I no longer need the alarm. My internal clock, my inner anxiety, pokes me awake before 5 a.m. Usually my body overrules it — just 15 more minutes to knit myself back together after last night. Just 15 more minutes.
Five is normally all I get. Body-mind compromise. I haul myself semi-vertical, check my phone for messages; sometimes I get nice notes from normal people keeping normal evening hours that I miss because I am dead asleep.
I’ve developed a habit of performing most of my ablutions at night, so I am dressed, boots laced up and out the door by 5:30. Subie Sue, as my vehicle likes to call herself, jumps awake when I ask, but in return, we slow roll down the rural road towards the lodge, 8 minutes away. Human-car compromise.
When the pavement ends, Sue tells me she’s warm enough and I accelerate into the fog or frost or rain, or, sometimes, just a pretty Minnesota pre-dawn morning.
Everyone is asleep at the lodge when I arrive. Everyone except for a random smattering of high-strung gun dogs, who bark at anything. All the time.
I swing into the dark kitchen, solo. It’s quiet. I am alone. For a few precious moments.
Life as a cook in a hunting lodge isn’t the hardest job in the world, but nor is it the easiest. It’s not as physically demanding as commercial fishing, but rolling through breakfast, lunch and dinner for anywhere between 18 and 40 people every day for more than a month grinds you.
On a whim, I did the math: You don’t want to know what I make on an hourly basis ($3.90). We live and die on tips, which can double or more what we’re guaranteed in pay. More on tips another day.
This is what it’s like to work a day at the lodge. All lodges are the same, and different, in their own ways. But I’ve been in enough to know that my experience isn’t out of the ordinary.
In those few precious moments silent and alone, I’ll check my email, send a few messages to people I care about, maybe watch an IG Reel. Then I set myself in motion.
Get the coffee on; it’s dreadful, institutional coffee no one should be made to drink, and I bought my own Chiapas beans as a small luxury to stave off suicide. (That’s mostly a joke.)
Set out boiled eggs, muffins I made the night before. Fun fact: Hunters don’t like brown muffins. Every time I make them with pumpkin or whole wheat, almost none get eaten. When they are light-colored, they gone. Clearly this is a sign of white supremacy. (That’s also mostly a joke.)
Light the flattop. Deep breath. In order to do this, you set the end of a skewer on fire and stick it into a small hole — think about the child’s game Operation and you now know how vital skills honed on that game may ultimately become — while carefully turning on the gas. WOOOOF! Gas on. Eyebrows intact. Today.
These past few days the water heater has been out, so the next task is to take the two largest pots we have, fill them with water and get them hot, so we can fill the wash and rinse sinks.
Time to make breakfast and lunch. Our hunters get a box lunch they eat in the field, so mostly that’s already made, or at least the components of it are, and we build it at dawn. One of us takes lunch, the other breakfast.
Mostly the other has been my friend and “cooking wife” Rachel, but she had to return to Kansas City to cook for her brother’s wedding, so my friend Nick spelled her; Nick is from Two Harbors, Minnesota, and is one of the wunderkind chefs of Fargo’s Hotel Donaldson (Da HoDo) who wowed me back in 2013. We’ve remained friends.
By now, we got this shit down cold. Chilaquiles, pancakes, wild rice porridge, oatmeal, straight up breakfast tacos, and an ersatz Taylor Ham sandwich made with the crappy “Genoa” salami we can get from the food distributor. It’s actually pretty good.
Lunches are normally deli sandwiches with good meat and decent cheese, sometimes muffaletas, but we love making meat pies of all descriptions: Empanadas, Finnish meat pies, bierocks, that sort of thing. I know these are harder to make than slapping meat on bread, but we all have a certain level of pride as cooks.
It’s that pride in our work that has been difficult.
We are all chefs. We make great food, and love pleasing people. We want to do more, all the time, every meal, every day. But doing that absolutely causes burnout. We could all feel it a week in: This is not sustainable.
So you scale things back, just a little, so that you are fighting the good fight where it matters, like sauces, like those meat pies. And, well, maybe alongside that meat pie they get chips. A small price to pay for my sanity. For the record, no one has complained.
Kitchen thrift is the other Prime Directive. Many home cooks are familiar with this, of course. Dinner tonight becomes lunches later, and maybe an element in one meal turns up as an element in another. That requires thought, and a certain skill with improvisation. We’ve all gotten very good at it.
The lull in our day comes after we clean up morning service. When we have everything together, we can escape for an hour or three. Sometimes I hunt, sometimes I look for mushrooms, sometimes I just walk.
Lately though, I’ve been sleeping. It has been more than 20 years since I’ve gone this many days without a day off — I haven’t had one since September 26. Much like when we all got sick here, this schedule gives me an enormous amount of empathy for those for whom this is just life.
That second sleep has allowed me to spend the rest of the day happier and more productive. I need it, because the day is spent making tomorrow easier. We cook the lunch for the next day, make elements that take a long time (like stock) in advance. I pluck and butcher birds that hunters kill for the table.
One of us comes up with some sort of grouse or woodcock appetizer for the evening. We’ve done everything from roast woodcock to fried woodcock legs to grouse nuggets, grouse rillettes, grouse spiedini, woodcock egg rolls…
The week has a rhythm. Monday is Italian night, and I alternate between my classic New Jersey red sauce and classic New Jersey sausage, peppers and onions. Tuesday is Mexican, and we’ve done cochinita pibil, carnitas, carne asada, you name it. Wednesday is stew, and this depends on our mood. Tonight it’s three sisters stew. I’ve been reading a book about the Mandans, who live around Bismarck, North Dakota, and was inspired by that.
Thursday is Asian, and Rachel typically shines here. She goes wild with foods from all over the continent, while I mostly stick to Japanese and Chinese favorites.
Friday is fish, and Jerry the owner was nice enough to buy some of my salmon from Alaska, and I’ve been smoking salmon each Friday, with wild rice pilaf and something sweet. Saturday we either roast a whole pig, lamb or make something else extravagant, and Sunday roasts are our norm.
We’ve also learned to live with the variability that is our guest numbers. We get “the number” from Jerry, but that number can change, sometimes dramatically. So we make extra.
There’s also the Mysterious Lunch Eater, who, much like the creature that steals one sock out of your dryer, will take lunches without a trace, leaving us to scramble to feed hungry hunters in the middle of prep work for dinner.
Dinner services are a blur of prepping, cooking and serving, then a sweaty, wet blur of scrubbing and cleaning so I can walk in again at 5:30 a.m. and not lose my shit because the kitchen’s a wreck. In most kitchens, there are separate crews who do morning and evening, so this can be a problem. But when I am both morning and evening cook, well, if the kitchen is shitty, it’s on me.
I do not socialize.
This camp is a haven for grouse and woodcock hunters. They love their dogs, their fancy guns, their brown liquor. I am indifferent to dogs, fancy guns and brown liquor. In fact, I have been working hard to avoid all hard liquor these days, and even most alcohol in general. So walking into a room full of well lubricated hunters when I am sweaty and stinking of fryer oil isn’t something I love.
Sometimes I’ll grab a Hamm’s, mostly not. Mostly I just return to the cabin to wash the day off. This moment is what I cherish the most: Hot shower, nice towel, a shave, taking care of my burnt and beat-up hands, my face. I fall into bed, message a friend maybe, look at Instagram one last time.
Sleep. Deep. Until somewhere around 4:45, when that anxiety pokes me up to do all this once again.
This is my life, until November 4. Each day is similar to the last, with minor crises and little wins. It’s hard. Draining. I hang onto those few shining beacons in my life for dear life. They’ll get me through until the end.
And then, finally, I can start my new life in St. Paul.
I worked a fall on a private island in Maine, cook, boat handler, caretaker... up before dawn to take those blasted duck hunters to a ledge.... by 9 they were back and breakfast, bourbon and bacon. However, each morning I had to dispose of the duck bodies, something I loathed. I grew up here. We ate what we killed. Finally the guides got on board. The paid “sportsmen “ said that wild duck wasn’t edible. We soaked the pieces of duck in buttermilk, later fried them in batter, with multiple dipping sauces. When the guests asked “this is fantastic, what is it?”, we all said, FKG duck! They conceded and ate it all, and duck stew the next night.... I actually was able to tell them at that point, how horrified I was by such waste. They listened!
I might add that these hunters had been all over the world... rarely if ever ate game... one of the was an importer of cheese ( and they left us with a great deal!) and my reaction, inspired several conversations about hunting and game as food, and waste. I was humbled and impressed that they listened...