Quarter Year » rain

Presence in Your Mouth

Mike — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 05:07:49 +0000

by Mike

Have you heard of the word, “terroir?” It’s French. Terroir is why champagne can only come from the Champagne region of France. It’s why you can’t call your crappy, molded chicken milk, “Roquefort.”

Terroir is the sum of the environmental conditions in a place. It’s the soil composition, the acidity of rain, the angle of the sun, the height of the hills, local farming techniques and surrounding plant species and all the minute variables that even local farmers might not know. The terroir of the Champagne region can’t be reproduced anywhere else on earth. You want to make champagne? Move to Champagne. But if you’re satisfied making some shitty sparkling wine then you can stay in Fife or wherever you live. Expand!

When you eat a meal you eat a place.¹ Not only are you physically becoming part of the food and its soil, but you’re spiritually saturating your body with the terroir.²

This will blow your mind. Have you ever heard of camas or salal? Well, let me tell you about them, friend. Camas is a plant with an edible root that seems to be somewhere between an onion and a potato. (It has a bad-ass brother named, death camas, which isn’t nearly as fun to eat.) And salal is a low shrub that you’ve definitely seen around the NW if you’ve spent any time here. It lives under tall trees, near water and it makes little black-purple berries. You’ve definitely seen it.

Both these plants are native to the Pacific Northwest. Along with salmon they were the staple foods of the Northwest native peoples.

I have lived here my whole life. I wouldn’t say I know everything about Western Washington botany, but I pay as much attention as anyone else. Until a few months ago, I had never even heard of the two plants that were the pillars of people’s diets, right here, for the last 10,000 years. And it’s not like I’m six years old; I’m thirty! Over thirty!

So, what does this have to do with anything? I’m not really sure myself, I’m a little drunk.

I guess what I’m getting at is that Presence/Attention/Awareness is about more than just focusing on the moment, it’s also about engaging with this place where we are.³ Because we eat many times a day, we have many opportunities to engage with the terroir, to be sensually present in this physical Place and let the rain become our blood. We should eat food with which we share terroir, with which we have a common rhythm.

Salal and camas evolved here, so where are they in our diets? Maybe they taste bad, I don’t know, I’ll tell you this summer, but maybe they were pushed off our plates by cheap food from other places. If we are where we eat, then most of us are geographic Frankensteins.

Where it rains so much that there’s rain in my dreams and my knees can feel it and it narrates Sunday mornings, do I eat the onion that drank the rain that wet my hair weeks before?⁴

—

¹ “Terroir” technically refers only to food and drink (and the official distinction doesn’t even require that the food be organic), but I like to think of it as applying to other things as well – clothing and building materials immediately come to mind.

Art made with local materials is, I think, something different. Of course food and clothes and structures can be created with inspiration to become more than just necessities of survival – they can become expressions of place through person – but the timing of the creative process may or may not coincide with the need for food or shelter, and those two things are going to be taken care of regardless.

² Not to mention the spirit with which the farmer grows, treats and harvests the food.

³ Travel is, essentially, the experience of and engagement with Place. Which is why these food posts have a place on a travel blog.

⁴ This is what I thought about when praying before each meal in France, how our bodies mix with the earth and why I can taste Marguerite’s biceps in her wine.

Reading Winter Sunshine

Mike — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:18:19 +0000

2001
The night I returned home from three months in Paris I had a dream: I was arriving back in Paris and I said, “I’m back, I’m finally back.”

That winter I woke up in the evening, my roommates were gone for the break and I kept one room warm in the top of the house. Mine was the only light in the neighborhood. I would be awake the whole night, depressed, and during the day I’d sleep and I’d dream, “I’m back, I’m finally back.” I didn’t see daylight for a week.

But things got better, as they do, and I met a girl who I’d known for a year. We secretly danced in the dark under trees. We fell asleep tangled in her bed and then I’d dream about being in Paris, being back, finally back.

I’m sure I studied around this time because I remember walking to German class in the snow and swearing at it for visiting Seattle in March. I took the class because I’d met a German in Paris and schemed to go back and woo her with my painful conjugation of simple verbs. But the scheme faded as the snow melted and I kept waking up tangled with the girl on white sheets, waking from the Paris dream again and again.

I had the same dream, warmer, later in the Spring, after we fought about nothing and I walked home alone, looking up at the trees drip in the rain. We had fought about the world: I thought it was incurably sick, while she was more optimistic, and I slept alone, tangled in sheets in my warm room.

Despite her optimism, we stayed together through the summer. At her cabin we swam in fresh water. I pulled myself up the ladder to lay on the dock in the sun, the boards scratching my chest. We swung in a hammock and slept there together in coins of sunlight, and I dreamed of Paris.

In winter I woke up, untangled, alone, in Paris, I was back, finally back. I descended dark stairs to a wet, stony street and walked in the rain on a bridge. I wandered the Left Bank until I found a hotel and carried my things up dark steps to the desk. A young man smiled and motioned down the hall. I walked down the hall and stopped at a door, behind which she waited, asleep, tangled in white sheets.

Sartene sunset storm

Mike — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:03:18 +0000