Making Mama's Chicken

Making Mama's Chicken

I started cooking my Mama's fried chicken my first week in Africa. I was still stationed at the main house on the Mkhaya Game Park, unable to make camp out in the bush until the local SiSwati guide returned from his days off. The past six days had been physically exhausting, spiritually exhilarating. The childhood dream of conservation work in Africa was finally happening, but as any seasoned conservation professional knows, caring for the wild and it's critters is not all dramatic scenes darting animals and releasing them into restored habitats. There's a lot of hard, physical, repetitive labor required.

 My work days thus far consisted of fixing fence, manually hacking and pulling hundreds of invasive lantana vines intertwined with the veldt's native trees, and haying for hippos, i.e. cutting grass, LOTS of grass, for some naughty hippos slated to be trapped and re-located out of a local sugar cane plantation, lest they get shot for eating the sweets.

But it was Saturday night. We'd been cut loose from lantana assassination early. Would also have all of Sunday free. Speewee, the chief cook and bottle washer for the house had a well deserved evening off, since the park's manager and his family were away for the weekend.  Supper was needed only for myself and one Dutchman, an IT guy from the Hague working out his own African dream.  The day before she had given me the layout of the kitchen. Pointed out which meats I had permission to prepare from the deep freeze, what cabinets held various spices and dry goods, which items were available for mixing and matching from the vintage 1950's fridge.

I could have been bold. I could have picked impala chops, or chunks of kudu meat for stew or grilled a circle of warthog sausage, but I had Mama's fried chicken on the brain. Had been since I'd seen the unmistakable image of Colonel Sanders on a billboard on Swazi's main highway. My North Carolina mother taught me to fry chicken before I turned 9 years old. No corporate, fast food version from half way around the globe could substitute.


So the frozen bag of mixed chicken pieces was plucked from the cold, set out to thaw. Most anatomically interesting chicken I've ever seen: five legs, four wings, three thighs and a solitary breast. Still, Picasso worthy or not, Mama's Mickey's Fried Chicken would be on the menu from a kitchen far away from it's origins along Tobacco Road.

Some swaps had to be made; sour cream and whole milk for the buttermilk soak.  Portugese peri-peri peppers providing a really good kick instead of the Cajun mix I use at home. It turned out better than perfect. I thought Mama might be smiling from on high. Hoped she was proud, not only of the cooking but of her baby girl's current adventure. Her generosity after she passed the year before had made Africa possible for me.

 That platter of chicken would be the first of many prepared and shared during my travels. Samples I left for Speewee made it to the head chef at the resort lodge. I was asked for the recipe from other chefs in other places once word got around the "American girl who makes the chicken" was close by. I began to lose count of the times I demonstrated how to do that one simple, secret step at the end of the fry for the perfect outside crust. Find me and I'll show you too.

I am proud to say Mama Mickey's Southern Fried Chicken has been on the menu of some very fancy places in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar for a decade now. Cannot not think of a more fitting and enduring legacy to my beautiful mother, whom I miss every single day.

Saving Africa's Wildlife: Burning Ivory

Burning Ivory

On my flight to Australia in 1990, I read the cover story of the latest "Outside" magazine. A massive African elephant, a tusker, graced the cover. " Wildlife Wars" shouted at the reader in bold red letters at the bottom. The piece described the latest head of the Kenyan Wildlife Service's efforts to end elephant poaching. Richard Leakey (yes, one of those famous anthropologist Leakeys) had the daunting task to try to stop the epidemic slaughter of African elephants. In 10 years Kenya's elephant numbers had dropped from 85,000 in 22,000. He describes walking through warehouses full of tusks, from every size elephant. He realized poachers wiped out entire herds. There were piles of rhino horn, stacks of animal skins: leopard, lion, cheetah, zebra, and sable antelope. The reality of the wildlife deaths represented by the lifeless remains sickened him.

It was still legal to sell the ivory in 1989. Leakey could use the proceeds, ironically, for the anti-poaching programs he had planned, He didn't. He burned it. The whole world watched. The ivory trade stopped and African elephant were safe...for awhile.

Yesterday there was another dramatic burning of elephant tusks, rhino horns and endangered wildlife remains outside Nairobi National Park in Kenya. Africa's mega fauna (once again) reduced to bits and pieces. Eleven pyres were lit to demonstrate what illegal poaching looks like. The decision in 2009 to allow the limited sale of ivory have put the lives of wild African elephants in the cross hairs of extinction (once again).

 Pretty certain in this Twitterfeed, Snapchat, Smartphone universe, the whole world didn't watch this time. I'm absolutely certain many humans simply don't care that at the rate elephants and rhinos are being poached in the first quarter of the 21st century, they will be gone in the wild in one human generation. The elephants have, perhaps, 25 years. Rhinos 10.

 Last fall I went to Washington DC to participate in a Global March for Elephants and Rhinos. My poster used photos I had taken myself from my work on the Mkhaya Game Park in Swaziland in 2006.  Only a couple hundred gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial for our walk to the White House. Disappointing that many of the participants were more about competing with one another on who had done the MOST, been to more African nations, donated the most money, to make themselves feel better rather than being invested and passionate. Only a handful knew the devastating stats on the level of killing or the complexity of stopping organized crime syndicates feeding Asia's insatiable demand for ivory and rhino horn.

I do like the slogan we called as we marched and use it as a mantra :

 "Not a trinket. Not a trophy. Ivory on an elephant only."

They didn't have a good one for rhinoceros. Hard to rhyme I guess.

 How about this one: "Only a rhino needs it's horn."

Here's the story on Kenya's latest ivory burn. Let's hope this is the final time such drama is necessary.

Up in Flames: Kenya Burns More Than 100 Tons of Ivory

Hemingway's Idaho

Hemingway’s Idaho

Last fall a couple I met told me they were in Ketchum on July 2, 1961. That Sunday afternoon they heard about Ernest Hemingway’s suicide. We discussed our favorite Hemingway books and short stories as I toured them around the skinny part of Idaho as part of my McJob for a time share resort. I keep the note they wrote to me when they left tucked away in my wallet:
“ From the couple who were in Ketchum when Hemingway died.”
I re-read it often, trying to imagine what hearing the news on an AM car radio on the way out of town must have felt like 47 years ago.

I set out for Hemingway’s Idaho last June. A part of the country I tasted briefly, building fence for the Forest Service on the Sawtooth National Recreation Area after college graduation. Twenty five years later the middle fork of the Salmon River roars with snow melt, kayakers and rafters getting their first whitewater adrenaline of the season as I follow the road and river to the Stanley Basin.

The buck and rail fences I helped construct were still in place along Highway 75. Sunday, so the Stanley Ranger Station is closed, but the aptly named Sawtooths fill the sky. I see the single wide trailers we seasonal workers called home every summer are gone. Good thing, a little white trashy in such a spectacular location. Years slip away. I feel my twenty two year old spirit rise as the truck climbs towards Little Redfish Lake, where Beau, my thirteen year old lab mix and I will establish base camp for a week of wilderness and literary explorations.

Being a strong believer in Thomas Wolf’s philosophy “You can’t go home again”, regressive trips are not something I normally indulge in. The trip has taken on additional significance after shocking news I received last Tuesday; my oldest brother died unexpectedly in western
North Carolina. Baby brother is back in the Appalachians doing the heavy lifting for my family, insisting I continue with my plans, a summer road trip more in keeping with David’s adventurous spirit, my first with “writer” on the second line of my business card. He’d have preferred covering this morning’s central Idaho scenery unobstructed from his vintage BMW motorcycle. Pulling into a Forest Service campground at half capacity, I turn down the Allman Brothers’ Live CD I’ve been blaring all morning in deference to the sibling who took me to see them in concert when I was a fourteen.

The aquatic image of Thompson, Willard and Alpine Peaks is clear and unbroken in the lake. I split the image with a spontaneous, shallow water dive. The water is frigid, breaking away road weariness and melancholy. Beau follows me in, as he has since puppyhood, but neither one of us lingers, happy for a short baptism before setting up camp.

I set up in a site without neighbors. Not much to it: a seasoned two person tent, Coleman stove stained with huckleberries from last summer’s canning, freshly stocked camp box and portable CD player. The latter is important for refocusing my attention from family loss to literary reflections. Time to give up blues infused rock for a recorded version of The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber. It’s one of the few Hemingway stories I’ve never read. The British actor’s voice does boom from the box and I become self conscious of it’s intrusion into a geography very different from the African scenes he describes.

I’m about to switch it off in deference to the alpine wilderness when the dialog begins: pregnant, punctuated words from the protagonist, his wife, the hunting guide. Hemingway captured my lifetime reading loyalty with his gift for human speech when I read Hills Like White Elephants a long time ago. In this very short story he captures a complicated romance in hushed, single sentences over drinks at a train station. The Spanish scenery described in the title is as much a character as either human being.

It occurs to me I’ve never read any Hemingway narratives set in central Idaho. I know from Lloyd Arnold’s biography, Hemingway: High and the Wild , he hunted in the surrounding mountains: Galena summit a favorite elk spot in the autumn. Aside from a piece about antelope hunting in the magazine True in 1951, there isn’t any Idaho literature. A good part of his “Idaho time” did make the press, features in LIFE appeared regularly over the years. Reporters and photographers found Hemingway to the south and west of my current
location. In the coming days I’ll tour the Silver Creek Nature Preserve and get a rare glimpse of Hemingway’s final home in Ketchum, hoping to fill gaps in my knowledge. Allow me to marry my own private Idaho with the Nobel Laureate’s.

Silencing the CD player, I walk towards the lake again, taking in the surprising sight of 75 to 80 percent dead trees along the shore and up the hillsides. Pine beetles have been busy in the lodgepole stands; my scientific self is curious and concerned. How long did this die off take? Archived forestry training tells me the trees must be stressed in order for boring bugs to get under the bark and do their damage. Drought is the usual suspect so, how long have things been drying out? Will lightening, a stray ATV spark or undampened campfire set the Sawtooth Basin ablaze soon? This isn’t an “if” question really, but a “when”, an ecological fact, warnings by Smokey the Bear be damned.

Switching on the player back on, continuing my bi-polar sensory exercise, the tragic tale of a dying great white hunter in Africa comes to its conclusion just after dusk. Dreams that night are confused: white rhinos and giraffes crashing through straggly dead lodge poles as I hurriedly build fence to keep animals separate from a raging wildfire. African flora and fauna, manual labor I finished a quarter century ago, and my current concerns of the threatened landscape meld on an epic scale. But these action packed workings of the collective unconscious are not what pulls me awake.

For the first time in my life I hear a wolf howling in the wild. Its cry is identical to those I’ve heard on nature programs. Beau becomes restless, growling, then barking at the tent closure. The wolves weren’t here in 1983. Weren’t here when Hemingway hunted with his entourage of movie stars and Idaho cowboys in the 1940's. Wolf populations are strong in the American West due to a series of re-introductions a decade ago. Recently pulled off the endangered species list, there’s talk of setting a hunting season. A court decision is due any day.

Hauntingly human sounding, it’s nothing like the yips and yelps of coyotes I’ve heard countless times. Of all clichés, the moon is full through the mesh tent skylight. The dog and I settle back down and listen to his wild cousin call into the early morning darkness. Awed by nature’s auditory power, I compose a simple prayer towards the federal judiciary in Missoula:
” Leave the wolves alone.”

Morning starts cold. It’ll take awhile for the sun to crest; a thin line of fog covers the lake. I pull maps out to re-familiarize myself with a part of the country I once knew so well. After quick reconnaissance and a second cup of instant coffee, I load Beau and set off.

Still spring by botanical standards, the full spectrum of green is on display; aspen groves pale with round, light green embryonic leaves. Ponderosa pines dark green shadowed against the slopes. My solitary drive on a scenic byway morphs into a cityesque commute as returning millionaires start moving through Ketchum, Sun Valley and Hailey. The first two look remarkably unchanged since my last visit; but the latter is no longer the funky cowboy town I remember. Thoroughly gentrified since Bruce Willis and his Demi bought property several years back, the line-up of private jets at the Hailey Airport testifies to the area’s latest status as a celebrity destination.

My day trip takes me to Idaho’s first Nature Conservancy project. Situated in sagebrush desert west of Picabo, a town unlikely to be adopted by the well-to-do, the entrance to the Silver Creek Preserve is marked by the environmental groups iconic the oak leaf symbol mounted ranch style on a lodgepole cross bar. Irrigation wheels rotate through alfalfa fields to the left, a reminder that the preserve has been pieced together from private holdings. At the log cabin Visitor Center Ryan, a Conservancy intern, kindly lets me put Beau inside on a day
that’s turned hot, while we take the nature trail through one of the world’s most productive cold water fisheries.

Silver Creek serpentines through the valley, the riparian rich with thick sedges and water grasses. Water birches, willows and cottonwoods line the banks. As we walk toward the water
I’m told I just missed the year’s brown drake hatch the night before. Ryan lights up as he describes the intensity of entomology life cycles in action, wild trout hitting insects hard, creek surface boiling with curved fish bodies. In hopes of catching something the morning after, a lone angler works a pool as we bend over to catch a glimpse of a couple of shy fish among the thousands occupying every mile of stream.

Hemingway only fished here once, being a more avid salt water angler. Silver Creek was his place to hunt ducks in the autumn. Originally known as the Sun Valley Ranch, the property was part of Sun Valley Resort. Access to hunting and fishing was a perk for the A-Listers taking advantage of Union Pacific Railroad’s hospitality at the lodge. A unique watershed for Basin and Range country, it’s continually fed by deep aquifers, keeping water temperatures cool enough for trout throughout the year. Unlike his father, Jack Hemingway caught fresh water fly fishing fever as a kid, returning year after year. He eventually made Idaho his permanent home. It’s his efforts as a commissioner for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game setting the way for Silver Creek’s preservation in 1976.

Back at the Visitor Center to gather my sleeping old dog, Ryan points to the latest map of Silver Creek. The preserve totals 850 acres, with easements handled for all the surrounding creeks, assuring thriving fishery habitat will prevail over traditional consumptive uses like livestock grazing. All this talk of conservation and co-operative resource management has me missing my once official status as a federal government cowgirl. I worked on these kinds of projects, one of the most rewarding parts of my bureaucratic existence. At August’s end Ryan will continue his studies at the University of Idaho in Bioregional Planning, a new discipline since my days at the same school. The current freelancer self wakes up from a past career, recalling photos are important. I convince an impatient pair of decked out fly fisherman to
take a picture of Ryan and I on the porch, then leave him to check them in for a dream day of black diamond, world class fishing.

It’s dark when I pull into camp. A few more camp sites are taken; I have neighbors on both sides. Attempts to find the one grocery store in Sun Valley on the way home proved futile, resort area take out a bit rich for my travel budget, so I dig in the cooler for scraps of salami, cheese and bread to edge out any day end hunger. Not much appetite, eating more of a necessity than a desire in a day filled with new information and a bit of guilt. How did I not visit Silver Creek when I called this part of Idaho home so many years ago? I long to come back in the fall, in Hemingway’s favorite season. My black lab mutt eats in ravenous contrast to my half hearted snacking. We sigh in stereo, undoubtedly for completely different reasons, as long partnered dogs and humans are apt to, before slipping into the tent for an easy sleep.

The next couple of days are spent exploring old haunts. High elevation snows prevent any deep wanderings, so hikes are restricted to short out and backs at the end of secondary Forest Service roads. Menu offerings at Redfish Lake Lodge prove much fancier than the burgers and Schmidt’s draft beer the fencing crew lived on during well deserved days off. I splurge on spring greens with candied pecans and lamb medallions, happy to find the bar is exactly the same, swinging saloon doors leading into in a linear, dark cavern of a room with high backed wooden stools. Original issue, so says the bar manager who’s significantly younger than the furniture is. So say the initials carved on the seats.

My final morning in the Sawtooths is clear, cold and cloudless. After splashing my face in the lake, Beau and I say our hellos to a new camping neighbor with Montana plates on a seasoned Nissan pick-up. His accent is distinctly not from Big Sky country though, an Aussie fishing guide sorting out his gear. He bought the truck when he hit the States a month ago, planning to fish as many blue ribbon trout fisheries he can in the western United States during our summer/his winter. Silver Creek is next on the list. I grab some of extra literature from my recent visit, give him Ryan’s contact information and wish him happy angling.

Today is my long anticipated private tour of the Topper House, Hemingway’s final home. It’s not open to the public, situated on a private road along the Big Wood River. Expensive
vacation homes border on either side. Taylor, the Nature Conservancy employee living and working in the house, warned me not to drive too far up the road. Some neighbors call the police when visitors accidently miss their destination and pull into their driveway.

Despite the warnings I do drive past, a call from Taylor on my cell reeling me back in. Compared to the ostentatious real estate to the right and left, the Topper House is subtle. Wooden in appearance, concrete in construction, it was designed to mimic the Sun Valley Lodge, using the exact forms. It’s an eerie sensation to expect to touch wood and instead feel cool, hard concrete.

Set along a mile of river on eighteen acres, the house made a idyllic writing haven. No neighbors to interrupt the creative process then, Hemingway finished The Sun Also Rises looking up the Big Wood towards the mountains. The Nature Conservancy received the home as a gift after the death of Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth wife. Taylor currently acts as curator, cataloging documents and possessions not already called for by varying museums and serves as the home’s restoration expert. His unique qualifications as a carpenter with a degree in English from Michigan State made him the right candidate for an unusual split of responsibilities.

Hemingway’s estate does not consider The Topper House significant in any historical fashion. Doesn’t matter. For me seeing the footlockers with “Hemingway” in block letters, bull fighting posters from Spain, a pair of snowshoes propped against the wall, a ‘50s era television situated in a book shelf, the mix of portraits, black and white photos and a still working manual typewriter, creates a quiet reverence rarely witnessed in my overly enthusiastic countenance. Taylor is unobtrusive, allowing me to linger, take pictures, draw it all in. After an hour I am a satisfied, satiated literary groupie.

My oldest brother was literary, intelligent. He was expected to be the writer in our clan. It’s not Hemingway’s presence I feel as leave, its David’s. Only one thing left to do before hitting the road to Boise for a post Father’s Day visit with my own Papa: play some more Allman Brothers.