HOW TO MAKE BOILED POTATOES

BY SHANTELL POWELL

Late 70s. Muscle cars. Chain-smoking. Leaded gasoline. Gun racks on the back windows of pickup trucks.

I’m living out in the bush in central New Brunswick. Our nearest neighbours are a half-mile away along a dirt road. We are deep in a forest, half-way up a steep, long hill across from a tree-covered ridge rising up like a living wall.

To make boiled potatoes for a family of four, you need:

• Water

• Salt

• Margarine

• 10 lbs of Russet potatoes.

Mom always lived in towns, trailer parks, and army bases. Now she is way out in the boonies with two small children. My father lives in a distant man camp during the week. She starves for adult company. Although we are isolated, we never run out of things to do. We live in a mobile home on a small farm and raise most of our food.

Make sure the wood stove is stoked to high heat. (Tip: Hardwood burns hotter than softwood, but don’t burn wood from apple trees; it burns so hot the stove glows cherry red, and you’ll be afraid the chimney will catch fire.) Fetch potatoes from the root cellar.

When it’s time to fetch potatoes for supper, I go into the porch and down a steep flight of stairs to the dank, unfinished basement. Last winter, Dad still didn’t have the stairs installed and my little baby sister tumbled through the open hole to the cellar. Her snow pants caught on a nail, and she dangled upside down over a puddle screaming, “I can’t swim!” Now there are steps made from repurposed wooden road signs. Now there’s a handrail. The root cellar behind the staircase smells like earthworms. The cement floor is damp, cold, and gritty, and I move quickly. The floor feels disgusting against the skin of my bare feet. Sometimes I remember to wear flip-flops, and then I don’t need to rush so much.

Knock eyes off potatoes if necessary. Wash potatoes in the sink, then peel them with a paring knife. Cut out any bad spots. Throw peelings, eyes, and spots into a bucket to feed to the pigs and chickens.

We raise chickens, rabbits, and pigs for meat. Dad hunts for deer and moose in the fall, and we fish year-round. We keep geese and chickens for eggs. I pick berries, but more end up in my mouth than in the bucket. We have goats for milk, and when they’re not producing, we get milk from our neighbours’ cattle: Oscar with his herd of doe-eyed Jerseys, or Guy with his one Holstein, Bossy. Every year, a city person shoots at Oscar’s cows thinking they are deer. Sometimes they even shoot at the black and white spotted Holsteins. I’ve never fired my Dad’s hunting rifle, but I know the difference between a deer and a cow, and Bossy needn’t fear me. She lets me rub her crooked horns, but refuses to let me lasso her with a lariat made of baling twine. She won’t let me sit on her back, either. How will I ever become a cowboy?

The root cellar is lit by a single lightbulb. I need to walk halfway into the room to switch it on. I fumble in the darkness for the dangling pull-cord. Cobwebs always seem to be hanging from the walls and lightbulb. I do my best to avoid them, but sometimes they catch in my hair.

I always choose the biggest potatoes I can find. I read an entry in Anne Frank’s diary about how she likes tiny potatoes the best. This makes no sense to me. What is so great about tiny potatoes? When you peel them, there’s barely anything left. Peeling ten pounds of potatoes is a lot of work, and I’m not very fast.

A plywood cabinet with peeling white paint stands at the end of the root cellar. It is filled with jars of Mom’s preserves and is also stacked with squashes, carrots, beets, parsnips, and rutabagas. Sitting on the end of a shelf is a huge mason jar containing a vinegar plant. It looks like moon-white layers of fungus embalmed in amber fluid.

After you peel the potatoes, chop them into uniformly-sized pieces and put them in a big pot. Rinse them again, because they will somehow still be dirty. Cover the potatoes with water. Add salt. Cover pot with a lid and place onto a hot wood stove. Bring the water to a boil, then tilt or remove the lid so the pot won’t boil over and make a starchy mess.

We get our water from the spring in the backyard. The water is cold and sweet and alive. Every winter, we harness up the dog team and collect firewood from Dorn Lake. Dad made the dog harnesses from old polyester pants wrapped around worn-out nylon pantihose. He cuts the wood with his chainsaw, and my sister, Mom, and I load the wood onto the dogsled. The basement stove keeps our trailer warm. One winter, after an ice storm, an earthquake runs a crack through the entire length of the basement. I follow the crack in the ice-crusted snow for miles through fields and forest, but I never find its end.

After boiling for about twenty minutes, potatoes should be soft enough to eat. Test with fork. When they are cooked according to preference, strain potatoes, reserving the water for the pigs.

By late winter, the potatoes in the root cellar shrivel. Touching them is like touching the skin of an old, old person. I know a woman named Alice. She is one hundred years old. I don’t know if she ate a lot of potatoes, but she is as wrinkly and brown as last season’s harvest. Pallid tentacles grow from the shrunken potatoes in the root cellar, reaching for a sun they know is up there somewhere. In the springtime, the leftover potatoes with their long spindly eyes will be chopped into pieces and buried in the tilled rows of the garden. A few will liquefy and smell like rotting meat. Then the root cellar needs to be scrubbed clean.

Serve as a side dish for meat or fish. Add salt, pepper, and cheap margarine.

Dad says we are living the way people are meant to live. We grow our own food. Mom makes all our clothes. We take care of our neighbours, and they take care of us. I wish Dad didn’t have to work so far away.