weekend in a waterbed lounge chair

 this trailer-park-fabulous setup cost me less than $20 (thanks, china!) and kept me cool the last few 95+ degree days. you know you want one.

 i had a feeling the chickens were going to figure out the doggy door eventually. they're always trying to get inside--they frequently gather at the doorstep and peck at the plastic door. i'm not sure how long they'd been hanging out in the mudroom when i heard clucking and went back to find all three of them in there, standing at the door to the kitchen.

 friday night jason and i had an impromptu apricot adventure in horseshoe bend. we've gone to this tree every summer for the last three years.

 normally i'm the one who butt-slides down the hill to get to the best fruit, but this year i was wearing a skirt, so j went for it.

 he took it a step further and monkey-footed up the tree to get the VERY best fruit. this made me a little nervous. not only is this tree clinging to the side of an incredibly steep, tall hill with lots of jagged rocks below, and thin breakable branches, but we were in the middle of a super windy thunderstorm. he made it out fine, though.

 the sky on the way back was dramatic. we drove up to the cemetery and watched the rain fall over the hills.

 then we met some horse friends, and i got my favorite horse picture ever!

 saturday morning i pilfered my parents puggle for a happy puppy playdate with cam's pups.

 the two dogs were a bit overwhelming for scout. they were too big and loud and scary, even though they just wanted to play and be best friends. DESPERATELY wanted those things. hugo had to sit out the party inside.

 scout is the puggle's official name. they went through dozens of ideas before settling--the naming process took almost a month. my favorite name was mucho. i still call him that. el mucho poocho! but ultimately my mom wanted to name him after the little girl from to kill a mockingbird.

 back to work tomorrow. i got a lot of nothing done this long weekend and i'm feeling pretty good about it.

preserving the wild harvest

this summer i’ve had unbelievable luck finding fruit trees on public land. it started with the apricots in horseshoe bend. then reed and i found a *nice* crabapple tree (not the ubiquitous, tiny, crappy crabapples you can’t really do much with). a few days later i was walking home and along the way i found a plum tree and some kind of cherry tree, right next to each other. the cherries weren’t quite ripe yet, but the plums were, and the tree was so full of fruit some of the branches were bent all the way to the ground.

i went to pick mirabelles at my usual spot...bad luck there, actually, i don’t know what happened to the three trees along the greenbelt this year. i picked maybe a dozen. then i moved on to an apple tree that didn’t produce at all last year, but this year was loaded with delicious fruit.

later that day i found more mirabelle trees, including one that had more than enough fantastic ripe fruit to fill my bag:

since then i’ve found probably half a dozen more mirabelle trees. they seem to be all over the place. i keep running into more and more apple trees too. blackberries are everywhere and just starting to ripen...i’ve picked a few handfuls so far. and yesterday while out on a hike i came across a mulberry tree! i’d never eaten mulberries before--they’re like blackberries but smaller, less tart, less juicy, less flavorful. not my favorite, but still cool. and it’s a beautiful, huge old tree.

what’s eluded me, though, are the currants. i know they’re here, in fact i think they’re kind of common, but i haven’t located a single one. i’ll keep trying.

so far i’ve picked...

12.5 pounds of green apples,

7 pounds of apricots,

6.5 pounds of mirabelles,

6 pounds of plums,

1 pound of huckleberries,

and 6 pounds of crabapples.

clearly i needed some way to preserve all this. i dehydrated half the huckleberries and a few pounds of apricots:

and then, on july 25, my mom taught me how to can.

my mom is the master of canning. every year she enters jars of food at the western idaho fair--it’s tradition, she makes her famous bread and butter pickles, watermelon pickles, flavored vinegars, etc; her friend gail makes jams and jellies; and i print some of my photos for the photography exhibit. we all drive out to the fair together to submit our entries. the two of them have a running competition for who can collect the most “best of show” purple rosette ribbons. my mom has five so far, and literally hundreds of blue ribbons. she wins just about everything she enters, and there is seriously tough competition.

obviously she’s a good person to learn from. we made apricot jam together, and she outfitted me with a ton of canning supplies. she’s too busy to make much this year--i got her a watermelon with a nice thick rind (she said it was thicker than any she’s seen in a decade) so she made two batches of watermelon pickles, then she made 10 gorgeous flavored vinegars, but that’s probably all she’s doing this year.

anyway, since i learned how to can i’ve been going crazy with it. i made mirabelly jelly, mirabelle preserves, crabapple butter, spiced apple butter, mom’s apple pie in a jar, plum preserves, plum-apricot preserves and more. i was even able to re-process my remaining dandelion jelly, and this time it gelled perfectly:

i’ve produced 44 cans of food so far:

only 35 pictured...i gave away a few, ate two, and i’ve made four more since the photo. almost all of them were made entirely from fruit i picked myself. one exception is the bread and butter pickles. since my mom was too busy to make them this year she let me use her recipe--actually it’s her friend suzanne’s friend tina’s recipe that she’s been using for the last couple decades. i feel like a secret has been passed down to me.

i think my favorite so far is the crabapple butter. it’s extraordinarily flavorful and complex, and the texture is perfect:

in fact the whole batch is almost gone already. this is one of the ones that took the most work, too. i had to quarter and cut the blossom ends off of five pounds of crabapples, then cook them, then work them through a sieve, then cook them some more. just the first step took over an hour.

my cousin gets here tomorrow...i can’t wait to see her. i’m definitely taking her fruit picking.

jaybear and shmemily ride again: the ghost town tour, 7/22/10

this was a trip jason and i had been meaning to take since high school: placerville, centerville, idaho city. three old mining towns north of boise.

placerville had thousands of residents in the gold rush days, and is now down to...60. idaho city is still somewhat well-populated, and we’ve been going there for years, mostly to visit the graveyard, almost always at night. we tried to find the other two towns once, venturing down a sharply-winding dirt road for what seemed like hours, middle of the night, not really knowing where we were...then we saw a jeep, driven off the side of the road, overturned and abandoned. wary of omens we turned back immediately.

this time i looked up maps ahead of time. we left during the day, driving out highway 55 through horseshoe bend then making a loop, placerville to centerville to idaho city and back to boise via highway 21. and we had one of the best adventures ever. EVER.

on the drive up we got ourselves pretty pumped. we listened to holly golightly and the brokeoffs (perfect soundtrack for old-timey western mining town explorations). we reminisced about old times, all the crazy stuff we used to do in high school, how impossible it seems that that was six whole years ago.

after about an hour we reached the turn-off that lead to placerville. not far down that road we found ourselves surrounded by stunning scenery and interesting vegetation, so i pulled over. we were circled by a bald eagle and an osprey, found a beautiful creek, j collected yarrow,

we found a lot of what i think is wild amaranth,

then we searched for a way down to the creek. just up the road there was a small bridge, and on the other side of it a fairly easy way down to the water.

we hunted for pretty rocks,

saw huge, dreamy spiderwebs connecting the low-hanging, dead branches of trees,

and j waded but i stayed on the bank and took photos. i was wearing socks and sneakers and didn’t want to get my feet wet yet. besides, as he reminded me later, the two of us can’t be trusted with cameras near streams--together we dropped my first digital camera in a stream in mccall years and years ago, destroying it completely.

we drove down the road another few minutes, then out of the corner of my right eye i glimpsed something amazing by the side of the road.

see it? how about now:

holy crapricots! a wild apricot tree, loaded with perfectly-ripe fruit! they weren’t easy to get to. the tree grows out of the side of a ridiculously steep, loose-sandy hill that ends in jagged rocks and a stream. after we gathered all the fruit that could be reached from the road i sat and slid down part of the hill on my bum until i could reach the fruitiest branch. i didn’t really stop to think about how i’d get up again. that was a struggle.

worth it, though. i took a lot, but only as much as i could use, leaving tons of fruit still on the tree for animals and other lucky travelers. believe it or not, the above picture of the branch was *after* i’d had my way with it.

next we stopped at a beautiful overlook where j collected more yarrow.

then we found a historical site.

star ranch, built around 1870, once inhabited by the ranft family. i wish i could see what it looked like back then.

finally we reached placerville.

we stopped in the general store for sodas, and i picked up a copy of the adorable local newspaper.

then we drove up to the cemetery.

j brought his banjo and i brought my accordion, and together we serenaded the dead people. he was so excited about the accordion. no one’s ever reacted so positively to my lower-than-beginner-level playing. i played neutral milk hotel’s “ghost,” for one because it seemed setting-appropriate, but mostly because it’s one of the only songs i can play reasonably well.

we were wandering around the cemetery playing music when we came across a plaque that stopped us dead in our tracks: “fiddlers murdered at ophir creek.”

the story describes two wandering musicians (one of whom played the banjo) who stumbled upon a gold robbery/murder in progress and were killed. we were both awestruck. i went to my car to get my camera and on the walk back practiced “amazing grace,” the only funeral-ish song i could think of at the moment. coincidentally, j had just learned the clawhammer version of that song, so under the shade of the four pine trees we took turns playing “amazing grace” to honor the dead musicians.

after leaving the cemetery, we stopped alongside a lovely creek--i think it might be ophir creek, actually.

this time i took a dip, which is why there aren’t many pictures closer to the water--i left my camera safely on the bank. the water was cool and refreshing, and we found more neat rocks.

after that stop we looked for centerville but never found it. turns out we drove through without noticing it. there’s no town, really, just a cluster of houses.

so, on to idaho city. first we stopped at the sluice box, the craziest, coolest, hoarder-tacular-est secondhand shop i’ve ever seen.

i’ve never been inside because it’s never open when i’m there.

believe it or not, this store has both a website and a facebook page. i’m surprised they even have electricity.

i took a peek inside the window...can’t wait to go in sometime:

from certain angles the shop reminds me of howl’s moving castle. i can imagine it coming to life, sprouting legs and hopping around in the mountains.

in town we saw this gem...bill clinton in a jail cell, smoking a cigar, with a blue dress hanging behind him:

we took a quick trip to the cemetery.

we can’t go to idaho city without stopping by to say hi to allegra eckles.

one of the reasons j and i were excited to go back to idaho city was “top dollar dog.” we found harley’s pub, but dusty wasn’t on duty that day. there were other dogs, though--a fluffy white dog, a sweet doberman named buffy, and a playful pit bull puppy named reefer.

we also met an awesome czechoslovakian guy named george. when george learned that jason played banjo, he went upstairs and returned with a guitar and a banjo. george has been playing guitar since the 50s--he even spent time in jail for playing protest songs during the communist era. 25 years ago he escaped and immigrated to idaho, first boise then idaho city. he and jason played some incredible music together while i watched and documented.

first they played “cripple creek.” i got so excited because when j said “cripple creek” i was thinking of the song “up on cripple creek” by the band, one of my all-time favorites. apparently i’m an idiot because j said i had the same reaction the first time he played “cripple creek” in my presence. they also played “dueling banjos” (the deliverance song), “amazing grace,” and a few others.

there was hardly any available light and i didn’t want to use flash, so i had to use 1600 ISO and 1/15-1/40 second exposure at f/2.8...but i got two photos that (after extensive editing) i love:

we split a beer at the bar. it’s perfect because we’re both extreme lightweights when it comes to drinking--if either of us tried to drink an entire beer on our own, on an empty stomach, we’d be falling down drunk. ridiculous, right? even after slowly sipping half a beer we were both tipsy, so we left the bar and took a walk to sober up.

we walked up a steep hill to this catholic church.

we stood on the church’s porch and enjoyed a view of the town just after sunset.

then it was time to go home. i hate driving, but this drive was wonderful--windows rolled down, clear night with an almost-full moon glittering on the surface of lucky peak reservoir. we got back to jason’s around 10:30. neither of us could believe the day we’d had. everything about it was magic. later j told me he tried to describe it to some of his friends but no one understood...it’s definitely one of those things where you had to be there. but i think this insanely long post at least does it some justice.