Lost In Translation

Just after sunset the chili-dogs began growling. I had eaten three full, a personal best. No, not what you’re thinking. My friends and I invented this version, by committee. Each must consist of a foot-long smoked kilbasa, charcoal-grilled, on a whole-grain french loaf, condimented with onions (also grilled), fresh kraut, and juicy slabs sliced from the center of a Mister Stipey, just picked, and all washed down with a large ginger ale, no ice. Where’s the chili part, you ask? Here’s the con-demented genius of our group. That fresh kraut is made from equal volumes of shredded Savoy and minced Serranos, all soaked in cheap Champagnoise (we found a case in the basement, determined it undrinkable, so decided to use it’s yeasty sourness in a few kitchen experiments. Later I discovered other powers in Champagne, but I never drank for taste) a half hour, then heated in a cast-iron pot on the side of the grill. Trust, it sates any capsaicin jones. Tart, too.
That was our graduation party, and no one puked. We had been metriculated out into any world we could find or make, far away, or right here in this our natal neighborhood, between the suburban and semi-rural plats of America’s social atlas. A mixed bedroom district, blue collars at the mill, retired brass and non-coms, liberal minded educators, a few families displaced by civil wars on other continents, all flourishing while eking in this place of warmer nights and cooler days. The sawyer who taught his children to make phantasmagoric sculptures out of car fenders, the Physics professor who refuted refridgeration (but he did build a cooling unit fueled by swine manure for one neighbor), a much-decorated war hero who lived by non-violent mediation, and Lelia, eldest daughter from East Africa, gracile, cocoa-skinned, with a gap in her front teeth through which only truth comes. God, she is beautiful.
But tomorrow I leave for my seasonal job, wrangled through my mother’s brother (call it nepotism), as assistant mechanic at a cannery up the coast in a village called Translation, normally a few shacks and one general store/tavern, sleepy nine months a year, but hectic in the season-of-plenty when fishing boats disgorge their holds into the maw of food-preserving technology, like a flock of gulls feeding one giant fledgling. My task is to keep things running, as needed, maybe 20-30 hours straight, then wait a day or three ‘til the next frenzy arrives. Why, you ask? In two-and-a-half months I’ll earn enough for a years tuition, room, and board, at State U. My grades were passable, not enough to warrant scholarship grants like Lelia (sigh), but then my energies had been invested in diverse interests slightly outside prescribed curriculum, all legal sure, but they don’t give academic credits for feeding your family all year on the output of a quarter-acre garden. We were glad to eat.
What to do with time off? Catch up on sleep, mostly, in the gender-segregated bunkhouses mercifully upwind from the fish-factory. Listen to the veterans bragging on past seasons and moanin’ the bunkhouse blues. “Look down the line, them women all work apace. That gal settin’ chub-ends can set her chubby end on my face.” Go into town a few times, not so much as tourist, but on quests for the mintiest chewing gum antidote to the industrial-strength coffee that fuels the days-on-end wake-time. Sit in the tavern, too, more stories, one about the woman who ran the place a few years back, whose name was Apprehensive Ice, a translation of the Aleut term for the season when sun-melted snow is shaped by still-freezing winds into arches that free-stand, ‘til gravity wins, the season of her birth.
Her parents were sometimes residents, other times off herding jobs in a migration along that frontier, so she grew up in a sense multi-cultured, trans-humance newness countered sometimes by extended abandonings to her old-school grandmother, whose shack was on the frayed hem skirting Translation. “Never take you boots off with a strange man”, Gramma would attempt an instruction on marriage etiquette. But, perhaps slightly confused or just willful, when teenage, Apprehensive Ice took it literally, using as a trademark wonderfully decorated mukluks as the only costume of her nightly entertaining, won by the highest bid. Soon she owned a third of the village, but left then on the rumor that big cities held big bids. She sends the town a postcard every year, around her birthday, from somewhere else.
A curmudgeonly old fart seats himself at the bar, “Do you serve crab here?” “No. You’re the only exception”, the reply. Horns are blaring another boat’s arrival, so I run back to run the line. Those stories are outside my ken.
Still, it makes me wonder if Lelia would like a pair of mukluks?

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