The Dog Stars

WHOLE ROASTED TROUT

I have never been a fan of postapocalyptic literature. The world, to me, is terrifying and confusing enough on a daily basis without all of the fire and brimstone, collapsing buildings, and dwindling food supplies. In college I tried reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road because I was smitten with a guy who said it was his favorite book. “The Road,” he told me, “is full of adventure and friendship and humor. It changed my entire view of what it means to be a man.” We were eating comically large burgers at Paul’s on St. Mark’s Place and talking, in the earnest and embarrassing way that college students do, about books that we felt defined us. I remember thinking vaguely, as he wiped melted cheese from his mouth, that I would be a bit mortified if anyone was eavesdropping on our conversation.

When we had finished our burgers I walked over to the bookstore. The Road had just come out a few months earlier and was still prominently displayed in the front window of the shop. The man at the counter shuddered while ringing it up—“You’re brave for this one, girly,” he told me, pushing it into my hands so eagerly it was as if the cover was burning his. I made it through about twenty pages on my subway ride home and by the time I walked in my front door and looked in the mirror my face was ashen and my knees felt like Jell-O. After fifty pages I was in a cold sweat and had to tuck the book into a drawer in the other room before trying to fall asleep. Adventure? Friendship? Humor? Had he even read this book? I felt betrayed.

A few days later I was invited to his apartment for dinner. I was building up the nerve to tell him that I couldn’t make it past fifty pages of his favorite book when I noticed a stack of multiple editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on his coffee table. Opening one up I saw that it was absolutely covered with underlines and stars, notes and exclamations, in boyish handwriting—it looked not unlike all of my favorite books. It suddenly occurred to me that I had tortured myself with The Road for no reason at all. This guy was no Cormac McCarthy fan. And while I can chalk up forgetting the name of your favorite novel to first-date jitters, allowing Jack Kerouac to define for you what it means to be a man is, for me, an issue. That dinner was our last.

I gave my unfinished copy of The Road to my neighbor across the hall and didn’t touch another postapocalyptic novel until a friend gave me a copy of Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars a couple of months ago. She, and many of the reviews I read, described it as “The Road but with hope,” which is probably why it took me so long to pick it up—I was terrified of reading anything remotely like The Road. When I finally did crack it open, though, I was not sorry at all.

In sparse and heartrendingly beautiful prose, Heller tells the story of a man named Hig who has lost everything to a superflu that wiped out ninety percent of the human race. He lives in the hangar of an abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a man named Bangley who seems to enjoy the cruelty and violence that surviving in a postapocalyptic world allows him to enact. What sets The Dog Stars apart from other novels of its kind is Hig himself. The Dog Stars is more about what it means to be human than about what happens when “civilized” society crumbles.

What really set this novel apart for me, though, was the food. Normally in novels of this kind there is very little (if any) food, and what’s there is seldom appetizing. The food in The Dog Stars, on the other hand, is mouthwatering. Hig plants beans, tomatoes, and potatoes, eats venison heart, cooks catfish with dandelion salad and basil, makes wild strawberry, black raspberry, and mint tea from a jar of summer flowers, eats shepherd’s pie dripping with butter, and drinks pitcher after pitcher of cold milk. The most powerful, most prevalent food scenes in the book, though, are ones involving fishing—trout fishing specifically.

By the third sentence of the novel Hig has already told us that before the superflu, his favorite pastime had been to fish for trout. Once it hit, Hig watched as most of the animals on earth disappeared, but he never cried, he says, “until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.” The most poignant memories Hig has of his wife, Melissa, are of her fishing for trout with him—how “she didn’t have the distance and accuracy in her cast but she could think more like a trout than probably anyone alive.” Hig fishes before disaster strikes, he fishes when the flu hits; when Melissa dies, he fishes with Jasper in the mountains, salts his catches on flat stones, and “pull[s] out the skeleton from the tail up, unzipping the bones.”

In the summertime when I was growing up, my dad would wake me while it was still dark outside and we would go fishing for sea bass in the cold black of the Atlantic Ocean. It was thrilling, sneaking around the bedroom trying to get dressed as quietly as possible while my sisters slept. My dad waited in the kitchen, where the smell of newspapers and coffee and aftershave hung heavy, the nighttime sounds of crickets still creaking through the window screens.

After fishing we always went to a breakfast place called Arno’s and ordered enormous stacks of buttermilk pancakes and tiny griddles of corned beef hash. At first this was what I looked forward to most about these fishing excursions. The casting and the waiting and the shivering were, in the beginning, just a means to an end, but eventually I grew to love the pre-pancake ritual, too. I never became a great fisherwoman, but I learned volumes about patience and silence.

One morning I caught a horseshoe crab by accident and reeled it in as it scrambled and scratched against my hook. I had only ever seen dried-up pieces of them on the shore, so catching one in all of its prehistoric glory gave me pause. It was as if the world suddenly threw back its hood and revealed just how tremendously old and sturdy it was and how easily it would continue to thrive once we are, all of us, gone.

THE DOG STARS

Whole Roasted Trout

Serves 3 to 4

1 (2-pound) rainbow trout, gutted and scaled

Kosher salt

2 thyme sprigs

2 garlic cloves, halved

½ lemon, sliced into thin rounds

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces

2 tablespoons olive oil

Coarsely ground black pepper

1 cup dry white wine

Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Rinse the fish and pat it dry. Salt the inside of the fish well and place it in a shallow baking dish. Stuff the cavity with the thyme, garlic, lemon slices, and butter. Rub the outside of the fish with the olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Tie the fish in two places with kitchen twine to hold the herbs and lemon in place. Add the white wine to the baking dish and cover with aluminum foil.

Roast for 15 minutes. Remove the foil and roast for 7 to 10 more minutes. The meat will release from the bones and you should be able to “unzip” the fish and enjoy the meat easily.