I’ve been trying to learn how to bake bread.  One of my dreams is to be able to make a good sourdough bâtard, to make up for the loss of the Semifreddi’s.  Sure, there are good North Coast bakeries, but I’ve got more time than money and a curiosity to learn.

My starter is sort of wild.  At first it spent time in the heater closet, where it bubbled and stank and generated a layer of hooch on top.  It smelled like acetone and I wondered what I’d created.  Then I kept it on the counter a while, basking in the fog, and it grew a little more civilized, if sluggish.  I’ve read way too many sourdough primers.  I’ve tried a little bit of everything in starting this starter.  I’ve fed it rye flour, bread flour, white flour, a teaspoon of homemade Greek yogurt.  It ate it all and it’s still hungry.

Recently it began to rise when I fed it, which excited me and I decided to try to bake with it.  I fed my starter a banquet meal to get it properly riled up, then threw together a big mess of dough and let it rise overnight on the counter.

In the morning I wasn’t sure it had risen at all.  I even took before and after pictures, but couldn’t be sure.  So I moved it to the heater closet with hopes of getting wild.  I was talking to Uglyworm, and he suggested that if I played a buckwild guitar solo, that might also help.

It swelled minimally.  It bubbled a few times.  I gave it all day then decided what the hell, let’s bake this thing.  So I shaped it into two bâtards, crafted a makeshift proofing tent out of a shopping bag and returned the raw loaves to the closet.

Still no movement.  Depressingly flat dough.  So I let the loaves hang out one more night to get extra sour and super experimental; I was going out of bounds.

The next morning I baked them, thoroughly expecting a yield of two bricks.

What I got was not two bricks.  Nor was it two perfect bâtards.  What I got were two rocky, flat, sour flour objects.  Sort of lowrider, like a ciabatta, but dense and crackly.

My first sourdough loaves were not inedible!  In fact I sliced into a hot one and proceeded to eat half of the slab in one sitting, chopped into hors d’oeuvres, sliced and buttered.  Beth was both skeptical and running out the door to catch babies, but I was duly stoked, savoring my rocky loaf.  Such is life as an amateur baker on the North Coast wearing funny hats and taking the advice of stuffed animals.

I don’t claim to know what the Humboldt lifestyle is, but I may be living it anyway.

Now I know I write this and instantly you think a few things.  Like, for instance, I’m shopping here every day:

I’m not!  This is actually crucial.  In my head it’s an important litmus test:  this store will probably either make you laugh or cry.  Stuff n’ Things–A Unique Shop–offering Toking Exotica, Free Karmic Readjustment, and Headie Glass, though I have no idea what the last thing is.

I think that in the past, like in college, this store would have made me laugh.  But now it more makes me want to cry.  Because in college I would have just been passing through town, but now I live here.

(Actually, the real reason is more complex, and has to do with the death of irony.)

But it’s not all bad.  Today I went for a bike ride into the Eel River Valley, a huge river wash.  There are straight, narrow roads through cattle pasture that go for five miles and only end because they hit the ocean.  There are farm dogs that chase your bike, hoping to bite your wheels, or I’m not sure.  I haven’t completely figured out the farm dogs yet.  I will say that they scare me, but I’m not sure if my fright is totally justified.  I remember dogs used to chase me on my bike all the time when I was mini, but in the time that passed since then, I guess I thought that dogs had grown more civilized, because I hadn’t been chased in so long.  It turns out I was wrong.

This picture nicely captures the vibe of the Eel River farming valley, riding on Cannibal Island Road, driving through foot deep lake puddles, threading between the potholes and getting passed by huge trucks.

When I reached beach at the end of the road, some rednecks were standing around their trucks drinking cans of beer and reminiscing about their first guns while I sat quietly on a driftwood log eating a Banana Bread Clif Bar hoping they weren’t going to kill me.  One guy was wearing a sleeveless shirt that said BITE ME on the back.  Perhaps he found it at Stuff n’ Things.

On the way back I took a long loop through the Table Bluff Indian Reservation, up to the cliffs where people were parasailing.  Then back through the marshlands, where birds were migrating, and alpacas roam.

Lately it seems like all I’m doing is cooking and exploring. In the last two days I’ve made tortilla soup, granola, cookies and a loaf of whole wheat bread. Looming large on the whiteboard is GINGER BEER in graffiti type, and “feed sourdough Wednesday night.” Whoa man, you’ve turned into a house boyfriend.

When I’m not cooking I’m exploring. Yesterday I drove north to Patrick’s Point. I parked outside the park to dodge the fee and set off randomly through the woods, trying to hack my way into the park.  My goal was Agate Beach, and after a detour down a muddy fire road, dank deer trail, hard highway and through a Yurok village, I made it.

The surf was glassy on the north side of the point.  I walked two miles along the beach to Big Lagoon, and spotted twenty agate hounds.  Like guys with beards and dreads, technical outdoors wear, and the long pinchers one might use to pick up trash in the quad, only these dudes were picking up rocks.  I wanted to go up to one and ask him to show me a good agate, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I looked myself–I think I have some pretty good beachcombing eyes–and found a few pretty stones, but nothing worth taking, so I arranged them in the hollow of a log next to a dying bumblebee.

I don’t think my goal is to be a house boyfriend; what it feels like I’m doing is trying to rediscover my inner stoke, which is a reorientation of the inner compass towards clean, inspired living.  That’s a tall order, but I’m trying, and it seems Humboldt is a good place to do it.  In my early estimation, about half of the people here are happy, disarmingly nice, and in the place they want to be.  Like the old man with the foot long beard in a pair of overalls whom I met on a bird walk, who went way out of his way to wish me a good walk before pulling away in his turquoise blue thunderbird.  However the other half are wildly unhappy, unsatisfied, and fighting with eachother; they seem stuck.  Like our three pairs of bickering neighbors, living in beige townhouses, wearing Raiders gear, and microwaving their meals.

Obviously I want to be in the first camp.  There is incredible beauty here if you go looking for it.  I just need to add a job into the equation, and figure out which type of facial hair I’m going to grow next.