Strawberry cake

Once I ran away to a wild secret valley  in the Arkansas Ozarks to work on a farm. On Wednesdays  my boss and I would drive over the mountain and into town to deliver vegetables.  Afterward we’d take care of weekly errands—library, feed and seed, health food store. Then we’d stop in at the lunch counter off the court square, where you could get a turkey club, cottage cheese with pear half, macaroni salad, tuna melt. We’d go for the tuna melts and then split a piece of cake, yellow or green or pink, lemon or pistachio or strawberry flavored layer cake, soft sweet pastel box cake with Jello in the mix and matching frosting.

Pink cake. And the bottomless green bowl of the Meadowcreek Valley, the gut-burningly beautiful Buffalo River, cold springs and silver falls and mossy caves. Militia men, herbalists, writers, rock thieves, people who drank strychnine. And their lodging dogtrots, piles of tires and fence stone, shifting chimney smoke. We’d walk to a turquoise  swimming hole where the water moccasins were unmotivated. Y2K was coming, people were burying their stuff.  Our cabins were part greenhouse, part root cellar, part two-story fireplace. Drew and I couldn’t get enough Jimmy Driftwood.  Zach would fry fish in the yard and the coyotes would clean up.  Megan and Greg and I played Louis Jordan and drank beer and weighed salad greens. I stopped being a vegetarian and ate the pigs and chickens that had pastured behind my cabin.  Brad gave us deer meat, once some boar. Donnie drove up with movies and ice cream. For a few weeks the woods were full of morels. The bears ate the blueberries.  Thunderstorms broke the heat but came inside. At night the shadows of  luna moths made angel decals on the floor. I felt like I was settling into something as I picked peas, bundled onions, walked deep in the corn.  My truck lost parts and we made new ones.  We shot a skunk that we thought was rabid, but it was just circling a cage where another skunk was trapped.

Cake from fresh strawberries is more flecked beige than clear candy pink. These were made with ripe, almost caving berries I bought just down the road. They’re moist and not too sweet, with olive oil and crème fraîche, and a little white pepper for warmth. They’re better than the box kind, unless you have run away to dark green woods and tuna melts in the mountains of Arkansas.  There, bluestar on the roadside, pink cake, white heart-faced barn owls hiding and hunting.

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