MILO'S PANCAKES OF GREAT SUSTENANCE

Chinook was the city of my father, Milo’s, childhood. I had heard of it only through stories. It formed the backdrop of his adventures in youth. That was during the Depression years, when he and my Grandpa Frank pulled handcarts of fresh vegetables from the Valley to sell at the outskirts of the city center.

My father first brought me to Chinook for a visit when I was fourteen. He promised that before we left, he’d buy me a Coney Island at a downtown café. First, he had to visit an old childhood friend named Don Riddle who lived someplace called The Crossing.

I remember crossing a bridge over a very impressive river. Enormous rocks jutted through the surface and sent the water into turmoil. Then a broken paved road curved through a desolate landscape.

Another dirt road seemed to dive down and into another world. There were strange crumbling houses clinging to the edge of the river. Every tree seemed to want nothing more than to grow, and to reach out and expand and twist around whatever it was growing near–another tree, an old building, a wooden fence. Their roots bullied their way through the neighborhood’s old sidewalks.

Don Riddle was a stinky, old, fat man who lived in a broken-down box-like house. He had a skinny wife—a sad woman who never seemed to leave the kitchen, where she fussed over meals for her always hungry and impossibly cranky husband.

I escaped outside as soon as possible. Just south of Don’s little house was about a half-acre of nothing but rubbish. Don, you see, spent most of his days collecting whatever he could that was free and bringing it back to his home in Lower-crossing.

There was no one to be seen in the neighborhood, and I wondered who lived in all those curious houses--thrown like a handful of seeds on this small shelf of land above the river. When I came back as an adult and moved into the neighborhood, I discovered what a menace Don and his rubbish were to the neighborhood. Eventually, however, Don became too debilitated to function; he sold his property and abandoned his treasures. Gus eventually came to possess much of Don’s former land and spent weeks piling the rubbish into giant green dumpsters rented from the city. In all, 80,000 pounds of trash collected over decades were removed from the land. This is the space where Doctor Gus later erected his granite.

It was always an odd coincidence that the first place I came to on my first visit to Chinook was The Crossing, to visit miserly old Don Riddle--my father’s childhood friend. So, my father is yet another of the legendary ghosts of The Crossing and I want to share a bit about him.

On Sunday mornings, in another small town many miles from here, my father would get up early to begin the complicated process of making pancakes. He assembled us three girls, dressed still in our pajamas, along the kitchen counter and equipped us with an assortment of kitchen tools—spatulas, eggbeaters, and forks. Already bacon was frying in a cast-iron skillet, because bacon grease was an essential ingredient in the pancakes. An assortment of flour sacks knelt against one another along the counter. Eggshells were scattered about with their broken edges up, gently rocking on their rounded bottoms.

The pancakes were a hardy mix of flours, grease, eggs, and milk. Father lorded proudly over the assemblage process. Measuring was taboo in our family, so the act of dumping flour into the mixing bowls in the correct proportions and quantities was solemn work. My father inspected the quality of our batter, lifting it gently with a spoon. Slowly, he turned the spoon sideways so the batter slid in a thin stream back into the bowl. Whether our mixing instrument was a fork or an eggbeater, we counted to at least 100 before we stopped mixing. The batter was made thin, so each cake was delicate, in contrast to the heavy ingredients.

I remember how my father tested the heat of the grill by placing butter on its surface. If the butter sizzled, it was time to ladle the batter onto the grill.

My father was greatly indulgent in his love, and these pancake-making sessions were one of the many expressions of his affection. He introduced us to his friends as “the three most beautiful daughters in the world.” We each had funny pet names—Little Lamb, Skunk, and Cabbage. One birthday, he bought me not one stuffed animal, but an entire menagerie, so that my room was filled with animals and looked more like a toy store than a bedroom.

Best of all, my father made us pancakes on Sunday mornings. My sisters and I stood around him in amazement as he poured the perfectly consistent batter onto the grill. Some mornings he would feel extra playful and would skillfully form people adorned with hats and scarves, an art form requiring patience and imagination.

He created complete families that grilled into a deep brown before our eyes. Sometimes he formed pancakes to look like our pets, and then dogs romped and horses galloped across the grill.

Yet my father was simply not able to love consistently. He had a dark side that would take him unpredictably and painfully away from us. Sometimes for days or even weeks we would not know where he was. He would return with fragmented stories and a bruised face. He was a man who drank, and his drinking brought him trouble. As he got older he forgot our birthdays, forgot to make pancakes on Sundays, and eventually he forgot his way home. He died in Chinook, returning to his childhood home where once he and the miserly Don Riddle were children and played together. Before my thirtieth birthday, my father left us for the great and unknown beyond.

It’s the father of my early childhood whom I hold in my heart and who lives in spirit among us in The Crossing—the man who made pancakes of great love and sustenance. As if he knew he needed to give us something to carry us through times less abundant.

Milo’s Pancakes of Great Love and Sustenance

Ingredients—measurements provided as guideposts only.

1 cup white flour

½ cup buckwheat flour

½ cup rye flour

¼ cup cornmeal

1 teaspoon. baking powder

1/2 teaspoon. baking soda

¼ cup any combination of oil, butter, and bacon grease

2 eggs

1½ cups milk

1 tablespoon. Molasses

¼ cup honey

2 teaspoon vanilla

Fluff dry ingredients

Beat wet ingredients together

Fold into dry ingredients

Stroke 100 times

Use 1/2 cup batter per pancake. Grill on hot butter-coated grill . Flip when bubbles form on top. Both sides should be a deep brown.