quantity of Kirkland brand junk food freely available, which was served super-bowl style: potato chips mounded in gigantic plastic bowls, warm soda cans set out on the counter, basins of room-temperature ranch dressing.

Second, the vast collections of taped-from-TV VHS cassettes. Titles like An Officer and a Gentleman, Flowers in the Attic, and Another 48 Hours. A lot of people think Mormons are watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Herbie in their basements but they are not. They’re in their family rooms hungrily fixing the tracking on TNT’s presentation of Return to Blue Lagoon and those sort of psychological dramas. I have never drunk so much warm pop nor watched so much abridged, lurid programming as I did when I was young and under the influence of Mormons.

The floor plan of a typical LDS church, for those who’ve never had the pleasure, is more or less like this: a not-that-spiritual chapel, a carpeted basketball court, an exceptionally spiritual white marble bathroom lair, and then a whole bunch of little stalls outfitted with double VCR set ups for re-recording programs and expanding the church’s video collection (If you would like a copy of my academic essay, “What Does it Say About Mormons That Their Chapels Are Business Casual and Their Bathrooms Are Heaven on Earth?” send $2.50 shipping and handling to The Decline of the West Press, P.O. Box 1344, Portland, OR, 97202).

Pablo Escobar Master Bath or Latter-Day Baptistery?

I should note, my maybe exaggerated impressions about the junk food and the video collections might have something to do with the psychologically important fact that my mother, who is not at all Mormon, starved my sister and me on snacks invented by Mollie Katzen mostly. Like Montessori Mushroom Escarole Casserole and Tofu-Sorrel Guacamole. When we rented a video each solstice, we also had to rent a VCR, which came in a foam-lined Pelican case and smelled like cigarette smoke.

I derive my authority to speak candidly about Mormonism, by the way, from the LDS DNA that survives in my body in still grey pools. I like to think that the inside of my body is a vast desiccated salt flat and the parts of me that are Mormon are beautiful pluvial pools that are lifeless except insofar as they are teeming with brine shrimp like the Great Salt Lake is. That is, my father’s mother Lorraine, who is the headwaters of my family’s natural beauty, punched my ticket to the Telestial Kingdom because of the fact that she was Mormon and because of how DNA works.

Quorum of the Twelve Slobbering Octogenarians.

It’s popular to believe that Mormons are basically crazy because of their admittedly hilarious latter-day saints narratives, their Quorum of the Twelve Slobbering Octogenarians, their penchant for threesomes, and their distasteful desire to glue dead holocaust victims into their scrapbooks. It’s shameful, however, that the Mormon pioneer history—and the importance of Mormons in the settling of the West—has been so mishandled and so completely painted over. We know, in a kind of anecdotal way, that the Mormons travelled overland to the West to wiggle free from the discomforts of bloody religious persecution in the eastern states. And that they stumbled onto the Great Salt Lake, which they mistook for Zion even though it was, in fact, a miserably uninhabitable horsefly hatchery. And that some of John Wesley Powell’s men were killed and eaten by ‘Mer-mens’ on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. We know, also, about how Mormons like to not drink beer next to the pool, like the rest of us do, and about how they’re not that fun at a party and think that Jesus Christ visited North America in the year twenty to convert a super lost tribe of caucasian Jews.      

And we know about how, in addition to be being a car dealer, the President of the LDS church, Thomas Monson, is a prophet and seer. If Elder Monson is taking a bath with his cowboy boots on (Mormon Presidents never take off their cowboy boots) and God sees fit to pierce him with a revelation, he is ordained to dial up the Quorum of Twelve Slobbering Octogenarians on his bath phone and let them know that skateboarding and rollerblading is prohibited at all times or whatever it was God whispered to him on his bath phone.

There are a fair number of Oregon Trail historical markers in the western states you can pull off the road to look at—river crossings, massacre sites, missions, and winter camps. There are a few places where wagon ruts are still visible in soft stone, and a few standing stage stops and signature rocks that can give you a somewhat underwhelming feeling for the migration. There is an Oregon Trail river ford near Mt. Home, ID called Three Island Crossing—that you can see from the freeway and when you pass it your brain superimposes a little red dotted line onto the landscape, denoting the narrowest and shallowest route across the river. You can stand out in the desert and look at the same crushingly infinite panorama the pioneers saw when they came onto the Snake R. Plain. Otherwise, there are the Whitmans and the Donners and a lot of nameless, cartoon pioneers fist-fighting indians and singing Oh Susanna. This more or less comprises our broad cultural understanding of the settling of the west.

Mormons, on the other hand, are very keen on their pioneer history, and research it vigorously. Much of the feverish genealogy Mormons are known to perform is attributed to the practice of converting the dead. But I think their archival rigor springs as well from very personal desires to find continuity with their ancestors who crossed the west with Brigham Young, or later in ragged hand-cart bands, to find the dead inland sea John Fremont surveyed in 1844.

Besides their patient record keeping, and the pioneer motifs they carve into their gigantic marble bath tubs (note the bath pictured above, which is born by a team of oxen), Mormons take every chance to reenact pioneer times at events like Pioneer Day, which is a Utah state holiday. The LDS church also promotes Youth Hand Cart Treks, which are multi-day reenactments of the sorrowful voyages of the ancestors to the west. Participants, in prairie dress, pull all their food and supplies over the broken sagebrush steppe in replica hand carts and camp along the trail.  

Because of the still, beautiful pools of LDS DNA inside of me, I am also grabbed by an irresistible urge to reenact pioneer times. That is why I walk around with stones in my boots and cook my dinner in a sorrowful gale out of doors. More recently I have become spiritually interested in reenacting pioneer potted meats. Pioneers loved potted meats because they preserved well and were symbols of thrift, since they are made mostly of butchers trimmings, and undesirable organ meats.

To make my Mormon Country Pate, I first ground up a couple pounds of pork butt using the big die.

Then I mixed some pork livers, shallots, and quatre épices with half the ground pork and put it through the grinder again, this time with the fine die on.

Sage Elixir.

Along with three eggs and a half cup of heavy cream, I added a small collection of juniper berries and a strong dose of sage elixir, which I made last winter. Sage elixir is brewed by soaking a handful of sage leaves in a decanter of eau-de-vie for a long time. I include juniper berries and sage elixir in the pate to impart the spirit of the juniper woodlands and sagebrush plains the pioneers struggled in.

I lined the terrines with bacon and packed in the pate mixture.

Then I hid a few small golden plates in the pate to commemorate The Book of Mormon.  The founder of the faith, Joseph Smith, was woken one night in 1823 by the trumpet blast of the angel Moroni, who told him to get his shovel and start digging on yonder hill. Smith’s digging yielded a series of golden plates inscribed with some “reformed Egyptian” gibberish. Smith returned home with the plates, which he hid away in a box. His buddies wanted, naturally, to get a good look at the celestial plates but Joseph Smith said “no deal. However you may heft the box to get an idea for how heavy they are.” Smith later set about translating the plates’ inscriptions using a seeing stone, which I guess is a mystical crystal in the modern parlance. Before he finished the translation, unfortunately, he accidentally misplaced the heavy golden plates and they were never seen again. He had to complete the text that would comprise The Book of Mormon based on memory and some scattershot follow ups from angels. I set the terrines to bake at 300 for an hour.

I let the pate congeal in the refrigerator for a few days and we ate it with bread and strong mustard and cornichons. 

In the early nineteen-forties AU and UK set up military installments on Papua New Guinea, which was the land that time forgot, if we’re to believe Sorcerers of Dabu and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies and the severe field notes of Margaret Mead.

The Papuans, apparently, carefully watched the Queen’s men set up stations, depots, and air strips. Then they heard the wonderful acoustics of far-off cargo planes and saw them flicker in the sky and skid onto the new air strips like corpulent geese, full of cans of peaches and gin-and-tonic kits and willow-wood cricket bats.

Mistaking the military-industrial-complex for magic I suppose, the lustful Papuans began constructing dirt airstrips and coconut radios and bamboo air traffic control towers and tin can headsets and then waited for their own glinting airplane to appear in the sky. It would land, they thought, and Charles de Gaulle would step out in a swan white uniform and begin distributing boxes of fancy hats and candy bars and all manner of brass keepsakes. It’s a strange thing about Charles de Gaulle. It’s all strange, but somehow the Papuans heard about de Gaulle during the war and he became their guy.

I’ve had a strong interest in trout of late, like I do every late winter. Besides naked ladies and sandwiches, trout is all I think about during the estrus and rutting moons. Trout, in other words, is the locus classicus of summer, quoting our best and earliest feelings about the immense drama of the wilderness and the beauty of solitary bodies flashing in the current of it.

I have no trouble finding trout to eat. I have a good trout lady, and a stocked trout pond nearby that is good for trout when ospreys are not ruining things. That is, I have plenty of cargo if I want it. It’s the fruitless and hilarious orchestrations of fishing and looking dumbly into the wild river that I lust about. It’s a cargo cult except in reverse. I purchase real cargo in late winter in hopes a replica air strip and coconut radio will magically appear. That is how all of us live in the western world, so far as I can tell. Everything available for purchase. In want of nothing except the hilarious profundity of looking at the sky and expecting something to emerge from it.

I’ve had some good luck here and there fly fishing for trout, but mostly the concatenations of casting and the mystical selection of flies and trout water comes to nothing save the reward of floating flies in the immense and baking Deschutes canyon, or upon one of the Middle Fork’s chandelier tributaries or luminist pools.

Until the warm trout season opens there’s nothing to do but purchase trout and smoke it and stare at the sky.

Last weekend we caught two youthful trout at the Canby Pond, which is more or less the same as buying trout at Fred Meyer. I had some pork shoulder smoking on the grill, so I decided to smoke the trouts too.

First I cured the trouts in rock salt and brown sugar.

Then I smoked them for two hours in apple wood smoke. The apple wood was sourced from Robin’s childhood apple tree, which was damaged in a storm.

In the meantime I began work on wheat bread with walnuts and browned onions.

I mixed and kneaded the dough before I added the nuts and onions.

I let it rise and proof and then put it in a roaring hot dutch oven to bake.

I sawed into the magnificent geode to see what it was like inside. 

We ate the smoked trout with the onion bread, the last jar of my famous jalapeno jelly, and some smoked green chiles.

Max’s t-ball game got called on account of rain. We felt stumped and tried to think of some other activities we could burn off some patriotism on. We called up Sam and Darian and went fishing at Canby Pond.

Max and Sam went over by a tree and started whispering back and forth. Then they returned and said, “We don’t fish until we’re fed. That’s what we decided when we were over by that tree.” Darian and I thought it was a dumb rule, but the boys started stamping their feet and before too long they were happily drinking pops and eating candy bars.

Before too long we caught a wonderful little trout.

And then another.

The sun came out and then a large bird did. It looked like a buck knife in the sky and cast a dark shadow over the pond. The bird began pilfering the pond’s trout one by one. Everyone at the pond looked up at the terrifying bird and began to identify it with squinted eyes.

“An eagle!” said one man who was smoking a cigarette in such a way that it would not get rained on. “A seahawk!” said a man wearing a satin Seahawks jacket. “A falcon!” shrieked another man, tucking a hoarse chihuahua under his lawnchair.

It was an osprey. It looked beautiful compared to us, and it drained the pond of trout.

Pond drained, we went for hamburgers inside a B-17 bomber.

The hamburgers tasted magnificent inside the bomber, which flashed in the sun.

We stopped to look at the Willamette R. in flood stage, roaring past the paper plant.

The KGN news crew were there too and they were dying to get Darian and Sam’s perspective on the flooded river, so they shined a bright light on them and the handsome newscaster asked them what they thought of it. “The power of it is what gets me,” Darian said. “It looks like chocolate milk,” Sam added.

Then we went home and cleaned our trouts first thing.

I picked Max up from school early to go trout shopping and cactus shopping.

We visited our favorite arid plant handler to buy some sedums. We wanted to build Robin a surprise desertarium inside a gigantic glass orb we found at the flea market. We wanted Robin to be able to gaze into the gigantic orb and have diminutive vision quests in the desert we built for her.

We planted the sedums and poured hot orange sand into the orb.

Then we got in the car and went to see our trout lady.

Max, who wore his favorite cycling jersey to school today, picked the most athletic and wonderful trout she had.

Then she took us into the back room to look into the foamy crab tank. This dungeness crab was just harvested from the Oregon coast and wanted to pinch Max badly.

When we got home we started a roaring fire to cook our trouts on.

And picked some cat mint to stuff in our trouts to make them seem like they were trouts from a long lost hiking trip in the White Clouds or Sawtooths. Cat mint is an exact replica of an arid alpine meadow, smell-wise. It has a sweet and sagey and altogether undomesticated aroma. Crisp pine can also transport you to last summer’s backpacking trips. And gamey geranium, and sage and garlic greens. But cat mint especially.

We bruised up some garlic and onion and rosemary and sage too.

And stuffed it into our trouts, along with some salt, pepper, and lemon rounds.

And put them on the fire next to some asparagus.

Max flipped the trouts.

The trouts began to look magnificent and we talked about stealing off with them and eating them quickly in the darkness like raccoons.

Instead we served the fish with woodland mushrooms and potatoes.

With the rest of the fire we roasted marshmallows and talked about all the things we want to do this summer, including fishing for trout in faraway lakes.

I think if you annotated Wallace Stegner’s milquetoast Mormon-country panoramas with Joan Didion’s crestfallen boomtowns and clogged freeways, you’d have a fairly studious picture of the American West. Both writers subscribe to the biblical notion that the primordial west—as painted by Albert Bierstadt—was paradisial and that it has since been speculated into ruins and littered with the carcasses of water parks and casinos and sweltering parking lots.

The fore-warnings of the junking of the west show up very early in the historical record. Not a moment after Lewis and Clark and John Wesley Powell and the first-wave explorers returned with their heaping specimen boxes and plant presses, a wave of anthropologists, photographers, and record keepers set out to make the last accounting of the American West and its people. Wherever there are anthropologists there are vultures not far off.

You can see the speculators and carpetbaggers—kicking in their chutes—reflected in the dumbstruck eyes of George Catlin’s portrait subjects, who appear to have been dressed from a proverbial trunk of old indian costumes. Although it seems stupidly obvious to say, it’s astounding that it took us a mere two hundred years, since Lewis and Clark’s keeled barges nosed into the big misty west, to dismantle the entire western wilderness (save a few token swaths) and put up all these hot wings restaurants and quick loan kiosks and air-conditioned data centers.

Stegner and Didion have no illusions that the pace of expansion might be stemmed or that there is any ground to gain back. Rather, they’re plainly heartbroken about the quality of our reverence. At least we should appreciate the scale of the disaster and the absurdity of the retarded business schemes and government auctioneering that continues to piss off the last subdivided acres of Mr. Bierstadt’s primordial west (it would be a startling project indeed to set up easel at Bierstadt’s plein air sites and make honest accountings of those same views today, hydroelectric condo developments and all).

Stegner shyly moves his camera over the endless sagebrush steppe as Didion notes the death of coniferous majesty by way of the zoo-tiger pacings of a series of worn out tabloid characters. What bothers both writers is continuity. Old manners of living seem to’ve had no shortage of it. Seed saving and herd keeping and the stored fruits of summer and the passing of quality skills and tools saw to continuity and kept clear passage, through the travails and ecstasies of former seasons, to the ancestral headwaters. For us, there are too many Herculean dams and diversions to feel very well connected to the Borgean camps up river…

One minor symbol of continuity, I propose, is the sourdough starter. Minor indeed, but the sourdough starter registers a concept – to use Ezra Pound’s phrase. A person “keeps” a sourdough starter, after all, suggesting a lineage from our ancestors to our children and grandchildren. If you are lucky, you inherited a sourdough starter and you can imagine the antique pancakes and breads that were raised from it and the camps up river. 

Stanley Basin Sourdough Pancakes

Sponge

Ladle sourdough starter

1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup warm water

Pancakes

Remainder of sponge after you’ve returned a cup to starter

2 eggs

2 TBS sugar

2 TBS melted butter

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup flour

Put the sponge to ferment overnight. In the morning return a cup of the sponge to your starter, and mix in the rest of the ingredients. Make sure all ingredients are more or less warm. Cold ingredients make for tough pancakes.

I was born in 1978 in the LDS hospital in Salt Lake City just as Hotel California was cresting and then breaking and then running out onto the sand. At some point much later on, just to test the idea, I made a private agreement with myself that Hotel California was the last great rock album and that, in fact, you can hear the institution of rock music painfully seizing and rusting over within the album itself. Sometimes tester ideas accidentally gain purchase, even if they are bad ones, and start to become true.

I began to imagine there was a yellow light coming through the window all the way from California and wobbling on the far wall of my hospital room when I was born and that wobbly light was the album by The Eagles. Not in a grandiose sense. I don’t think that I am a reincarnation of Hotel California if that’s what you’re thinking. The light I’m talking about is the kind that wobbles on your living room wall if you’re lucky enough to have a swimming pool in your backyard.

Probably this whole dumb hallucination has mostly to do with a few fundamental misconceptions I have about my birth and upbringing in Chilly Desert, State of Deseret, Mormon Country. I don’t actually believe in the citrus-crate fantasy of California and there are surely thousands of magnificent rock albums that were cut after Hotel California including everything from Bob Dylan’s magnificent Christian period, all the early-period Joan Armatrading and mid-period Jackson Browne, as well as everything from Richard Thompson’s solo period. Also, Emmylou Harris’s Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town gets to walk on the Ark.

Anyways, my mother, who is a gatherer, gathered the pool of wobbly light and put it in a one gallon stoneware crock with some whole wheat flour and then left it on the counter to ferment. Many years later, when I was old enough to care for things besides myself, I inherited the crock and the starter inside and have secretly kept it alive all these years.

Besides supporting terribly delicious sourdough pancakes, the starter also makes very good bread. I’ve chronicled the mysteries of sourdough, which are akin to the Four Mysteries of the Rosary (joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious), more or less exhaustively elsewhere, so I won’t say more, except to say it’s best to bake bread when your starter is enshrouded in either a luminous mystery or a glorious one, in temperament and odor. Although I’m not fond of the phrase, there are times that I suppose have to do with the zodiac when your starter is on the rag and shouldn’t be bothered with for bread or pancakes.

The fact that will disqualify most of you from the mysteries of sourdough is that sourdough-keeping requires a lot of patience and chilly austerity, which there is not a surplus of. The remainder of you will be disqualified owing to the fact that we’ll be cooking our sourdough bread over an open fire in the dangerous wilderness.

This is the sponge, just waking up.

When the chilly red sun is setting and flashing on the river and on the teeth of the wiry beasts out there in the darkness, it’s time to manufacture your sponge. Mix together these in a bowl and let ferment overnight:

250 grams white bread flour

1 1/3 cups warm water

ladle of sourdough starter

You can put on a little country and western for the sponge to listen to, if you think it will make a difference. While you’re sleeping and dreaming about gigantic piles of dollar bills, your sponge will be listening to country and western and conjuring itself into a frothy ghost.

In the morning mix your sponge with the remaining flour and salt:

300 grams white bread flour

10 grams salt

Knead the dough until it develops a magnificent presence. Let it rise and then punch it and form it again. Let it rise four times, which has to do with the four mysteries. This will take practically all day. Sourdough is very slow to develop.

Now proof the dough for a good long time on top of some parchment paper. The parchment paper will act like a cradle, allowing you to carefully move the dough from the proofing basket to the hot dutch oven.

About an hour into your proof, get your coals started. For my 12” dutch I used 13 coals on the bottom and 27 coals on top. After the coals are grey, put them in place and get the pan roaring hot.

Sprinkle the proofed dough with flour, slash it, and carefully lower it into your hot dutch. Replace the lid and let bake for forty minutes. Don’t check on it. If it burns it burns.