The funniest man in the world, David Sedaris, is the youngest of my heroes by a long shot, only a year older than I am. And afterward, I’ll visit my oldest remaining mentor, John Berger, high in the French Alps, where he’s lived quietly, almost anonymously, for the last four decades.
Why Sedaris? Beneath the craftsmanship and the glittering tears of laughter in his work, entire cultures and civilizations move. He abhors injustice, ignorance, prejudice. He can be savage or caustic, but he can also be sweet. Both strands are within him. His work quivers with the voltage of his intelligence.
Erin and I have brought gifts: dried morel mushrooms from Erin’s home in Oregon and elk meat from mine in the Yaak Valley. If, as an agricultural product, they pose a problem for the customs officer at Heathrow, in a pinch I will ask Erin to wear the morels like a necklace, or a lei. As for the elk, frozen brick-hard as the day began, wild meat doesn’t spoil easily—in fact is best eaten cold and raw—but I am concerned about TSA agents confiscating it. Yet I encountered no trouble in Spokane, the origin of the journey, nor in Seattle, where airport matters are taken more seriously. I passed through these checkpoints safely, with the frozen meat in my carry-on bag. Now I have made it even through JFK, which I assumed would be the most problematic, and am here with Erin aboard the red-eye to London, a whole row to ourselves.
Heathrow customs will be the biggest dragnet, but I have a plan. I’ll bury half the meat in a checked bag and store the other half in my carry-on pack, doubling my chances of being caught but also increasing my odds of at least one piece getting through. Earlier I also asked Erin to try to carry another piece.
“You shouldn’t have told me,” she said. “Now when they ask if anyone unknown to me has given me any item to carry, I have to say yes.”
“But I’m not unknown to you.”
She made some kind of expression I couldn’t read—exasperation?—tabling the issue for future discussion.
There are a couple of pounds of ground meat for elk burgers, and a length of backstrap, thick as a man’s arm, which I have marked “tuna,” since you can bring fish into the European Union. I’m hoping that at Heathrow they will not really know what elk looks like and, since the meat is bright red, will believe it is indeed tuna.
Erin and I settle into our seats with that fizz known specifically to travelers starting out on an adventure to the faraway. My daughter Lowry will be meeting us in London, coming from college, having just finished her first year. Sedaris is her hero as much as mine, and she’s psyched not just to meet him but to do so at his home in West Sussex. Meanwhile, Erin and I cram as if for a test, reading our favorite passages of Berger and Sedaris to each other, and catch up on gossip, keenly aware that we have no idea what’s in store.
Upon disembarking in London, I feel moisture trickling down my spine and think at first that it’s the perspiration of the guilty. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” But something about it feels a little different, and I realize, with a spasm of panic, that the meat is thawing, and doing so rapidly. Both packages have become bags of blood, and the Ziploc seals are failing.
Ahead of me, the same phenomenon is happening to Erin, but I can tell she doesn’t know it yet. A broad bloodstain begins to Rorschach itself down her back, and now I see we’re both leaving a splattering, dripping trail behind us. I take Erin by her arm, whisper to her, and just before we reach the customs line, we detour to the restrooms (surely video cameras are witnessing our suspicious behavior), where we can repackage the elk meat and wash up.
There at the sink, I avoid the alarmed looks from fellow travelers—so much blood—and can feel the fumes of fury emanating from Erin in her own washroom: the scrubbing and rinsing, the sink full of blood as we pour off the excess from the Ziplocs, then seal them back up. Tuna, my ass.
Yet we clear customs without a bit of trouble. No one asks us anything, we declare nothing, we don’t even encounter anyone. Did we somehow go around the checkpoint, pass through the wrong door while other passengers stood in line? Whatever the reason, our entry to the United Kingdom goes pretty much undetected.
We wait downstairs in Heathrow’s cavernousness for Lowry to arrive from Boston, and it’s a great thing, a feeling all middle-aged fathers know, to see her come walking out, all grown up, wearing her sweatshirt and pulling her roller bag. To be in a crowd of what seems like millions, in an unfamiliar place, and then to see one of the ones closest to me in the world lifts my spirits indescribably.
We navigate some midmorning subways to a train station—David has sent detailed directions on how to do this—and, jet-lagged, take our train seats, craving sleep yet unable to find any, for the entire train car is filled with small screaming boys. They run up and down the aisles like a troop of monkeys, throwing things and shrieking, whacking each other with sticks while their parents lie comatose in the slumber of the deeply medicated.
The din is so great that we cover our ears with our hands. At one point I speak to the pack of boys as they howl past, and they lower their shrieks a few decibels, but only temporarily. Meanwhile the meat in our bags is still leaking, and the high-speed train is pitching and swerving, swaying and clacking, and it is as if the boys are driving broadswords deep into the travel-inflamed meninges of our brains. Two more hours to West Sussex.
Not a moment too soon, the three of us spill from the train, into the meadow-scented green wonder of West Sussex. Across the valley, soft yellow light bathes the Downs—a long ridge separating the valley from the English Channel—and the fields and woods glow. David and his partner, the painter Hugh Hamrick, drive up in their old Volvo, step out, and welcome us, smiling the greetings of hosts, but curiosity is etched on their faces as well.
The world unfolds as if in a dream. We drive straight away to the butcher, David and Hugh up front, Erin and Lowry and I in the back seat. Hugh, I will soon discover, is all about food—a great chef, and great shopper—and I begin to feel I am here under false pretenses. I’m certain that whatever meal Erin and I make will fall short of what Hugh himself could create.
Technically, David is not a mentor. I was already learning to write—had already published my first book of stories—by the time he made his breakthrough with “The Santaland Diaries,” an NPR essay about being a department-store elf. He’s possibly Lowry’s mentor more than mine. Woodsy is not a word you would associate with him. He has spent his adulthood in New York, Paris, London, and now the English countryside. In truth I hadn’t expected him to say yes to the project. I was surprised he did.
I’ve been particularly daunted by Hugh from the beginning, a feeling that will only amplify throughout the day. In our first correspondence, David informed me that Hugh had directed him to let me know that the stove is “a Rayburn, sort of like an Aga.” I had no idea what this message meant and still don’t—I didn’t look it up. In our second correspondence, David mentioned that Hugh had just made a delicious spanakopita, using wild nettles from the yard.
I have my mind set on using the elk backstrap we brought as an appetizer, with Cornish game hens as the main course. At one point in our emails, when I mentioned I might attempt to express-mail some frozen meat ahead of our arrival, David nixed the idea, saying that it sometimes took days, even weeks, for FedEx to reach him. He suggested an alternative might be for me to hunt and gather some of the local pheasants. Sometimes he couldn’t so much as go out of the house without stepping on one, he said. Lowry, who had just secured her hunting license, was intrigued by this idea, and began suggesting various box traps and deadfalls we might set up in the English countryside. I in turn feigned Montana bloodthirstiness to David, saying it sounded like a great idea. I began to imagine he might have expected to greet three Westerners dressed in coonskin caps and fringed leather boots.
There are two butcher shops in the village, and as we drive, David and Hugh engage in conversation about which one is open on a Friday, and which one is better. Will their favorite butcher be cross if they go to the other shop, seeking a hard-to-find item? In the end they decide to throw caution to the wind and visit the farther, less frequented butcher.
Inside, it’s meat happiness. Pale naked fowl hang from hooks and chains. Thick chops of pinkish-red meat—lamb, surely—line the racks, and fat little sausage links bulge in silver trays. Everything’s behind a glass counter—ducks, squab, quail, chickens, pheasants, geese—but there are no Cornish game hens, and when I ask at the counter if they might have some in the back, the butcher has never even heard of that type of bird. Strange to think that Cornish may be a misnomer.
Whenever Erin gets stressed, she eats, and now she has set her gaze on a curious monstrosity, huge as the eye of a Cyclops, a nut- and bread-crumb-crusted orb the size of a grapefruit. It’s a Scotch egg, David tells us, and it seems roughly a third of the shop is devoted to these, as if no one has bought one in decades but they keep bringing them in nevertheless. They look both disgusting and delicious: the British equivalent of a corn dog.
Two other guests, Frank and Scott, friends of David and Hugh’s who are renting their flat in London, will be joining us later in the evening, and so I’m shopping for seven. I’m tempted by the pheasant, but with a gourmet’s intuition Hugh says quietly they had some pheasants from this shop the other day and he found them a little tough. Directness coupled with tact is a rare talent, and much appreciated.
I’m unaccustomed to thinking of birds and meat in this manner. Mine always begin in either feathers or fur; I trim and pluck and butcher them myself. They each have a character, are woven of the muscle required to stay alive. The birds still possess the prickles and goose bumps from where their pinfeathers were. But all the meat here—so fat and pimply—looks ghostly. I feel trapped by the customers stacking up behind me, and by the frivolity of the butchers in this sunlit room, wearing their cheery white aprons and their little red paper hats, like one would wear at a child’s birthday party. This, coupled with their big smiles of expectation, has the effect of making them look like clowns, but with cleavers. Every fiber of my being is telling me to get out.
Erin’s no help; she’s still ogling those eggs. And Lowry is keying in on the sausages. Am I being hypersensitive, or are David and Hugh starting to wonder what they’ve gotten themselves into, as the minutes stack up and the store fills with a steady stream of other customers, so that where only a short while ago we were inhabiting a dreamy patch of time, there is now an accruing tension? The scent of bleach is coming from somewhere—the back butchering room, I guess—and I’m fading. I just want to go back out in the sun and lie down in the grass and have someone else take over. I want a nap, a good meal. Everyone is looking at me.
“Quail,” I say, “we’ll have a dozen quail.”
Why I’ve said this I don’t know. I can’t imagine a more challenging form than quail—the haiku of poultry—how tiny they are, how difficult to cook well. The birds’ bodies, ill fitted to a grill, are thick at one end and tapered at the other, so that you’ve got to cook the two ends of the bird at radically different temperatures, rotating them every several seconds. Is it my imagination, or are Hugh and the butchers giving one another a WTF look, and is David—always cunning, all-seeing David—amused, delighted, by this display of sprawling human foible and terror?
Like a bandit in a bank heist, I take receipt of a bag of frozen quail, a bundle of minted lamb-sausage links, and a Scotch egg, and we escape. Not until we’re back outside do I realize I’ve been holding my breath.
From the butcher shop we drive into the heart of the village, park, and walk down cobblestone streets past quaint businesses with storefronts harking back to the nineteenth century. Well, almost. I realize I’m short of cash and stop at an ATM. When it transpires that it’s out of order, David reaches into his wallet and hands me £100 in fresh bills.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
Lowry, knowing my forgetfulness, gives me a don’t-mess-this-up look.
We walk on, and at a fresh-vegetable market with beautiful potatoes and luscious greens I remember the winter parsnips we found for Peter Matthiessen, who died a few weeks before this trip. I’m so grateful to have gotten the chance to cook for him.
When the list is finally executed, there’s barely room for our overbrimming boxes and bulging sacks in the back of the Volvo, which groans already beneath all our luggage. We leave the village and drive through the woods with the sun filtering through the trees in gilded, dappled columns. A fox hunt is in progress. We pass the emerald fields of hobbit land. Brilliant rooster pheasants scuttle across them.
A group of old people is walking along the road and David calls out, “Look, ramblers!” There’s a rambling club in the area, he explains, and bevies of older hikers go on nature walks, all suited up in wool knickers and cardigans and berets, wearing high socks and toting wooden staffs.
This winding road flanked by stone walls, Hugh tells us, has been a road since the dawn of the Roman Empire: only a wagon track, back in the day.
At last we stop outside a cottage surrounded by bursting wildflowers, a fairy-tale scene, with more stone walls and a picket fence and gate leading to an updated old farmhouse from the sixteenth century. Home. There are also two guest cottages on the property, one of them converted to David’s writing office and the other to a studio for Hugh, who is a painter. The sun glints on the freshly scrubbed windows.
In the kitchen of the farmhouse Hugh shows us what’s what, as a resident physician might explain the setup in the OR to a visiting surgeon. I’m carrying the bag of elk, eager to refrigerate it, and no sooner have I crossed the threshold than it drips a spot of blood onto the immaculate tile floor. Without a word, before I can even move, Hugh wipes it up in little more than a nanosecond.
“You’ll probably want this,” he says, and shows me the spice rack.
“I forgot the curry,” I exclaim. “I forgot the cashews, for the salad.”
“Not to worry,” Hugh says. He has cashews and can whip up some curry. From his cabinets he pulls the various ingredients—coriander, cumin, turmeric—and calmly grinds them in the mortar while we sip the tea David has prepared and try to convince ourselves we’re not exhausted.
Then David and Hugh take us to our rooms. Erin will be upstairs in the main guest room, a lovely loft with lace curtains and a view of the Downs. Lowry and I are given the cottage containing David’s office, long and open, with a kitchenette at one end, a big sunny space in the middle, and at the other end a bedroom and bathroom with a claw-foot tub.
The ceilings are high, the bookshelves filled with fiction, particularly with short-story collections. There’s a broad simple wooden table in the center of the room, presumably for writing. Very few knickknacks adorn the shelves. A stuffed gray squirrel crouches above the sink, looking intent and engaged, and a bottle of Fairy dish soap rests on the sink itself. Other than that, there’s little if any of the whimsy one might associate with David. It’s an elegant chamber of calm, a room in which it is almost impossible to imagine writer’s block.
David glances at the clock and smiles, watching us settle in. He inquires about Lowry’s and Erin’s lives, how they came to be part of the project, and then announces that he thinks there’s time for a walk, and that we can prepare to leave at 4:15.
He is smiling, but he does not say around 4:15, and I notice the electrical currents that sing silently between him and Hugh, as between all longtime couples, indeed as they once sang between Elizabeth and me. Though I am not in the crackling cross fire of it, what I think I feel coursing back from Hugh is a kind of reminder: These folks aren’t used to being punctual, don’t get your hopes up. And what I think I feel roll back from David is something along the lines of I know, I know, but if we don’t leave at 4:15, there’s not time to do everything precisely and perfectly.
It seems like all the time in the world—it’s barely four o’clock—but before Lowry and I can change into our rambling gear, David takes us out onto the grounds through an elaborately landscaped rock-and-flower garden. Above the garden, out on the sprawling verdant lawn, there is an item so improbable it appears almost to fit. A lone covered wagon sits as if stalled; as if its team of six white horses has merely wandered off for a while. It’s not a Conestoga, but instead the much smaller design, used by sheepherders since time immemorial. Inside, the cabinets are tiny, as are the twin bunk beds, the bookshelves, the woodstove, and the window, like the portal in a ship’s berth. The only gesture toward contemporary culture is a transistor radio, from analog days, by the bedside.
“Sometimes Hugh comes out here and listens to the radio,” David says simply. Tenderly.
At exactly 4:15 we walk out of the cottage and proceed, five abreast, toward tea. Along the way David stops to pick up any scrap of trash he spies and puts it in a sack he carries for that purpose. Whenever adolescent boys see him doing this, he says, they taunt him, thinking he is simple and this is his job. He’s got a keen eye and misses not even the tiniest glint of gum wrapper or single Styrofoam peanut, earth-colored with age. Lowry, delighted, joins in. Together the two of them scour the road.
The next village is about a fifteen-minute walk. Once there we enter a garden—there’s outside seating—but David and Hugh want to sit inside, it’s still a tad chilly, so we go inside and sit beside a light-bathed window. Our tea steams. Before us are slices of rosemary-lavender and ginger-and-walnut and carrot cake. We begin sharing it around and after all the trading is done, or has paused, I realize there’s a little unfinished business: I have not yet tasted Hugh’s cake. But because there are a couple of shimmering conversations going on, for me to ask for a taste of the unsampled cake would be an interruption. Instead, in the interest of what I think is good manners, I reach my fork toward Hugh’s plate and break off just a flake, and consume it with silent satisfaction.
Lowry’s eyes scold me—I can’t believe you did that! He doesn’t want your nasty old fork stuck into his cake!—and once again I have dismayed my younger daughter. In the absence of Elizabeth’s civilizing influence, I do worry that I will go to seed, or even further to seed, as I have seen happen to so many heartbroken men of divorce, as well as widowers. Perhaps I can put it down to the sleep deprivation. Indeed, I’m looking forward to a spot of sleep, but first there’s another walk, to the Downs, and a meal to cook. We’re only starting.
At some point, mentally revisiting the dishes for the meal, I become aware that I did not buy enough butter, certainly not taking into account the other two guests coming. Hugh volunteers to hurry back to their house, get on his bike, and return to the market. He thinks he can get there just before the store closes and then drop the butter off at the house before taking the car to the train station to pick up Frank and Scott, as if in some West Sussex version of the most genteel triathlon ever.
When the proprietor brings David the check I offer to take care of it, but David says no, that he would like to, and so without that boring fanfare of back-and-forth on such matters, I just say, “Thank you.” Again, Lowry gives me the look—strike two—and we step out into the glorious springtime and head south, for the Downs.
Before I know it, we’re out of the village and on a gravel road that leads to a busy two-lane highway, a winding autobahn. We cross it and start up a steep grade of what seems, enchantingly, a dirt road to nowhere, with ancient oaks above us on either side of the banks carved by the road. The scene reminds me of Mississippi: red gravel, with sun piercing the deep shade, and everywhere the color green. As in Mississippi, cattle stand amid that green, chewing, grinding the grass, and watching with dull stupefaction as we pass. The bracing tonic of the pastoral. We gain the ridge trail to the Downs and strike north, all pastureland now, and a hundred miles of trail. To the south, the English Channel glints metal-colored. There’s nobody else out on the trail today, just the cattle.
David and Lowry are collecting trash once more, when David’s Fitbit beeps. He likes a day in which he takes ten thousand steps. He says he hit that number yesterday, but not until eleven o’clock at night.
As we walk I find myself slipping unaccountably into a football metaphor, telling David that I know we don’t have anything in common, but I love how he uses humor to drive-block the story, to clear a gap and impose his will upon the opposition like a pulling guard, so he can then run a misdirection, or a trap, or really whatever play he wants: a bubble screen, a quick out to the slot, a post, a curl, a sluggo, anything. (Lowry is out of earshot, and so I avoid another vexed look.) I tell him I admire the turn at the end of his stories, where, after all the laughing is done, the story announces, then concludes itself.
David smiles, does not agree or disagree, just smiles and walks on, pleased with the day and the elevated view and, I think, the eager curiosity of this pilgrimage.
I ask him if he thinks about getting older; if he has an image of himself as an old writer. “So many of my old heroes are choosing to stay in the saddle,” I say. “I’m not sure that’s the model for me. I mean, what’s the difference between, say, fifty books, or fifty-one?” And I ask him how he imagines being when he is our mentors’ age.
“I find that I’m getting meaner,” he says.
“I have to kind of work at it now sometimes,” I say. “Not being mean.”
“I don’t mind it,” he says, and allows that he’ll probably just keep rocking on, traveling, and giving talks; that it’s his life and he likes it. Then he says something that renders me speechless. “I know there will come a day when my publisher doesn’t want me,” he confides. “It happens to everyone, eventually. I know it. It’s just a business.”
Part of me is thinking, That’s my line. My last novel, my thirtieth book, sold fewer than five thousand copies—less than a hundredth of what David’s books sell.
Erin’s got an on-and-off day job, a working spouse, and no family responsibilities beyond that. She doesn’t yet have to make a living from her writing, and so these words, which are caught by the wind and whisked off the green ridge and out toward the channel, aren’t crucial for her to hear. But we’re back in earshot of Lowry now, and I hope she’s hearing them. She seems to be lost in contemplation: wondering, I can’t help thinking, Why has my dad chosen such a tenuous calling?
David is so taken with Lowry. He keeps looking at her sideways, with a small smile on his face, looking right at her in a way young people tend not to get looked at—Who are you, what’s your story? They’re hitting it off splendidly. She’s comfortable enough with herself to go into her own brand of humor in his presence without showboating, and I sense that they’re using humor to map each other’s character. It pleases me more than I can say to see my daughter’s literary fantasy metamorphosing into reality.
“You could survive here, couldn’t you?” David says to her.
Lowry looks around at the radiant green countryside—dandelion salads and wild violets at this time of year—and out at the channel, an obvious no-brainer with the bounty of the twice-daily tides: fish, shellfish, and who knows what else delivered to shore. She mentions the two calves we just passed. “I guess I could get a strand of that fallen-down barbed wire,” she says, “and take care of them with that.”
It takes David a second to realize that by “take care of them,” Lowry does not mean build a new corral.
We descend into a small patch of woods—shelter—in which Lowry notes the runways of rabbits and pheasants, good places to set the snare of a deadfall.
“Yes,” she says simply, so beautiful, so young and strong, so self-assured.
It is at moments like these—here to witness something in our daughter without her—that I miss Elizabeth most intensely, recalling times so good, so powerful, that the roots of them seem to reach all the way down through the soil of the past into the underlying bedrock, the stone, that was here before any of us. Other times I feel relief at a thing as simple as the freedom of emotional and physical space. Just to be. To disappoint no one, to be free of seeking the adulation or even the small kindness of a spouse.
The two lenses, the two sets of memories. Is one real, and the other not? Or are they both real at once? And is it better this way, or that? Did I mess up? Could I have done better? There’s no way to know. Time has gone on past.
We descend from the Downs. David, invigorated by the walk, emerges from the woods with the vitality of a deer and practically bounds down the side of the two-lane highway. Benzes and Audis, as well as delivery vans and buses, rip up and down the winding bumpy road with its yellow middle line painted as if by a drunkard. David strides along the unshouldered edge, inches from the howling traffic. Road weeds wave in wild semaphore. The cars pass with the sound of tearing cloth, shearing the air right next to us.
I’m right behind Lowry, and, as if she’s six or seven again, I find myself watching closely, making sure that there is always as much space as possible between her elbow and the side mirrors of the procession on this autobahn. In a strange and irrational way I’m admiring David’s carefree enthusiasm. He does this every day? Puts his life on the line for the cleansing benefits of something as basic as a walk in the country?
When we finally reach the crossing-over place, he looks left, right, then dashes across. Erin and Lowry and I follow like ducklings, gliding to safety, and with the roar behind us, we are again on the gentle country road that leads back to David and Hugh’s cottage in the woods.
We’re walking with leisure now, our hearts slowing beneath the high canopy. David and I stroll side by side for a while, and now comes the part that I was hungriest for without realizing it: the building of community, the starting anew. Meeting someone who was around at my beginning and who has aged. Being reassured and inspired by the sight, the proof, that in the greats this fire is never extinguished.
We talk of Chekhov, Alice Munro, and Welty. Faulkner, Barry Hannah, and Richard Ford—we’re Southerners, after all (David grew up in North Carolina). It turns out David and I share a love for the stories of my dear friend the late Larry Brown, who died of a heart attack when he was younger than I am now—a brilliant writer, and one of the sweetest hearts imaginable. Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Joy Williams, Susan Minot, Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore: the breath of the eighties, this magnificent tide that rolled across the country, west to east and south to north. David and I came of age in the intoxicating draft of it, being pulled along and following behind it.
There was nothing but space in front of us, nothing but momentum, and walking down that country lane, talking quietly, with the day so beautiful, I feel like I did before.
When we return, Hugh’s out in the little covered wagon, listening to his radio. He’s secured the missing butter and now departs in a rush to get to the train station in advance of Frank and Scott. Shadows are coming on fast, and there’s a strange moment in which David gives us a look that seems to say, Okay, that was a lovely afternoon and now I’m passing it off to you, I trust you to do what you said you could do. I wish you well, I wish you luck, thank you, and goodbye now.
His dark eyes fix the three of us and he smiles and backs away like a lion tamer who has opened the cage door.
Later, having returned from collecting Frank and Scott at the train station, Hugh is pouring an absolutely first-rate gin-and-tonic for each of us, except for David, who retreats to the front of the room with a cup of tea.
Erin, who must rest, says she is going out into the garden to smoke a cigarette, and for a moment I am struck by the idea that I might never see her again. Without even having napped on the flight over, we’ve now gone a day and a half without sleep.
From the kitchen, Lowry and I can hear David and the other guests laughing loudly in the other room. Hugh has lit a fire in both fireplaces, one in the front room and one here in the kitchen, and the cast of firelight across his face illuminates planes and angles of concern as he busies himself around us, cleaning up our minor irregularities before we have really even begun. A spilled quarter-teaspoon of kosher salt here, a drop of elk blood there. One last cleaning, before the onslaught of the barbarians. One of us, made nervous by his concern, knocks over and shatters a wineglass, which Hugh sweeps up almost before we can register it.
Hugh attempts to show us how to work the stove, the rhythm of which excites him—the way you can move the skillet around on top of it, inch by inch. There are no burners. Instead, it’s like something a sorcerer would use, placing the food on the one magic spot where it will cook perfectly. Except that the perfect place changes, over time, as the wood burns, so that it’s like playing a piano with a migrating keyboard. There can be no more gin-and-tonics during this process.
Erin returns from her walkabout and helps us spread the food out along the narrow dining table, and on all the counters, without a word. The fancy, complicated stove sits there like some great ticking being, some kind of Buddhist presence, with its inscrutability and its mysterious dials. One means 150 degrees Celsius, Hugh tells us, speaking rapid-fire, as if agitated. Two means 200, which is who knows what in America, Three is 250, Four is 300, and so on. Meanwhile the measuring cups are in alien denominations like deciliters.
The three of us work quietly, moving around one another gracefully and efficiently, but our physical fluidity belies the inner tensions of the exhausted. There’s no conversation, only a kind of grim focus, the focus of not wanting to mess up—tunnel vision more than focus. Sometimes you can look right at a thing and not see it. Where’s the pepper, where’s the cumin, where’s the spatula, where’s my joy?
The yellow sunlight has flattened; it flows across our hands, across the food, across the table, bathing the kitchen with its last touch before darkness.
We spread the quail, gleaming with oil and glinting with salt, on a foil-covered baking sheet—a dozen of them, each a potential disaster. Even without heads or feathers or feet, they still somehow look evasive, as if poised for flight, and my dread builds. Ideally, I’d grill them instead, but I don’t have the nerve to rig up skewers and hunker by the fireplace, cooking them like marshmallows. This is a first-draft world, a ragged militaristic campaign—make the landing, establish the beachhead, control the perimeter—and I do not give the fireplace a second glance, knowing the chances are not insignificant I could burn the house down.
Lowry will make the balsamic-and-fig glaze, as well as her famous gingersnaps with molasses. To this we’ll add great mounds of leafy greens, so fresh and local they might have been growing this very day in the deep black soil, and our old go-to, potato chili gratin. Erin and Lowry are pros at this by now, and they slice the potatoes to perfect thinness, arrange the peppers just so. A team effort.
But almost immediately there’s too much smoke. The quail are sputtering their sweet grease everywhere inside the oven. Hugh appears ready to cry. Smoke and the smell of wild meat permeate the house—no doubt soaking into the furniture. Hugh opens a window and the blue smoke dissipates. From the other room come the sounds of jocularity. Notwithstanding the smoke, the quail is finishing just right. Meat is the one thing, maybe the only thing, I can do well, in any kitchen, knowing when it’s done sometimes just by the weight of it in the skillet. Meanwhile, Hugh glides behind and beneath us, scrubbing and burnishing as if the kitchen is an EPA brownfield site, cleaning up the slightest spill before it can linger. He seems almost to be able to reach out a sponge to catch a drop of olive oil or a sift of flour before any of it can touch the floor.
With her part done, Lowry leaves to join the party in the front room. Erin and I try to do some damage control on the accruing mountain of dirty cookware. At some point, Hugh relaxes—gives himself up, I think, to the project, and to the evening. He does not cede the kitchen entirely, but appears to determine to enjoy the festivities in the other room. Soon all five of them, Lowry and David and Hugh and Frank and Scott, are laughing steadily, sometimes uproariously, and I am happy for my daughter.
A pine-nut tart—the dessert—is baking in the strange high-tech oven, the salad is tossed, the fat little quail are dressed and wrapped in bacon. The gratin meanwhile is browning and bubbling, filling the cottage with its lovely scent. Outside, night has fallen. It was not so many generations ago that we gathered thus around fires in caves, and in forests, and in huts and cabins. The blood remembers things the mind never knew. The body leans toward these old invisible things.
Now that I have a moment to rest, Hugh has fixed me another fantastic and stout gin-and-tonic. Great gusts of laughter continue to rollick in the front room. The only thing left to do now is to throw the backstrap of elk meat into the iron skillet, with salt and pepper and the hydrated morel mushrooms. Everything else is under control. A quick glimpse at the tart, which I have been bragging about, having succeeded with it once before, shows it to be gleaming a bit brighter than I remember. There’s quite a sheen of oil, but it’s actually prettier that way, and I close the oven door, take another sip of that incredible drink, and focus my attention upon the skillet, and the elk, forsaking in my mind everything else.
The backstrap is the best cut of meat, the most tender and delicious, taken from an animal I hunted for five weeks, traveling up and down steep mountains, through dark forests and across windy snowfields. Each day that I went out I awakened long before dawn and hiked all day, not returning until late at night, only to do it all over again the next day, and the next.
I lift the perfect elk out of the skillet, medium-rare, and slice it into medallions, then hurry to the front room; the temperature must not fall below a certain threshold. I urge everyone to eat it immediately, and they do, lifting it to their mouths as finger food and wiping the juices from the meat on paper towels I’ve distributed, licking their fingers and eating every last scrap, until all that remains on the plate is a little juice. I nearly sprint back to the stove and throw another length of backstrap into the skillet and we repeat the process.
David, the most enthusiastic consumer of the elk, comes into the kitchen to watch the wonder of its preparation—salt, pepper, butter, iron skillet—and when he returns he can’t find his napkin, and has to get a new one. “Odd,” he says, “I left it in my chair.”
Has my nineteen-year-old fan-daughter snatched it in his absence as a souvenir for her friend back home, a napkin with the bloody handprints of their literary hero? I suspect so, but I don’t rat her out.
Dinner at last. We take our seats, light the candles, and begin to serve the extravaganza of dishes. The quail, alas, are mostly tasteless. The best thing about them is the bacon draped across them, and even that could have been improved with pepper or maple syrup. But the company is good, the setting elegant, and—I hope—we’re still riding the wave of the magnificent elk. We’re out of gin but the wine, a Bordeaux, is delicious, and I pour it often.
One of the highlights of the evening is a word game that David and Lowry, who are sitting next to each other, engage in.
“Which Hollywood actors or historical figures have tree names?” David asks Lowry, innocently. “Like, you know, JenniFIR Garner, and Annie OAKley?”
Lowry pauses, fascinated. Her hero is addressing her directly, knighting her, it seems, by asking her to join him on an expedition into the legendary territories of his mind. I believe in you, he might as well be saying, and as he knew she would, she delivers, thinking for only a few seconds before answering, “ASHton Kutcher.”
David nods, thrilled, as though it’s easily the best thing that’s happened to him this whole trip. Better even than the elk. He casts about for only a moment, then says, “Charles BARKley.”
They’re in another universe, he and she. The rest of us strain and search, but we can find nothing, even as David and Lowry go off like flashbulbs.
“John TREEvolta,” David says, slyly, and as if with a tennis volley, Lowry answers, “Robert PLANT,” and David could not be happier. “SPRUCE Jenner,” he says.
How many, really, can there be?
For the rest of the evening, our dining is punctuated by these random utterances, like public service announcements.
The meal might yet prove salvageable, I’m thinking, as we move through the entrées with polite murmurings, but I have not reckoned on that pine tart, which has been baking at whatever indecipherable and arbitrary temperature pulses within the implacable Rayburn, the considerable heat of which we can feel all the way from the kitchen. The tart is meant to be the centerpiece of the evening and our salvation from what was otherwise (with the exception of the elk) an attractive but underwhelming meal. As people are finishing the quail, I rise to check on the tart, and what I find inside the maw of the stove is a health hazard.
It would be easy for me to blame the oven, or the butter here, or the pine nuts bought in bulk, or Hugh’s Pyrex dish. It’s tempting, as I stand there staring at a lake of melted butter and oil, to blame all of England. I’ll never know the culprit. A super-oily batch of nuts? Too much heat for too long? A too-small dish? There seem to be a lot of pine nuts—did I accidentally double the recipe? Or was it faulty estimation in my conversion from English metric with the great block of butter that I hewed and hacked into the dough while knocking back those gin-and-tonics? As for the dough, it resides far beneath the depths of clarified butter and the iridescent ribbons of rich oil from all the nuts streaking the yellow lake.
Maybe if I blot up the excess butter, I think, it will be as if it never happened. And this is what I attempt, with a fistful of paper towels that grow quickly saturated, so that it’s as if I’m holding the dripping wick for a Molotov cocktail.
“Careful with that!” says Lowry, who has come into the kitchen to see about the holdup, meaning, Mind your heat sources!
Stubbornly, I bring the bloated disaster to the dining table and plate it, as if there is special merit in soldiering on despite evidence that one should retreat. With all the hubbub, Hugh’s hard-gotten relaxation is taking a hit. David appears curious and disappointed at the same time, while Erin looks at the tart and says only “Ewwww,” an unambiguous statement that she had nothing to do with this.
Everyone makes a pass at the tart with their forks, but it’s foul—somehow greasy and chalky at the same time. An annihilation. For those adventurous enough to lift it to their mouths, it takes every bit of civility not to gag.
“Lowry,” David asks sweetly, “how about some of those lovely gingersnaps?”
At last we say our goodnights—so many hours without sleep, but our job done. Erin goes upstairs, and Lowry and I to the cottage that serves as David’s office, where we will sleep in the work space of a great and important writer, a man who summons one of the rarest things, again and again: laughter.
All that laughter—millions of people laughing, sometimes until they’re crying—coming from this one quiet office, with no one in it now but me and my younger daughter, who might one day be a writer. Alone, we look around as if at a piazza fountain, or the wellspring for some magnificent and timeless river, and then we go to bed, finally, and sleep the deep and dreamless sleep of healing.
In the morning, the green-gold light of spring slides across the pasture and into the cottage. Outside the mullioned windows of the south-facing French doors, a fox digs in the grass at the base of Hugh’s wagon, hunting for crickets, I suppose, or the rest of last night’s pine tart.
No one is stirring in the windows of the farmhouse. Lowry has asked to be awakened one hour before it’s time to leave, and Erin has made no request. Knowing they are both sleeping soundly, I sit and write for a while. Maybe I should do some yoga, after the brutality of the plane and the train, or go for a walk, but I feel like writing on this beautiful morning. I fix a strong pot of Italian roast and, perhaps to my discredit, sit at David’s desk and scratch out a couple of paragraphs in that wonderful stillness.
I cannot stop. I have scant years left, and in whatever supply, that mysterious number, always smaller than it used to be, is one that would motivate any self-respecting geologist to sit up straight in cold terror.
After a bit I walk over to the farmhouse and find David and Hugh up now. We toast some peasant bread from town and spread butter and blackberry jam on it. The morning light, so golden, turns the house into a movie set, and we sit around in quiet satisfaction, in a strange mix of rest and fatigue from the late night before.
David looks out at the light. The door to the kitchen is a stable door, allowing the upper half to swing open while the lower half remains shut. David walks over and opens the upper part, and the soft light pours into the kitchen. He smiles a deep and distant smile. “I had that door specially made to do that,” he says. “I was thinking of mornings like this.”
It touches me deeply, his pleasure, the absence of humor, only the quiet marveling at great beauty and the associated peace of home. I think he’s glad we came. I know I am—pleased, more than anything, by the inspiration Lowry has gotten from meeting her favorite writer. The difference in their ages, it occurs to me, is greater than was the difference between mine and Matthiessen’s, and for a moment I feel dizzy: the force and ceaselessness of the old river of time.
Frank and Scott drift in, pour cups of coffee. We all slouch like the haggard survivors of an all-night card game, one in which everyone won. There’s not a lot of time left before the cab arrives to take us to Gatwick Airport, from which we’ll fly to Geneva, where we’ll rent a car and drive to Mont Blanc, in France, to see John Berger.
I return to the cottage and wake Lowry, who’s a little grumpy—how a teenager craves and needs deep sleep—but when she realizes that time is telescoping, she jumps right up. Back in the farmhouse, Erin comes downstairs. A good night for her is twelve hours. Her sentences crackle with the intensity of glass being broken, slinging their refracted light from the sharpest shards of words with the prismatic wonder of a kaleidoscope. But they do not get written early in the morning. She does not say good morning, does not say anything, just sits down with a cup of coffee. Only the call of a bird, or a cigarette, could rouse her from her stupor.
The cab arrives ten minutes early, and while I can’t speak for the natives, the North American contingency is as dismayed as if we were prisoners for whom the executioner has arrived. Perhaps we could live in the covered wagon.
The cab driver tells us not to worry, no rush, and we walk out into the garden and sit on the rock wall amid the boisterous flowers. We visit lazily, as if we have all the time in the world.
But I sense a faint whir beginning in David, not antsiness or impatience, but a coiling, a readying for the day. It’s an energy that’s almost athletic in character, as if for him each morning is game day. He has not yet crossed over that threshold, though. He is still present, still peaceful, there in the garden, and with a sweet generosity he turns and bestows the last of our time upon Lowry.
“Lowry,” he says, “you’re a princess. Come back anytime.” He steps in a little closer to her. He’s staring down at her feet, the toenails painted a glorious plum color. “I want you to do something for me,” he says to her. “It’s very important to me.”
We are all listening carefully, aware that this is a farewell moment, and that there’s a great possibility that he might be about to dispense some life advice. Lowry can’t even speak. She nods.
“I want you to treasure this moment,” he says. “I want you to stop and be fully aware of how beautiful your feet are. They’re so beautiful and perfect. I want you to remember this moment, and how perfect they are.”
We’re all staring down at Lowry’s bare feet now. Is this a dream? she must be wondering.
“Mine,” he continues, breaking the sweet spell in order to release us to our cab, “are gnarled, like little hobbit feet. Like hooves.”
Lowry laughs. “You should channel your inner hobbit,” she says. “Gambol in that field barefooted.” And David smiles, as if imagining it.
Then the clock owns us once more. We shake hands, hug. Mercifully, I remember the leftover elk meat still in the freezer—needed for a recipe at Berger’s—and duck back in to grab that bloody frozen bag, which I see I inadvertently tossed into the ice-cube maker, so that some of the cubes are tinged red. A new recipe for Hugh’s gin-and-tonics.
In the cab, the driver wants to chat, but none of us can think of anything to say. Eventually he comes to understand this, and we ride in silence through the English countryside. Lowry’s feet, I imagine, must still be tingling as if in a fairy tale, imbued with magic dust.