Participants:
| Scene Title | Sea Dogs |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Silas works on re-establishing contacts upon his return to the Pelago. |
| Date | May 17, 2020 |
The Colin looks about as one would expect of a houseboat named for a dog: it’s got windows like eyes that look into brown paneling and white and blue paint, and occasionally ruddy whitish curtains shutter over them like lids for a good night’s sleep; it’s got a decent kitchen that can swallow up any food that appears into it (and possibly chuck it back out into the sea behind); it’s scruffy.
Scruffy, too, are its two current occupants. One is Erin Gordon, formerly an agricultural science researcher at Cornell but since the flood taking the opportunity to, er, freelance, running away to the salty horizons to run her own research lab, seeing a need not to write grant proposals on blackened scientific benchtop reflecting fluorescent lights back into her eyeballs as the Word document tears into her soul a little more with every keystroke - no, instead, taking her skills with soil density and her brain of botany into learning how to make plants grow when there is so, so little dirt and no dearth of sky.
And of those green things that civilization has always and likely will always need to survive, some provide less in the way of nutrient and more in the way of experience. Right now, Erin Gordon is unscrewing a jar of pickled cucumbers and sprinkling in some dill, and wondering vaguely where on Earth she can get a new stock of vinegar when that in the hold runs low.
There's a saying that variety is the spice of life; it is, as far as Silas Mackenzie is concerned, a decent metaphor to equate spice and variety, because certainly spice goes a long way towards bringing variety to the kitchen. Once upon a time, Silas had a little garden of his own — dill and basil and all the rest — but then the Sentinel had shit all over that, as the Sentinel does. Silas's garden now resides with the rest of his entire building, at the bottom of the sea… which puts him into a predicament.
Which is why he's paying a visit to this particular little ship. "Ahoy the ship!" he calls. "Permission to board?"
The hail comes from outside and Erin starts at the sink in the makeshift “galley,” perking up and peering out the window between a crack in the curtains. Colin perks up at her side, tawny ears perked with one flopped halfway and inside-out. “It’s okay, boy.” Erin reassures him. “This is a planned visit.”
She navigates the cramped passage and up to the main deck, waving at the person appeared off the stern. “Permission granted! Welcome to the Colin, named for-” A glance around, looking for a canid shadow, “-this little guy.” The Australian Shepherd bounds up and sits next to her, wagging his tail in a moderately apprehensive way, the goodest boy.
Erin rolls out the rope ladder down to the floating figure and invites him aboard, offering a hand to the scraggly fellow and helping tug him up.
Silas affects not to see the offered hand — scraggly he may be, but he's stubborn. When he makes it over the rail and onto the deck, then he offers a nod… then, before anything else, he ties the rope he's got in one hand to the rail — it won't do him much good to come out here if his way back escapes.
With that tended to, his eyes turn back to the boat and its captain, quickly sweeping over the deck, assessing. "Thanks for the invite; you, uh, park a ways out, I see." Not the farthest trip Silas has done by rowboat, but far enough. "Anyway. Let's talk shop," he suggests, eying the dog for a moment in a way not at all dissimilar to the way the dog is eying him. "I've been told that you're one of the better ones to talk to about plants, these days."
Erin appreciates the lack of small talk. Small talk has never been her favorite thing, and living on a houseboat with basically only a dog for company has caused that particular muscle to atrophy without regular strengthening routines.
“Absolutely. I don’t know who has been telling what to whom, but I used to be an agricultural researcher at a certain university that had a large focus on agricultural science.” She says this over her shoulder as she leads Silas back through the narrow hallway towards the galley. “Instead of being stuck in a lab when the storms came, it seemed like a better use of my time and skills to develop new forms of agtech. As much as fish can be delicious, it’s not so good without seasonings other than salt.” She slides an old brass key into a corroded lock on an even more corroded door handle and opens it inward, revealing a makeshift galley-cum-mad scientist lab: a half-stove and oven, a massive two-basin slop sink, glass-fronted cabinets stacked with mismatched but well taken care of dishes, and lots of shelves with lots of lighting and plants in all stages from cotyledon seedlings to beefy, bushy basil. There are vials full of odd stuff, odd colors, and a battered microscope with the lens hovering over a slide of dubious origin. “Let alone vegetables. If the past teaches us anything, it is that we need citrus to keep our teeth and skin together.”
As Erin enters the space, the fronds of ferns of no apparent culinary value float down to frame the doorway as they may once have adorned a wedding arch, with small white flowers having budded here and there for a warm, green-tea like aroma that wafts with the passage of bodies through air, and she gently pushes them out of her way like a hippie’s beaded doorway in their cannabis-infused trailer. Grape vines of red and green hang from a long, narrow planter of soil over an otherwise sunny window by the sink, and hops for beer take over another wall altogether. There are experiments of various vegetable plants growing from moss, from soil, from water, and in one curious case, from the grout of the tiled backsplash. Another wall has various tropical plants struggling to take, and a corner is blocked off by boxes and a grow lamp perched precariously on top for a makeshift cold leafy greens area.
“As you can see, it’s been an interesting process. The natural evolution of what to do in our world leads me to hydroponics, but that can’t and won’t work for everything. So I’m trying a bunch of new things. Right now, it’s in the messing around stage.” A chuckle. “It’s not like I have a lot of funding.”
She leads him over to the kitchen island, walking around to the side nearer the window and gesturing at a clearly handmade stool bolted into the floor on its opposite side. “But I’ve never been much of a cook. I lack much in the way of palate. So that is why you’re here: to cook with my crop, to taste test and help me determine whether there’s any fidelity to these foods or if it’s growing to taste like junk. Which is, you know, not ideal. And if you can help me learn to cook something other than a PB&J sandwich and help me stock my fridge with the results, well, that’s just an added bonus for me.”
Beneath the island there is a shelf and from it Erin pulls a tray with several small old glass bottles, stoppered with cork or rubber or whatever she has here or there. The labels are long worn off and instead there is paper or masking tape on them, haphazardly labeling them: dill. Sesame. Cardamom. Turmeric. Ginger. And on.
“Many of these come from roots or flowers, and it’s hard to simulate their environments. I’m in the process of cobbling together a greenhouse up on the deck. It’s not like we lack for humidity. Anyway: tell me what you need and where you’d like to start, and I will provide. I’ve got most vegetables somewhere in here, though it’s kind of going by seasons right now. I picked a patch of peppers last week and haven’t yet gotten a chance to, er, pickle them.”
Silas observes all of this with a keen eye; it's been awhile since he's seen this much greenery in one place. "Hydroponics makes sense," he agrees slowly, taking everything in.
"As to what I need…" he trails off, considering. "Ideally the way to test fidelity would be to find recipes centered around each specific ingredient, preparing them, and judging the results," he says, looking to Erin. "I can work on sourcing those and doing the cooking; if you provide the base ingredients and the facilities, that should make for a good start."
"If that sounds good to you… then all that's left is to figure out where we start. So. Whatcha got?"
“What don’t I got!” Erin exclaims, the most emotive she’s been in weeks. “I’ve got all the winter greens - spinach, kale, collards, etc - and some really pathetic heads of broccoli. I’ve got some fledgling strawberries, they’re small but they have heart. I’ve got basil, thyme, rosemary, all the Mediterranean spices plus some roots like ginger and some bulbs like garlic and onion and a sesame flower up on the roof. I’ve got some sacks of rice in the pantry, some preserved fish and various frozen bits of meat solely for testing purposes like this one. There’s some sausages that I bartered for a while ago, they’re probably still good. Oh, and there’s some pot, but all things in time.”
She heads to the kitchen island, crouches down, flings open the doors, and starts whipping out lots of very aged pots and pans, steel and iron alike. But then she squats and pops her head above the counter. “What is your job here, anyway? Are you a traveler? I’m new to the Pelago so I can’t say I know anybody terribly well. And please, sit!”
Silas's eyebrows climb as Erin starts listing the many, many things she's got growing here. Her question, though, catches him off guard. Are you a traveler has meanings for Silas that it doesn't have for everyone else; whether she'd intended to evoke them or not, they give him pause for a moment as he considers.
"I've had a lot of jobs," he settles on. "Been a cook and an engineer and a few other things besides. Traveler isn't entirely off, either; I'm an old hand around the Pelago, but I've been away for awhile. And my travelin' days may not be over yet…"
Silas collects himself and offers Erin a grin. "But at the moment, I'm an old sea cook. I've served aboard the Forthright, and anyone who's crewed with Mad Eve while I was here can probably tell you about my cooking," Silas proclaims. "But then again… I've always found words make for a pretty poor lunch, wouldn't you say? The proof's in the eating, not the talking about it. So… if you want, I'll cook something right here and now, and we can see how it works out. Once that's done — once we've seen the fidelity of what you've got, and once you've sampled my food for yourself… we can talk business. What do you think?"
“A storied past, eh?” Erin says with a crooked grin. “I like you. I feel the same way. About many things. So anyway, yes, I like that. All of that. Let’s get going!”
And out of seemingly nowhere does she pull a wild array of greens, several vials of dried spices, and a bag of white rice that likely has worms.
Silas grins back at Erin, but his attention swiftly moves to the ingredients she's producing. "Alright… greens and rice. I can work with this." The rice will need a thorough rinse; insects have an easy time hiding in there. If it does have worms, they'll float at the top during the rinse, which will solve that particular problem handily.
There's still the question of what to make, but Silas has some ideas starting to come together already. "Let's see that sausage you were talkin' about." He considers for a moment. "And maybe a little of the garlic, too." A hearty soup sounds like a decent way to make something good with what he's got.
“Garlic!” Erin barks, and Colin also barks - the dog seems to have garlic as some kind of command word, which almost makes sense, as garlic is ball-shaped but also extremely toxic. She goes to the pantry and reaches up to a large, braided bundle hanging in its doorway as though to ward off vampires, which contains about twenty bulbs of garlic, and digs around in a burlap sack for some onions. “I assume you’ll want a whole bulb, because nobody can do anything with one clove.” The bulbs are small, but they have heart, harvested on time after enough cold weather but with not enough fertilizer in the soil box. Lessons for next time.
As they rinse the rice and start the stock and Erin putters about fetching necessary items. “The sausage is a little freezerburnt, but useable. Just like all of us, I suppose.” A smirk. “What kind of business is it that you run exactly, by the way? I get it, keep yours cards close, but this is purely professional curiosity.”
"'Business' would've been too grand a description, before; I just tried to keep myself fed and clothed. Now, though…" Silas trails for a moment, considering as his hands go through the motions of cutting and cleaning and making things ready to cook. "Trading, I guess. Maybe. Hopefully. Gonna head out into the great unknown and see who's out there. Maybe make some new friends."
Erin laughs. “New friends would be nice, wouldn’t it? I’m thinking of heading into that unknown, myself. Can’t stay in the elago forever, and I hear some people are heading north eventually.” Colin whines and tilts his head, and she pets him. “Don’t worry, buddy. Friends other than you, I mean.”
The time passes, the soup simmers, the conversation wends its way as the sun moves its familiar sisyphean pattern around the pale blue dot. Finally, the moment they’ve all been waiting for. Erin watches as a testing spoon rises to the old cook’s lips.
“And? How did it turn out?”
Silas doesn't answer immediately; he's mulling over the flavor. Everything's smelled alright so far, but the proof lies in the tasting. Finally, after a moment, he nods. "Not bad," he says, lips curving into a grin. "I think that sausage mighta been pushing the end of it's shelf life, but it's not bad at all. And the herbs?" His grin broadens. "I think they're fine."
Erin pumps the air with unbridled delight at the successful experiment - both culinarily as well as scientifically - and grins. “Hell yeah. We’re in business. Which means you and me gotta talk business. But first,” and she pulls a chipped old bowl towards herself, dips an even older bronze ladle into the viscous solution to a host of flavor problems in this reality, “We eat.”