Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Barbecue: it's the pits

Ever since our ancestors huddled together in caves blackened by fire and smoke, trying to keep warm while trying to reduce a mastodon ham-bone to something other than leather, there has been a handing down of knowledge about fire. So important was fire that the Greeks claimed that Prometheus stole it from the gods who were hoarding it as one more sign of their superiority. Superior firepower, I suppose you might call it. They rewarded him by chaining him to a rock and letting an eagle devour his liver once a day for eternity. The liver, of course, unless soaked in alcohol, regenerates itself.

Somewhere along the line of Western civilization, the knowledge and fear of fire was supplanted by the taming of fire. When we wash our clothes, we can hang them out to dry, or, much more conveniently, bundle them into a dryer with a cloth that makes them smell as though we hung them out. The furnace replaces the soot-blackened firepit. And if it's not warm enough for you, there are many different kinds of heaters.

And so the last vestigial bit of knowledge about firemaking is dying out. As, for example, today when my next door neighbor's grandson, early twenties, dragged out the smoker kettle and prepared to set a barbecue dinner for his beloved. Sitting in the Zinn Center, I observed only his hands and feet through the wide boards of our deck. But that was enough to tell the whole story.

First, he poured in a fairly generous portion of a new bag of briquets. So far, so good. Next came about a quarter of a spray bottle of firestarter. Then came the wooden matches. About two dozen of them.

The wind was up a bit, and Grandson had a lot of trouble getting a flame to catch. He's close to six feet tall, and it's a long way for a match to fall and retain its flame. Some matches indeed fell into the firepit, but landed in such a way that they could not catch the fuel. Some fell across the grill, and so other matches had to be used to push them into the fire. Bending over would be dangerous if your reaction time is factored by your height.

After a time and a tussle and the addition of more starter fluid, a fairly decent plume of orange flame shot up, and G went inside to get the chicken breasts. After carefully applying at least four different doses of dry seasoning to the topsides, he went back to find the fire had left no discernible trace of its existence. The occasion called for more fluid and more matches, and apparently more wind.

Eventually, another dozen matches later, he saw flame, and encouraged it by spraying the starter stuff directly into the cauldron. He was rewarded by the heavy smell of refinery and a generous flare. At this point, he put the chicken on the grill.

Covering the grill, he went back inside. Upon his return, the flame perversely had died down again. He treated it to several fresh infusions of starter spray, around the outside edge. Some additional flames burst up, but apparently not enough to suit the recipe, for he then began lighting matches and tossing them onto the unburned briquets. Back into the house for a few minutes, and soon out again to turn the birds.

At this point, he added equal amounts of condiments to the conflagration for the second side, squirted a bit more starter, and threw in a few more lights. Then the cover went on again, while the neighborhood began to smell like the Esso truck had just made another delivery.

Finally, the chickens gave up, and he replaced them on the grill with hamburgers or buns: it was difficult to tell through the smoke. And then, at last, the reason for this labor of love, this multimatch extravaganza, his girlfriend arrived.

I do not know how the meal turned out. I can only guess. It might have been the original or the crispy. I speculate that it was historical, in any case. It had to have tasted like one of Ogg's attempts at mastodon meat when he tried using tar pit blobs as briquets. That was before Ogga took over and forbade him to enter the kitchen ever again. And just think: it could all so easily have been otherwise, if the ancient knowledge of the mystery of fire had been passed from father to son just one more time.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Unintended Coon Sequences

So just one raccoon, although it might have been two, blew my whole weekend, and there's still more to do.

I deconstructed the Zinn Center just enough to be able to wrestle with a 14 by 14 foot chicken-wire top, made by joining four strips of what the manufacturers elegantly term "poultry netting" with wire ties (also called "zip ties") every foot. It took about four hours to staple the netting in place and clip the individual wires to remove the extra footage. The next problem was to figure out how to fill the 3.75 inch gap between the Zinn Center and the side of the house, which, to make it more complicated, has clapboard aluminum siding.

The Zinn Center is not straight vertical, because it follows the slight slope of the deck. It had to be this way to make the six foot wide screen cloth wrap evenly around it. So there's a gap at the top that tapers to almost nothing at the bottom. Add to that the serration of the clapboard, and you have a very unwelcome combination of incompatible surfaces. An open door, you might say, for flies and mosquitoes.

The previous solution was to stuff the joints with insulation rolls. They occasionally slipped, but could be held in place by cardboard and duct tape. But when the raccoon(s) started throwing the stuff around, I had to consider other techniques and materials that would be more resistant to vandalism.

I've settled, I think, on a spray concoction that is like the foam insulation you can spray into cracks, but this stuff is not supposed to expand into huge grotesque beige puffballs that have to be trimmed with a saw. The only time I've ever used that material, it called to mind those horror movies where a whole town is overwhelmed by an endless rolling ball of goop.

And then, of course, there was the cleanup, which is only partly done as of this writing. Vacuuming the deck would have gone more quickly had not the sweeper suddenly ingested a label or something that caused a total embolism in the hose. Another fifteen minutes of disassembly and reassembly made the day seem even more tedious.

The toughest part is yet to come: to fold the chicken-wire into disposable packets that can be dropped into a garbage bag without ripping it to pieces on the way in. Meanwhile, two raccoons have already been back up on the deck, checking on the new configuration, or maybe just scouting for more green tomatoes to pull prematurely off the vines. Let's hope they regard the chicken-wire as a boundary, rather than a challenge.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Reality shows.

Well, the raccoons have, as they always do, won.

I built a screen room 8 x 8 near the back french doors of our dining area, resting on the deck, but not actually attached to the house. It's a "Florida Room", in a sense, which we call the Zinn Center.

J's love of everything raccoon has finally encouraged them to bolder moves. Starting with the nightly feedings of whatever was left over (and J's leftovers are as good as some restaurant's entrees), the bandits moved in. They would walk right past us when we were sitting around the firepit, on their way to the bar and grill. Eat at Joe's.

Next, they found there were tomatoes: bright red orbs that looked like Christmas balls. And even better, if you followed the vines up to the deck level, there was the intriguing sound of a fountain in one corner. Of course, ascending the tomato vines has its dangers. On two separate nights, the damn things broke off in a cascade of raccoon fur and greenery.

Arriving at the fountain, they found fish. Carpe diem. At least they looked like fish, but when they got them in their mouths they chomped down on plastic. And raccoon rage being what it is, they bit the nose and mouth off one of them, shredded the plastic water lilies, and flung the fish to the far reaches of the deck.

Tonight I took a closer look at the Zinn Center. I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but it was obvious that the torn and battered paper lantern that formerly swung from the center of the Center and now rested on top of one of the ceiling screen panels could only have gotten there by something breaking through the other screen and reaching in to haul the lantern to the top. Only one screen panel remains still firmly attached to the frame. The other is the same panel I had to repair when one of our temporarily adopted cats decided to have a sleepover.

So plans are afoot to replace the top with a new screen, then build a framed roof with clear acrylic panels that can be raised to let the heat dissipate, and the whole to be covered with the tarp to act as a heat shield when necessary. If not, then at least some combination of materials that will let heat out, cool air in, and provide a visual path to the wonders of the summer sky. It was 110 degrees in there late this afternoon.

Raccoons are not to blame, of course. They are cute, intelligent, curious creatures with a love of anything new or shiny or food-looking. They pull things apart in order to better understand them.

They're so much like grandchildren.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Maybe I'm all wet, but ...

Saturday afternoon, J and I returned from a drumming gig at the Oxford, Ohio farmers' market. It was hot and humid, and when I finally joined her in the pool, the afternoon popup storm was waiting to begin. It reminded me of a long-ago visit to Puerto Rico, where the saying is, "If you don't like our weather, wait a minute."

J climbed out to attend to other matters, but I decided to stay and see what might transpire. I put up a lawn umbrella at the side of the pool to sit under, and turned off the normally turbulent pool pump. As the current died away, the sprinkles began.

I sat in the pool with my eyes as close to the water as my nose would permit. Each raindrop splash instantly created a bubble about half an inch across. At first, I could count them, but very quickly, it became an impossible task. And as the rain became steadier, the bubbles were burst immediately by the drops that came more frequently. Soon, I saw no bubbles at all, but only small columns of water popping up, sporting tiny spheres on their tips.

The ripples generated by the pelting rain countered across each other in patterns of interlaced diamonds and circles. I submerged to listen to the music of the showers as I had many times in my childhood at the lake. This time, however, I could no longer hear the soft, high singing of the raindrops that I loved so much as a youngster. But I could hear the pinging and popping that is heard nowhere else in our lives as the rain dented the surface and the waves fanned out.

As I emerged, a sudden menace of thunder reached my hears. It turned out to be the only rumble of the afternoon, but it sent me back to the garage to change into my clothes. I went upstairs to the Zinn Center (named after a beloved friend of ours in Florida) which is essentially a framed, screened 8-foot cube on the deck with a tarp on top. The pattering and then pounding of the rain on the canvas brought back memories of what J refers to as my "two camping trips".

It was a day to be savo(u)red. If I had a waterproof camera, I could have taken one picture, which would have saved a thousand words.