Troll's-home Picnic

          It was a troll's home, surely, inside that grove of bay trees atop the Berkeley hills. Outside, the wind-tossed fog thickened in swirls. Inside, like gnarled fingers of old hands, twisted black trunks held back the billowing white blankets. Outside, it rained in drizzles. Inside, under the sweet-smelling tangle of leaves and branches, it merely drizzled.

          On one of those nearly horizontal trunks, a troll's table, we laid our lunch for two (none for the troll): French bread, Swiss cheese, Greek olives, and California tomato and avocado. It doesn't get any better than that. We ate standing in this little parlor on the knoll, watching the fog play thick and thin around us. When it was thin, we could see the sun glint gold on distant hills like the twinkling drop of a coin from heaven.

       Later that evening, after our walk, I found Desert Solitaire on David's bookshelf, and the conversation turned to nature writers. David said he found today's nature writers (Edward Abbey, perhaps, excluded) falling far short of Thoreau and Muir.

         "Why," he asked, "try to be Thoreau and Muir all over again?"

         He had a point. Every Russian writer who followed Tolstoy felt Tolstoy's breath on the back of his neck as he bent over his desk, pen in hand. Brahms, aware of the overpowering shadow of Beethoven, had to grit his teeth and work on. Contemporary nature writers are not trying to be Thoreau and Muir all over again but to create their own path, to forge in the smithies of their own souls their sense of truth. There was a truth in the troll's home of the morning's picnic, in the strong black trunks and twisting patterns of fog, that I want to express. If I were a painter, I would paint it, but the problem with the painting would lie in not conveying that the olives were Greek, the cheese Swiss, and the bread French. From me it would take words, even if my words were to be compared with those of the masters. 

          It wouldn't matter. Thoreau and Muir weren't at my troll's-home picnic. If they had been, they would have experienced it differently, anyway. It would take my words to convey my experience: the  fairy-tale enchantment of that afternoon in the Berkeley hills.

          

Next week: "Birthday Cake Traditions"

Recipes from this post: The picnic

THE PICNIC

Note the Provencal tablecloth in this version.

Ingredients

French bread, uncut

Swiss cheese, preferably Gruyere, unsliced

Greek olives, preferably Kalamata

California tomatoes, unsliced

California avocado, uncut

Butter (optional)

To bring

Bring the food listed above, of course. Besides that, bring a picnic loth, a small knife, a fork, a cheese clipper, and a cutting board. Bring wine, if desired (Oregon wine, or South African, maybe) and water, of course. Bring glasses and napkins.

To make

Spread a cloth under or on a fat limb of a large treee. Set out the bread, cheese, jar of olives, bright red ripe tomatoes, and the avocado. Unwrap the cheese and the butter and lay them on a cutting board. (Tuck the wrapping cut of sight.) Slice the avocado onto the cutting board, but leave the tomatoes whole. Put the cheese slicer next to the cheese and a knife next to the butter. Put a fork next to the olive jar. Break bread. Spread with butter as desired. Eat bread with cheese and avocado. Bite into tomatoes as into apples.

      A finishing touch would be chocolates. Belgian, say.

Here, I've opted to slice the tomato.