Burn Permits and Chinese Beer
Once again, that old chestnut: “What do you people do all day out there in the winter?”
Mostly, we obsess about the weather. The weather here, the weather at the airport in Rockland, the weather at Matinicus Rock. After getting updates on those, we check the weather anywhere else we can think of, such as somebody else’s house a quarter mile away, places we’ve been that are still programmed into our phones (Bozeman, Montana; Goose Bay, Labrador,) and the summit of Mount Washington. That stuff’s important to know.
An average evening in late January had me on the phone with an older friend. Her island home is basically our Historical Society. Being heavy on authenticity, the structure requires four days to warm up, its 1800’s interior heavy on plaster and brick. For that reason, her house is not well-suited for a lot of coming and going this time of year; you either live in it all winter, running heat of some kind, or you pack up and leave before snow flies. On any island, age sometimes encourages the latter, and she was in Wiscasset. Anyway, our conversation landline-to-landline was about she and her 85-year-old husband intending to come to the island the following day, in hopes of burning a pile of demolition debris wood from a repair done last year. Snow on the ground. People get a project in mind, and—well, we know how it is.
Okay; the repair was because one of the band members took out the stone wall and a bunch of rosebushes with his Yukon and drove right into the corner parlor. But you don’t need to know any of that.
I offered to pick them up at the airstrip, and issued an invitation to supper that evening, for which she was grateful. “But,” she added, “We don’t have a burn permit. We called Larry and he’s supposed to call Jeff. We haven’t heard back.” Jeff is the fire warden. He wasn’t around either. I don’t know what Larry had to do with any of it.
“No, you have to get a burn permit online,” I explained. These folks don’t have a computer. It’s a point of pride, maybe, but it does make bureaucracy maddeningly complex these days. “Do you want me to process your burn permit?”
Early the next morning, in the hammering gale that is our default winter weather, as I was typing their particular details into the state burn permit website I thought, “No way they’re going to get here, and even if they do, there’s no way they’re going to burn. Also, it’s 38 below zero out there. This is not a thing.” I called their Wiscasset number in hopes of catching them before they set out for Rockland to make their scheduled 9:00 a.m. flight, but they had decided to have breakfast at Moody’s and had left home early. There was no heading them off: my friends do not carry a cell phone, either. They’d have to get to the airport in Owl’s Head before hearing confirmation that their trip was a no-go because of wind.
My other project that day was trying to get the Tsingtao beer. We celebrate Chinese New Year on Matinicus. It’s a long story, something to do with the Coast Guard and fireworks, but really it’s about the food. Most everything we do here is about the food.
Tsingtao is fairly ordinary, as beers go, but it tastes good with potstickers. We’ve been trying for the last couple of years to get some—the lot of it having been stuck in a shipping container off the Port of Long Beach last year, or so was alleged. Being a special order, I had to buy the case. Few of the neighbors around my table were drinking this year, for various reasons, and my husband doesn’t even like beer. At this slow rate of consumption, I will likely be serving Chinese beer for Super Bowl Sunday, Valentine’s Day, the Great Backyard Bird Count, George Washington’s Birthday, Mardi Gras, Holi, Pi Day and St. Patrick’s.
Our Lunar New Year Chinese dinner was excellent. Everybody brought tasty dishes, and as one of our happy group had grown up in China we had expert guidance. After feasting, we piled on the arctic gear and stepped outdoors to wave sparklers around, touch off a few firecrackers, and look at Venus and a bright crescent moon against the blackest of winter skies.
My friends without internet will get here eventually, have their scrap-lumber fire (properly permitted) and hopefully they will not freeze to death at the breakfast table. I got my case of Tsingtao right before the big tariff announcement, making me think I should have also ordered a case of Moosehead and a case of Dos Equis at the same time.