One Potato, Two Potatoes

     

    Linda Hladik taught me how many potatoes it took to feed company. Solomon Ballantyne, a full blood Cree, taught me how to cook those potatoes in a driving rainstorm while he whipped up a shore lunch for three, lightning in the air, up on the wild Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan.

    Linda's lesson, yea these many years gone, was one of the most important I ever learned. Linda was a wonderful cook, and practical. She knew all kinds of simple tricks I had never heard of, and wanted to learn. One was the proper number of potatoes to feed the crowd, one to one hundred. I remember the day, honest.

    It was at Linda and Dave's house, another one of many fabulous home cooked meals Pam and I ate there over the years. The dinner had been "packed away", and we were in that quiet conversational interlude between great meal and dessert, to be followed by time to clear the table and wash dishes.

    All the gossip and bi-family news had been sorted through. I posed a question that had been bugging me after Linda's dinners for years. It was so stupidly mundane that I had always been too embarrassed to ask.

    "Alright, girl," I said looking right at her. "There's a mystery you've got to solve for me right now."

    "What."

    "Every time we eat here, every time, there is not one spoonful of mashed potatoes left over at the end of the meal, not one. How do you do that?"

    She started to laugh at me. She had a wonderfully quiet laugh that lit up any room she was in, perfectly modulated, that was never too loud. I am hearing it right now.

    "Conrad, it's simple. One potato per person. Two people, two potatoes, One hundred and two people, one hundred and two potatoes.

    That last was an interesting note. She had cooked for crowds of over a hundred many times. She cooked for years, with no pay except for the cost of the groceries, for the weekly Wednesday night crowd at West Port Baptist Church. The girl knew potatoes and their numbers. It was not a small thing to me.

    You get older in life, you learn things you never could imagine earlier. Here's one. There's nothing scarier in life than a shadow on an x-ray.

    When the chemo started, Linda was able to drive herself to the doctor's office. Later, Dave did, and when he couldn't, Pam did. When Pam couldn't, I did. I never saw her down. I saw her with no hair, just a scarf as bright as her smile, and the quiet laugh, but never down.

    Often she was hungry after a session, and she favored a Mexican place over on Cherry Street whose name I forget. Cheesy, hot, and savory, just like her cooking; sometimes a thick, cold, pineapple/pecan milkshake from Braum's at the Twenty First Street exit. She always insisted on buying, no protests allowed.

    One day, I dropped her off in her driveway, and as she exited the passenger side, I said as plainly, clearly, and sincerely as I could, "Linda, I love you."

    "I love you, Conrad," and then, smiling, gone.

    We all loved her.

    That day up yonder in the rain and lightning on wild Keg Lake, Solomon performed a miracle by stripping bark off a birch, using it to start one of the hottest, oiliest shore lunch fires I have ever seen, let alone one in a driving rainstorm. Birch bark burns well when wet. I didn't know that. I do now.

    Not ten minutes before, right there, August Hammer, a naturalized German-American with a heavy accent, caught a twenty-five pound northern pike, and after it was netted, on the very next cast I caught a twenty-two pounder. It's looking down at me as I write this. How long ago? It was June 1971. There are ghosts in this room. Can you see them?

    Chuck Kepper, the Pearl Harbor vet that had talked me into this first trip north, for me, was the third fisherman in the boat that day, and fired up three powerful smelling cigars and passed them around. I do not smoke, but have since a boy enjoyed smelling other people's smoke, and the air was thick, blue, and full of rain and lightning that day; grins all around, three white men and an Indian, and no mosquitoes.

    Solomon had constructed a fire ring for his hot birch/spruce fire and dropped a grill grate on it and placed two black, cast iron frying pans on top to heat. In both he dropped one-pound rectangles of white lard to start melting, one for the walleye fillets, and another for the potatoes. He placed a quart-sized can of Bush's baked beans on one of the rocks to heat, and broke out a big bag of potatoes and a huge onion to start frying early as they take longer to cook than fish fillets, right? Yes they do.

    First he would look at the bag of potatoes, and then at us, hunkered in the rain and partially hidden by billows of blue cigar smoke. Then he would go through the process again, clearly bothered by something. He did it two or three times. Finally, August, who barely spoke better English than Solomon, spoke up.

    "Cooook theeeem all, dameeet! Cooook theeeem all!"

    And he did. Hot, crispy, greasy, sluiced with onions and faintly flavored with cigar smoke, they may have been the best potatoes I have ever eaten. We ate every blessed one of them, roughly five apiece is the way I recall it.

    I got hooked all those years up North on the Canadian culture of the shore lunch, and when I fished home waters down here I was never again quite satisfied with just "going fishing." I bought an old wooden ammo box with rope handles and a simple latch to keep it closed at the army surplus on Memorial, just the right size to hold a small fire grate (driftwood's easy to come by on Lake Keystone); some long-handled cooking utensils, three or four forks and spoons, a roll, of paper towels, some paper plates, salt and pepper, two cast iron frying pans, a little fish mix, two onions, and some potatoes. Ketchup, optional. The kit's rectangular shape is surprisingly small, and fits well in the bottom of any boat I've ever owned because I want it to.

    Not so long ago, I was in the kitchen filling up the grub box the night before a trip up on wild Waresha Creek with Alan Karstetter and David Campbell. We didn't care what we caught, it would all look the same when it hit the bottom of the pan. It always pays to check the box's old "reliables" for presence and cleanliness. We don't mind the occasional cockroaches and fiddlebacks, but draw the line at rat turds.

    Pam was standing at my shoulder watching me go through the box's necessaries.

    "You've got your beans," she said.

    "Yep."

    "You've got your onion."

    "Yep. The biggest I could find in the pantry."

    "Salt, pepper?"

    "Yep."

    "Hey, wait. You've only got three potatoes, are you sure ...." she caught herself, finishing quietly, "Oh, my. Linda."

    "Yep."

    You believe in ghosts, don't you?