While travelling, and actually in general, I try to avoid not being too caught up in nostalgia or wistful, or wishful thinking. Focusing on the good things of the present and future is why I’m out here. That being said, this question triggered memories of a rich flavor of my home territory.
Perry’s Orchard is a small scale orchard back where I’m from in White Creek. The owners are the dear salt of the earth people I grew up with as neighbors there. They are soil stewards, first off, which is like the vanguard of human civilization.
The scraggly hills of White Creek are unsuited to plowing, but still capable of fertility, so it’s a beautiful sight to see the Perrys’ beef herd out on pasture. Ethically raised and well-fed on rich grasses, their beef is the best. I love the t-bone the most, since that gives excellent flavor from the bone as well.
Some people know me partially for my “oil rants” where I preach the gospel of complex soils, first taught to me in a post office parking lot by another soil guardian, soil steward, of my area. He is a hay producer who can tell by the smell of volatile oils reaching his nose as he hays, which parts of the field need soil amendment or not. Plants each have genetic instructions on which oils to produce, and in what quantities, but only well-balanced soils will allow a plant to produce the full wide range that it’s capable of.
Furthermore, animals raised on those plants (and us) can only produce or synthesize our full range of molecules when we ourselves get the full range of nutrients we need. In meat and dairy applications, this richness of oils- the full suite of what an animal is capable of passing on in their milk and meat, can only come from the most nutritious plants.
That’s why my favorite recipe is only makable in a small slice of the world. White Creek’s soils, carefully amended to make the rich pasture and hay of Perry’s grounds, are where the beef is produced. I would make small cuts in the steak before broiling, and put in mushy half-crushed cloves of black garlic, made from my favorite Rocambole varieties of garlic. The Rocambole family had a genetic predisposition for high sugars and high sulfur content, and so in rich soils made the fullest flavor.
I try not to wax poetic, neither here nor in my mind, too much about things I might miss from where I came from. Most thoughts like that cause people to seek things out like “comfort foods” or other comforty things. Those attachments are dangerous threads to dangle happiness on when you’re on the road- instead, the joy is in discovery. They’re dangerous because a sudden non-access to certain objects is very likely out in the wild. If you can only wash your body with Dove soap, can only use Tide detergent, can only eat 100% Angus (TM) beef, and anything less will lead you to slowly losing your mind, then you’ll never make the big leaps needed into the wide beyond.
In Marash, I discovered that the local minced lamb (ground lamb) kebab was unparalleled. I couldn’t help but notice that in early spring when I was there, the olive groves were lush with undergrowth- wild poppies, mustards, and other low-growing flowers of many diverse genera, exactly what the shepherds were rotating the sheep onto. The complexity of the lamb fat is unbeatable in Marash, and why local kebab was so good. Pungent, powerful parsley was served as well, and fairly sweet onions chopped up. I always asked for extra onions in my kebab.
Another aspect of tonight’s concessionary admission that I miss Perry’s beef, is that I’m also missing the Washington County Fair. My region’s celebration of agriculture, truly bad food, and fuel consumption (showing the weakness of nostalgia, I have positive associations with some truly uninspired, unhealthy food served at the food trucks.) I am mostly finding myself deeply fulfilled socially while abroad- whether that is new friendships found within the humanitarian work, or with the people we’re helping, or just the social acts of sipping a coffee at a cafe in a bazaar or other mingle-ish things. It’s rare for me to stand back and say, “man, I wish I was at (x) location.” The county fair is just such an iconic symbol of the start of autumn that it almost functions as an emotional closure on summer, though, so it earns a spot in my mental parade of things to think of.
As I type this in comparatively mild Ankara, I feel like I need my own close for what occurred in my Marash summer. I need a symbolic rite ending my summer and acknowledging my spring- I guess that’s where missing the fair comes in. Ankara is a good 15 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than Marash, and has much more greenery, so it feels like a transition. I believe that when I get to Poland, or maybe even sooner in Istanbul, I’ll get some sense of autumn for sure.
I find that desire for ritual, or desire for particular comfort foods, comes in large unrelated, grasping batches and so represents an irrational, or at least reasonably dismissible impulse of a searching mind looking for some brief familiarity. I say irrational because I don’t think it addresses any pure physical need. I miss White Creek beef, but even briefly mentioning Poland in autumn made me think of the pungent, smoky, oily smell of smoked fish in Polish delicatessens. They are really tasty, and they do carry strong positive memories of my first weeks in Poland when I joined the program nearly a year ago.
But the fact that my mind so quickly leapt from White Creek beef to Polish fish tells me that there’s no fundamental rational need to either desire- instead it’s just my visceral reaction to being on the road between places and trying to espy a place to anchor to. Pungent oils, being in some species entirely produced for their scent signaling, become symbols for places or principles.
If I let those thoughts dominate, I’ll miss the point of what I’m doing now- which is hopping between cities in Turkey, to see old college friends. It may also close me out of some novelties- of trying whatever is new and current wherever I am. Not just in a food sense because concurrent with this desire for that familiarity in food, I find myself “hobbitish” in other senses of the word, when thinking of stepping outside my friend’s apartment. It means that I’ve had a certain excess of novelty and I’m struggling to process it all. What I need is to have perspective and not give too much credence to those impulses though. It’s my gut’s signal that I should settle soon- somewhere- and not live on buses for weeks on end, which is fair.
It’s like a headache- it’s a legitimate signal from your body, but it doesn’t mean you don’t take an ibuprofen and move on. Similarly I just take these impulses as warnings that I don’t fundamentally want to move around forever- 1-3 days in each city- and that I do prefer to set down some roots- even if they’re the advantageous roots of a tomato vine touching wet ground- tenuously grasping a spot for just a few months, like what I did in Marash.
I once answered an icebreaker question of “what is my spirit vegetable” by saying the potato. A nightshade just like tomatoes, the two cousins both have the feature called adventitious roots. Basically, nodes on their branches will respond to light or darkness with two different behaviors. Buried, they’ll form roots from the nodes. Exposed, they grow leaves and seek light. It’s why we hill potatoes- heaping soil against them- to encourage more roots to form.
I’d like to think that my form of settlement is something like an annual plant forming adventitious roots. It’s not in a perennial way that I do it- it’s simply to gain sustenance from that one piece of ground for a multi-month period before putting away my resources for the next start somewhere else. To overwork the analogy, I feel like hope for the world, hope for my own personal future, etc, need to be stored in tubers, in hard seeds, the way plants store their precious genetic code from damage in hard times. I jump from seasons of growth to seasons of storage, waiting, marshalling of resources.
Still whipping the analogy like a dying horse, I’d like to think that when I’ve been buried in life- immersed in growth media- that’s when I’ve put the most roots down. Like my life from 16 to 35, where I focused on full immersion of my life in White Creek, I just tried to be the best of the best at settling. I tried to know all the bits of info I could to navigate that world. I consciously took on a Bilbo-like* dedication to being an inhabitant of my area.
*I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan and have to frequently use its motifs for analogies.
When metaphorically not buried- not immersed- I’d like to think I’m now branching out. Discovering essential truths about myself, like that I’m an extrovert who became hermitish when overwhelmed with the immensity of tasks that need done in the world, but that I am attacking it with new energy and decidedly unhermitish tendencies. Sometimes I am extra-harsh in my rhetoric on comforts because it was my own personal sin of excess, to build a life of comfort around myself. I recognize that time now as a time where I avoided conflicts, assumed that the pursuit of the simplest hedon (the smallest measurable particle of pleasure) was my goal, and so designed my life to be full of easily repeated seasonal patterns. There’s nothing too wrong in that- some people spend their lives seeking exactly that- but I felt I’d made nearly 10 identical years doing exactly that, proving it was doable and proving that even very good things, done to excess, can run their course. I didn’t like the sense I was going to lather-rinse-repeat that pattern another 40-50 years til I was dead, and felt like making a move 5 years from now was no good- it was now or never.
The analogies have drifted from how I literally root in place in a setting like a Marash in southeast Turkey, or a Jaroslaw in southeast Poland, to how I metaphorically find myself adapting to two different phases in my life- a rooting phase coming strangely first, and a branching out stage being explored in my 30s. In both cases I love the parallels of plant behavior and my animal behavior. I similarly hope that when I do settle- with adventitious roots in a multimonth period, or more, that it’ll be in fertile places that will let me exhibit the full expression of what I can be.
In a post script of sorts, I’ll share that Perry’s got hit with a bad frost after a severe spring warmup. Global warming’s disruption of the Gulf Stream has caused a lot of destruction and loss of livelihood. Perry’s locally famous cider won’t be on this year. Even if I was just a mile away, I’d be as deprived of that unbeatable September flavor as I am now in Ankara, Turkey.
PS, I asked the AI assistant what it thought of this blog I wrote, and it suggested that I give my readers some closure. I intentionally avoid those things because I think it’s an insult on our intelligence as a species that we need to moralize, summarize, or otherwise compress our ideas into the lowest resolution .ZIP file to transmit. Our next stage of evolution requires us to reject both linearity and “loopish” assumptions that all things circle back onto themselves. Our obsession to create loops out of non-loops leads us to false conclusions. (concludere, Latin for “to shut completely.” Why shut what is open?
The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach) 
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