WW: Ranch rings

(A round dozen of fudo rings collected on a friend's ranch. They're black because I sealed them with rust converter.)

Rough Around the Edges: Pullman

Pullman is improbable. Even from a distance, the town looks, not out of place, but out of epoch. In theory it's a typical prairie town: terraced into four loamy knolls, shaded by spreading maple, pine, and spruce, all of it drifted together by steel rails. In its leafy streets and neat switching yards you could believe you're trapped in an HO layout, especially if you throw in a train. Which you often do, in a city named for the man who invented the sleeping car.

But even from the horizon – say, the top of Kamiak Butte, eleven miles north – there's something incongruous about Pullman.

Only on approach does it land: it's the brick. Lots of it. Pullman's ruddy walls rise like the defences of a medieval town, which it also resembles, once you've put your finger on it. But those ancient cities were not walled in factory-made terra cotta, and so Pullman has a futurism, like a robotic eye in a human face, that contradicts and complements the train set and the Templars.

Those red ramparts, rising amidst what Greensiders sneer a cow town, are the source of cognitive dissonance. Because Pullman is nowhere. It's near nothing of consequence in three states, of which it lies outside all but one. Had matters so rested, Pullman would today be what its constituent bits still are: a Gold Side hometown in dusty decent coveralls.

But in 1890 the red came. That year, the federal government extended its network of land-grant agricultural colleges to Washington, and with atypical boldness, the State Legislature sited the new institution, not merely in eastern Washington, but in southeastern Washington. That is to say, in Plutonian space.

And as Pluto was not a real planet, so Pullman was not really a city. Incorporated just four years earlier, its 200 farmers and railroad workers were quickly inundated by a veritable lahar of staff and students. And so the first product of the Agricultural College, Experiment Station, and School of Science of the State of Washington, was that most Washingtonian of things: a mill town. Except that this mill splits from its raw resource, not shakes, but scholars.

In our motherland of apple carts, that was just the first the new college upset. For all the novelty of its location, today's Washington State University serves a region more cultural than physical. Olympia may be capital of the map, and Seattle the money, but Pullman is the capital of nowhere. All of it (the nowhere), from Sumas to Sekiu to Skamokawa to Scotia, and every backwater between. Country kids statewide aspire to WSU, not just for agronomy, veterinary, and teaching programmes, but also its world-class faculties in media, literature, and archaeology.

And behind the carrot, the stick. Growing up in rural Thurston County I engaged daily with WSU's army of barnyard Green Berets. Their Cooperative Extension ran my 4H programme. They ran FFA. They ran the tansy-ragwort eradication campaign, the artificial insemination service, the whole head, heart, hands, and health consultancy. They answered questions about recycling plastic, feeding babies, canning corn. With an irony I did not remark at the time, they sponsored the marine science summer camp I loved.

From WSU's guerrilla intellectuals I learned as much about war, Watergate, and women as rabbits and razor clams. They wore gumboots and flannel, got our jokes and fears, and saw no incongruity between our podunk ZIP codes and their university degrees.

The Extension Service is the reason a King County town can lie 30 minutes and a million miles from the University of Washington. To those of us in the woods and prairies and mountains, the difference was never about football.

I'd never been to Pullman before that day, but even from afar I knew those brick battlements for the college. As they encadre that city's neighbourhoods and thoroughfares, so too do they gird every small town in Washington.

The bone and sinew of the Academy.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Joe Mabel and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Airship

Rock Groups 2016

July is happening again, and that means another rack of Rusty Ring rock groups is ready for delivery, in no particular order, with no implied obligation or warranty.

The rules remain the same as they are every year:

1. Anybody can use any of these band names; I claim no form of copyright or trademark on any of them.

2. That said, be aware that some of these bands may already exist. (And some names may be taken by non-music projects, such as the Internet browser that stole "Iceweasel" from me, probably before I even thought of it.)

3. If your group decides to take one of these names, all I ask is that when people ask you where you got it, you say, "A Zen hermit gave us this name." Because that's, like, an awesome origin story.

Where a genre suggests itself, I've included that meditation. Such proposals are for your consideration only; if your Cookie Monster metal band wants to take a name that sounded like a jazz ensemble to me, I stand corrected.

And now:

Rock Groups 2016

Baby Goes Boom
Opie's Maw (all female alt-country band)
Box o' Rocks
Kalakala (North Coast First Nations rock band)
Dormouse (psychedelic)
Metal Rain
Titanic Mushroom
Hitler GIF
The Tailfins (50s rock)
One Horse Town
The Trust
KOCMOHABT
Dr. Strangepork
The Zouaves
Dred Scott
Terd O'Hurtles
Blood Moon
Scred
Tinfoil Fedora
The Chocolate Teapot
Mudd's Women (all-male group)
Gastropod
Possible Soup
Henge
03 (pronounced Ought Three)
Tone Def (rap parody)
Blowtorch
Sloboda
Death Zipper (Canadian metal)
The Screaming Carrots
Hammer & Tongs (British folk rock)
Mysterious Meat
Sonar
Magnet School
Axolotl
The Love Dogs
Steel Penny
The Flashbulbs (warning: apparently there's already a musician called The Flashbulb)
Gizzard
SpicePeach
The Walking Stereotypes
Klo Zen Plā (old-school rapper)
Voynich
Origami Ethos
Quảng Đức's Heart (political rock)
Doctor Dregg and the Maniacal Plan
Haakon
Monkey Wrench
Kutter
Bucket of Dumb


(Photo of the original rock group courtesy of Sam Boulton Sr. and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Irony

WW: Sawbuck

(I recently reckoned I've built at least seven of these over my lifetime – possibly more. All made from scrap that would have been firewood itself if I hadn't pulled it off the woodpile or high tide line and turned it to generate more firewood.

Such a basic device. Worth no money; indispensable in real wealth.

Once, while moving from one home, I wrote in my journal: "Today I burned the sawbuck."

The depth of those words is difficult to sound.)

Hermitcraft: Fucus

Though delicious, Fucus (FYOO-kuss) has a marketing problem. The genus sounds like some kind of fungal disease; its common names – rockweed, bladderwrack – are hardly better. But once you've tasted it, nothing else will do.

Fucus is a distinctive, prolific seaweed, readily identified by the yellow-green "mittens" at the end of each frond. These endear it to children, who love to pop them. Incredibly tenacious, bladderwrack thrives in the harsh upper tidal zone, and is therefore accessible at all but the highest tides.

This remarkable alga, adapted to long, thirsty stretches high and dry, will keep for a week or more in the refrigerator. Used fresh, it lends nutrients and a suggestion of shrimp to sauces and soups. The flavour compliments tomato bases especially well.

Fucus also dries readily, dwindling to unrecognisable wiry black shreds that spring miraculously back to life after a brief soak. (It's also one of the rare marine algae that bear up in fresh water.)

Dried bladderwrack can be lightly toasted and crumbled on salads and baked potatoes, for mock-crustacean tang. Eaten as a snack chip, it goes surprisingly well with a crisp blond beer.

Fresh Fucus is a powerful source of Vitamin C, while protein accounts for up to 25 per cent of its dried weight. In the past, bladderwrack tea (see below) was taken for goiter, a painful swelling of the thyroid glands occasioned by iodine deficiency – yet another Fucus asset. Full-spectrum nutrition also made bladderwrack tea a traditional, if ironic, response to both starvation and obesity in Scottish fishing villages.

On the scientific front, modern studies have found that Fucus extracts reduce plasma cholesterol in rats, are an effective anticoagulant, and may even be useful in treating radiation poisoning.

The resilience of this vinyl-looking weed means that you can often gather heaps of it from the beach after a storm; if sufficiently fresh, all it needs is a vigorous wash and you've got pounds of delicious food. (On sand beaches it can be difficult to get the grit off those sticky clusters, but I just dry them on a clothesline and bag the result. What sand survives washing and drying collects in the bottom of the sack.)

But do check for barnacles and epiphytes before collecting a washed-up clump. In the open sea bladderwrack often plays host to a variety of other life forms, and is increasingly likely to be encrusted the further out you get from new spring growth.

In calmer waters, where Fucus blankets logs, pilings, and rocks, you can simply snip fronds from the growing plant, leaving the rest intact. Because it grows so densely you can gather quite a bit this way in little time, with minimal impact to the community.

So give Fucus a try on your next beach trip. Those who get past the name(s) soon come to appreciate its true beauty.

A few recipes:

o Bladderwrack Tea

(This "tea", which tastes more like a seafood stock, is savoury and satisfying.)

Steep 1 tablespoon of dried and toasted Fucus in a cup of boiling water, or four tablespoons in a pot, for about 10 minutes. Strain and drink.

Typical amendments include soy sauce, black pepper, lemon juice, hot sauce, and malt vinegar. My favourite: seafood cocktail sauce. (A smooth variety, without pickle chunks.)

The leftover leaves can be used in cooking.

o Bladderwrack Breakfast

Slice up some bacon or sausage and fry it soft. Pour off the fat that pours off.

Add minced garlic and chopped onion.

Add chopped fresh Fucus. (Make sure to slice the mittens in half, or they'll explode in your face.)

Throw in a diced tomato, or canned equivalent. In the absence of these, I use tomato juice or sauce.

Sauté till the bladderwrack is bright green and tender. (Bear in mind it'll always remain al dente.)

Grind in some black pepper and serve over rice, or as a side dish with eggs, hash browns, etc.