Labor

“It’s a beautiful day out!” said the man walking a surprisingly swishy dog for rural New Hampshire on a road meant for Point-A-to-Point-B sort of business and not for meandering. He said it with such a genuine grin, you wouldn’t have known it was code for ‘what are you doing here’ unless you grew up in these parts and knew the language. The password is a tilt of the head and a ‘Can’t complain!’ with an equally blinding flash of cheer. My mind doesn’t translate from regular English to New Englander that fast anymore and I said something robotic and unconvincing that made me sound like a flatlander or, for those unfamiliar with the term, a vacationer visiting from any state south. I rejected “Yup, it’s a pisser” at the last possible moment knowing that it would work but only if I could say ‘pisser’ without pausing to look at the word in a squinty, suspicious sort of way like I was examining a yard sale appliance.

I was walking the two-plus miles back to my sister’s house after spending the afternoon in the bookstore which was the only place I could find that had the five vital things that would keep me sane, internet access, cell phone coverage, hot coffee, a reliable heating system and, well, books. When I got off the plane in Logan Airport in Flip Flops it was clear how unwilling I was to grasp my situation. Winter and I bitterly parted ways long ago and I stopped returning its calls. My inability to keep the woodstove going was either because I no longer knew how to load the wood in ‘blazing inferno’ formation or because the damper needs to be turned in another direction besides ‘towards Mecca’ which was my first guess. My last effort produced the equivalent in BTUs of warming your hands over a baked potato. The meager clothing options to pilfer in my nephew’s closet tells a sad tale about how unhip warmth must be and the unwillingness of my sister’s cats to drape themselves over my cold feet even while walking had me seeking relief in the less rugged climate of retail-turned-Red-Cross-shelter.

Given the frigid and slick conditions, I was impressed with all of the extra effort I’d expended hiking back and forth into town like some burley mountain women trudging along in an ‘ain’t nothin’ kind of way. I considered stopping to track and trap small game all Grizzly Adams like so I could roast a vole over the woodstove if I ever figure out how to get it hot enough. Having to check the internal temperature of the little carcass with a meat thermometer, however, is way to Galloping Gourmet for rustic rodent roasting and I doubt I can find a thermometer with ‘Varmint’ listed on the dial.

Long ago I had shunned the idea of paying extra for a lighter laptop because I thought that sort of feature was only for slack-armed sissies but the load felt suddenly significant. Any idea I had about counting this forty-minute schlep as exercise was completely squashed by Mark Rippetoe, coach and author extraordinaire, when someone asked him if adding a walk was beneficial to strength improvements to which he was quoted as saying, “Walking for an hour is not exercise. It’s shopping. If you count it at all, in any way, as part of your program . . . well, I’ll be disappointed.”

After each of my non-exercise treks that first week, I set myself up at the corner table to get my e-mail done and do some necessary cyber surfing unfortunately, by Saturday I’d established a sort of Majlis Al-Shura – a Saudi-style, town-hall airing of grievances to the prince in residence - through no fault of my own. Folk here like to refer to this practice as ‘shooting the shit.’ As each person came in, they spotted me and whether or not I had any earthly clue who they were, they’d ask about my trip to India and gossip about people I’d never heard of which is, I’m guessing, how they knew who I was after various like-minded chats throughout the town. I doubt it’s the only thing they know about me.

In some regions of this country, Americans square dance, polka, play jazz or rap, New Englanders shoot the shit. If you aren’t familiar with the term you can’t do it and shouldn’t try. At best, you’ll get your feelings hurt and at worst you’ll end up walking straight into a nickname that you’ll never shake. Just ask my friend, Booger. Shooting the shit is essentially a call and response game of wits that’s part teasing, part stand-up sarcasm and part gossip. It involves a lot of ribbing and a stealthy sizing-up and is based on the desire to figure everyone out. Consider it a residue of the Puritans without the float test which is still practiced in this country and called ‘water boarding’.

In the Pacific Northwest this style of communication is unwelcome and will quickly get you shunned in a snitty-passive aggressive sort of way but it’s an essential tool here and it’s worth spending some time developing your game given that conditions force you to depend on neighbors to drag you out of snow banks from time to time. To survive in Seattle without earning a reputation as a nasty S.O.B., if north westerners would ever refer to somebody in such a pedestrian way, I learned to bury every third thing I was going to say behind a wholesome, supportive grin.

With the way I operate, I first threw myself into the viper pit of shit-talking, no-holds barred sarcasm peppered with the foul-mouthed expletives and colorful references to naughty bits with a fervent hope that I wouldn’t get tagged with an unsavory pseudonym. I joined a construction crew to help finish a summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee and I was trying to blend before I became the Piggy in this ‘Lord of the Flies’. If you’re looking to acquaint yourself with the more colorful characters, this would be the place to do it.

I had promised my sister I’d be home from India for my nephew’s graduation and that created some scheduling issues. I now find myself with a couple of months to kill while I formulate my next diabolical plan. It reminds me a little of Stalag 13 – given my necessary confinement in subzero conditions while I dig an escape tunnel out past the gate. Not that I don’t love my family but this is New England at it’s bleakest – March – and when I agreed to teach a boot camp at Gordo’s Gym in Wolfeboro along with my day job, I pictured lots and lots of push-ups performed at my command and with precision not soccer moms squatting in Sorel’s.

I’ve been working with my brother in-law once removed – I believe we refer to that as ‘ex’ – helping finish out the miles of pine trim in a home with a fabulous view and lots of windows. ‘Finish carpentry’ for those of us who aren’t nearly clairvoyant with molding measurements or are interested in keeping most of their fingers, looks a lot like sanding. Lots and lots of sanding. Eight hours a day as a matter of fact and after my first week I’d nearly run out of games in my head to make sanding interesting.

The first day on the job, I was privy to a conversation amongst the crew about whether or not a Glock 45 leaves any traceable marks on a bullet and if the concealed weapons permit had any flexibility when crossing the border. That in combination with the fact that we’ve all inadvertently sanded off our fingerprints had me concerned. The next day put me at ease when the subject turned to female menstruation and how accurately a doctor can predict conception dates which I found intriguing but then, given how many ‘unplanned’ children they all have, I had to wonder if perhaps they were looking at conception dates from the wrong side of the bar tab. This Monday morning quarterback chat didn’t appear to be lowering anybody’s child support payments but as the new guy and the only one of us who actually menstruates, I just nodded a lot and kept sanding.

Then, after a couple of days of verbal sparring when I proved that I could take even the sucker punches standing, Spanky treated us all to the half-time entertainment as he traipsed around in nothing but a tool belt and enough back hair to shelter him from a nor’easter. Luckily, when he sauntered into the bathroom I was working on he spared me his version of pole dancing performed in the other room on an aluminum ladder. As a woman in these situations, it’s important that you go along with the joke but not be too enthusiastic so I left my dollar bills in my pocket and went back to work. Had I considered it beforehand, I would have set my quota of naked episodes to roughly one per month accounting for scandalous mishaps and moonings but four days into the job and I’d already hit my limit which means that St. Patty’s day will have to be spent at home with a book far away from any Guinness tap.

Coming from India, I got a little caught up in the romantic notion of the noble working class and this little escapade was beginning to blow that concept right out of the shimmed window. But Mahatma Gandhi spun cloth on a wheel and thought everyone should do it and who am I to argue with Bapu.

Gandhi explained it this way, “I strongly believe in the sanctity of human labor. Men and women must perform their duties with devotion. Not to labor because of one's being wealthy is unholy. Work with the hands is the apprenticeship of honesty and recognition of fellow humans' toiling.” And maybe if the wealthy homeowners grabbed a putty knife and bellied-up to the baseboard beside me, I’d be feeling a whole lot more ‘devoted’ about now. Plus, painting poly on pine to spruce up the second home of stressed manhattanites seeking a scenic overlook to admire a rare view only seen by the upwardly mobile is not the sort of job Gandhi wanted us all to get our hands dirty doing. He himself spun Khadi, an inexpensive cloth, made on a wheel called Charkha and made into clothes worn by the working class until his dying day, making little use of his University College law degree.

In Indian Opinion on January 15, 1910, Gandhi wrote, “it seems to us that, after all, nature has intended man to earn his bread by manual labour -'by the sweat of his brow' -and intended him to dedicate his intellect not towards multiplying his material wants and surrounding himself with enervating and soul-destroying luxuries, but towards uplifting his moral being-towards knowing the will of the Creator- towards serving humanity and thus truly serving himself. If so, the profession of hawking, or, better still, simple agriculture or such other calling, must be the highest method of earning one's livelihood. And do not the millions do so? No doubt many follow nature unconsciously. It remains for those who are endowed with more than the ordinary measure of intellect to copy the millions consciously and use their intellect for uplifting their fellow labourers. No longer will it then be possible for the intellectuals in their conceit to look down upon the 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. For, of such is the world made."

It sounds beautiful until my fingertips bleed and then I find it doubtful that my whining is uplifting. I wish I could claim to be serving humanity in selfless ways but my goal is more of a labor lab in my ongoing attempt to explore functional movement. First, I keep designing workouts that ‘mimic’ real work though I haven’t dealt with the world of manual labor since my stint with the Romanian contractors. The experience of sanding for eight hours straight jacked on coffee and paint fumes is different than the experience of ‘labor’ in 20 minute timed bouts in a gym. Even if I could sand 200 feet of baseboard in 20 minutes, I’d have to do something else like it 23 more times in a day only to wake up in the morning to do it again. Second, the mental game of getting me to get up in the morning for eight hours of sanding and then focusing on each task without dallying or complaining is a rare opportunity to harden myself and my raw fingertips. Which, by the way, rugged fingertips will pay off rather nicely the first time I try and execute a Gi choke and get rejected with a burn of my fingers down the collar.

And if it sounded like I was getting uppity comparing myself to Gandhi here it should be noted that my status as an intellectual, had it existed previously, is being diminished daily by huffing polyurethane and sucking sawdust from treated lumber. One day soon, I fear, I’ll have nothing more interesting to say to my fellow noble laborers other than the occasional command of, “Smile!” like one of the carpenters who realized that most of his dialog was too dirty for someone who had all the equipment he was constantly referring to. He also replaced the game ‘Rate my Burp/Fart’ with a self-conscious ‘Scuze me’ completely for my benefit, he assured. I explained with a tight-lipped grin that smiling just lodges the flying sawdust between my teeth while I judged how quickly I could pack his pie-hole with wood putty.

I admit that’s a little not-so-Gandhi and I didn’t really mean it but I hate playing trained seal and I know that keeping the guys comfortable would entail smiling on command, pretending that dirty jokes are hilarious and Harley’s dreamy. I realized that every time I’m anything less than delighted by whatever these guys have to say, they think I’m ‘in a mood’ which might actually happen on a day when I’ve lost the mental game and feel slightly peeved after holding my arms over my head for four straight hours. And so what if sometimes I’m not radiant?

I did finally lose it and demanded a ‘cone of silence’ for the rest of the day when a simple conversation about Easter turned into references to stroking oneself complete with, um, sign language for the hearing impaired. It wasn’t the worst thing I had heard but it was the last thing I intended to hear that day. I let my opinion rip – a little spike of Sicilian what-for - and told them that my belief in fairy tales was threatened by all of their knuckle dragging and that if I was going to save myself from a lonely future with nothing but cats thanks to the picture of their gender they had painted for me - thank you very much - I would need some time alone for a little intracranial pep rally. Talk turned to football and golf clubs.

With my work day a little more wholesome, attention could now be paid to nutrition. To celebrate my first paycheck in the more lucrative dollar rather than rupees, I conned my nephew Gunnar into a ride to town for a quick meal after a week of drinking protein powder stirred into coconut milk. This has always been my emergency MRE for several reasons whenever I drop into hostile territory. First, it doesn’t have to be refrigerated since saturated fats are more stable and less prone to rancidity. Second, it’s antimicrobial and keeps my gut churning nicely until I can source clean food. Third, it has thermogenic properties which, especially here, will ratchet up my body temperature to ward of winter at least a little.
Most people still shy away from saturated fat even in coconut thanks to the propaganda regarding cholesterol and in spite of access to actual data that says otherwise. The easily searchable editorial by Harvard’s Walter Willet, M.D. in the American Journal of Public Health (1990) as quoted by Weston A. Price Foundation, "the focus of dietary recommendations is usually a reduction of saturated fat intake, no relation between saturated fat intake and risk of CHD was observed in the most informative prospective study to date."

Mary G. Enid, PhD of Westin A. Price is a big fan partly because of the antibacterial properties which she discusses in ‘Know Your Fats’. Enid writes, “A few researchers have known for some time that a derivative of coconut oil, lauric acid and monolaurin, are safe antimicrobial agents that can either kill completely or stop the growth of some of the most dangerous viruses and bacteria.” Continues Enid, “Monolaurin, in particular, is being shown to be useful in the prevention and treatment of severe bacterial infections, especially those that are difficult to treat or are antibiotic resistant. Difficult bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus as well as other bacteria have been studied here in the United States in research groups such as Dr. H.G. Preuss’s group at Georgetown University. They found that monolaurin combined with herbal essential oils inhibited pathogenic bacteria both in the petri dish (in vitro) and also in mice (in vivo).4 “ One can only imagine what cargo I snuck past customs in my intestinal track so this isn’t a bad strategy on my part.

According to an unconfirmed source, “In one study, the thermogenic (fat-burning) effect of a high-calorie diet containing 40 percent fat as MCFA [medium chain fatty acids] was compared to one containing 40 percent fat as LCFA [long chain fatty acids]. The thermogenic effect of the MCFA was almost twice as high as the LCFA: 120 calories versus 66 calories. The researchers concluded that the excess energy provided by fats in the form of MCFA would not be efficiently stored as fat, but rather would be burned. A follow-up study demonstrated that MCFA given over a six-day period can increase diet-induced thermogenesis by 50 percent.” This appeared in a website touting the diet benefits of coconut called coconut-connections.com. I wouldn’t refer to it unless I could directly attest to the fact that every time I drink a glug of this brew my body heat cranks up a few degrees, a completely necessary tool given I’ve already been wearing four layers of clothes and can still feel a chill. My only concern then is the protein powder because I can’t defend the bioavailability of the whey or be assured of the quality.

I asked Gunnar where he wanted to go given that he works at the most posh of the local restaurants and one of the few that keeps its doors open past the summer season. “It doesn’t really matter. Wherever you go the food is Sysco,” he said, referring to the Houston-based wholesale food supplier that according to the ‘Every Bite You Take: How Sysco Came To Monopolize Most of what you Eat,’ by Ulrich Boser posted Wednesday, February 21, 2009 for Slate services over 400,000 American businesses including every single one of the restaurants in this happy little hamlet. Interestingly, even the folks in the nearby town of Freedom are eating Sysco food which happens to supply the kitchens at Gitmo. The locals even joked post 9/11 that wiping out the entire community would take merely a spoonful of super-powered streptococcus in a shipment.

Though that’s the kind of joke shared over a cup of coffee here and then forgotten, it actually was a concern in Washington. “Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental--and deliberate—contamination,” wrote Michael Pollan in ‘The Vegetable Industrial Complex,’ which appeared in the New York Times Magazine on October 15, 2006 approximately a month after nearly 200 Americans in 26 states contracted E. coli from packaged spinach. Continues Pollan, “When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do." The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. "The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry" make them "vulnerable to terrorist attack." Today 80 percent of America's beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company.”

Slate’s article claims that much of Sysco’s produce is locally sourced, the products name-branded and the prepared foods unassuming but there are the exceptions. Take the SmartServe Chicken – Please, and bury it in a leak-proof container away from the aquifer. According to Slate, “While it looks natural, it consists of parts of other chicken breasts mashed together into a single, chicken-breastlike block. As the company notes on its Web site, our ‘unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost.’“ I reserve all my sculpted so-called-food consumption to buttercream roses shamelessly swiped off cake like a toad snatching insects. Beyond that, I prefer consumables whose descriptions appear in seed catalogs not periodic tables – protein powder momentarily aside.
For the most part, or parts, Sysco’s website made very little reference to actual edibles at all. I had hoped to find some information about their suppliers and how they source their food and when I looked at their ‘Supplier Compliance Guide’ assuming that it would give me a little insight on how they choose suppliers or how their suppliers, well, comply, I found this, “Sysco's Supply Chain Operations / Supplier Compliance (SCOPS) team is the central liaison between the Redistribution Center (RDC) network and the supplier community. SCOPS' role is to successfully transition suppliers into the RDC network and to monitor and report operational issues. Our goal is to promote positive and open relationships with RDC suppliers while sustaining operational requirements that result in shared cost reductions.” Wha?

This is not at all like the wholesale market in Paris, Marché d'Intérêt National de Rungis, which you might argue is Europe’s self-serve Sysco, covering 573 acres and feeds one-fifth of the French population stocking primarily livestock and the veggies in which you might make, say, soup stock. Roaming the stalls allows the chef to put a face on purveyors of the foods that often sport faces of their own. Barbaric as it would seem to American shoppers, the French prefer to buy their bunnies whole, unskinned and identifiable in a line-up so that they know what hops onto the menu is exactly that and not feral cats which make a less tasty Lapin Rôti à la Moutarde. Americans buy and believe in brands which is how we’ve been brainwashed to think thanks to our commerce driven system. This allows the squeamish to shop in a more sterile environment but leaves us evaluating brilliant marketing campaigns while the French are evaluating food. Slogans to ape and jingles to sing are far less nourishing.

In ‘Unhappy Meals’ published in the New York Times Magazine January 28, 2007, Michael Pollan argues that the ideology of ‘Nutritionism’ – which has scientists splintering food into nutrients and then making unfounded assumptions without considering the possibility that whole foods are greater than the sum of their known nutrients – traditional wisdom is overlooked. “The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.”

In contrast, Kathleen Flinn writes in ‘The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School’ about her time perusing Rungis with Chef Alexander Colville and says, “He gives us a lesson on quizzing stall managers. Vital questions include: Where did it come from? What did it eat? What does the seller know about the people who raised it? How long has it been hung to dry or waiting to be purchased? A good chef is not shy about asking such questions.” [pg 57] These are the same questions I asked in Ballard’s Farmer’s Market in Seattle, the same questions I would ask in India if I spoke any of the languages and the same questions I’d ask here if Sysco, an acronym for Systems and Services Company which sounds even less like it’s about the food, could answer questions on it’s website with text explaining things more clearly than:

“Sysco’s suppliers are an integral part of our business. We value our supplier relationships because we know that strong partnerships lead to growth and success – for our suppliers, our customers, our shareholders and our Sysco associates.” Right. Can I get organic fries with that?
Post World War II, America tried to foist its faceless system on the French in the name of the almighty Franc. Most of our initiatives were part of the Marshall Plan designed to rebuild France and turn the country away from communism. Julia Child explained this with the help of Alex Prud’homme in ‘My Life in France,’ “When American experts began making helpful suggestions about how the French could ‘increase productivity and profits’ the average Frenchman would shrug as if to say: “These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think, as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make these changes that you suggest.” [Pg 102] Child’s husband was assigned to the American Embassy in France and was responsible for bringing exhibits to Paris that would essentially sell capitalism rather than communism to the French.

Again, Pollan writes in ‘Unhappy Meals,’ “If there is one word that covers nearly all the changes industrialization has made to the food chain, it would be simplification. Chemical fertilizers simplify the chemistry of the soil, which in turn appears to simplify the chemistry of the food grown in that soil. Since the widespread adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined significantly. Some researchers blame the quality of the soil for the decline; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding to select for industrial qualities like yield rather than nutritional quality. Whichever it is, the trend toward simplification of our food continues on up the chain. Processing foods depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back in through ''fortification'': folic acid in refined flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal. But food scientists can add back only the nutrients food scientists recognize as important. What are they overlooking?”

According to Child and most folks who enjoy a good meal, the one thing that was clearly overlooked was flavor. “The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside a teddy bear.” [Pg 213] Child, who was never much concerned with the nutritional density of the meals she served and preferred her chicken to taste ‘Chickeny’, knew that there was something amiss with our birds. When quality flew out the window so did the taste. But it’s cheap.

“The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There's no escaping the fact that better food -- measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) – costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation,” wrote Pollan in ‘Unhappy Meals.’ For Americans in the end, all that money get’s paid back with interest in healthcare, vitamin supplements, gym memberships and lost wages due to our decrepitude.

In a small town in rural America, especially one with a limited growing season, sadly sourcing food begins at Wal-Mart which is not within walking distance for me and has no organic selection and no local suppliers which were not surprising given Wal-Mart’s singular focus on price slashing. Here, there are two supermarkets in town that are forgotten affiliates of giant chain stores though they look like renegade outposts that bootlegged the sign unless I’ve taken too many cart spins around boutique shops and Whole Foods –the Prada of Produce.

If I was planning to eat local and seasonal, William Bradford’s account in ‘History of the Plantation of Plymouth’ in 1620 recorded the suffering and starvation which left only 53 of 102 people alive a year later to celebrate the first Thanksgiving. That number included only four adult women. Essentially, eating local and seasonal in New England means not eating until July. That rivals Wal-Mart in cost savings and may be slightly healthier than eating Wal-Mart’s meat. I’ve managed to befriend a man with two English degrees that works in the meat department of IGA – let that be a lesson to you – and have hopes of turning him into my Squanto without the part about ostracizing him from his people in the end. All the ladies at the check-out tease him already so that may be an unavoidable consequence.

Of course I can buy my meats online and suck it up with Mexican produce for awhile but the trick is to find real local food that I’m sure is produced by the local farms after the snow melts. I may have to shift my hangout from the Bookstore to where ever it is the local farmers hang out. With any luck its got internet access, cell phone coverage, hot coffee, a reliable heating system and, well, books.

Sysco Kid

“It’s a beautiful day out!” said the man walking a surprisingly swishy dog for rural New Hampshire on a road meant for Point-A-to-Point-B sort of business and not for meandering. He said it with such a genuine grin, you wouldn’t have known it was code for ‘what are you doing here’ unless you grew up in these parts and knew the language. The password is a tilt of the head and a ‘Can’t complain!’ with an equally blinding flash of cheer. My mind doesn’t translate from regular English to New Englander that fast anymore and I said something robotic and unconvincing that made me sound like a flatlander or, for those unfamiliar with the term, a vacationer visiting from any state south. I rejected “Yup, it’s a pisser” at the last possible moment knowing that it would work but only if I could say ‘pisser’ without pausing to look at the word in a squinty, suspicious sort of way like I was examining a yard sale appliance.

I was walking the two-plus miles back to my sister’s house after spending the afternoon in the bookstore which was the only place I could find that had the five vital things that would keep me sane, internet access, cell phone coverage, hot coffee, a reliable heating system and, well, books. When I got off the plane in Logan Airport in Flip Flops it was clear how unwilling I was to grasp my situation. Winter and I bitterly parted ways long ago and I stopped returning its calls. My inability to keep the woodstove going was either because I no longer knew how to load the wood in ‘blazing inferno’ formation or because the damper needs to be turned in another direction besides ‘towards Mecca’ which was my first guess. My last effort produced the equivalent in BTUs of warming your hands over a baked potato. The meager clothing options to pilfer in my nephew’s closet tells a sad tale about how unhip warmth must be and the unwillingness of my sister’s cats to drape themselves over my cold feet even while walking had me seeking relief in the less rugged climate of retail-turned-Red-Cross-shelter.

Given the frigid and slick conditions, I was impressed with all of the extra effort I’d expended hiking back and forth into town like some burley mountain women trudging along in an ‘ain’t nothin’ kind of way. I considered stopping to track and trap small game all Grizzly Adams like so I could roast a vole over the woodstove if I ever figure out how to get it hot enough. Having to check the internal temperature of the little carcass with a meat thermometer, however, is way to Galloping Gourmet for rustic rodent roasting and I doubt I can find a thermometer with ‘Varmint’ listed on the dial.

Long ago I had shunned the idea of paying extra for a lighter laptop because I thought that sort of feature was only for slack-armed sissies but the load felt suddenly significant. Any idea I had about counting this forty-minute schlep as exercise was completely squashed by Mark Rippetoe, coach and author extraordinaire, when someone asked him if adding a walk was beneficial to strength improvements to which he was quoted as saying, “Walking for an hour is not exercise. It’s shopping. If you count it at all, in any way, as part of your program . . . well, I’ll be disappointed.”

After each of my non-exercise treks that first week, I set myself up at the corner table to get my e-mail done and do some necessary cyber surfing unfortunately, by Saturday I’d established a sort of Majlis Al-Shura – a Saudi-style, town-hall airing of grievances to the prince in residence - through no fault of my own. Folk here like to refer to this practice as ‘shooting the shit.’ As each person came in, they spotted me and whether or not I had any earthly clue who they were, they’d ask about my trip to India and gossip about people I’d never heard of which is, I’m guessing, how they knew who I was after various like-minded chats throughout the town. I doubt it’s the only thing they know about me.

In some regions of this country, Americans square dance, polka, play jazz or rap, New Englanders shoot the shit. If you aren’t familiar with the term you can’t do it and shouldn’t try. At best, you’ll get your feelings hurt and at worst you’ll end up walking straight into a nickname that you’ll never shake. Just ask my friend, Booger. Shooting the shit is essentially a call and response game of wits that’s part teasing, part stand-up sarcasm and part gossip. It involves a lot of ribbing and a stealthy sizing-up and is based on the desire to figure everyone out. Consider it a residue of the Puritans without the float test which is still practiced in this country and called ‘water boarding’.

In the Pacific Northwest this style of communication is unwelcome and will quickly get you shunned in a snitty-passive aggressive sort of way but it’s an essential tool here and it’s worth spending some time developing your game given that conditions force you to depend on neighbors to drag you out of snow banks from time to time. To survive in Seattle without earning a reputation as a nasty S.O.B., if north westerners would ever refer to somebody in such a pedestrian way, I learned to bury every third thing I was going to say behind a wholesome, supportive grin.

With the way I operate, I first threw myself into the viper pit of shit-talking, no-holds barred sarcasm peppered with the foul-mouthed expletives and colorful references to naughty bits with a fervent hope that I wouldn’t get tagged with an unsavory pseudonym. I joined a construction crew to help finish a summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee and I was trying to blend before I became the Piggy in this ‘Lord of the Flies’. If you’re looking to acquaint yourself with the more colorful characters, this would be the place to do it.

I had promised my sister I’d be home from India for my nephew’s graduation and that created some scheduling issues. I now find myself with a couple of months to kill while I formulate my next diabolical plan. It reminds me a little of Stalag 13 – given my necessary confinement in subzero conditions while I dig an escape tunnel out past the gate. Not that I don’t love my family but this is New England at it’s bleakest – March – and when I agreed to teach a boot camp at Gordo’s Gym in Wolfeboro along with my day job, I pictured lots and lots of push-ups performed at my command and with precision not soccer moms squatting in Sorel’s.

I’ve been working with my brother in-law once removed – I believe we refer to that as ‘ex’ – helping finish out the miles of pine trim in a home with a fabulous view and lots of windows. ‘Finish carpentry’ for those of us who aren’t nearly clairvoyant with molding measurements or are interested in keeping most of their fingers, looks a lot like sanding. Lots and lots of sanding. Eight hours a day as a matter of fact and after my first week I’d nearly run out of games in my head to make sanding interesting.

The first day on the job, I was privy to a conversation amongst the crew about whether or not a Glock 45 leaves any traceable marks on a bullet and if the concealed weapons permit had any flexibility when crossing the border. That in combination with the fact that we’ve all inadvertently sanded off our fingerprints had me concerned. The next day put me at ease when the subject turned to female menstruation and how accurately a doctor can predict conception dates which I found intriguing but then, given how many ‘unplanned’ children they all have, I had to wonder if perhaps they were looking at conception dates from the wrong side of the bar tab. This Monday morning quarterback chat didn’t appear to be lowering anybody’s child support payments but as the new guy and the only one of us who actually menstruates, I just nodded a lot and kept sanding.

Then, after a couple of days of verbal sparring when I proved that I could take even the sucker punches standing, Spanky treated us all to the half-time entertainment as he traipsed around in nothing but a tool belt and enough back hair to shelter him from a nor’easter. Luckily, when he sauntered into the bathroom I was working on he spared me his version of pole dancing performed in the other room on an aluminum ladder. As a woman in these situations, it’s important that you go along with the joke but not be too enthusiastic so I left my dollar bills in my pocket and went back to work. Had I considered it beforehand, I would have set my quota of naked episodes to roughly one per month accounting for scandalous mishaps and moonings but four days into the job and I’d already hit my limit which means that St. Patty’s day will have to be spent at home with a book far away from any Guinness tap.

Coming from India, I got a little caught up in the romantic notion of the noble working class and this little escapade was beginning to blow that concept right out of the shimmed window. But Mahatma Gandhi spun cloth on a wheel and thought everyone should do it and who am I to argue with Bapu.

Gandhi explained it this way, “I strongly believe in the sanctity of human labor. Men and women must perform their duties with devotion. Not to labor because of one's being wealthy is unholy. Work with the hands is the apprenticeship of honesty and recognition of fellow humans' toiling.” And maybe if the wealthy homeowners grabbed a putty knife and bellied-up to the baseboard beside me, I’d be feeling a whole lot more ‘devoted’ about now. Plus, painting poly on pine to spruce up the second home of stressed manhattanites seeking a scenic overlook to admire a rare view only seen by the upwardly mobile is not the sort of job Gandhi wanted us all to get our hands dirty doing. He himself spun Khadi, an inexpensive cloth, made on a wheel called Charkha and made into clothes worn by the working class until his dying day, making little use of his University College law degree.

In Indian Opinion on January 15, 1910, Gandhi wrote, “it seems to us that, after all, nature has intended man to earn his bread by manual labour -'by the sweat of his brow' -and intended him to dedicate his intellect not towards multiplying his material wants and surrounding himself with enervating and soul-destroying luxuries, but towards uplifting his moral being-towards knowing the will of the Creator- towards serving humanity and thus truly serving himself. If so, the profession of hawking, or, better still, simple agriculture or such other calling, must be the highest method of earning one's livelihood. And do not the millions do so? No doubt many follow nature unconsciously. It remains for those who are endowed with more than the ordinary measure of intellect to copy the millions consciously and use their intellect for uplifting their fellow labourers. No longer will it then be possible for the intellectuals in their conceit to look down upon the 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. For, of such is the world made."

It sounds beautiful until my fingertips bleed and then I find it doubtful that my whining is uplifting. I wish I could claim to be serving humanity in selfless ways but my goal is more of a labor lab in my ongoing attempt to explore functional movement. First, I keep designing workouts that ‘mimic’ real work though I haven’t dealt with the world of manual labor since my stint with the Romanian contractors. The experience of sanding for eight hours straight jacked on coffee and paint fumes is different than the experience of ‘labor’ in 20 minute timed bouts in a gym. Even if I could sand 200 feet of baseboard in 20 minutes, I’d have to do something else like it 23 more times in a day only to wake up in the morning to do it again. Second, the mental game of getting me to get up in the morning for eight hours of sanding and then focusing on each task without dallying or complaining is a rare opportunity to harden myself and my raw fingertips. Which, by the way, rugged fingertips will pay off rather nicely the first time I try and execute a Gi choke and get rejected with a burn of my fingers down the collar.

And if it sounded like I was getting uppity comparing myself to Gandhi here it should be noted that my status as an intellectual, had it existed previously, is being diminished daily by huffing polyurethane and sucking sawdust from treated lumber. One day soon, I fear, I’ll have nothing more interesting to say to my fellow noble laborers other than the occasional command of, “Smile!” like one of the carpenters who realized that most of his dialog was too dirty for someone who had all the equipment he was constantly referring to. He also replaced the game ‘Rate my Burp/Fart’ with a self-conscious ‘Scuze me’ completely for my benefit, he assured. I explained with a tight-lipped grin that smiling just lodges the flying sawdust between my teeth while I judged how quickly I could pack his pie-hole with wood putty.

I admit that’s a little not-so-Gandhi and I didn’t really mean it but I hate playing trained seal and I know that keeping the guys comfortable would entail smiling on command, pretending that dirty jokes are hilarious and Harley’s dreamy. I realized that every time I’m anything less than delighted by whatever these guys have to say, they think I’m ‘in a mood’ which might actually happen on a day when I’ve lost the mental game and feel slightly peeved after holding my arms over my head for four straight hours. And so what if sometimes I’m not radiant?

I did finally lose it and demanded a ‘cone of silence’ for the rest of the day when a simple conversation about Easter turned into references to stroking oneself complete with, um, sign language for the hearing impaired. It wasn’t the worst thing I had heard but it was the last thing I intended to hear that day. I let my opinion rip – a little spike of Sicilian what-for - and told them that my belief in fairy tales was threatened by all of their knuckle dragging and that if I was going to save myself from a lonely future with nothing but cats thanks to the picture of their gender they had painted for me - thank you very much - I would need some time alone for a little intracranial pep rally. Talk turned to football and golf clubs.

With my work day a little more wholesome, attention could now be paid to nutrition. To celebrate my first paycheck in the more lucrative dollar rather than rupees, I conned my nephew Gunnar into a ride to town for a quick meal after a week of drinking protein powder stirred into coconut milk. This has always been my emergency MRE for several reasons whenever I drop into hostile territory. First, it doesn’t have to be refrigerated since saturated fats are more stable and less prone to rancidity. Second, it’s antimicrobial and keeps my gut churning nicely until I can source clean food. Third, it has thermogenic properties which, especially here, will ratchet up my body temperature to ward of winter at least a little.
Most people still shy away from saturated fat even in coconut thanks to the propaganda regarding cholesterol and in spite of access to actual data that says otherwise. The easily searchable editorial by Harvard’s Walter Willet, M.D. in the American Journal of Public Health (1990) as quoted by Weston A. Price Foundation, "the focus of dietary recommendations is usually a reduction of saturated fat intake, no relation between saturated fat intake and risk of CHD was observed in the most informative prospective study to date."

Mary G. Enid, PhD of Westin A. Price is a big fan partly because of the antibacterial properties which she discusses in ‘Know Your Fats’. Enid writes, “A few researchers have known for some time that a derivative of coconut oil, lauric acid and monolaurin, are safe antimicrobial agents that can either kill completely or stop the growth of some of the most dangerous viruses and bacteria.” Continues Enid, “Monolaurin, in particular, is being shown to be useful in the prevention and treatment of severe bacterial infections, especially those that are difficult to treat or are antibiotic resistant. Difficult bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus as well as other bacteria have been studied here in the United States in research groups such as Dr. H.G. Preuss’s group at Georgetown University. They found that monolaurin combined with herbal essential oils inhibited pathogenic bacteria both in the petri dish (in vitro) and also in mice (in vivo).4 “ One can only imagine what cargo I snuck past customs in my intestinal track so this isn’t a bad strategy on my part.

According to an unconfirmed source, “In one study, the thermogenic (fat-burning) effect of a high-calorie diet containing 40 percent fat as MCFA [medium chain fatty acids] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_chain_fatty_acids#Long_and_short was compared to one containing 40 percent fat as LCFA [long chain fatty acids]. The thermogenic effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermogenic of the MCFA was almost twice as high as the LCFA: 120 calories versus 66 calories. The researchers concluded that the excess energy provided by fats in the form of MCFA would not be efficiently stored as fat, but rather would be burned. A follow-up study demonstrated that MCFA given over a six-day period can increase diet-induced thermogenesis by 50 percent.” This appeared in a website touting the diet benefits of coconut called coconut-connections.com. I wouldn’t refer to it unless I could directly attest to the fact that every time I drink a glug of this brew my body heat cranks up a few degrees, a completely necessary tool given I’ve already been wearing four layers of clothes and can still feel a chill. My only concern then is the protein powder because I can’t defend the bioavailability of the whey or be assured of the quality.

I asked Gunnar where he wanted to go given that he works at the most posh of the local restaurants and one of the few that keeps its doors open past the summer season. “It doesn’t really matter. Wherever you go the food is Sysco,” he said, referring to the Houston-based wholesale food supplier that according to the ‘Every Bite You Take: How Sysco Came To Monopolize Most of what you Eat,’ by Ulrich Boser posted Wednesday, February 21, 2009 for Slate services over 400,000 American businesses including every single one of the restaurants in this happy little hamlet. Interestingly, even the folks in the nearby town of Freedom are eating Sysco food which happens to supply the kitchens at Gitmo. The locals even joked post 9/11 that wiping out the entire community would take merely a spoonful of super-powered streptococcus Streptococcus in a shipment.

Though that’s the kind of joke shared over a cup of coffee here and then forgotten, it actually was a concern in Washington. “Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental--and deliberate—contamination,” wrote Michael Pollan in ‘The Vegetable Industrial Complex,’ which appeared in the New York Times Magazine on October 15, 2006 approximately a month after nearly 200 Americans in 26 states contracted E. coli from packaged spinach. Continues Pollan, “When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do." The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. "The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry" make them "vulnerable to terrorist attack." Today 80 percent of America's beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company.”

Slate’s article claims that much of Sysco’s produce is locally sourced, the products name-branded and the prepared foods unassuming but there are the exceptions. Take the SmartServe Chicken – Please, and bury it in a leak-proof container away from the aquifer. According to Slate, “While it looks natural, it consists of parts of other chicken breasts mashed together into a single, chicken-breastlike block. As the company notes on its Web site, our ‘unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost.’“ I reserve all my sculpted so-called-food consumption to buttercream roses shamelessly swiped off cake like a toad snatching insects. Beyond that, I prefer consumables whose descriptions appear in seed catalogs not periodic tables – protein powder momentarily aside.

For the most part, or parts, Sysco’s website made very little reference to actual edibles at all. I had hoped to find some information about their suppliers and how they source their food and when I looked at their ‘Supplier Compliance Guide’ assuming that it would give me a little insight on how they choose suppliers or how their suppliers, well, comply, I found this, “Sysco's Supply Chain Operations / Supplier Compliance (SCOPS) team is the central liaison between the Redistribution Center (RDC) network and the supplier community. SCOPS' role is to successfully transition suppliers into the RDC network and to monitor and report operational issues. Our goal is to promote positive and open relationships with RDC suppliers while sustaining operational requirements that result in shared cost reductions.” Wha?

This is not at all like the wholesale market in Paris, Marché d'Intérêt National de Rungis, which you might argue is Europe’s self-serve Sysco, covering 573 acres and feeds one-fifth of the French population stocking primarily livestock and the veggies in which you might make, say, soup stock. Roaming the stalls allows the chef to put a face on purveyors of the foods that often sport faces of their own. Barbaric as it would seem to American shoppers, the French prefer to buy their bunnies whole, unskinned and identifiable in a line-up so that they know what hops onto the menu is exactly that and not feral cats which make a less tasty Lapin Rôti à la Moutarde. Americans buy and believe in brands which is how we’ve been brainwashed to think thanks to our commerce driven system. This allows the squeamish to shop in a more sterile environment but leaves us evaluating brilliant marketing campaigns while the French are evaluating food. Slogans to ape and jingles to sing are far less nourishing.

In ‘Unhappy Meals’ published in the New York Times Magazine January 28, 2007, Michael Pollan argues that the ideology of ‘Nutritionism’ – which has scientists splintering food into nutrients and then making unfounded assumptions without considering the possibility that whole foods are greater than the sum of their known nutrients – traditional wisdom is overlooked. “The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.”

In contrast, Kathleen Flinn writes in ‘The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School’ about her time perusing Rungis with Chef Alexander Colville and says, “He gives us a lesson on quizzing stall managers. Vital questions include: Where did it come from? What did it eat? What does the seller know about the people who raised it? How long has it been hung to dry or waiting to be purchased? A good chef is not shy about asking such questions.” [pg 57] These are the same questions I asked in Ballard’s Farmer’s Market in Seattle, the same questions I would ask in India if I spoke any of the languages and the same questions I’d ask here if Sysco, an acronym for Systems and Services Company which sounds even less like it’s about the food, could answer questions on it’s website with text explaining things more clearly than:
“Sysco’s suppliers are an integral part of our business. We value our supplier relationships because we know that strong partnerships lead to growth and success – for our suppliers, our customers, our shareholders and our Sysco associates.” Right. Can I get organic fries with that?
Post World War II, America tried to foist its faceless system on the French in the name of the almighty Franc. Most of our initiatives were part of the Marshall Plan designed to rebuild France and turn the country away from communism. Julia Child explained this with the help of Alex Prud’homme in ‘My Life in France,’ “When American experts began making helpful suggestions about how the French could ‘increase productivity and profits’ the average Frenchman would shrug as if to say: “These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think, as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make these changes that you suggest.” [Pg 102] Child’s husband was assigned to the American Embassy in France and was responsible for bringing exhibits to Paris that would essentially sell capitalism rather than communism to the French.

Again, Pollan writes in ‘Unhappy Meals,’ “If there is one word that covers nearly all the changes industrialization has made to the food chain, it would be simplification. Chemical fertilizers simplify the chemistry of the soil, which in turn appears to simplify the chemistry of the food grown in that soil. Since the widespread adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined significantly. Some researchers blame the quality of the soil for the decline; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding to select for industrial qualities like yield rather than nutritional quality. Whichever it is, the trend toward simplification of our food continues on up the chain. Processing foods depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back in through ''fortification'': folic acid in refined flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal. But food scientists can add back only the nutrients food scientists recognize as important. What are they overlooking?”

According to Child and most folks who enjoy a good meal, the one thing that was clearly overlooked was flavor. “The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside a teddy bear.” [Pg 213] Child, who was never much concerned with the nutritional density of the meals she served and preferred her chicken to taste ‘Chickeny’, knew that there was something amiss with our birds. When quality flew out the window so did the taste. But it’s cheap.

“The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There's no escaping the fact that better food -- measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) – costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation,” wrote Pollan in ‘Unhappy Meals.’ For Americans in the end, all that money get’s paid back with interest in healthcare, vitamin supplements, gym memberships and lost wages due to our decrepitude.

In a small town in rural America, especially one with a limited growing season, sadly sourcing food begins at Wal-Mart which is not within walking distance for me and has no organic selection and no local suppliers which were not surprising given Wal-Mart’s singular focus on price slashing. Here, there are two supermarkets in town that are forgotten affiliates of giant chain stores though they look like renegade outposts that bootlegged the sign unless I’ve taken too many cart spins around boutique shops and Whole Foods –the Prada of Produce.
If I was planning to eat local and seasonal, William Bradford’s account in ‘History of the Plantation of Plymouth’ in 1620 recorded the suffering and starvation which left only 53 of 102 people alive a year later to celebrate the first Thanksgiving. That number included only four adult women. Essentially, eating local and seasonal in New England means not eating until July. That rivals Wal-Mart in cost savings and may be slightly healthier than eating Wal-Mart’s meat. I’ve managed to befriend a man with two English degrees that works in the meat department of IGA – let that be a lesson to you – and have hopes of turning him into my Squanto without the part about ostracizing him from his people in the end. All the ladies at the check-out tease him already so that may be an unavoidable consequence.

Of course I can buy my meats online and suck it up with Mexican produce for awhile but the trick is to find real local food that I’m sure is produced by the local farms after the snow melts. I may have to shift my hangout from the Bookstore to where ever it is the local farmers hang out. With any luck its got internet access, cell phone coverage, hot coffee, a reliable heating system and, well, books.

Basa was right

I collected my bags at SeaTac airport knowing that I should have been doing this very thing at an airport I flew over roughly six hours ago. There was no real reason for me to be in Seattle again. Instead there was a list of reasons to which girlfriends would have nodded in agreement while politely keeping their opinions to themselves. Being in this city was like sex with an ex – comfortable, reliable, familiar – that would leave me asking ‘why couldn’t we make this work?’ in spite of myself and as if I’d actually forgotten the answer. It was a silly indulgence hidden behind my ‘non-refundable’ return flight from Bangalore, a debit card unusable online thanks to one last indulgent cup of coffee in Heathrow Airport deemed ‘Suspicious Activity’ by my bank, and some fuzzy math that explained how a one way ticket from Washington to Boston and the transfer fee to change my destination were roughly equivalent.

I enjoyed twenty-one hours of flying, six attempts to poison me with in-flight food worthy of assault charges, five mind-numbing movies and a foot-dragging meander through Heathrow in which I tried unsuccessfully to miss my connection so I could visits friends in London. Some Brit, aligned with my secret agenda, tried hard to accommodate by pulling an emergency brake in the train that shuttled between terminals. This felled most of the occupants and forced us to exit on the wrong platform. The orderly, queue-loving Brits cordoned us neatly and then spent the next thirty minutes plotting exit strategies only to shuttle us through one of the three exit doors directly in front of us that opened directly to the platform on the other side of the train. We were eyed keenly and with suspicion as we walked through one at a time leaving a distance appropriate for queens of England following their kings while dreams of my first legitimate cup of coffee in six months poured away with each wasted minute. I readied for my just-to-say-I-tried sprint to the gate pausing only for a pageant-wave to my hijackers and a tightening of the straps to my backpack.

Those of us fresh from India, and I use the word ‘fresh’ loosely, joked that this would never have worked at the Bangalore Airport as Indian Aunties would have wandered off in every direction from the onset disregarding shouts and even gun-waving thanks to Gandhi and the residue of civil disobedience combined with their plain obstinacy and hearing loss. Regardless of minor mishaps and my best efforts the Brits did what the Brits do and efficiently moved me along until I found myself breathing the brisk but clear Seattle air with a ton of luggage on my back, a fist full of rupees in my pocket and a useless mobile phone that could help me secure a ride only if I elected to throw it at a cab windshield to get the driver’s attention. Even weighted down like a Sherpa, I was unflummoxed.

In India, something breaks. Had I allowed myself to get stressed by anything, I would have been stressed by everything. My time there became a sort of ‘coping camp’ so my current predicament left me unmoved. Twenty hours or more pressed against the rest of humanity was the norm in India so the flight had as little impact on me as finding myself in the middle of a city with a currency worth its weight in embossed stationary and no transportation other than the fervent hope that meditation would allow me to transcend matter. My well travelled friends with restricted passports had certainly landed themselves in more unforgiving circumstances especially Taha who recently found himself with a guarded escort and an order to get the hell out of Taiwan in less than twenty-four hours after global cris-crossing and a nap in a closed, unheated airport with any hopes of comfort heading to Bali in his luggage while he waited for a flight to Nairobi. For me, there was no imminent danger or threat of imprisonment but what was remarkable was my sense of complete contentment. I simply asked a businessman from L.A. if I could borrow his cell phone and then settled down with a book to wait for my friend Reza in the brisk winter breeze outside of Baggage Claim that, after the olfactory overload of India, refreshingly smelled like nothing but cold air.

All of it seemed perfectly reasonable when hours later I slid through the automatic check-out with a jar of organic almond butter at an upscale market with wide, serine isles in an equally upscale neighborhood with wide, serine streets and typed Microsoft’s main line as the ‘Preferred Customer’ card number to find that some things never change. Thanks to a group of brave freedom fighters willing to rack up a Preferred Savings tally in the name of another rather than be tracked and categorized for marketing purposes, the preferred savings which is usually nickels and dimes at a time, had already reached nearly $2,000 not six weeks into the new year thanks to all those fraudulently using the number in order to hide from ‘The Man’. How could I not come back? I was a vital part of ‘The Resistance’ and sometimes that demands some personal sacrifice. And I saved 42 cents.

My arrival in the United States was, for the most part pointless, other than a VISA which said In Hindi essentially, ‘You Don’t Have To Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here,” to quote Gretchen Wilson and I’m sure once translated, I’d find that the government of India had indeed quoted the country singer in an effort to give a little western-style pizzazz to paperwork. I had already decided to make the best of my return by embarking on a composting project in Vermont with my family while I figure out how to parlay all the fame and fortune of a Karnataka State Weightlifting Gold Medal into a lucrative product endorsement. Since the ‘Wheaties’ people haven’t called, it probably means returning to India where I’d built a rather cozy life for myself – if by cozy I mean dirty, dangerous and bacteria-infested – but with a certain amount of clout and respectability.

From the onset, my trip to India was never intended to be one of those journeys of personal discovery about which I would scrawl a 200+ page neurotic ramble of a memoir that gets lodged inexplicably on the best-seller list like a cherry pit choked on, plucked presumably from the bowl of cherries that is life. Unless of course, this manifesto already has that kind of vibe. It was never about where I ended up so much as how I got there and how I would handle it once I landed. Though finding myself in India and then writing about it would’ve been fabulously uplifting for my so-called career, I suspect in my case that process would be like locating lost keys right where I left them. I’m not sure that’s best-seller compelling. And, alas, I had been warned: There would be no leaving baggage at the airport unattended.

In ‘A Girl from Foreign,’ Sadia Shepard returned to the U.S. for a visit to find that ten months in India’s toxic air had blessed her with the lungs of a pack a day smoker according to her doctor. Taking into account the assault on the respiratory system as well as all the other exotic ways to die both quickly and slowly in India, it seems a silly place for someone like me whose preoccupation with wellness borders on persnickety. In fact, being persnickety about anything in India is a Western indulgence that I abandoned immediately along with western hair products and walking shoes. In India, one adjusts.

In fact, letting go of all my structures and beliefs was part of the appeal to begin with since most countries manage to have better overall health than Americans even with limited access to healthcare, no nutritional supplementation and an arguably unbalanced diet. Meanwhile I had built up a complex schedule full of work-outs, supplementation and meticulously-sourced, often-artisan foods that didn’t necessarily leave me any healthier. It did leave me with what could amount to my entire retirement account passing through my digestive system on it’s irretrievable way through the Seattle sewer system. Was there something other cultures added or something they had failed to add to their lifestyle that helped them live longer by what would appear to be accident? Is this a Gestalt phenomenon where all of our examination of minutiae is leading us farther away from any real answers?

Paying strict attention to parts of my lifestyle while ignoring other parts doesn’t make me a little less dead on the day when lack of sleep finally kills me. It would take distancing myself to come to conclusion and even then my ‘results’ would still be nothing more than speculation and maybe only applicable to me. It would be fun, though.

After six months, my laundry said it all. It was misshapen and worn after being hand-washed in cold tap water from the kitchen sink, scrubbed with what I assume were harsh and corrosive ingredients in the local bar laundry soap, twisted into tight balls to squeeze out water and hung out to dry in pollution so severe that it turned everything once white into a mottled steely grey. It aged my clothes as quickly as it aged me. My ragged t-shirts became an appropriate metaphor for the wear I was feeling. I was dirty, I was short of breath, I drank the tap water. I was, however, well-rested which is the kind of supreme joke you can usually only laugh at when it’s aimed at someone else.

In the end, I hadn’t found nutritional enlightenment to go along with my nightly eight hours of sleep. What I found for the most part were a people hurrying unquestioningly in our American footsteps all the way to the grave. There was an eagerness to westernize even if the results were bleak. Apparently, even dying young and fat is all the rage. Beneath that surface, there were things that I found there that, for me, would have only been found in India. For starters, it was meditation that gave me access to a new idea, a book that explained things to my non-believing, research hungry brain, and the snatch that connected the two.

I began to meditate regularly not because I was in India and that’s what you do when you’re a tourist and you’re not on Commercial Street paying too much for bangles to look like Madonna in the 80s but because the sensory overload of smells, sights and general chaos made at least thirty minutes a day of sensory deprivation not only a necessity but a relief. It reminded me of my early experiments with alcohol when somebody told me I could get rid of room spins by keeping one foot hanging over the bed touching the floor and I believed it eagerly because I wanted there to be an answer other than the more obvious stop drinking sooner, a solution I had already overlooked several drinks earlier.

As I calmly sat breathing, I boiled down the distractions of Bangalore’s sights, smells and sounds leaving nothing but a spicy broth in my head peppered with the occasional fleeting thought which, as it turned out, usually centered around the snatch, a movement I couldn’t quite master in spite of the many hours of practice and the looming state championship. I couldn’t help but think that regardless of how much work I put into it, that catching a significant percentage of my bodyweight over my head in that perfect space teetering between falling in front and falling behind was any feat other than luck. As a result, progress had become that: mostly luck.

I then overhauled my thinking and decided that I, like many people before and after me, could find the sweet spot but only if I would stop messing up my pretty solid understanding of the movement by thinking so damn hard about it. And I did – in time to win gold. This took me all the way back to one of my first coaches, Jim Martin, when I was 14 years old and learning to golf. After months of practicing swing mechanics, Jim lined up a bunch of balls and gave me three seconds to hit each one leaving me no time to brood about it. After countless repetitions, the body knos what to do instinctively while the brain worries, gets underfoot, creates unnecessary tension and gossips about you later. Wax on, wax off, Heather-son.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D. would describe this in a little all-you-can-eat buffet of ‘In the zone’ quotes in which athletes described moments of mastery in her book “Extraordinary Knowing – Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind” published by Bantum Dell, 2007:

“I read what Michael Jordan said about his mind-defying dunks: “I never practice those moves. I don’t know how to do them . . . . I’m taking off, like somebody put wings on me.” Here’s Catfish Hunter after he pitched his perfect game against the Minnesota Twins in 1968: “I wasn’t worried about a perfect game going into the ninth. It was like a dream. I was going on like I was in a daze. I never thought about it that whole time. If I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have thrown a perfect game – I know I wouldn’t.” Pele, describing his 1958 World Cup soccer game: “[I] played that whole game in a kind of trance, as if the future was unfolding before [my] own disinterested eyes.” And British golfer Tony Jacklin: “I’m absolutely engaged, involved in what I’m doing . . . . That’s the difficult state to arrive at. It comes and it goes and the pure fact that you go out on the first tee of a tournament and say, ‘I must concentrate today,’ is no good. It won’t work.” The German philosopher Eguen Herrigel talked this way about learning Zen archery: “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise . . . . You mustn’t open the right hand on purpose.”

There’s clearly a point in which thinking is a necessary part of training and, in the case of Zen archery or anything else sharp and lethal, life-preserving. My mother’s advice was also life-preserving for a time until much of it turned less-insightfully towards the many reasons to travel to New Hampshire and how best to begin a life of baby-making. It was at a point in my life when I began to disregard every third thing she said. When most of the movement in a snatch, or any other complicated skill, becomes instinct the time comes when every third thing the mind thinks should also be disregarded. Since the brain’s primary job is to keep you out of harm’s way, if given a voice during the snatch, it’s primary piece of advice would probably be, “Duck!” Not at all helpful.

Even if the brain could move at the speed of snatch, it doesn’t, which means that most of its useful advice comes too late and is as welcome as driving directions barked from the backseat. Think of it as touch-typing when fingers translate words into a key combination while never registering the individual letters. When I come across an unfamiliar word that I have to spell, my fingers slow to hunt-and-peck speed. I experienced this in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as well. My defense was automatic and I only regarded it after execution as if I was color-commentating the actions of another. This literally took years of training until blocking a choke was typing ‘The’ and not ‘T-H-E’.

Jiichi Watanabe and Lindy Avakian, in The Secrets of Judo: “You and your opponent will no longer be two bodies separated physically from each other but a single entity, physically, mentally, and spiritually inseparable.” That level of connectivity might be one belt away from my purple, but I know that when I grappled, I was reacting to what I knew was coming without knowing what had me know. It’s when I got entangled thinking about my offense that I generally missed something vital and found myself tapping out. The development of an offense usually comes only after the defense starts to happen automatically. It seems that most mastery is preparing me for a state of non-thinking, a state I achieved in high school without any of the preparatory thinking part with a reliable result that looked a lot more like stupidity.

Knowing that the thinking sometimes pushes me farther away from the experience of the snatch had me approaching the bar with less internal ruckus allowing me to ‘feel’ the movement rather than talk to myself about it. Once I’d created adequate acceleration and a reasonable trajectory, my job was simple: Get under the bar and stay there without messing it up and let the bar do what the bar does. Any idea I had about how that was going would only pop in my head after the fact and would depend on whether or not the bar was still balanced overhead when everything stopped moving. As Mundane as learning to trust the nature of gravity as a universal law can be a big step for someone like me who tends to make things complicated in my head. Realizing that my endless analysis was often pointless gossip about something that happened three seconds ago was a huge breakthrough for me. “An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by another force,” so said Sir Isaac. From then on, my job in the gym and in other areas of my life would be to stop being that other force standing in the way of my goal.

Not only did meditation give me a place and a time in which I sometimes visualized the perfect execution of the snatch it also gave me the mental practice of not thinking which my goal was during meditation at other times. In studies examining the brain with Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) during states of deep meditation and prayer, radiologist Andrew Newberg and his colleague Eugene D’Aquili doing research at the University of Pennsylvania found that blood flow to the posterior superior parietal lobe of the brain decreased. They published their findings in ‘Why God Won’t Go Away, Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.’ This has interesting implications as explained by Lloyd Mayer in ‘Knowing’.

“Those bundles of neurons located in the posterior superior parietal lobe, the region of the brain that’s critical to orienting us in the physical world. This part of the brain normally feeds us ongoing signals regarding the physical limits of our individual selves in relation to everything else, helping us separate “us” from “not us” with messages such as “I’m here, not there,” “I’m next to my bed, not on it,” or “I’m in my body, not hers.” During the subjects’ moments of deepest meditation and prayer, what stopped firing were all the signals that tell us where to locate the boundaries that separate us from everything that isn’t us.”[pg 65] Lloyd Mayer continues, “On a purely neurobiological basis, the SPECT scans led to a fascinating speculation. They suggested that anybody whose posterior superior parietal lobe quieted down would experience the same subjective sensation. They wouldn’t feel separate and boundaried from the rest of the world in all the ways we consider normal. Instead, they would probably experience a subjective sense of oneness or connectedness with everything around them.” [Pg 66]

“Newburg and D’Aquili’s experiment suggests there may be a neurobiological basis for achieving that art of union with reality, not by achieving access to new sources of sensory information but rather by learning how to tune down the flow of incoming sensory information that constitutes our daily and habitual diet. And that is absolutely consistent with what meditators and mystics have told us over centuries about how they gain access to the states they engage.” [Pg 66]

Leave it to me to twist mysticism not for perpetuating serenity and peace but to make me better, faster, stronger at throwing shit and kicking ass. I’m not convinced that Stacey, my yogi sister who spreads harmony and deep inner peace, will fully appreciate my interpretation. We may be in for a comic book style duel of superpowers like the Wonder Twins in a cat fight. “Wonder Twin powers Activate!” “Form of 65 Kilos,” “Shape of Downward Dog!” (Yes, Stace, I specifically wrote this for the Wonder Twins reference so I could giggle to myself over my Americano. Fellow patrons of Starbucks think I’m the weird ‘laugh at herself lady’ in the corner and they’ve suddenly elected to move to ‘more comfortable’ tables farther away)

And I can’t believe I’m going to say this having just returned from India using words that will sound so frickin’ Om it forces me to make fun of myself, wouldn’t becoming ‘one’ with the bar come in mighty handy? Wouldn’t sparring with that kind of mental edge be scary cool? Paul Tholey explores this as he argues for the benefits of Lucid Dreaming, which is a state in which a person who is dreaming can manipulate the dream, based on the Gestalt theory which, as he explains “conceives of the complex sensory-motor feedback system of the human physical organism as a servo-mechanism which serves the finely-tuned, energy-saving control of the organism.” Ok, I didn’t entirely get that the first time I read it and I’m not sure that I’ve even got it now but it gets more, um, lucid.

One of his arguments for lucid dreaming is the ability to incorporate the environment in the equation, “In the course of sensory-motor learning, separate parts of the phenomenal field can grow together with an increasing degree of unity. In this way, the skier "grows together" with his skis, or the tennis player with his racket. The sports equipment acts like an extension of the sensory-motor organs in the practiced athlete. The skier feels the snow and the terrain with his/her skis and willfully and deliberately moves the skis rather than his/her body,” writes Paul Tholey of Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Germany in ‘Application of Lucid Dreaming in Sports.’ Part of balancing the bar overhead in a snatch requires an intuitive feel of the bar that goes beyond up/down, left/right positioning. Feeling the bar as an extension of yourself gives you that special GPS of neurology.

“Visualization better work otherwise my whole life has been a hell of a coincidence,” Ben Blackstone said over a warm cup of coffee as we pondered my TiVo’d Brazilian Jiu Jitu training. Blackstone was my Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu coach in Seattle, and I had explained to him how in India, once I was getting enough sleep, my mind began to play stored images of chokes and sweeps that I had struggled with in class but that I suddenly understood in an instant as I walked through the crowded streets of Bangalore. I explained that though there was no place to practice in the city, I had continued to play back images in my mind and felt like I could probably execute the movements that had once had me stuck. He, of course, had talked to me about this practice before but I had never creating a discipline around it. In Jiu Jitsu, it’s seldom a formal part of the class but it’s a vital component in other martial arts and certainly of grapplers who like, say, winning.

In a piece for humankinetics.com called ‘Shingan: The Mind’s Eye' the practice of Katas in which one moves through the steps with an imaginary is explained. “The mind does not distinguish between a well-visualized Kata and an actual fight. The Kempo practitioner thus gains real self-defense experience without having to fight or harm a human being. Keep in mind that the Shaolin monks and the famous ancient Okinawan fighters developed their great fighting skill through Kata. Neither of these groups of warriors believed in mock competitive fighting. They practiced only Kata.” But then of course, I’ve never been able to get the measure of a Shoalin Monk since I’ve never seen one go toe to toe with Georges St. Pierre in a UFC title bid. I’m willing to take somebody’s word on it though and of course Google sources are never inaccurate.
Again Tholey explains this further in his paper on Lucid Dreaming:

“To illustrate this point I will first present the case of a competitor in the martial arts (Tholey & Utecht, 1987, p. 208). For years this man had studied the so-called "hard systems" (karate, tae kwon do, and jujitsu). Then he decided to learn the "soft" system of aikido. Over a period of two years, however, he failed to succeed in this because the previously learned movements stubbornly refused to be superseded. He considers the following to be the key experience that put him on the right path:

On this particular evening, after still not succeeding in wearing down my attacker and taking him to the mat, I went to bed somewhat disheartened. While falling asleep the situation ran through my mind time and again. While defending myself, the correct balancing movement collided with my inner impulse to execute a hard defensive block, so that I repeatedly ended up unprotected and standing there like a question mark . . . a ridiculous and unworthy situation for the wearer of a black belt. During a dream that night, I fell down hard one time instead of rolling away. That day I had made up my mind to ask myself the critical question in this situation: "Am I awake or am I dreaming?" I was immediately lucid. Without thinking very long about it, I immediately went to my Dojo, where I began an unsupervised training session on defense techniques with my dream partner. Time and time again I went through the exercise in a loose and effort-less way. It went better every time.

The next evening I went to bed full of expectations. I again achieved a lucid state and practiced aikido further. That’s the way it went the whole week until the formal training period started again. . . . I amazed my instructor with an almost perfect defense. Even though we speeded up the tempo [of our interchanges], I didn’t make any serious mistakes. From then on I learned quickly and received my own training license in one year.”

If this can be done with aikido, it can be done to override the tendency to bend my arms early in the snatch which developed as first a bad habit since I tended to be upper-body dominant thanks to the unpredictable back pain that I dealt with for years and second a faulty set-up. Performance Menu handles this in Issue 50 of their publication that came out this month and I was thrilled to read it but in a ‘now you tell me’ sort of way after struggling through the complete redesign of my poorly constructed starting position during my first two months in India. Performance Menu’s take on it was genius but certainly hard to sum up here other than to say a deadlift set-up never works for a number of reasons.

Initially I wanted to fight the point with my Indian coaches only to be proven wrong it seems. The set-up I was using had my hips too high and my shins perpendicular to the floor. This works well in powerlifting as the starting point for the deadlift but it almost always resulted in an early bend of the arms and a lack of explosive power out of the squat since my weight seemed to shift too heavily to my toes and didn’t seem to inspire much acceleration. Even when I set up correctly following the advice of my coach Sharada who I should have listened to right from the start and without question given the number of medals she’s one, I tended to shoot my hips up into the familiar position before the bar left the ground. This was one of the things my brain gossiped about three seconds after execution and that I was beginning to think would be fixed by nothing short of a lobotomy. One thorough session with a knitting needle would’ve stirred that idea right out of my head along with a lot of actually good ideas that I might later mourn the loss of.

One last point to ponder in the magical word of unthinking, is from studies done by Dean Radin, Ph.D., author of ‘The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena’ working with Marilyn Schlitz at California’s Institute of Noetic Sciences on ordinary folks like ourselves with an afternoon to kill looking at randomly generated photographs which actually might not make them like ourselves at all, “What I’ve observed in these experiments, conducted with a total of 131 participants so far, is that on average people sweat slightly more (that is, their autonomic nervous system becomes activated) before they see emotional photos than before they see calm photos. The observed overall difference in autonomic arousal is associated with a probability of p = 0.00003, so there is good reason to believe that this result is not due to chance. My colleagues and I have considered numerous conventional explanations for this effect, including sensory cues, inferences, nonrandom target selection, and physiological anticipatory effects, but none have been found to be adequate. It appears that our nervous systems can indeed perceive about five seconds into the future,” [Pg 228] as explained in ‘Knowing.’

The results were similar using ‘startle stimuli’, a blast of loud noise using a true random-number generator circuit not a computer algorithm, in a study done by Edwin May, Ph.D. in a collaborative effort with Hungarian physicist Zoltan Vassy. “In a paper published I 2003, the researchers reported that participants displayed more agitation – i.e. they sweated more – three seconds before they heard loud blasts of sound as opposed to silence during control periods, the probability statistics were impressive, with odds that the association was due to chance of less than 5.5 million to 1.”

This might be one of the only ways to understand the instinct that develops in Jiu Jitsu once a student passes the point of panic and starts to relax. Since I can’t necessarily go back in time and erase instinct only to see if I could get through the initial panic phase of Jiu Jitsu faster knowing that calming my mind would give me access to instinct, I’m not sure this helps. I do know that it will continue to be a reminder to me whenever I’m sparring to get out of my head more. And of course this always leads to the question I find myself asking at the end of some new piece of research, ‘is any of this even true?’ Everything I’ve read passes the ‘do no harm’ test even if the results are hard to measure and though I know it was part of my training in India, I don’t know if it was the part that made a difference.

At this point, I can’t help but think of my nephew Dustin’s superstition that washing hockey equipment ruins the season. It means if he can make it to the championship game, his gym bag has a radioactive miasma that could bust a Geiger gauge. Stale sweat smells bad but puberty adds a rare nose rich in hormonal funk that has me recoil even after being hardened by the routine olfactory abuses in the streets of Bangalore. As an observer, I can’t help but wonder if it has less to do with mind’s impact over matter and more to do with his personal impact on gag reflex. Perhaps it’s ability to impact the game’s outcome will one day be put to the test by the same scientists who were able to document the proof of beer goggles and it will likely be discussed by me at length at a party thrown by hosts who will never invite me back.