Author: Admin

Biltong Weather

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For me here in the States, it’s biltong weather: the weather is cool enough so the beef won’t get funky in the heat and kill me.  Of course it might still, because as Wikipedia notes, biltong is a kind of cured meat from South Africa: the “curing” being salt and a brushing of cider vinegar.  My ex built me a Biltong Box with a 60 watt bulb in the bottom, where I hang the beef for about three days using eight-inch cable ties.  The hooks I used to employ rusted out, this is better.  I like my biltong “wet,” that is to say, on the raw side, more taste if you know what I mean.  Of course, you’re probably making a face, unless you’re South African and then you’ll understand.  The biltong back in Africa is much tastier, not sure why—the beef isn’t as hormoned-out?—and the strips much bigger than my dinky little Supermarket specials. The Americans who’ve tried my biltong love it.  Of course, I had them sign a waiver—just kidding, but I probably should’ve.

Recipe

  • Beef (Preferably Round steak)—1-inch thick
  • Rock Salt
  • Coarse Ground Black Pepper
  • Coarse Ground Coriander
  • Vinegar (preferably Apple Cider vinegar)

Sterilize all your hooks, knives, and working surfaces by washing well in hot water and soap.

Cover both sides of the meat with rock salt and let stand for an hour.  The longer you let it stand the saltier it will become.  Scrape off all the excess salt with a knife (don’t soak it in water!).  Cut into two-inch strips then brush (do not dip) with the vinegar, just so the meat is covered. Let the excess vinegar drip off then sprinkle with pepper and coriander and hang.

Biltong Box
Biltong Box with biltong

Here’s a photo of a biltong maker in South Africa.

Finding Joan

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Joan is a childhood friend.  She’s the only childhood friend I’ve ever been able to find after all these years.  When you’re from Zambia when it was colonial Northern Rhodesia and everyone you ever knew has disappeared, you go a little nuts when you find someone from ye old school days: St. John’s Convent School and Kitwe High. Here’s the two of us in front of one of the single-quarters units up near the Mine Club. We must’ve been around fifteen or so.

Where I found Joan was on “The Great North Road,” an online forum created in 1996.  Here’s the lead-in: “In the heart of central Africa, a frontier spirit engendered a hardy breed.  We shared a very special time and place. Through this medium we’ve been able to reconnect again and to share our memories of the remarkable Northern Rhodesian experience. “The diaspora of Northern Rhodesians has scattered our small stock far and wide across the planet—from South Africa to Iceland, Hong Kong to Zimbabwe, North America to Australia, the British Isles to New Zealand . . . Northern Rhodesians Worldwide.”

Kinda cool, huh?  Along with “Remember When” lists–remember when you could get a Fanta grape and two Wicks bubble gum all for sixpence?”there were black and white photographs of skinny wild-eyed boys perched on those rocks in the Kafue river with a question mark above the middle bat-eared one, anyone remember his name?

Funny thing, I’m not big on nostalgia and I couldn’t wait to emigrate to America, but finding Joan jacked me up enough to tell anyone who’d listen I’d rediscovered a childhood friend.  So? But you don’t understand . . . So sweet after all this time.  All the reasons why I wanted so badly to get out of Africa and all the shitty decisions I’ve made in my life dulled by time.  Instead, all the good stuff came rushing back: the wildass chances we took, hitchhiking to Luanshya in the middle of the night down a bush road after sneaking out of my bedroom window; whizzing down the “foofie” slide at Rhodwins Resort—a thick metal cable the boys had strung across the crocodile-infested Kafue river—hanging onto a cylinder the size of a toilet paper roll; the snogging in the back of the Astra and Rhokana Cinemas with some “talent” from Chingola or Luanshya; the white sweaters worn back to front over waists cinched to 18 inches.  Yow!

What I mostly remember about Joan was that she and both her sisters looked like different versions of Ava Gardner, all olive skinned and sloe-eyed.  She was not athletic, though she tried, just couldn’t see the ball, I later learned.  I was into everything our little bush town offered: ballet, swimming, softball, hockey and basketball, but still we hung together. She was a no nonsense type, not one to chase the boys, never wanted to get married.  I, on the other hand . . . She was my bridesmaid at my too young wedding.

Skype, you know, the online phonecam deal revealed she’s still gorgeous and still loving her “Harry Champers,” (champagne).  Oh, and she’s been married twice.  Hah!  When she saw my shoulder-length hair, she said, Oh, you California girls. Too funny.  She lives in a place called The Cobbles, Morland, in the Lake District of England.  Carrying her laptop, screen facing out with its built in camera, she took a walk down the  lane in front of her house.  With the sound of a gurgling brook as an accompaniment, “we” headed to the local pub where she called out to a man standing in front,  Say hello to my friend. He obliged. I yelled back my hello.

I’m off to see her in April, next year.  We’re going up to spend some time in Scotland, land of my dad’s folks.  She remembered, told me how much my parents had meant to her after she lost hers in a head-on collision on the road between Mufulira and Nkana when she was twenty.  To make it worse, she was the first one on the scene after the crash. More on Joan and my life pre-America after my visit.

 

Kiss Her Goodbye

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That’s the name of American crime writer Mickey Spillane’s latest novel reviewed in this Sunday’s LA Times. It features Mike Hammer, his hard-boiled gumshoe whose every case turns into a personal vendetta that–following a suitable number of trysts with beautiful and generally willing babes and raw scenes of brutality–inevitably ends with Hammer serving up his own kind of justice, usually out of the smoking barrel of a .45.

Is this the year for dead authors from my childhood with new books out or what?  (See The Faraway Tree post featuring British author, Enid Blyton, who died in ’68.)  Mickey died in 2006 after writing enough books to fill the ocean, 225 million sold internationally, alone.  I bring this up because, after outgrowing Ms. Blyton’s  books of magic, fairies and backyard adventures, I hit the hard stuff.  Ayn Rand “found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories.”  It was the Americanness of the stories I loved most: the slang, the setting usually New Jersey or New York’s seedy side, his quintessential American tough guy character.  It fueled my passion for everything American.

I won’t be picking up Mickey’s latest book though; I left him behind when I moved to the States.

The Things You Remember

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My dad also wrote a book.  What I remember is a chaotic heap of papers, pockmarked with cigarette burns that seemed to grow every time we moved.  I never caught him at it.

The first time I saw this pile was when we moved to Rustenburg, frontier post of the Kalahari Desert and unpacked this one big old trunk that belonged to my dad’s parents. I was seven.  My dad was back doing shift work on the mines, platinum this time.  We’d just spent two years in Zimbabwe where he managed a sisal plantation (a species of aloe used to make rope and mats).  We might’ve stayed longer if there hadn’t been an African uprising over wages when I almost died from eating bread the rebels had laced with strychnine.  By then my dad’s stack of paper was as high as a small end table, ratty as hell and tied with string.

The thing is my dad had a lot to write about.  He would’ve made a good David Livingstone, that intrepid Scotsman who became the first European to explore the central and southern parts of Africa, famous for discovering the Victoria Falls.  By the time my dad married my mother, who at first refused his offer of marriage—he’d already been engaged three times—he’d traveled the length and breadth of South Africa at a time when it was mostly dirt roads and wild animals were still plentiful.  He even tried to make it up to the Congo by himself in a banged up 1930’s Model A Ford.  He didn’t make it.  No roads to speak of.

I bring this up now because I’m doing a final on my memoir, Loveyoubye, and it just hit me that he’d written a book.  How could I have forgotten that?  I can’t ask him or my mother what it was about.  They both on passed years ago.  I’ll never know.  It’s been quite the wild ride writing this memoir.

 

The Magic Faraway Tree

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An unpublished Enid Blyton book has just been discovered: Mr. Tumpy and His Caravan. It’s about an anthropomorphic caravan that befriends a dog, develops wanderlust and goes off on an adventure involving a dragon. Lovely stuff. Who’s Enid Blyton you might ask? A prolific British author who died in 1968. And still selling.

As a kid, I devoured everything I could find of hers in our dinky library in the copper mining town of Nkana, Zambia. This was a room half the size of the “Men-Only” bar on the other end of the T-shaped Mine Club, social center of the mining community. As you can imagine my choice was limited, but with holiday trips down to South Africa to visit the relatives, I managed to get my hands on enough of her books to satisfy my addiction.

I loved Ms. Blyton’s The Famous Five and The Adventurous Four series: kids embarking on adventures and solving mysteries. But my favorite was the Magic Faraway Tree in the Enchanted Wood where the trees, “a darker green than usual,” whisper their secrets: “Wish-wisha-wisha.” This wonderful tree, laden with fruit of all kinds from acorns to lemons was inhabited by colorful characters like Moon-Face, Mister Watzisname, Silky, and the Saucepan Man, draped with all kinds of saucepans. Its topmost branches led to ever-changing magical lands above the swirling clouds. All this took place in the lovely English countryside, so regular and so civilized.

We had our own version of The Adventurous Four, only our adventures took place in the jungle which wasn’t so civilized, all kinds of snakes, notably, the deadly black mamba, and crocodiles, along with lions that lived in the bush at the bottom of town. The “foofie” slide we built across the croc-infested Kafue River featured in our adventures. This was a purloined mine cable strung between two trees across the river, a homemade metal cylinder the size of a toilet paper roll providing the ride down the cable. Wearing your cozzie (bathing suit), you climbed the tree on one side of the river, wrapped your hands around the roll, leapt into the void and zoomed fifty yards across the swiftly running water to land on the other side. Hopefully you made it. Fun. Belly button tingling, pants pissing fun. I don’t remember anyone not making it.

But the thing is I also wanted Enid Blyton’s world, filled with high teas, hedgerows, badgers, Peter Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh and fairies, where magic was part of its history. A Magic Faraway Tree could only exist in the lush verdant English countryside; a black mamba would make short work of all those fairy folk in their buttercup dresses and foxglove caps. I’m grateful to Ms. Blyton for instilling in me the love of ceremony and magic. It showed up in my first book, Monkey’s Wedding, featuring English fairies along with the African equivalent, tokoloshi. I can’t wait to buy Mr. Tumpy and His Caravan, so I can read some of the passages over the phone to my two grown sons (one in South Africa, the other up north in Davis, California) and see if they connect to the characters from the days I read the old Enid Blyton books to them.

Rethinking Things

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Fergie, you know, my Staffie, was up at 4:50AM this morning. Yesterday it was 5:05AM. It’s been this way since I got her. Killer. I’d given up early morning risings when I retired to write full time. And then along came Fergie. But it’s good for me, in a medicine-y way. It shifts things around, keeps me flexible, makes me rethink time. I hadn’t experienced the dawning of a Brand New Day before without the pressure of work hanging over it; even on vacation, which has its own pressures. I’m finding that these predawn hours are becoming magical again, like they were when I was a kid back in Africa, when I ran on nothing but imagination.

The Beach

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I’d had it with trying to finding an ending to my latest book—why did I ever think I was a writer?  A good time to take three-month-old Fergie down to the beach for her first visit.   She’s a brindle Staffordshire Bull Terrier, golden stripey-like.  Picture a cross between a pot-bellied pig and a cartoon warthog from Lion King.  Jake, her big bro—same breed—led the way.  It’s a mile from my house in Laguna Canyon to Main Beach.

With the sky a cerulean blue, a wintery 60 degrees in the sun, 45 in the shade, we headed down the canyon.  There were still traces of the knee high river of mud that raged down Canyon Acres just two weeks earlier from our 40 days and 40 nights of rain–okay, a week–now a fine ecru-colored dust that covered the street.  Everything else was so green: bushes, trees, those clumps of grass that had appeared overnight; you want to swipe your finger to check for wet green paint.

Fergie either charged forward, or catching sight of her skinny pink leash, latched onto it with her needle-sharp teeth and slammed on brakes–tug-a-war time–forcing me to either stop and play, drag her along, or carry her.  With a combo of this and her twelve impassioned pleas to passersby for a little love, we made it down to Main Beach.  I was beginning to feel a little edgy at all the time this was taking.  I really should’ve stayed home and stuck with wrestling my story to a close.

I jumped onto the sand from the boardwalk.  Jake leapt after me, shouting in doggy dialogue, Whoa! there’s those birds again, let me at ‘em!  Fergie, still cadging for connection, came to a dead halt at the edge of the boardwalk.  A seagull squawked above.  Her head jerked up and she stared at the bird, following its flight for a moment.  Reflexively, I did the same, caught at the sight of the seagull’s effortless grace as it did wheelies in the sky.  Yow.  It had been awhile since I’d watched a seagull in flight.  Jake barked.  Let’s go.  He gets his impatience from me.

I gave Fergie’s leash a gentle tug.  She tumbled onto the sand and charged after me, head down like one of those bloodhounds on the job, sniffing loudly from left to right.  Jake made a mad dash for a clump of sandpipers at the edge of the water and I let him go—leash law be damned—while I watched Fergie on her discovery of sand and sea.  At water’s edge, she stopped sniffing, lifted her chin and stared at the expanse in front of her.  No way, her look said.  She backed up.  I sank onto the sand behind her just out of reach of the water and watched as a wave rolled in up to her knees before receding.  She froze and looking as if she’d stepped in a pile of shit, high stepped over to me and, with dripping paws, leapt onto my lap.

Jake returned with gifts of seaweed and driftwood and Fergie ventured out again, this time staying clear of the water.  In front of me, a watery mirror left behind by the receding ocean reflected a cloud above then was gone.  I stared at it willing it back, just like I’d been willing back all those story ideas that had been waking me in the middle of the night only to disappear when I opened my eyes to write them down.  I rose to my feet.

It was time to return home to face the blank page.  A little more heel-and-Fergie-dragging and I was back in my chair.  A few words haltingly appeared out of nowhere, kind of like a door had been cracked, a door whose key had been fashioned from wonder and nature.  More words appeared.  I was a writer again.