Pozole As Penance

Pozole rojo might not immediately come to mind when you want dinner in Maine in June, but imagine this – it’s raining. It’s been raining for weeks and the sheets of water blurring the windows keep the eye from wandering outside the house, but not the mind, the mind is headed west with or without you. You’re nursing a multi-day hangover for the first time in a long time and it hurts more than you remembered but you’re trying to cowboy up because you just finished reading Jim Harrison’s, Legends of the Fall and you’ll be damned if you’re more Alfred than Tristan. Two days earlier you’d driven north a few hours to meet some new friends and learn how to fish with a fly instead of a worm. You follow the Connecticut River, through the White Mountains to its headwaters and a camp on Lake Francis banked in fog. In between sidewinding steep hills, you drove through many valleys adorned with buttercups and Jersey cows and their soft, new, caramel calves and you smell the iodine of those sleepless nights in the Hussey’s barn on night watch for new life, how easily they helped it happen and how awestruck and useless you were. This has persisted, for both parties. On the ride up you listen to a conversation with Tom McGuane and get choked up at hearing his age, finally, in his voice, but not his mind and the lump in your throat becomes impassable when he talks about burying generations of bird dogs and his cutting horse of forty years roped up on his backhoe ready to drop into the hole he dug like any other hole and how ranchers like him just get used to death and for the first time in your life you don’t believe him and it feels like shit. You stop to pee in an alder thicket and a cow moose stands up from her bed and lets you look her in the eyes - you accept this vitality as a man finding a spring in a desert after many mirages. You drive by a snapping turtle smashed and scattered across the road. Seeing the flesh of a turtle always makes you writhe with unfairness. You stop to make sure it’s dead and move the remains to the sandy streambank for safe passage through the bodies of scavengers and their hungry young. You cry for thirty-six miles. You get to fish camp and your friend asks if you’d heard that Cormac McCarthy died. You hadn’t. You moan and he pours everyone a tequila and you all drink and nod and go fishing. To be in the river, in the absence of theory, is a balm. The trees are all wearing their spring-green coronas and everything is real and touchable and nothing requires belief to be there, though the acoustics and the six o’clock slant of light are clearly what cathedrals were trying for. Your friend is a good teacher, no preaching, he casts like he’s never been there before and like he was born right there on that stone, in equal parts. Just before dark, the river flashes a salmon like a peek up the skirt at last call and you all go back to camp, thirsty. A magnum of red is opened after two bottles shared over chicken thighs and you forget your tolerance has wilted from willful neglect and you do that thing you should remember not to do – try to keep up. But there’s a well of Sven and Olie jokes somewhere beneath the floor that they’ve tapped into and you can’t think of a thing more sad than turning down a laugh so when the bottle is tilted toward you, two-handed, you raise your glass. At breakfast, a sheen of sweat blooms on your upper lip like a bad omen. They play you this song on their guitars, “Keep it light light light, when it's heavy I can't get along.” and you sing it as a plea the whole drive home. You pull over twice, once to sink into a green eddy that called your wounded body to it like any gutshot deer, and once because you were skirting a cliff and passed by a soaring goshawk, seeing it from above, which was disorienting enough to be reorienting and you needed to stop and put your feet on the ground.  At home, you faint like a starlet onto the couch with Legends of the Fall and after the first of the three novellas, fall asleep fever-dreaming of being lost in the desert and liking it. You wake, unsure if the tinny thrumming is in your head or the rain on the metal roof. You drink cold water, then go outside to stand in a particularly rapturous downpour to cleanse from both inside and out, it doesn’t work. You surrender to being at the mercy of time and lay back down to sleep it off but you pick up the book and accidentally finish it. Your vision is blurred by something you’re not normally susceptible to - wanderlust. Fishing in the next town over once or twice a year is usually as far as you care to stray from your beloved, home, but the book tricked you into wanting a new frontier - that wild west, the old west. You pace around, not sure what to do with this new impulse, especially seeing as you don’t have a working car or a horse, then you get hungry, real hungry, that specific grasping hunger of the self-poisoned. Hungry not only for food but for the story to continue, to keep being lost in it, and you beam when you remember that the book was made into a movie and you pull it up on the laptop and feel like you’ve outsmarted something as you’re transported, again, to the beginning. You savor this small victory and watching the three brothers on horseback, enjoy a memory of your pure ten-year-old self, hanging pictures of rattlesnakes on your bedroom wall, a friend suggests taping up magazine pages with the faces of young men, you dismiss Brad Pitt - the golden cowboy face of this film - as “gross”. You chop an onion, not yet sure what you’re going to cook, but there’s almost always an onion. From past experiences with this desperately depleted state, you know you’re at a fork in the road - you can shovel in quick, empty calories and curl back up on the couch and feel doubly bad, or you can make a genuine effort for bodily forgiveness and cook yourself a square meal. What would Tristan do? He’d probably go hunting, but it’s June, here. You think of the two-pound package of stew meat from that roadkill doe and that big fatty beef bone and your body cheers “Gallina Pinta!" So you brown the meat and simmer a few handfuls of dried Abenaki flint corn from last year’s crop to swell and soften in place of the traditional hominy while you watch young Tristan gouge the claw from a charging grizzly with his belt knife and old One Stab smile proudly. You sample a few pieces of the seared venison and your hunger strains like a barely-chained dog just out of reach of raw meat. You see you don’t have the green chiles that flavor this Sonoran stew, but you have a glut of reds, so you shift gears toward Pozole Rojo, which is usually made with a pig’s head, but you don’t have any pork, and you’re improvising here, so you toast a few each guajillo and ancho on a skillet and soak them and blend them into a paste that gorgeous deep red of a brother’s dried blood on Tristan’s face after he cuts the heart out of poor, dead Samuel and dips it in paraffin wax to send home to their father on the ranch - what a color. You wonder if it’s sacrilege to let the colors of the three pozoles, red, green and white, the colors of the Mexican flag, bleed together like this, making two stews into one, and it might be, but you trust that while the critics may damn you, you might be forgiven by most abuelas for using what you have. Since you’re already asking for forgiveness here you can’t resist tossing in a few handfuls of hot-leached acorns along with the pinto beans, acorns being the supreme offering of nourishment to the body, and some dried sweetfern, a sacred herb to you, and to Maine, in place of Mexican oregano. Choosing to make pozole when your hunger is already chewing off its own leg is a tenuous move and the ensuing hours, with the smell of meat in the air but the beans and corn still hard as stones, you must endure as penance, so you do. With the first bowl, though, heaped with onions and radish and cilantro, you are phoenixed and all is forgiven and on the third day the stew has become its highest self and after your fifth bowl, you still want more, it has restored you to your original form - a glutton.