New Mexico 2009

Steaming hot pancakes as the desert sun rises over the canyon wall - life is good!

As per usual, I packed ingredients for oatmeal and pancake breakfasts in our camping gear before we left Tulsa. We forgot to pack a small amount of cooking oil and syrup, however, so we stopped at Trader Joe’s in Santa Fe and splurged on Kerrygold’s Pure Irish Butter and Trader Joe’s Wild Maine Blueberry Fruit Sauce, among other vacation-only treats.

The first morning at Ghost Ranch outside of Abiquiu NM, Bill lit the camp stove, pulled our griddle out of the trunk, mixed up the pancake batter, and discovered we had forgotten to bring a spatula. How to make pancakes? I suggested he use our small frying pan and flip them with all the panache of Julia Child. Bon appétit!

Pure Irish Butter sizzled in the pan, Johnnycakes browned and crisped on the edges, and Bill flipped. Not one pancake hit the dirt! Then we smothered the buttery cakes in the blueberry sauce and declared them to be the best-tasting pancakes ever. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of mine. The recipe makes five cakes the size of the one you see.

JOHNNYCAKES

1 cup flour
1 teaspoon cornmeal
1 teaspoon brown sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
¾ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk (I use a small box of soymilk)

Mix dry ingredients in a gallon freezer bag. In camp add egg and milk to the bag and mush around. Pour onto griddle or in pan, flip and serve.

Desert Sestina

When I set off into the wilderness, I had plenty
of cookies for three days of hiking through orange
globemallow and prickly pear cactus, but a problem
arose on the very first day that caused me to stumble
and tumble backwards and down into a rocky draw
where I lost my cookies at the height of the season.

In a land of illusive rain, spring is the best season
and reason to explore the desert with its plentitude
of neon clean blossoms and secretive creatures drawn
from shadowy habits into the bright light orange
days for food and water, for the pure joy of stumbling
over each other for love, for forgetting problems.

But spring in the desert can’t last and the problem
is that foreign matter can from season to season
with dry winds and no rain. Creatures must stumble
upon my broken cookies and digest them or plenty
of chunks and crumbs will petrify in the torrid orange
scorch of summer down on the floor of that draw.

And future archaeologists would undoubtedly draw
conclusions about the odd debris, worry a problem
not knowing it was me who had fallen with an orange
backpack over the edge of reason, down that season
onto granite scree that broke my ankle while plenty
of bruises blossomed bright to prove who stumbled

on her first day in the desert. I felt like a stumble-
bum rookie, a tenderfoot, a dark-eyed fledgling drawn
from the nest before knowing how to fly. Oh, plenty
were the personal epithets I assigned, the problem
easily forgotten of crumbs scattered like seasoning
across the sand, raisin brown almond burnt orange.

When I set off into the wilderness in those orange
and black butterfly days as an artless spring stumbler
of rock, when for a very good reason in the season
of midlife I fell down, down in a rabbit hole draw,
I tasted the sharp crumbs of mortality and problems
small withered and flew but still I cursed a-plenty!

I had thought twenty was plenty but that was a problem
and very good reason in all desert seasons to stumble
and tumble down orange-varnished cliffs in a draw.