Mainer Potatoes, Baked

Recipe by Dikkon Eberhart
                                   
 
Ingredients:
 
1 13’ Whitehall Pulling Boat, with anchor
2 oars
some tinfoil
1 match – just 1
coupla potatoes and a chunk of butter; salt
 
Mise en scene:
 

1. Go down to my shore and shove off in the boat.  Row to the island.  Anchor the boat so she stays afloat.  (Tide falling, half.) Oh, yeah, bring along a heavy coat because it’s December, three o’clock, and clear.  Gonna be cold.  There’s wind from the northwest.  Also a blanket, a hat.
2. Below tide line, dig a shallow depression, and ring it with stones.  Find some                down wood and sit by the pit stripping the wood with your knife until you have a few feathery pieces and some other small stuff.  Watch the sun set.  Don’t think about it; just watch. 
3. Construct a fire, a careful cone of dry twigs with the feathery bits inside.  Lie down real close to the sand and the shale, so you can smell it, even in the cold, and, while protecting the wood with your body, light your match.  This is a test.  You’re twenty-nine and mythic.  Intentionally, you’ve brought only one.
4. If you fail, go home and try this on another night. 
5. But this turns out to be the right night.  Some things at least you can do well.

 
Method:
 

1. Keep feeding your fire with small stuff and then bigger stuff.  Notice that it’s dark now except for a sheen on the sea—we have a quick twilight in winter.  Wind’s from the northwest and steadier than you thought it would be.  Low waning moon chasing the sun.  Faint, lambent shoreline: one gull patrols then settles for the night. 
2. Listen to the cold sea water gurgling in over rocks and snails, gurgling out over rocks and sails, gurgling in, gurgling out. 
3. The fire tends itself now, and the sky darkens.  The moon is yellow: then gone.  Overhead is an appearing of stars. The meander of the Milky Way is a pathway between here and the other place.  Mostly by feel, cut your potatoes in half, smash some butter between the parts, salt them, close them, wrap them in foil, and push them into the coals with your stick.  Clean your hands on your pants, wrap the blanket around your legs, tug down your cap, lie still.  Alone; no muddle. 
4. In, you breathe, and out again.  In, and out again.  Feel your chest as it fills with air and empties.  In, you breathe, and out again.  In, and out again.
5. There’s a woman you want to marry, but you’re scared.  No real snow yet.  The last marriage hurt.
6. Alarmed at your fire, a squirrel chitters from the wood behind. 
7. Allow your imagination to enter into the earth.  Feel the to-ing and fro-ing of all her parts.  The tug of tree roots in soil as their limbs swing back and forth in the wind.  The tide’s pull on rockweed as it swishes on stone.  The flicker of barnacle webs sweeping plankton in. 
8. Allow your imagination to rise.  The cold steam of your breath, invisible now, streams eastward on the air, over meadow, over shore, over sea.  It takes you to an island that is further out than ours. 
9. Out and out, allow yourself to spiral through tree and stone, through squirrel and gull, through earth and sea—from star to star—until you find the entire awesome ponderousness that is God.  Devil and angel, you find, devil and angel there. 

 
Chef’s note:
 
Don’t burn your fingers when you grub the potatoes from the ash, open them, and, while they drip with butter, you eat them in the dark.
 
Clean-up note:
 
Pour water on the coals until they are really out.  Toss everything into the boat.  Drag the boat down the beach to the sea.  Wade out beside her and pull her farther until she’s afloat.  Stare off for a time at the black horizon. 
 
Await revelation.  What if I ask her?  Maybe I’ll dare. 
 
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