Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks

With “World War Z” back in 2013 and now with “Devolution,” certainly a child of the found-footage movie craze, Max Brooks has fully embraced the faux oral history novel. Subtitled “A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre,” the novel pulls together snippets of journals and interviews to tell its tale.

I grew up in a house with books on Bigfoot and the Lock Ness Monster tucked in tightly next paperback copies of “Lord of the Rings,” “Dune” “Chariots of the Gods,” and “A Man Called Intrepid.” It took me a while to work my way up to the latter, but Bigfoot was just as often found with me than in its place on the shelf. Pouring over glossy photo pages at the heard of the book, I’d stare hard at the grainy image of a hairy beast stepping over a felled tree, seemingly looking back to me before it’d continue on its way and disappear into the woods. So many trees, and so many places to hide! It would have been close-minded of me at the time--and now--to entertain a slim chance that something strange lurked out there and remained to be discovered.

“Devolution” takes as its conceit that a disparate group of urbanites have opted to become the inaugural members of a new green community nestled deep in the woods. No expenses spared, the cutting edge of technology is leveraged to reduce their carbon footprint and provide every urban comfort while promoting wellness, togetherness and a back-to-nature mentality.

Tragedy strikes when Mount Rainier erupts, wreaking havoc in the area and isolating the already remote outpost from broader civilization. Drama enough would have ensued with just this, as people who were initially strangers are suddenly called upon to solve problems and depend on others in ways they hadn’t intended, but this is a monster story, and so things soon get a little “hairy.”

I won’t say too much for fear of spoiling the book. The pacing is good and builds to a satisfying conclusion, but I’ll admit I wasn’t fully engaged with the characters. This is perhaps a drawback of the form itself. Where we rely heavily on journal entries, we get one person’s insights very clearly, in a heightened confessional style first-person narrative, but we’re so deep into this person’s head, we fail to see much of the others’ except as foils. While the adventure is there, its characters fall strangely flat and can’t seem to quite lift off the page into the round.

That said, with the novel coronavirus forcing us now to reassess our places in the world as individuals and as communities, this novel is nicely timed. A group of urban refugees with grandiose ideas of nature, our place in it, and how to get close to the land comes to realize that no matter our own strong feelings, nature doesn’t care about us. We may think we stand at one pole, but the world turns despite our wishes and we may quickly find ourselves at the bottom, looking up at something bigger and much scarier than we are.

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

Pulp, Original Graphic Novel by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

We pop our collective heads up and everywhere we look the world is in turmoil. 2020 is a unanimous write-off, and so it went with 1939 and the lead up to Fascism and World War II, and so it went with The Depression and psychic scars left in a population that survived that uncertainty and grinding poverty, and so it went going back to the 1890s, where it was considered a feat of divine luck just to survive a visit to a frontier surgeon.

Life. Is. Hard.

And, overall, it has always sucked.

Despite this, one constant source of pleasure for me is seeing smart people executing a job well. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips working together as a team have this down in spades. For years now, ever since “Criminal” and on through “Fatale” and all their other collaborations, they’ve returned and nibbled away at the same feast, savored and digested and presented back in different ways for the comics reader.

The pulps. Stories written to order, selling genre and pumped out at speed. These tales, whether lurid monster stories, noir mysteries or Western tales of adventure, were intended to be disposable, and the freelance writers who produced them, paid pennies for the word, were often treated the same way. Yet, if you were fast and lucky, you could make a living as a writer. And readers, if we were lucky, would find not just a good yarn, a trashy tale that knew what it was and played well within the rules, but something that smirked at those conventions, nodded to them, and somehow rose above.

“Pulp” does the same. One wonders under what conditions it was created, but it feels both timeless and a product of our time. It’s maybe lighter fare than their duo’s earlier original graphic novel “My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies,” but it’s a bracing read that lingers well after the last page has turned. Brubaker has the language and beats down to a science and Phillips’ art jumps off the page, from the frontier flashbacks to the congestion of a 1930s New York.

Life is hard.

Max, the protagonist of “Pulp,” is expertly drawn. Fedora always in place, he has the gaunt mustachioed face of an elder Dashiell Hammett. True to one of the genre’s tropes, his narration come to us out of a voice, he pulls together his story from pieces. There are “a lot of beginning,” he admits. “But that’s what life is…right?”

Life is hard and for every opportunity, every success and every failure, there comes a new beginning, and we keep living, just like all keep reading what this pair puts out, until it ends.

Pulp, Original Graphic Novel by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

Which way up

This weekend was a busy one for work… at the backend of long days and some midnight on-call sessions. What better way to reset our schedule than some Sunday afternoon chicken roasting? When the world goes upside down, I roast a chicken. It’s an easy, satisfying cook that doesn’t require finesse, is not too long and not too short, and fills the house with the promise of home and normalcy. 

 

Now, the recipe here is nothing fancy. It’s pure comfort food. Slight east Asian flavours with ginger and bird’s eye chilies were tossed through a can of chickpeas, half an onion finely diced, along with the chopped last of a head of broccolini, a bunch of garlic and a couple glugs of soya sauce. I use as much as I can of this to stuff the chicken cavity.

 

The bird is patted dry, rubbed with butter, liberally salted and further seasoned with some cayenne and ginger. Into the oven for 30 minutes at 450.

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the spicy chickpea mixture is tossed through some pre-cooked and cooled rice. Some more soya sauce.  

 

At the 450 mark the chick comes out and carefully set aside. If any pieces of skin have stuck to the sheet pan, scrape them off and mix them into the rice as you arrange the rice onto the sheet. You don’t want it too thick or too thin. Make a little space in the middle where the chicken can fit, then have the rice arranged in a ring around it that it will not burn and dry out. You want the bottom to soak up the chicken fat and make a nice crisp bed. Cook for another 45 minutes or so at 350.

 

Take the chicken out, test for doneness and set aside for ten minutes. I’ll usually give the rice a good mix, spread it out again and crank up the oven for another 10 minutes at 400.

 

Now, this all went to plan. The aim is to serve the chicken alongside the rice and a spoonful of the chickpea stuffing/salad, and then to go in for extras of the rich, chicken-fat flavoured rice. Rujira came over to inspect and start with the plating when she began to laugh. 

 

“It’s upside down!” She shook her head, “Again!”

 

I didn’t believe her and we proceeded with a short debate I lost as soon as I opened my mouth. It was upside down. 

 

Right at the start of our COVID-distancing adventure, I’d for some reason cooked a chicken breast-side down rather than up. I’ve never done this before. I’d since done it more than once again. I have no idea why. 

 

Truth, though, with everything else upside down, why not this, too? The results are less picturesque. There’s something awesome to behold in a chicken breast with perfectly crisp skin cut from the bone and plated in one perfect slice. The skin here is not that crisp because the breast sits in the juice as it cooks…

 

Yet the taste, as I’ve come to realize, is incredible. The meat is actually amazing, as the fat from the dark meat pours down onto the breast during the cook, keeping it juice and extra flavourful. 

 

Is it Instagram-worthy? Maybe not. Will it become a part of the new normal we’re negotiating? I think so.

Chris

Steak, finally...

Like many during this COVID-time, we’ve burrowed deep into domestic routine and thrown ourselves into cooking. We’ve allowed ourselves to indulge a little. You have to, right? I mean, we can’t really justify the two weeks where hot dogs featured absurdly high for the first time ever on the grocery list, then there was the run on crab, and our recurring cycle of curries peppered with the occasional (and ever-improving) home-made pastas. If everything else has been bad, this has been good.

I’ve even been reading food. Midway through Bill Bufford’s “Dirt” and just now dipping into, and enjoying much more, “Always Home,” Fanny Singer’s memoir of life and cooking with her mother, Alice Waters.

Lately, though, I’ve had steak in mind and no distraction is working. And not just any steak, steak with A.1. sauce. The memory of pungent vinegary umami flavor was reaching a gastronomical status I don’t think it ever really enjoyed with me before. Yet I do love a thing that hardly changes and I feel like I could spot this bottle on the door of my grandparents’ fridge in my sleep (right next to the selection of Kraft salad dressings). We ordered a bottle of the sauce off Amazon and waited.

This steak urge has been building with every week there’s news of incremental re-openings. Our pool opened under new rules. Stores and restaurants are pretty much opened and facing this new reality. And yet our grilling area is still off limits. So while the sauce had arrived, I felt like steak nirvana could not yet be achieved. And so we waited.

But yesterday was the day I broke. I didn’t care. I was done with waiting. I would brave the broiler and cook my steak in the oven.

A simple meal, the New York strip loin marinated a A.1. sauce for an hour, patted down and doused in steak spice just prior to entered the heated oven. On the side, broccolini dredged through the A.1. dripping from the steak marinade, drizzled with olive and roasted in the oven alongside potato wedges and slabs of zucchini.

Move over, Fanny Singer and your perfect daughter-of-Alice-Waters domestic bliss, this was home.

Chris

 

We know what we did last summer

So, we got married last summer. It was a small thing in front of two witnesses and the notary, followed by a dinner with close friends and Chris' family in Montreal. It was nothing big or that special but after being away for nearly 2 years, we were happy to see our friends.

A few days later, we made a decision to drive to Los Angeles where Chris would be starting a new job. We were sick of waiting around. Rather than staying put and then beginning our travels, we decided to make our own momentum to feel like we were stuck in limbo. As we were both working remotely at that point and we couldn't really take time off, we knew we would have to drive on the weekends and hole up somewhere to work during the week. The Labour Day weekend was coming up and we wanted to take advantage of the long weekend and get as much distance behind us, so we spent the night packing and jumped in the car the morning after the decision was made. Our visa was expected to come through shortly so we optimistically figured spend 1.5 to 2 weeks crossing to BC then driving down the coast to LA.

Who knew two weeks would turn into 2 months...

Oh, and it might bear mentioning that I don’t drive. At all. I have navigator duties and Chris would be the solo driver on the entire trip. 

It was the most spontaneous trip I've ever taken and we hardly had time to plan anything. All we knew was that we were driving to LA and we had to stay in Canada until the visa arrived. Then, we could cross the border and rush to our destination so Chris could start his job as soon as possible. We also decided that we would stay in hotels on the weekend as it would give us flexibility with check-in time with the possibility of breakfast on site, and we would stay in AirBNBs during the week to have more space to work and to cook, and to feel a little bit like home. Our knives (which traveled with us to Thailand for 2 years) were packed for easy retrieval. Of course, we also had a handy travel-sized rice cooker, just in case. We packed our travel clothes in one bag separate from the rest, which amounted to 3 more humongous suitcases. Funny how we can pack up our lives in just a mere few hours and stuff it all in a car when we decide to do so, don't you think?

The first 3 days of driving were long and intense. We decided we wanted to stay and work in Winnipeg the following week, so we knew where we needed to get. That meant more than 2300 kilometers of driving in 3 days. The first day started early and we drove uneventfully for 650 km to Sudbury, Ontario. What caught our attention was a tiny town of Mattawa, home of Big Joe Muffraw (we're still not quite sure who he was but his statue was awesome). I also ate Avgolemono which is a lemony chicken rice Greek soup, for the very first time at  Apollo Restaurant and Tavern.

From Sudbury, we went 1000 km to Thunder Bay which is still in Ontario, so we finally realized how huge Ontario really was. With dense fog in the morning and the rain hitting us all afternoon, the drive was not exactly leisurely. Still, it was impossible to miss the green and lush forests and the plentiful water along the road. We saw 2 of the 5 great lakes, Lake Huron and Lake Superior and maybe a thousand other small ones. They were breathtakingly beautiful. That night, we stayed at a gorgeous hotel on the northwestern shores of Lake Superior. The view of the water in front of the hotel was stunning and even though we had to rush out in the morning, we took the time to walk around the marina.

The third day of the drive was to Winnipeg, which was 700 km away. The Manitoba landscape couldn't be more different from Ontario. Where one was hilly and lush, this was flat, so much so that it reminded me of a joke a Manitoban friend told me: "If your dog runs away, you would be able to see it running for weeks." We also drove by several North American aboriginal communities and a couple of trading posts. We stopped to visit a few. 

In Winnipeg, we learned that there was a delay with our visa and it would take longer than we thought, so we unpacked a little more from the car and extended our stay for another week. Sadly, we were both very busy with work so we did not have a chance to visit the city much. The area where we were staying was residential and peaceful and we settled into a routine of work, home-cooked meals and Netflix. 

Rujira