“Yah, so I busted dese people in the campground yesterday,” said Jacques as I was stirring my Red River Cereal. Jacques is an enforcement ranger, of the variety to whom a badge and a truck represent intoxicating power. A mwa-ha-ha ranger. He dreams of reading Bermuda-shorted matrons the Miranda Rights when they fail to extinguish campfires by 10pm. Every morning he tries to impress the chicks with stories of busting tourists over Regulation 748b. Every morning we turn the heat up under our oatmeal and stir faster to get out of there.
   “Yah, dey had a big basket of mushrooms. Dey were laying ‘em out on the picnic table in the campground.”
   “What kind of mushrooms?” Surely he meant the magically delicious brand.
   “I don’t know the exact type, but you know, cooking mushrooms. Dey had the butter in the pan all ready to go when I confiscated ‘em.”
   “You confiscated their mushrooms?”
He puffed up. “It’s illegal to remove natural objects from the rightful place in the park. Dat includes mushrooms. And techically blueberries and raspberries too. I woulda gone easy on ‘em if dey had five or six, but dey had a whole big basket.”
   “ Those people are on holiday! They’re probably immigrants camping with their kids. They don’t even know why you took their mushrooms. That’s so mean!” we cry.
He looks hurt. “Rules is rules.”

I was still in mourning for the berries I’d left to rot on the Coastal Trail. The whole park is carpeted with fungus. Even the bears are hardly denting this year’s fine natural crop. To protest Jacques’s lumpish enforcement policy, I dragged Ranger Tim ‘shrooming Sunday morning.

We walked the private trail from Beaver Rock to Laughing Brook with the big dented stockpot that’s been sitting outside the staff kitchen all summer. He showed me the basic identification rules: the fleshy, porous boletes, the gilled agarics, the snowy purity of the Destroying Angel. We picked bone-white coral mushrooms, strewn on the forest floor exactly like dead coral. There were brown-black pigs’ ears, turmeric-stained Slippery Jacks, speckled boletus, chanterelles. We found supermarket mushrooms and a few pearl-grey oysters. Tim told stories of tripping casualties of Amanita muscaria in early mushrooming days.

At the Pilot Cabin he spread newspapers on the porch and arranged our many finds into little groups. I opened a bottle of wine and sat in a deckchair while he frowned over borrowed field guides. We would do a tasting menu, we decided, sampling each set. More than half our haul was unidentifiable or else too close to scary species to risk, but that still left a fine spread. He got butter, olive oil, salt and pepper and good bread from the kitchen and we fired up the camping stove. First, pigs’ ears steamed on a cocktail strainer (inevitably, they fell into the water). Gelatinous and good, like the wood-ear mushrooms the Thais serve. Next, Steinpilz, sautéed in butter, served on toast. Yum. Oyster mushrooms in olive oil. Mmm-mmm.

I’d drunk enough wine to feel like inviting Jacques to the fungus party, but Tim had to go to work. We promised ourselves a good mushroom omelette for brunch next day instead. Tim was in charge, slicing sulphur-yellow Slippery Jacks. “Edible and choice”, according to The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide “Wipe the slime from the cap and remove the tubes before cooking”. They stained his fingers and blended pleasingly with the eggs.

Forty-five minutes later I was staring into an enamel bowl and letting loose enormous rumbling belches. Tim paced the porch looking up fungus poisoning treatment in the field guides. I retched and belched again, louder than ever.
   “Can you say your whole name in those belches?” he asked. Not funny. I wanted more than anything to get the Slippery Jacks out of my stomach.
Eventually he headed to the kitchen and rushed back holding out a tall glass that looked exactly like a pisco sour. I groaned.
   “Emetic,” he said briskly, “Salt and mustard powder in warm water. Hold your nose and chug it.” I got half of it down. It immediately shot back up my nose: hot mustard solution, like the worst icecream headache imaginable. “I’m going to make more.”
   “No! No! I can’t take it.”

But I did. Two minutes after I finished the second glass, the Slippery Jacks were returned to their rightful place in the woods and I felt suitably punished for my wanton transgression. Naturally, Tim felt no ill-effects. I’ve never had a food allergy in my life, but it turns out I react badly to slimy yellow fungus in the north woods. Could be worse.

This was my seduction dinner back in my student days. The theory, I recall, was that I would charm them with cocktail wit while conjuring earth mother images by stirring this dish for forty-five minutes. Mixed marketing message. Sadly, none of the subjects fell for it, but at least they liked the rice.

Serves 2 greedy people

1 medium red onion
2 cloves garlic
8 cups good chicken stock (I make mine with roast chicken carcass, or giblety-things, simmered with sliced celery, carrot, onion, a handful of whole peppercorns, salt, and a bay leaf).
1 cup dry white wine (maybe you could use wine vinegar)
1 ½ to 2 cups Arborio rice
1 cup dried porcini, morels, shitake etc., and/or as many fresh forest mushrooms as you care for. Strain and keep the soaking liquid from dried mushrooms.
1 cup Parmesan cheese, coarsely grated
Butter
Salt and pepper
Light-bodied Italian red wine for the cook

In a wide, heavy-bottomed pan, sautée the onions and garlic in butter over medium heat until slightly softened (2-5 minutes). Add the rice and stir until grains are lightly coated and shiny. Turn the heat up and add the wine: let it sizzle until the alcohol burns off. The rice will start to absorb the liquid.

Back on a low to medium heat, add the chicken stock one ladle at a time. Stir constantly as the rice absorbs the stock (though you will probably find the time to make a green salad and dressing if you like). Add the mushrooms about halfway through cooking. When you run out of stock, use the liquid from the dried mushrooms. Continue cooking until the rice releases its starch and becomes gloopy, but the grains are still al dente. Turn off the heat, stir in the Parmesan cheese, add salt if you like and plenty of fresh pepper. Stir in extra butter if you’re as gluttonous as I am.

Serve immediately: unlike seduction techniques, risotto does not improve with age.

5pm, Day Four of the Coastal Trail. I am limping towards the old Agawa Lodge by the mouth of the Agawa River near the highway. A few more hours before I reach my cabin.

A blond family emerges from the trees. They’ve been down on the riverbank and are heading back to the SUV. Mum interrogates me as we share the path.
“Are you hiking the Coastal Trail?”
Yep. I shrug awkwardly to shunt my pack around on sore shoulders.
“The whole thing?”
“Yes, except for the bit north of Gargantua.”
“How long has it taken you?”
“This is day four.”
“And you’re by yourself?”
I want to say, not any more, but instead I grunt again.
“And you’re not lonely or scared?”
Nope.
“Do you see that, girls?” she says to her tweenies. She turns back to me. “We think you’re very brave.”

There were just two other hikers going my way on the Coastal Trail that day. At several points, the trail crosses touristed day-use areas, mostly beaches. I dreaded them. These were the paradise days at Lake Superior—85°F, no humidity, lapping, lappable water. People stretched out like cats on a car bonnet, warming themselves at last in Northern Ontario. I was a curiosity, stepping out of the woods, picking my way across boulders to get to the beach instead of strolling in from the car park. Burdened and sweaty, wearing boots on fine sand. And alone.

I was stopped every time by people—mostly women—who wanted to confirm I was really hiking alone. Once a man on a deckchair shouted “Hey, the guys you’re with are way ahead. Did you arrange a meeting spot?” I may be looking for the wistfulness behind the questions. But after a few days it seemed strange that these women who had experienced so much more than me—childbirth, childrearing, passing a driving test—could hardly dare imagine spending a night alone in a tent in the wilderness. Was it physical fear, of bears, attackers or getting lost, or breaking an ankle on a mossy rock far from help? Fear of not being able to heft a pack, climb a boulder, build a fire? Fear of solitude and silence? Fear, or hope, that families or lovers could not survive without them?

“You’re so brave.” This embarrasses me. I’m not brave at all. I’m a fearful chicken who screams at loud noises. Truth is, a blazed North American trail with pit toilets and neat backcountry campsites is not all that intrepid. You’d have to be inventive to die of thirst, hunger or cold in the bounty of a Lake Superior summer.

But I wouldn’t have considered a hike like this two years ago. How could I? I didn’t know to string food up in a tree or pick a good campsite or build a driftwood fire. It is too physically tough to count as the kind of relaxation I used to need: who wants to hobble back to the office after a ‘rest’? Like most workers in America, I had ten or twelve days off a year, from which I was to allot time with family 3,000 miles away and also somehow foster a marriage otherwise based around 70-hour work weeks. How could I take five days to walk alone in the wilderness?

I didn’t know it, but I needed it then more than I do now. Our culture does not want us to spend that kind of time alone. We might get to like it. I was lucky; I tripped and fell out of the corporate world, and flat on my back I found the time to try things I thought I might hate.

Great religions understand the power of solitude. The Catholic Church sends the faithful on retreats and pilgrimages. Buddhists spend days or months in silent retreat. African rites of passage send young people alone into the bush. Woodsier types have their spiritual equivalent: Wordsworth’s “natural piety”. But many secular, city people are going to die too fearful to have ever spent real time alone in case their demons came out to do battle.

I’m an extrovert, but I like my own company. Seek it out. I would do this every year if I could: five days or five weeks alone, preferably in the woods. I don’t think you need to haul a backpack, though it helps: you’re slow as a snail, but my God, carrying your house on your back bestows a sense of independence to make you yodel. (I’m surprised snails don’t yodel.) But you could as easily experience your own thoughts in a canoe, on a bike or even in a suburban house with the TV, internet and phone switched off and books and magazines out of reach. Solitude is there to be taken. You might even like it.

I didn’t bring sunscreen. Usually I just use my factor 30 face cream, since Lake Superior is cool enough for long sleeves and long pants most of the time. But these were the hottest days of the year. I sustained nice second-degree burns on the tops of my ears, which stuck out under my baseball cap. They were bloody and itchy, and I thought they were blackfly-bitten until I got home. Hard scar tissue has been flaking off like pork crackling ever since. I look at my festering, hobbity ears in the mirror and think, God, I’m irresistible.

My legs and arms are still covered in cuts and bites. My feet look like I’ve been tortured: raw welts on every toe, red wounds on my heels. I gave myself a pedicure on the porch the day after I got back and as I painted my abused toenails I felt like a battered wife bravely caking on eyeshadow.

Late on the third evening, I saw a sharp rock several steps ahead. Easily avoidable. After eight hours of stumbling over cobbled beaches and boulders, though, stupidity had set in. I slowly exfoliated my left calf along its edge, thinking, oh, I didn’t need to do that. The scar is impressive.

My elbows are scraped raw from my habit of missing the tiny blue signs that led back into the woods whenever the boulders on the coast got too steep and dangerous. More than once I found myself hanging off the edge of a huge rock by my fingers, wondering whether to jump after the pack I’d tossed down. Once a sturdy fellow hiker who was also lost reached down and pulled me up onto a boulder platform an arm’s length above my head, pack and all; halfway up I slipped and skinned all my corners trying to find a purchase in the walls of the little canyon.

I lost a small roll of reserve lard I’ve been hoarding around my middle since Ecuador, and am back down to regulation SoHo dating weight. In the staff kitchen I suck in my cheekbones dramatically, but Canadian park rangers are not impressed by scrawn.

The Coastal Trail Experience was best described by Ralph and Mike, two Toronto hikers I walked with on the last day.
‘We get to camp every night,’ said Ralph, ‘and we say, How can one man be so broken?’

I finished a wilderness hike. Got my computer back. Redesigned my site. My email isn’t working, so I have no electronic distractions unless you count dialling up obsessively to see if it’s back. But I am not writing.

I have a list of writing ideas jotted in my notebook, longhand. It turns out that now that I’m back in the tech/design world, however peripherally, I’d rather futz with my templates, figure out how to archive my sidebar links separately, set up my scanner, worry about how to redirect my site feed from its old URL (help?). I am catching up on Cascading Style Sheets and reading up on accessibility. Specifying plugins I want people to build.

Movable Type is a procrastination engine.

Cultured but monoglot Americans signal furren words by swapping the ‘a’ sound for an ‘o’. So Alain Delon’s first name, which he would have said with a broad second ‘a’, becomes eh-LON. Pasta, with its lovely, pappardelle-wide Italian ‘a’, becomes poss-teh. Hasta la vista, whose every short, broad vowel should be given equal, machine-gun stress, becomes HOSS-teh law VEES-teh.

Yet they are clearly physically capable of producing the correct ‘a’ sounds, from Dad to Da-ad!.

This has sub-irritated me for years now. It’s not that I want people to let fly with exaggerated Italian pronunciation in the middle of an English sentence. This leads to righteous head-kickings in red-sauce joints. I just crusade to get them to speak American consistently.

Like me.

Another storm at Lake Superior. At 8am it’s still dark in the cabin, and I am snuggled up with an unplugged laptop that’s as warm as a cat. Listening to Björk’s Debut, an audio timeport that makes me 21 again. That was the last time I lived this way: working, writing, cooking, on my own time. It makes me violently happy.

Welcome to the new-look dervala.net. Now that I am reunited with my precious ThinkPad I celebrated by finally setting up Movable Type. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, even though I paid for Blogger Pro. Why?

1. MT has features Blogger lacks. In particular, I wanted to be able to categorize entries. Blogger treats chronology as the sole defining characteristic for the split-file web format. This is appropriate for a strict ‘Today my cat/kid did X’ journal site, but too limited for what is becoming a collection of short essays. I’m just as interested in sorting my entries by, say, countries I visited as by months I wrote.

2. MT has other good stuff. Integrated comments. Trackback. Integrated update email notifications. Ability to create multiple additional templates, so you can manage static content as well as chronological entries (so that, for example, I can manage an About page or a résumé page using MT). Pre-defined, editable cascading style sheets—a great blessing. Innumerable useful plug-ins, such as a version of Dean Allen’s Textile text-formatting tool (which I haven’t been able to get working yet). Batch-editing for multiple entries. Global search-and-replace. Integrated site search.
3. The MT user interface is more elegant. The Blogger Pro back end has improved substantially with the latest redesign, but it still can’t touch MT.

4. Sites published through MT are generally far more elegant. Most users rely on or at least start with the default templates, and Blogger’s templates are not beautiful. My previous design made me cringe every time I looked at it, but over the last year of hurried internet café access I didn’t have the opportunity to clean it up (even though my friend Max kindly volunteered to design a new header, which I’m still hoping we can work on). No excuses now.
5. MT doesn’t use the term ‘blog’. I know most, well, bloggers are gung-ho about the word, but it makes me queasy.

So why didn’t I just set up my own database-driven site? Well, I’m lazy. And rusty. And not interested enough in content-management for its own sake to ignore excellent, existing tools that will teach me plenty as I stumble through them.

MT is reasonably well-documented, but it isn’t for novices. I found that setting up the tools, importing my entries from Blogger, and building a site was harder than it needed to be, even for a savvy user. It bears the signs of a small company that relies on Macs: for example, the most basic (and most popular?) default template is broken on IE for Windows. I discovered this after happily testing on Mozilla all morning. There are also import problems with IE. I know IE is not a fabulous browser. I know it should support certain CSS tags. But it doesn’t, and for now at least, it’s an IE/Windows world.

There are other UI bugs and lacks that are just plain annoying: I can’t find a way, for example, to search for uncategorized entries in the batch-editing mode. I wanted to be able to assign sub-categories (e.g., Travel->Bolivia) but haven’t figured that out yet either, though I can assign an entry to multiple categories. The default search function is not great.

Nits and gripes aside, though, I’m looking forward to using MT. You may notice formatting problems with some entries (particularly older ones), which I haven’t got around to fixing yet. Current categorization is also very basic—I’ve simply dumped every entry into a single default category for now. I suspect these issues will bother completists only…

I’ve added a few things in the left-hand column: a list of books I’m reading, music I’m listening to, quotes I’m ruminating on. I’m hoping to add some photos from my travels soon. I’d love to hear your suggestions for other additions or subtractions.

Caitríona, my best friend, is the most intrepid woman I know. While I flit around the world in flip-flops, she plonks herself down in the most unsavoury spots and tries to help. She was on the team that collected forensic evidence at the mass graves in Srebrenica, and she gave evidence at The Hague. Now she volunteers helping victims of Iraqi chemical attacks in northern Iran. (Seventeen years later, the women and children of this area are still mostly uncared for, maligned and discriminated against). Today she makes her journalistic debut for Irish radio, and I’m hoping that her reporting will carry at least some of the flavor of the wild and fascinating stories of Tehran she sends when limited internet access allows.

Her husband Dan covers Iran for the UK Guardian. Here’s his latest, horrifying story.

My laptop is still in intensive care. I’m taking the opportunity to hoist a backpack once again and try Lake Superior’s 66 kilometer Coastal Trail, which I will likely hike at AOL dial-up speeds.

See you Saturday, unless the bears adopt me and I turn into a superannuated Nell.