WEEK
40
Feeling Like Manure

“Wheat is life, boy. Don’t let no silly bugger tell you different.”
—Christopher Ketteridge and Spike Mays,
Five Miles from Bunkum, 1972

“I’m thinking I need to get some hands-on instruction,” I confessed to Anne after another so-so loaf of peasant bread. “I need to make myself a better baker.”

“Didn’t you learn anything at the kneading conference?”

Oh, did I ever. I learned that if you want to learn to bake the best bread, you go to where the best bread is. Half the bakers I’d met in Maine, both amateur and professional, had been to France, to bake bread, taste bread, or both. Not to mention Julia Child, Steven “the Professor” Kaplan, Charlie van Over—everyone who was interested in bread went to France. And here I was, trying to bake breads with French names in New York. Well, if I was going to take a bread-making course, why not take it in Paris?

I broached my idea with Anne, who, after a millisecond of thought, agreed to a week of sightseeing in the City of Light while I studied baking. Thus before you could say “pain de campagne” I was enrolled in the week-long boulangerie class at the École Ritz Escoffier, the cooking school at the Hotel Ritz.

First, however, I had some unfinished business here in my own backyard. The clay “oven” at this point consisted of no more than a round brick base surrounded by mounds of clayey earth, rocks, bricks, plastic buckets, and a wheelbarrow filled with rainwater. I’d stepped out of last week’s bath convinced I should give it up, but the allure of baking bread made from my own wheat in an oven raised like Adam from the dust of my garden was still powerful. Besides, I was so close, only a “Kiko weekend” away now.

The next step was to construct the oven floor, firebrick set into a mixture of clay and coarse sand. It so happened that I had some sand left over from an old project. I grabbed a bucket and shovel and headed down the hill to the compost heap, where I’d left it, thinking Kiko would be proud that I was scavenging it.

After clearing away the weeds that obscured the sand, I easily filled the bucket and brought it back up, then shoveled some clay through a homemade sieve—similar to the one I’d used to thresh the wheat—to remove the pebbles and rocks. It was enjoyable work on this perfect late-summer morning, the Catskills clearly visible in the distance, the work easy, the pace pleasant. In fact, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day. As the sun warmed the morning air, I peeled off my layers down to a T-shirt. In two short weeks, I’d be baking at the Hotel Ritz.

Autumn in Paris, a city with more bakeries than New York has delis. France, a country that has twenty words for bread, the way that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. Not only to study bread in one of the world’s most famous kitchens but also to be surrounded by great bread? The prospect was breathtaking.

Not as breathtaking as what happened next, though. Afraid I might be a little short of sand—I didn’t want to start mixing and have to run back for more—I went down for one last bucketful. Bending at the waist, I plunged the shovel into the soft mound of sand. Simultaneously, the tip of another shovel was plunged deep into my lower back.

At least that’s what it felt like. I gasped in agony and stayed bent over, afraid to try to straighten up, as waves of pain radiated from my sacroiliac up my back. “This is nothing,” I muttered out loud. “You just twisted funny.” I figured that if I gave it a moment, it would pass.

It didn’t. I thought it best to go back to the house. I should be able to walk, I reasoned. After all, I was still standing.

And then I wasn’t. I didn’t exactly lose consciousness, but I didn’t exactly keep it, either, and I didn’t so much fall as crumple backward onto the soft compost heap, joining the other discarded refuse of the yard: rotting peaches, decaying grass clippings, decomposing weeds, and composting manure. The heap was surprisingly soft and warm and comforting. I let my body relax, closed my eyes, and settled in.