Clogs Abroad: Collioure Connections, Part One

 "So we must leave the North Star behind us," said Miss Bianca to Patience. "Can you remember?" - Miss Bianca, by Margery Sharp     

 

Let's start with the obvious: Train travel is so different from flying. On a train, one generally leaves and arrives in a city’s center. There isn’t much time devoted to security on trains – shoes stay on, electronics stay packed, you’re not shuffled through a line like a bellowing beeve. Train travel is slower, but easier. 

           Except – sometimes the extra time built into air-travel for the shoeless-shuffle can make a big difference in terms of being oriented to departure gates, restrooms, and water stops.

            I reflected on those differences as I jumped out of my taxi in Barcelona, dashed into the, yes, centrally-located train station, and, in a perfect sweat of worry and disorientation, looked at the departure boards. I was headed to Collioure, France, with a transfer in Perpignan. None of the signs wore words resembling either.

            Sure, Collioure is tiny, and also after a transfer, so I wasn’t expecting to see it listed on the boards. But I’d hoped there would be an indication of, like, This way for France, buddies! There was, but I was too rushed to spot it. I asked a uniformed person (ask is not the right word: I thrust my ticket out and gasped, "Donde? Donde?") where I should go and she calmly pointed me toward an escalator leading down to the platforms for trains heading to, oh, silly me, Gare de Lyon. That way to France, buddy.

            The train was more crowded than I’d expected it to be. Full, actually. I found my seat after glancing repeatedly at my ticket – as it cripples my language abilities, travel stress affects my retention of numbers; I should have allowed myself at least a thirty minute cushion at the train station, but arriving early to anything is not in my nature. At least I hadn’t thought I had time for a quick smoke outside the station.

            I settled in and watched Barcelona give way to suburbs, and then to farms, still brittle and brown in the early March sunshine. The Pyrenees rose in the distance, their peaks cloaked in snow, an unexpected geographical and visual treat.

            An hour and a half later, we crossed the border into France and stopped at Perpignan. I grabbed my little blue suitcase, hopped off, and went to find my connection.

Here is something I have learned. Traveling solo means you can make all the mistakes. There is nobody to deride your rationale for thinking a certain bus goes to a certain station when you find yourself going in the opposite direction. Nobody needs an explanation for how you missed the signs. Indeed, the opposite direction can lead to some interesting adventures and knit together the landscape of a place in a way you might otherwise have missed. Accidental forests are discovered and explored. There is also no one to apologize to for making a mistake. There is no reason to have your day ruined by the internal conversations of imagined rebuke and self-blame. Am I harder on myself (and possibly my occasional fellow travelers, all of whom, by the way, are a lot of fun to travel with) than I should be? Who knows. What I’m saying is that, freed from another person’s expectations, appetites, fatigues, desires, and walking speeds, travel is simplified.

So, when you learn the connection from Perpignan to Collioure is by bus because those particular rails are under construction, you are free to dash around and outside of the train station looking for the bus stop in the ten minutes you have before the bus departs. You can go to every exit, ask for directions, follow them into dead ends and blocked doors. You are free to let sweat trickle down your spine. You are released from feeling like you need to apologize to anyone when it becomes abundantly clear you’ve missed the bus without ever finding where it was supposed to depart from.

            And, there is the added benefit of finding out another train to Collioure, on a different set of rails, I guess, would be along in about thirty minutes. A train, mind you; I didn’t want to take a dumb bus anyway. This was working out in my favor!

            I relaxed with a citrus soda and a smoke, all the time in the world.

             A note about smoking cigarettes. If you don’t, don’t. If you’re like me and enjoy surrounding yourself with a toxic cloud as an excuse to leave crowded gatherings or other awkward social interactions (“going out for a think and a stink,” you might say to no one in particular as you put your coat on and walk outside to stand alone in the rain, snow, freezing temperatures, locusts, or tornados), Europe is a fun place with ashtrays everywhere. (There also may be some truth to the stereotype that "breaks" do not exist in restaurants for non-smokers, but that is a different story, possibly about Wage Theft.)

            Collioure is on the Mediterranean coast of France, a tiny hamlet tucked like a pearl into a necklace of other tiny villages. In terms of culture and atmosphere, there were at least six other places where I could have disembarked and enjoyed an experience similar to the one I had. But my reasons for going to Collioure were specific – I was on a Side Quest, a chance to step away from the real reason I was in Europe in the first place, a reason I don’t feel like writing about at the moment.

            I was there to visit Patrick O’Brian’s grave.

            Few writers have given me the kind of pleasure O’Brian delivers. He’s probably not for everyone, but if you like tall ships, and battles at sea, and enjoyed watching the movie “Master and Commander”, I’d recommend his books. Font size, some sparseness to the language, and a hard-to-pin-down melancholy are, admittedly, challenges. But that is why I have reading glasses, and I learned to love the way a day’s-long battle is described in one devastating sentence, and I guess I don’t mind a little melancholy. (I’ve written about his books here before in "The Master and the Marmalade," February, 2014.)

            The train station in Collioure is about a quarter of a mile above the cluster of houses and restaurants forming a rough letter “C” around the beach. I headed down the hill, dragging my suitcase until the noise of the wheels against the cobblestones started rattling my teeth. I picked it up and carried it, walking with intent, as one does when arriving in a strange place.

The entrance to my hotel was hidden so effectively I’m frankly surprised they had any trade at all. I inadvertently performed a preliminary reconnaissance of the place, occasionally looking at my phone for directions, a tiring game of “Warm, Hot, Warm, Cold, Cold, Cold.” I might have even muttered, “oh come on,” when I found the sign with an arrow pointing down an alley I had walked past about six times – it’s a small town, but has that Mediterranean Maziness you may have encountered in places like Genoa or Barcelona.

After checking in and getting a map, I went to my room to wash my face, change my socks, and plan my route to the hillside cemetery. Plenty of hours left in the day, despite the missed connection in Perpignan. 

So far, so good.

Dull Knives and Cold Pans

 

 

 Keep your knives sharp and your pans hot

 – Just something we say to each other sometimes

 

           These knives are pretty dull right now. Unlike chef knives, which lose their edge with work, my writing “knives” need use to stay sharp, and I’ve neglected them for several years.

            It’s true: I was going great-guns there for a while, working on this blog, working on an amalgamation of the blogs with an autobiographical skeleton to hold the meat of the essays. Agent letters were going out. Book pitches galore. I was using my time away from cooking wisely. To a point. Although, honestly, I was feeling pretty idle in August of 2018 when I got a call from a former Exec Chef;  he wanted me back for a minute! I returned to my first command for a year-long stint at the helm, a bittersweet, rat-heavy stint.

When I left, I thought I was done with kitchens forever. My lower back was so happy.

With a little time on my hands again, I began working on a different, third-person version of the cooking memoir, which had nothing to do with the clog blogs, but really tended to focus on the highs and lows of a long kitchen career, including my profound loathing of cocaine (I do go on!), and the personal growth and sacrifices with which this career rides tandem. I found it fairly compelling, enough to give it a pithy title (To Hell with All That) and worked on it almost every day.

The record-scratch of March of 2020 occurred and I, like a bunch of other people, found it almost impossible to concentrate on the literary equivalent of pushing peas around a plate. Work slowed down. Stopped.  

            A couple of months later, I sort of started again, but really couldn’t see the point of it all: The state of the world was more interesting than the state of my navel. I returned to the project a few times, but the work produced was nonsense-adjacent, slightly feral in tone, and, I suspect, incomprehensible to anyone living outside of my head. And I badly needed to find a job-job at that point.

            The job I found was a great gig. Tiny little place with a great reputation in Seattle, a lot of creative room to maneuver, a name that inspired me on a daily basis to begin an essay about my feelings of insecurity whenever my writing work was compared to that of a giant in the field (vanity much?). A different kind of rat ruined the experience, but the timing worked in my favor – I needed a month off for traveling and that would have been almost impossible to swing if I were still in my clogs every day.

            Journaling comes pretty easily to me when I’m out and about. The little notebook-and-pen combo are like good paring knives – they stay sharp enough to trim Brussels sprouts and garlic without taking off the tip of a thumb; I couldn’t have fashioned a tomato rosette with one of these little knives (we’re talking figuratively here) without a trip to the whet stone, but they were used every day, with some interesting results. Sketches, reflections, food notes, all embedded in the chronology of the journey.

            With those journals in mind, I’m changing the course of these clog blogs for a bit, while I get back into the groove and feel ready to tackle the large scale butchery that is Trad Pub – the knife set I’ll need to hack into that beast must be very sharp, so I want to get some good practice reps in here first.

            But while we’re here, talking about knives, let’s talk about sharpening, a field I am decidedly not an expert in, so the talk will be brief and might consist entirely of: Should you like to learn more, there are many resources out there for you. (My former Sous Chefs’ jaws are hitting the ground right now – I’m a honer, and an infrequent sharpener, at best; my knives are pretty annoying to the Razor Lads. If they thought I had the audacity to describe a method, that I actually believed I was a good source of information here, were worries plaguing me while writing this. So let that short and italicized instruction suffice.)

One such resource is a book called Knives Cooks Love. I’m pretty sure I have a copy around here somewhere….

I found it. Flipped through it – it’s a Sur la Table book with a very onion-heavy focaccia on the cover, the kind of book stacked next to the store’s register. While the clerk is wrapping your le Creuset Dutch Oven – this season’s colors run from Brioche, to Peche, to Rhone, to Red, by the way – while the clerk wraps up your latest gorgeous kitchen treat, you decide to buy the book, for yourself, for a friend who loves to cook but simply can’t master the knuckle-claw, it doesn’t matter: It’s a book with a lot of information and dinner-party recipes. I don’t remember how it landed up on my shelves – I’m too smug/vulnerable to have purchased it myself – I’m supposed to know how to do the knife stuff by now, and I am not a home cook, I do not need a recipe for a beet and walnut salad.  This is an unfortunate, insecure combination of feelings, a frequent tightrope walk through my culinary-school-free career. But we aren’t all born knowing everything, and I’m not as knife focused as many chefs.

I’m deeply regretting the choice to write about this topic. Nothing leads to greater public shaming than calling yourself out on your own dull-ass knives. But, as it’s an essay about writing tools, and it’s going all over the place and isn’t really coming together in a particularly cohesive way, I have, perhaps, illustrated the point in a graceless, ragged way. Let us persist.

            My first serious knife was a gift from a guy named Hilbo. I worked with him just before the turn of the century at a long-closed spot called, Hilbo’s Alligator Soul. I consider him my first mentor (in kitchens), and remember his ferocity and kindness with a full heart. I named that knife Chopper, a santoku with a Granton Edge, the way a girl might name her first cat Fluffy. I don’t name all of my knives. That would be weird. But there was Kingfisher, a gorgeous knife that I brought along when I traveled in 2010. My daily sharps for cheese and butter are anonymous; my chef knives live in a knife roll right now.

            As for hot pans, I have no real need anymore, not with the kind of cooking I currently do. I’m not searing steaks or scallops, because I don’t have a hood in my kitchen, but also because I’m not interested in eating those fleshy bits right now. I don’t need a hard sear on a batch of lentils. If you are interested in high-heat cooking, hey! It’s summertime (she writes, wrapped in a blanket because it’s June in Seattle), get out there and do some grilling.

            Let the spirit of the saying guide you: May your knives forever be sharp, may your prep callous not grow too large, may your pans forever be hot, and may the oil not spatter your face. It's meant as a blessing.