Belgium to Berlin on a Thumbnail

Waterloo, Belgium to Berlin, Germany -- August 2011

I'd caught the European equivalent of a Craigslist ride from Berlin to Brussels to meet the effervescent Heather Vescent who was in town on business from Los Angeles. She'd just been hired by a large Belgian firm to help predict the future of tech and the economy (yes, that's right, she's a professional Futurist!). It was fun to watch her leave for the day in her sassy tailored suits and purple hair*. After a few days touring Brussels – go see the Atomium when you're there! – it was time to hitchhike back to Berlin.

In delightful contrast to our posh hotel in the suburb of Waterloo**, I hefted my beat-up backpack over my shoulder around check-out time and hoofed it a mile to the highway. Soon I hopped in the car with an elven middle-aged lady on her way to work in Brussels. She listened to Europop with English lyrics on the radio and at a stoplight handed a bag of cookies to an old Turkish beggar woman on the side of the road, as was her daily custom. She took me to the fancy organic food store she worked at and set me up with a care package of granola and trail mix, as well as a reusable black laminated card with an erasable white marker. On it she wrote: “Berlin – Merci! Dank U! Thank You!” and drew a smiley face giving a thumbs up. I used the back side of that card many times on my European hitchhiking journeys. It still travels with me in the trunk of my car, her happy message emblazoned upon it.

It was shift change at her shop, and my second ride was from her co-worker, a sweet gentleman in his late 20s from Côte d'Ivoire. He spoke no English, and I speak very little French, so communication was tricky. Fortunately the international language of reggae pumped through the stereo. This fellow must have driven 20 minutes out of his way to get me to a serviceable service station outside of the city.

The next ride was from a Moroccan chauffeur-by-day, rockstar-by-night. He explained to me a number of times in excited, broken English that his Moroccan reggae-funk band features the guitarist from Blondie, and he invited me to stay with him in Liege if I wanted to come back in September for their next show. We exchanged albums, and when he dropped me off he told me to give him a call if I had trouble catching another ride.

I was stuck at that service station in Liege for a couple of hours, eating a sandwich made from ingredients pilfered from the hotel's buffet and wrapped up in a bag from the room provided for “sanitary reasons." My last ride for the day finally came from a Congolese fellow who taught underprivileged Belgian youth to rap in French. He'd just dropped his Rwandan-Canadian girlfriend off at the airport after her two-month visit and had picked me up on his way to Cologne to take his mind off the fact that he wouldn't see her again until December. 

I'd never been to Cologne, and the weather that day was so nice that I was loathe to spend it wasting away in automobiles. When I said I might spend the night there, the Congolese fellow was nice enough to drop me in the city center. A lot of my rides have gone out of their way for me, and I sincerely appreciated it every time, especially while toting 40+ lbs of gear. Boots back on the ground, I got a bead on a couple of hostels from a hotel concierge. Before I checked in I sat gazing at an ancient cathedral from a pub patio in the old town, soaking up the sunshine over a Kolsch, listening to an Irishman speak German with an Irish accent and a German speak English with an Irish accent, too.

The next day, with a raging hangover, I successfully – if painfully – hitched the remaining 350 miles back to Berlin in twelve hours with five trucks, two cars and one hell of a headache. I holed up in my spartan Kreuzberg room the day after that, listening to the din of Goelitzer Park that wafted through my open window as I recovered.

*The crazy loon then flew into Reno for the last two days of Burning Man. Jet-setters, us.

**Yes, that Waterloo. And yes, I did have Abba stuck in my head for the duration of our stay.

Creepy-Crawly Concerns

Esmerelda outside of Hydrangea

Here on Cherrymont Farm in southern Pennsylvania I'm currently residing in a cabin known as Hydrangea House – named for the flowers that surround it – a wooden structure roughly 10x10 feet built in the early 1900s. There's a loft for sleeping, so the floorspace of the cabin feels pretty roomy. A small round table covered by an patterned Indian cloth sits in front of large windows where I procrastinate from working on the second draft of my novel by looking out at the lush green grass and autumn fireworks. This morning I woke to a lovely romantic mist creating chiaroscuro haze in the treetops visible from the high window of Hydrangea that ventilates the loft.

But it is awfully rustic here, which is saying something after a year on an off-grid homestead in Montana. While I have electricity in the cabin – supplied by a power strip plugged into a heavy-duty extension cord that runs from the main house – the bathroom facilities are in the big house or the outhouse, both a mere 20 second walk away. Last time I was here I didn't recall being quite so entrenched in nature, but that was in the dead of winter, when buggies go dormant. I'm no longer super squeamish about insects and vermin, but I do have a few creepy-crawly concerns.

My workspace. Pity me.

Yesterday there were three hornets inside the cabin. I let them be because I don't like to interact with stinging-things if I don't have to. Especially in a magazine-wielding capacity – if I miss my target, things could get ugly. That was probably not a great idea though, as they were poking around the joint like prospective real estate buyers. One hornet made the mistake of landing in my bed last night though, so I killed it. That's the deal I have with the bugs in Hydrangea – stay away from my bed and I'll most likely leave you alone. Come near my bed and you forfeit your life. I think it's a reasonable request.

The stink bugs are just irritating. I don't remember them ever being this prolific in my southern childhood. They stink differently too, a mix between cheap cologne and musty farts. They're beginning to look for cozy places to spend the winter, which they often believe is my bed – and they'd be right if it weren't for me. Every night before I go to sleep I have to sift through three layers of covers and flick the stinkers away. The other night I had to evict ten from their blanket fort. They're harder to kill because I don't want to squash them in the bedding, so they generally escape with what is essentially a good spanking. Last night I didn't find any, so maybe they're learning.

I'm also certain I have at least one rodent friend in the cabin. Sometimes the scratching around in the ceiling wakes me from a dead sleep at night, and I've found mutilated pieces of tissue on the built-in counter top. As long as I don't die of the Hanta virus, I suppose it'll be okay.

The view from the loft

I don't really mind the spiders – they eat other bugs and tend to keep to themselves. For a while I had an orb weaver (non-poisonous, I looked it up) the size of a 50 cent piece who built her large, luxurious web just off the loft. She freaked me out at first, but the night she moved in there were so many mosquitoes in the cabin that I let her do her thing. I named her Edwina and told her that as long as she stayed away from my bed we could live in harmony. Edwina hung out for a week and then disappeared one day. I was sad to see her go, I'd become quite fond of her company and bug-disposal services.

I believe Edwina's departure marks the beginning of the bug hibernation sequence. So while I'm enjoying this bit of Indian summer, it will be nice when the chilly weather drives all the winged creatures dormant. The mice, well, I might just have to accept them as my cabin companions through the colder months. But it's worth it for the tranquility and regular impromptu dinner parties Cherrymont is famous for.

The Places at the End of the Spaces in Between -- a musical tribute

I'm feeling the incessant grasp of gravity that holds land masses in place. I long for continents collided. I know the charm of it all lies in that ruthless distance, the spaces in between where I am and where I've been. Mostly I am absent, so my heart of full of fondness.

For now my Pangean heartbreak will maintain those oceanic fissures. The continents collide inside my fantasies--but remain far and wide thanks to necessity.

-R. Pontiff

Please enjoy the following musical tribute to a small sampling of the places I long for. (After the jump)

ARTICLE: Time to Bale

Well, I made it back to the east coast in one piece. Montana to DC in four days of driving, whew! I thought to honor my time in the Rocky Mountains, I'd post my swansong for the Philipsburg Mail (August 2013).

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Time to bale

by Reecy Pontiff

Well, I did it. Yes, this southern city girl made it through an entire year in Montana, including a winter, and most of the summer (which is like a New Orleans winter, but colder).

And to cap it off, I became a part of that revered annual ranching ritual: the hay harvest.

My rig during the hay harvest, the hay rake.

When I mentioned my new employment to my Montana friends, many regaled me with stories of driving tractors shortly after they took their first steps, but were encouraging nonetheless.

When I told my metropolitan friends what I was doing with my summer vacation, there were mixed reactions. My favorite came from one of my most fabulous of city-slicker friends, a cabaret singer named Chris who exclaimed, “Reecy, you're a farmer now?!”

I suppose for a few weeks there, I was.

My job was to operate the hay rake. For you fellow city mice out there, a hay rake is a long “V” shaped contraption on wheels pulled behind a tractor. The beams that form the “V” have a number of light-weight metal wheels covered in tines that spin on the ground, combing flattened rows of mowed hay together into big, fluffy piles. This allows the hay to dry faster – if you have wet hay in a bale it will rot – and the baling machine to scoop it up more efficiently. It was fun to watch the baler roll by, gobbling up the rows of hay like Pacman and then periodically pooping out a big round bale like a gigantic mutant rabbit pellet. 

Life from the tractor.

The training I received was startlingly brief, considering that I'd never even ridden on a tractor before, and how lawsuit-happy America has become. My only strict instructions were not to hit any bales (“The bales will win.”) and to keep the tires of the rake out of the ditches. Each field is hemmed in by irrigation ditches, which given my instructions meant the outer ring of hay was the most stressful to rake. It was hard not to feel at least a little paranoid, as the job entailed constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure the tires and rake wheels were all where they belonged and functioning properly.

On my first day I repeatedly hit a particularly lumpy patch of ground and my tiny, open cab John Deere pitched uneasily beneath me every time I moved across it. I asked my co-hayer, who like everyone else in Granite County had been doing this since birth, how difficult it might be to actually roll a tractor. “More talent than you've got,” he replied amicably, which put me at my ease–though I think he underestimated my talent.

The baler at work. See? GIANT RABBIT PELLETS!

As for my boss, he spoke almost reverently of the reason we'd gathered together. “That's some good hay,” he'd say with bright eyes. And he wasn't exaggerating—I keep hearing around town that this is the most hay a lot of folks have ever seen in these fields, and a number of times out on the ranch we had issues with the baler jamming up because there was so much.

Generally I found operating the rake to be meditative. I created a temporary labyrinth from the ground, shaping tidy lanes across the valley between four-foot, olive-drab barricades of hay that would soon be transformed into a flat, camel-colored landscape dotted with bales.

Haying was one of the best seasonal job I've ever had. I soon shall take my leave of the Rocky Mountain wildfires and return to moister altitudes--but might I return to Montana for the next haying season? I just might at that.

#end#

ARTICLE: These Boots Were Made for BBQ

From the Philipsburg Mail, July 2013

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by Reecy Pontiff

“The nice thing about barbecue is that there are no fingerprints, so you can't trace anything to anywhere,” laughed rotund and jolly BBQ impresario John Bagorio as he performed emergency chicken skin surgery on his entry with a toothpick.

Bagorio traveled with his three man team, “Da Fat Boyz BBQ”, all the way from Portland, Oregon in a converted 1989 ambulance to compete in the first annual Boots and BBQ Cookoff at the Drummond Rodeo last weekend.

It was a last-minute decision for the team to head up; Bagorio's regular teammate was unavailable to come, but “it showed up on the schedule and I'd never been to Montana, so I said, if I can get help, I'll come.”

Though Montana is a first for them, Bagorio's team participates in cookoffs near and far.

It's tricky to guess what judges will like in any given region as tastes vary from place to place, according to Bagorio. The day before the rodeo Da Fat Boyz sold samples to try and get a feel for the Montana palate.

“We travel all over the country and each region has a different flavor,” he said, “What I'm hoping is they like a little bit of heat and a little bit of sweet. If they don't, we're in trouble.”

It's not cheap participating in these events and Da Fat Boyz regularly look at $1000 in expenses between entry fees, travel and supplies. Some of their costs are recouped from food sales, but the big money is in the cash prizes – $6500 in all this time – handed out by the Pacific Northwest Barbecue Association (PNWBA), the group who with the help of Drummond mayor Gail Leeper sanctioned the Drummond cookoff.

The PNWBA's judging is done double-blind – each entry is put in a box with a barcode on it and assigned a random number. This is done “so your friends can't help you and your enemies can't screw you,” said BBQ master Dale Groetsema, who came out from Vancouver, Washington to participate.

Participants are also given a deadline to turn in their entries.

“If you're early you just stand around and wait,” Groetsema said, “if you're late you're disqualified.”

The competition included four kinds of meat – ribs, beef brisket, pork and chicken – judged for appearance, texture and taste. The judges are all certified by the PNWBA and overseen by a “table captain”, a sort of referee for the judges, according to head judge Angie Quaale.

“This is a first year event and kind of out of the way, so it's a good place to get your feet wet,” said Quaale, and with only eight teams “it's a great place to start with a small competition.”

This year the “Mayor's Choice” award, along with overall second place, went to Philipsburg's Upnsmokin' BBQ.

Competitions are how Upnsmokin' originally got their start, but to cover costs they had to start catering. Now with the restaurant, they've had to make time to get back to their roots according to owner Brett Schreyer.

“You have to back it up,” Schreyer said, “Some barbecue joints, as soon as they open up a restaurant they stop [competing] and they lose credibility with their customers.”

“So far it's been great. There's some top-notch cooks from the Pacific Northwest here,” he continued, “the contest is small but the competition is high.”

#end#

ARTICLE: Merrill K Riddick - Pioneering Eccentricity

I was terrible about documenting the 10 months I spent on an off-grid homestead in Montana. Fortunately I spent most of that time scribbling for the local rag, The Philipsburg Mail, which covers all of Granite County, MT (population 3000). I'll be posting some of my articles here.

From the Philipsburg Mail, May 2013:

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by Reecy Pontiff

Granite County's airport, Riddick Field, bears the name of a quixotic legend, a man who barnstormed with Charles Lindberg, ran three unsuccessful presidential campaigns and pioneered environmentalism in America. 

“He wasn't going to be the president... but everybody tolerated him. He had respect,” said Dean Neitz, who worked at the Philipsburg Mail when Merrill K. Riddick made his home here after World War II.

Neitz ran the printing press late into the night, sometimes until two in the morning, and Riddick would stop by to chew his ear off.

“When I'd be working at night Merrill would come in, and he'd talk and he'd talk and he'd talk. I was trying to run the press... He was kind of a nuisance. ” Neitz said.

But “he was certainly very bright... and a very accomplished pilot,” Neitz said.

And Riddick surely was. A graduate in the first class of the Army Air Force Aeronautics School in California, Riddick flew reconnaissance missions in Europe during WWI and acted as a flight instructor in both World Wars. He later barnstormed in an air circus with Charles A. Lindbergh and was also one of America's first airmail pilots, according to the University of Montana's Riddick archives.

Neitz recalls Riddick saying “he landed many times on the White House lawn with the mail,” during one of their late-night sessions.

Though born in New York state, Riddick's family moved to Montana when he was 11 years old. After his adventures through the wild blue yonder, Riddick returned to Montana to prospect for gold, according to his New York Times obituary.

While mining around the Granite County area, Riddick made local history by staking a claim on the corner of the bank parking lot in downtown Philipsburg. He drove a 4x4 post into the ground and placed the claim in an old tobacco can hanging from it, according to Mike Kahoe, who was chairman of the committee that rededicated Philipsburg Airport in Riddick's name.

“I don't know if you can actually stake claims on private property,” Kahoe said, “but I think he was trying to make a point.”

“The banker didn't like that very well because [Riddick] was actually thinking about drilling,” said Steve Immenschuh, who was just a boy in the 1960s and 70s when his mother ran the Philipsburg hotel where Riddick took up residence, “He had a drill rig just outside of town here on another project... he was serious!”

Riddick was quite a character around town, a short, round widower with thick glasses. He forayed into politics after the death of his wife, making a bid for governor of Montana in 1968 and U.S. senator in 1972. Failing miserably on both counts Riddick decided to raise his sites to the highest office in the nation – he ran presidential campaigns in 1976, 1980 and 1984, according to his New York Times obituary.

Immenschuh was a teenager when Riddick asked him to paint a campaign sign for his first election, which was hung in the window of Riddick's office on Broadway.

After Riddick lost, “it was stored in the hotel basement... a year later he decided he was going to run for another political office and we dig out the sign and I repaint it with a different party and a different office,” Immenschuh said, “The 'Merrill Riddick' stayed and everything else changed.”

Riddick was also famous for refusing to accept campaign donations – with the exception of a silver dollar from young Immenschuh.

“He was kind of a unique guy. I went down to his office and said, 'I know you're not taking any campaign contributions, but have a silver dollar,'” Immenschuh said, “He thought that was pretty nice. He said, 'That's not really a campaign contribution, that's something else,' so he took it.”

Fortunately Riddick had other projects to spend that silver dollar on. He also published a periodical on resource management called the “Journal of Applied Human Ecology” completely out of his own pocket – and that of his local financiers.

“My dad owned the service station... and I can remember him when I was a kid coming up and asking my dad for a little bit of money” to publish the journal, Kahoe said.

As the name of his journal suggested, the environment was a huge issue for Riddick. During his late-night sessions at the printing press with Neitz, “he talked about environmentalists. Nobody had heard the terminology [back then]. He was ahead of his time,” Nietz said.

To that end, Riddick ran for president under a political party of his own creation, the grandiosely named Magneto-hydrodynamics-Puritan Epic-Prohibition Party.

“He explained to me [his political party] had to do with producing electricity through burning coal and producing steam to turn the turbines,” Immenschuh said, “Which was really neat because I'd never heard of it before.”

And so it came that Philipsburg Airport was renamed Riddick Field on the town's bicentennial in 1976. Due to poor health Riddick had already relocated to Maryland to live with his sister, but he returned to Granite County with his family for the ceremony on that sunny day in May. “Several hundred persons flocked to the field” to listen to the local high school bands and watch the air circus, according to the May 6, 1976 issue of the Philipsburg Mail. Riddick even returned to the skies once more, taking a ride in an open cockpit biplane during the celebrations.

Merrill K. Riddick died in 1988, but here in Granite County his legend will live on forever.

#end#

ARTICLE: The City Girl's Guide to Winter in Montana

My, my, blogosphere, it has been a while since last we talked. 

I did it. One whole year in Montana. I'll actually be leaving on my first anniversary. There's so much I could say, but instead I'll post this piece I wrote not long after my arrival here (in fact the first article I wrote for the Philipsburg Mail back in October 2012, which I've been scribbling for ever since). It's actually hilarious to go back and read my blog posts from Cherrymont Farm in PA (where I only spent a month) after having braved life on an off-grid homestead for a Montana-style winter.

More to come later. Enjoy!

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The City Girl's Guide to Winter in Montana

By Reecy Pontiff

With the first dustings of snow covering the mountains here in Montana, Philipsburg is abuzz with a completely foreign concept to me: winter.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool city girl – and to top it off, a Southerner. I relocated to Philipsburg about two months ago, and while I grew up with the occasional snow during my childhood in Virginia, I haven't spent a whole winter north of Louisiana in almost a decade. The nighttime temperatures here have already dropped well below what we see during the coldest months in New Orleans – when it hits 60 degrees we're shivering in our parkas on the Gulf Coast. My beau, a Rocky Mountain native, and I have already argued over whether popcorn snow is “real” snow or not a number of times – of course it is, I say – and it's not even “real” winter yet. I've avoided winter for a very long time, so long that it's become a mythical beast in my head. This year it's time to face my fear.

TIMBER! Felling my first tree.

But ultimately, this is all an adventure to me, and living on the side of a mountain a few miles outside of town I'm experiencing firsthand what must be accomplished before a thick blanket of snow creates extra challenges for outdoor projects. Most of this is all new to a city girl like me. Before I moved here, I thought sawyers were just relatives of Tom, but today I felled my first tree with a chainsaw. Earlier this month I helped thresh the kale seeds and harvest onions and potatoes from the garden. Soon we'll be cutting the rest of the firewood and canning up stews. I'll be going on my first hunt, though thankfully we won't be relying on my skills alone for this year's meat.

When I tell Philipsburgers where I'm from, many say I'm really in for it come winter time. Fortunately far more folks say that winter is their favorite season here in Montana and that I'm in for a treat.

So while the cold and the dark are daunting, I am looking forward to fun in the snow. I grew up skiing on the icy, groomed slopes of the Appalachians and can't wait to carve into the powder of the Pintlers.

Here on the mountain we'll be gearing up for my first snowshoeing expedition and I've been promised an ice luge to sled down once the snow is deep enough.

We'll build wooden sculptures to burn in a bonfire for the winter solstice, and I'm hoping that at least once or twice I can commute to work by snowmobile – that'll boggle some minds when I tell my friends down in New Orleans.

Perhaps most of all I am thoroughly charmed by the romantic vision of snuggling up with my mountain man and the dogs and a steaming mug of chocolate by the blazing wood stove, reading aloud from a favorite book as the fluffy snow piles up outside the window, dancing the limbs of the Lodgepoles in the gulch. It's a writer's dream, really.

Yes, if my thin Cajun blood can stay pumping in the cold and my vagabond soul can withstand the cabin fever, my first Montana winter shall be a wonderland indeed.

#end#