Steamed Pudding

Saturday mornings R generally reserves to go to yard sales. Combing Craig’s List Friday night she divines which are worthy and shortly after the next dawn is through screeching, with long time friend and partner in crime C she blasts off in a cloud of dust. Sale-ing they call it. The whole shebang I could take or leave, but one morning I decided to go. It was a high speed tour of the back streets of Santa Fe, stopping briefly to scan the offerings for choice items and make deals and if nada climb back into the car and boogie to the next.

Nearing the end of our mad cap stomp there was one more sale in close proximity to a source of breakfast burritos. With our blood sugars perked up, we went for a quick look. Over a retaining wall and into a dirt lot squeezed in between seedy houses a few tables were set with odds and ends of old clothing, towel racks, CD’s and hard worn vacuum cleaners of questionable value. In other words, it was a pile of crap. I loitered. From a box of books a silver dome spoke to me. I picked it up, what a curious item. “What is this for?” I asked the plump bo woman running the show.

“My son used the top part for a helmet. But what it’s really for I don’t know.”

“How much would you like for it?”

“50 cents, I guess.”

Who knows, in her hesitancy, she might have come down. But 50 cents had to be more than fair, so I pulled the coins from my pocket and gave them to her. “Thanks very much. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but for 50 cents!” I said. She smiled. I couldn’t have been happier and was soon thinking about adding legs and eyeballs to it. But before sending it down a new and irreversible path I decided to do some research. It’s stamped “Wearever No.110” on the bottom. So I sent Wearever an email with photos and after some back and forth they couldn’t tell me what is was for. The pan then went on the shelf and drifted from my attention.

R and I were having tea with S and we got trading stories about bargain hunting and sale-ing and I mentioned my curious find. “I bet it’s for steaming puddings.” S said, and because she usually knows what she’s talking about, I turned to my ancient copy of The Joy Of Cooking and the World Wide Interweb for more information. Sure enough, between the quaint line drawings in the cookbook, and a couple of photos from Ebay (one just like mine the seller is asking $21.95) I confirmed the Wearever No.110 is in fact a pudding mold.

The recipes for steamed puddings in The Joy are for heart attacks on plates: a half dozen egg yokes in one; 1 cup beef suet, yes, 1 cup beef suet!!! in another, and some require steaming for up to six hours. I’ve never cooked any one thing by any means for six hours nor have I ever knowingly consumed beef suet. That’s usually reserved for putting in a net and hanging from a wintertime tree for woodpeckers. But by golly, I’m hooked. Which recipe hasn’t yet been decided and I think I’ll wait for cooler weather, but I’m going to steam a pudding… as a dessert… after something light… like a giant rib roast of some meaty beast.

Gordon Bunker

When The Oil Is Gone

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

My childhood friend Christopher and I used to dream about when there would be no more oil. We reasoned Ferraris would be dirt cheap without it and we’d each get one to have on display in our living rooms. Though the basic question of how we would get around never crossed our minds (we had our feet after all).

Today, as we come to terms with supplies of oil getting used up, all the while with demand increasing we’re looking down the road and wondering what’s next? Manufacturers have flirted with hydrogen powered cars, but given the inefficiencies of producing that fuel they’ve quickly become has-beens. Electricity has found its way into the transportation marketplace, but where’s all the juice going to come from? Coal will only prolong the agony and solar and wind are no match – so far – for the wallop packed in gasoline.

As an aside, I’ve been rooting for the end of the automobile altogether and going back to donkeys. A trip to town might take three days but all of life would be more simple and quiet. It’s a wake up and smell the coffee and alas, manure, perspective.

Enter Stewart Prager Ph.D., director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and contributor of a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “How Seawater Can Power the World.” Dr. Prager and his associates (and peers around the world) believe they have the silver bullet: nuclear fusion. In short, by combining the nuclei of two cousins of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium - both abundant in sea water – voila, you get heat. Make some steam and the rest is history. There are considerable technical challenges to this process but it has been achieved on relatively small scale in the lab. Environmental impact is miniscule compared to burning fossil fuels or nuclear fission, the process used today in nuclear power plants. According to Prager, bringing fusion to a reactor scale will take time and dollars. About twenty years and 30 billion, respectively.

Given that we of the United States spend over four billion a day on energy, the dollar part of the equation is small. Nonetheless our “leaders” are hesitant to foot the bill. Private money then? The Walton sibs for example could get together for lunch and after dessert each cut a check for 7 ½ billion and nary feel the pinch. Rob, John, Jim and Alice, are you listening? In the mean time while I am not holding my breath, Ferrari is developing hybrid electric vehicles so it looks like my living room won’t be graced with one any time soon. Of course if we run out of deuterium and tritium the once desirable Italian cars may at last become cheap. The price of performance donkeys however, will go through the roof.

Gordon Bunker

See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11Prager.html, and http://www.pppl.gov for more information.

Wounded Knee

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

I tell the fellow from Nebraska I have never seen an eagle and would be unsure if I could distinguish it from a hawk. He says, “When you see an eagle you will know.” Bald Eagles have wingspans approaching seven feet.

I sit on the edge of the hill where a mass grave exists at Wounded Knee, South Dakota looking to the south, to the creek, the site of the massacre. As many as 300 Lakota Sioux died here at the hands of the U.S. 7^th Cavalry on a winter day in 1890. Now cottonwood trees are in full green leaf, the leaves quiver and rustle in the wind. It is peaceful but it is not. I close my eyes and sit, it is as though I can hear the din and inexplicably I nearly collapse. This takes me aback. This is a sad and powerful place.

A man approaches me, his jet black hair pulled back in a pony tail. His name is Lawrence and he asks if I would like to buy a dream catcher he has made. He tells me he is Oglala Sioux and is very polite. Yes, I would like to buy it and when he does not have change for the bill I have I give it to him and tell him to keep it. Lawrence thanks me and goes away. I sit for a while longer. I sit and feel what I can.

Walking back to my truck parked at the base of the hill, a hard worn pickup with three men squeezed into the cab and two men in the back races into the lot spitting gravel and stirring a big cloud of dust. One of the men in the back holds up an eagle’s foot with beads and feathers tied to it and screams at me, “Eagle’s foot! You want to buy it?” He and his companions are all drunk. I say, “No. I do not want to buy that.” The man looks at me for a long moment gathering comprehension. He pounds his fist on the back of the cab. The driver of the truck hits the gas and it roars off, gravel sprays, the men in the back sway and lurch nearly falling out. I get into my truck, shaken, and sit for a moment.

Driving back to where I am camped in the badlands I look ahead and see a man and woman on the other side of the road. They are stumbling down drunk, they are trying to walk. The woman falls into the ditch and the man falls trying to assist her. They gather themselves as best they can and start the process anew. As I pass I see their faces, flushed, and they barely keep their balance and grin and wave. I wave back.

My peripheral vision catches a motion in the field to my right. I glace over. A Bald Eagle has fallen from the sky. It pounces once, a spatter of blood and fur fly into the air. The dive, the strike and the ascent are fluid, unbroken motions. The bird flaps its great wings and rises with a jack hare dangling from its talons and flies away. The Nebraska man is right. There is no mistaking this bird for anything but an eagle.

At dusk, before getting into my sleeping bag on the cot I have built into the back of the truck, I tie the dream catcher to the frame of the window. I undress and get into the sleeping bag and stretch out. It has been quite a day. I lay there and watch the light fail and think and fall to sleep. When I wake in the morning I do not remember my dreams.

Gordon Bunker