This Rural Life

From Verlyn Klinkenborg's editorial in the New York Times today,

What the insects are noticing--the bats, too--is beyond me. Our perceptions overlap without ever converging in the night. All the entangled lives on this farm seem to run on seperate tracks, except where they collide as predators and prey or companion and caretakers. Push this thought far enough, and nature seems to fray, to come apart into a disunity that is gathered up only by our human perceptions. And yet that gathering up is just our own kind of solipsism. I don't know that the horses have ever made a general proposition about nature, but then they don't know that I've made one either.

Freezing Salmon myths

Listen to this, from a blog called Beyond Salmon:

The reason I was so surprised was that I've had previously frozen salmon before that was terrible, so I concluded that salmon doesn't freeze well. What I didn't take into account was that it was wild Coho and Sockeye Salmon that tasted awful. They are extremely lean compared to farm-raised Atlantic or King salmon and do turn to mush when frozen. So when you choose your salmon for freezing, go with Atlantic (always farm-raised) or King (farm-raised or wild).

Absurd. Friends don't let friends eat farmed salmon. For one, it is terrible for the environmentas currently practiced (check out Raincoast Research Society's great work on this subject). For two, all the farmed salmon I've ever consumed has tasted like soggy cardboard--even the fresh farmed king I had in Patagonian Chile.

Also, for the record, we have been freezing king, sockeye, and coho salmon forever with a very high quality result. Our guests rarely, if ever, realize it has been frozen and when we tell them so they begin to question the idea that freezing it so bad for fish. As is mentioned on the blog I bash above (which is pretty well done over all), this is a myth; what is important is how and when the fish is frozen, not whether it was frozen. My dad has always said that freezing should be done very quickly in a good quality freezer and that whole fish survive better than fillets because their is less flesh exposed to the air. From the discussion on the Beyond Salmon blog I learned why quicker is better:

I agree with Tse-Wei aho said that ice crystals can be made smaller if you freeze it very very quickly- metallurgical fact- yes I am a materials doctoral student! So it would make sense that a fish flash frozen at sea would last longer, preserve taste and texture than if you were to do the same thing at home. Also I agree with Helen that you should never defrost meat or fish or any food for that matter very quickly- i.e. do not microwave, or on your counter top.

new blogging leaf?

I'm going to try and resuscitate this blog. I'm inclined to post stuff on a couple of personal projects that I'm focusing on this summer with my time off from work. Here's a list:

1) new gustavus inn cookbook project with my mom
2) my garden in gustavus
3) mushrooming icy strait
4) kite flying
5) rowing
6) amateur anthropological research into culturally modified trees

I'll be more regular in posting, and this will get me to put more of my photos online. Here's to optimism!

Staying put.

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man's life
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.

--Wendell Berry

Adams Inlet snakes away from Glacier Bay toward Lynn Canal

through beatiful mountains on all sides. I spent seven days kayaking there last week with Sean Neilson. My journal/gillnet for mystery yields these fish for the bar-b-que:

"This morning we watched a pack of 8 wolves (3 black, 2 grey, one brown and one black/grey/black like an oreo or a scaup). They were walking the beach playfully, visiting the intertidal, tug-of-waring with a piece of something we couldn't make out and rolling in one spot before taking off into the woods a short walk from us. That was pretty wonderful and it seems they weren't aware of our presence until the very end. Interestingly, when the pack passed a group of Canada geese and sea ducks foraging in the intertidal, none of the birds seemed concerned, whereas they fly from our presence at much farther distances. I checked their path for fresh wolf scat, which I've never seen. It looked like a smooth black paste with white hairs throughout (snowshoe hares?) and smelled 'horrid'."

"Today we entered Adams Inlet. From our first site of the mouth of the inlet strange noises confused us. It sounded a bit like a waterfall coming from the middle of the bay but turned out to be a group of ~150 sea lions feeding. The group approached us en masse to within 20 feet and began to scream and levate halfway out of the water. They seemed more curious than angry and we did what anybody would have done: screamed our best barbarian response and snapped photos."

"We saw lots of goats today. As always, their regal faces and agile mountain climbing captivated my attention. This time though, the captivation almost sunk my boat. A goat/subject of our future awarding winning photography we were approaching decided to head up the cliff above us. He sent down a shower of unpredictable rocks (on purpose?) that nearly put a hole in my boat and head. The sea was boiling with his rocks for several minutes--a site that was quite memorable even without the adrenaline-enhanced flee from danger."

"It sank it where I was today when an eagle feather and a steady supply of moose hair (perfect for bird nest making by the way) floated by my kayak. Signs of death as signs of life."

"Our bird list filled in over the course of the trip, following predictably the ecologist's s-shaped species area curve. First, the abundant ones--old skuas, ravens, mergansers, cormorants, guillemonts--and then ones rarer--a magpie, a red-throated loon, and two black turnstones. On our last day, and only day of inclement weather, we saw a group of hundreds of sandhills cranes flying high. The group was flying in pretty severe disorder while over the bay, but we saw them reach the steadier air currents over Gloomy Knob on the horizon and fall like beautiful dominoes into the steady lines that take them through the long haul. The best part about seeing the cranes was the process: you hear them first . . . they sink into your subconcious . . . you look up at the black in the sky . . . feel wonder . . . understanding . . . and then more wonder."

Thank you to those whose hard work protected this wilderness, and whose voices we still need hearing: John Muir is as responsible as anyone for Glacier Bay National Park and knew well the simple truth: "Fear not to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand."