Brewing Black Walnut Dye, or Brou de Noix

In Adventures in Wood Finishing (The Taunton Press, 1981), master finisher George Frank relates that when he was a young apprentice in France, his master’s wife brewed a walnut dye using walnut hulls.  “She filled a large earthenware pot with them, covered them with rainwater and added a pinch of caustic soda.  Then she put on the lid.  For two or three days she simmered this pot on the stove, never boiling the mixture.  Finally, she strained the liquid through a linen cloth and bottled it.”

In the fall of 2015, I decided to follow Frank's account and brew some walnut hulls myself.  My first task was to determine precisely what "caustic soda" was.  It turned out to be lye.  My local pharmacy didn't carry it, so I went to a hardware store.  First the clerk and then the manager asked me why I wanted to buy lye.  I explained.  The manager laughed and commented that they had some, but these days lye is kept under the counter.  Apparently, it's in demand for cooking meth.

The next step was to harvest the walnut hulls. The walnuts of Juglans nigra, the common black walnut, are enclosed within a greenish hull that, after dropping from the tree, rots and turns black.  I waited until a number had fallen in early October, put on gloves, and quickly gathered a pail full.

Back home with my harvest of hulls, I filled our slow cooker two-thirds full of hulls and then added enough distilled water (rainwater would also work) to fill the slow cooker to capacity.  I wasn't entirely certain about what a pinch of lye would amount to, so I measured out a half teaspoon and stirred it in.  After covering it, I simmered it for twenty-four hours.

Not having any linen I wanted to turn dark brown, I used folded cheesecloth to strain it.  I then decanted it into a clean plastic juice container and labeled it. 

I've only had occasion to use this Brou de Noix once, but it does work.  You can dilute it with distilled water or rainwater if you don't want so dark a color.  Conversely, additional coats will darken the wood somewhat.  As it's water based, it may well raise the grain, so be prepared for the need for whiskering.

Chemically, according to Wikipedia, this dye is effective because black walnut hulls contain juglone (5-hydroxy-1, 4-naphthoquinone), plumbagin (yellow quinone pigments), and tannin.  The tannins act as a mordant in the dying process, helping fix the color.

Bottom line?  Brou de Noix costs almost nothing.  It's simple to make, and the process is rather fun.  In a small way, when you make some you become part of a tradition of craftspeople extending back into the Middle Ages.  That's a good feeling, I discovered.  You might enjoy it, too.

What's Wrong with The Revenant

As its numerous awards and Oscar nominations would suggest, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant (2015) is a powerful film, but it gets some matters totally wrong.  Now, I don't expect a documentary approach to the legendary mountain man Hugh Glass, and I have no objection to making a film loosely based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Michael Punke (which I haven't read).  Nor do I object to giving Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio, in case anyone doesn't know) a son he never had, any more than having his dead Pawnee wife appear to him in visions.  So what if the actual Hugh Glass never rode his horse off a cliff and, saved from death by falling into a convenient tree, then eviscerated his dead horse to climb inside its body cavity to survive the night?  Hugh Glass is granted almost no inner life, but this is an epic of survival.  A film is a visual work of fiction, and what counts in fiction is how well it works.

On one level, this film works pretty well.  For the most part, the landscape looks like the Rocky Mountains, except perhaps for a panoramic sunset which I'd guess was filmed in Tierra del Fuego.  The dialog is neither archaic nor contemporary.  The fort is architecturally convincing; its inhabitants are not sanitized like Bingham's jolly boatmen but boisterously drunk.  This marginally civil culture makes a powerful statement about life at the edge of the wilderness.  The costumes are appropriate to the time period of the 1820's, and the guns are flintlocks. (There is one lapse:  in a tense moment, expecting attack, one of the men is aiming his rifle with the frizzen open and forward, so there was no way the hammer with its flint could strike the spark needed to make a flintlock fire.)  By and large, however, this seeming veracity is at odds with the ignorance displayed by scriptwriters Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith about the realities of survival in the wild.

Again and again, this film betrays a complete ignorance of the wild and of ways to survive in it.  An elementary example involves wet feet.  Anyone who has read accounts of exploration from Lewis and Clark onwards will recall that they are always stopping after fording a river to build a fire to dry their footwear.  In The Revenant, however, nobody ever puts on a pair of dry moccasins or dries his boots.  The trappers are continually wading around in water close to freezing, unconcerned about their feet going numb, let alone about the subsequent hazards of frostbite, trench foot, and hypothermia.

Higher on the scale of ignorance is what happens when a person goes over a waterfall.  The Revenant has some exciting footage of Glass floating down a turbulent river.  As the camera pulls back, we can see he's about to go over a major waterfall.  He does, and then his head promptly pops up above the water.  He laboriously makes it to shore.

But, as every wilderness canoer or kayaker knows, that's not how waterfall hydraulics work.  At the base of a falls, there's a vertically oriented and back flowing circulation of water that traps a person and keeps him from getting up to the surface--that's why waterfalls are known as "keepers."  One's only hope of surviving is counterintuitive:  to  swim downwards to get below the circulating current and then to swim to the side.  In the real world, as opposed to the one depicted in The Revenant, Glass would have drowned.

The director has commented that the river is important symbolically to Glass's epic ordeal.  Sure enough, just as he's about to be captured by a party of Arikaras, he manages to escape by taking to the river and letting it carry him downstream.  At this point, it's still winter.  Apparently, nobody involved with the film realized that Glass would have lost consciousness in something like fifteen to twenty minutes and drowned.  Why?  Because cold water removes your body heat twenty-five times faster than cold air.  I've capsized into a glacier-fed river in late spring, not winter as in The Revenant.  I was wearing a farmer john wet suit, and it still felt like a cold hand being clamped on my heart.  You lose body heat and strength with fearful rapidity.  When your core temperature falls below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, you become confused and perhaps hallucinatory; when it falls lower, you die.  But rather than drowning (yet again!), Glass serenely floats away down this river not of death but of life.

All films require a prolonged suspension of disbelief.  Unfortunately, the imagined reality of The Revenant is only rewarding to an audience equally ignorant about wilderness survival.  I'm confident it will win lots of awards.  It's a good film, but it gets too much wrong to be more than occasionally persuasive to this viewer.

Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

Thad Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank:  Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier (Random House, 2001) is one of those books that is sui generis, perfect in its own kind.  Like Henry Beston's The Outermost House, Samuel Chamberlain's Clementine in the Kitchen, and Stephen Bodio's Querencia, Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is so well done that it affords delight beyond all expectation.  I had never heard of this book until a friend recommended it, but I liked it so much that after I finished reading it I immediately read it again.

Carhart's plot is nearly non-existent:  he and his wife and daughter are living in Paris, and he notices a shop with a window display of tools for tuning a piano.  He thinks it might be interesting to start playing again, so he enters the shop with the idea of buying a used piano, only to be told, not just then but on a number of subsequent occasions, that there are no pianos for sale.  The French do things differently, he eventually figures out, and, indeed, he learns at last from a friend that he has to be recommended by a former client of the shop to even be considered as a suitable customer for one of their many, many pianos discreetly assembled in a back room.

Fortunately, Carhart speaks fluent French and becomes friends with the young owner Luc, who eventually lets him see and try out the piano Luc has chosen for him.  Carhart loves it, and in this instance the course of true love really does run smooth.  He finds a teacher who is willing to take on an adult, and we learn more about what really counts in music.  At intervals, Luc discovers another "dream piano," one that is extraordinary or will become so under his loving care.

The more lore Carhart learns from Luc about pianos, the more we learn about Luc and his seemingly inexhaustible passion for pianos in their almost infinite variety. I'd say that all of this is charming, but that word has become almost meaningless.  I shall say only that The Piano Shop on the Left Bank makes you wish that you too were fluent in French, living in Paris, and friends with Thad Carhart and Luc.  Oh, and that you could also play the piano so Luc could pick out the perfect one for you as well.  This book, as the subtitle indicates, is about rediscovering passion, and thus it is entirely fitting that the last line has Luc justifying his own, "You can never have too many dream pianos."

Herter's Catalogs

In one of my all too infrequent attempts to get organized, I recently went through my father's fly tying box, something he probably last used in the 70's.  In it were some odd bits of fur I didn't recognize together with little cardboard boxes of hooks, one of which was from Herter's.  And then I suddenly recalled why those bits of fur were there:  we'd ordered them from Herter's one time when I was in college, back in the late 50's.  I could remember sitting with him, laughing about whether colobus monkey fur might tempt those selective trout on the Firehole.  Herter's prices were so low, however, that we ordered a variety of stuff, and some of it still survived in that box.  Herter's had long since gone out of business, but seeing the hooks and fur made me wish I had kept a copy of one of their annual catalogs, a treasure trove of outdoor gear.

Not long after, I came across a 1968 catalog from Herter's in a used book store and promptly bought it.  This one is Catalog No. 78, suggesting that Herter's began issuing catalogs only a few years after its founding in 1893 (the company may have been founded then, but several sources on the web state that the company only began to offer sporting goods after WW II).  Its cover was just like all the ones I remembered.  It always featured a coat of arms:  in the center was a shield of crossed flintlock rifles with a superposed dagger as well as a duck below plus two wildly out of scale fishhooks.  A white tailed deer on its hind legs supports one side of the shield; a seahorse supports the other.  Adding to this trademark's bizarre quality are a length of red and black rope surmounting the shield, a leaping trout or salmon touching the rope, and a three-masted ship resting on the fish's back.

These catalogs were good sized, 8.5" by ll", and this 1968 one runs to 597 pages plus index.  What stands out, however, is less its bulk than its hyperbole. Everything listed is the best available, regardless of price, and produced to the highest possible standards.  The copy is anything but routine:  absurdities are everywhere.  Herter's stainless steel set of garden tools will not only stay mirror bright but "they do not destroy the vitamin or mineral content of soils as with ordinary steel tools."  Say what?  Herter's "Genuine Hudson Bay Wilderness Ice Chest" is the only ice chest endorsed by the International Guide Association" (which as far as I know was a figment of George Herter's imagination).  George L. Herter designed the sheath knife carrying his name after "generations of testing and opinions from some of the best known guides in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia."  In fact, it is a blatant rip-off of the knife and sheath designed and sold by D. H. Russell in Nova Scotia.

And then there are the books.  Herter wrote the "World's Greatest Book on Fly Tying," books on reloading ammunition, a professional guide's manual (my copy has disappeared, but I still recall the entry, "How to Make Pond Scum Soup"), and several volumes of cookbooks advertised to contain "the secret recipes of the most world famous cooks from before the time of Christ up to the present time."  It will teach you not only how to make "the finest Canadian type whiskey from the cheapest American whiskey for 10 cents a fifth," but  how to make the "secret hors d'oeuvre from the Monk Perngon (sic) who invented champagne.  After you eat one of these small sandwiches, any liquor that you taste, no matter how poor in quality, will taste like the very best." 

Herter's only lasted another ten years or so after this catalog came out in 1968.  Accounts of the company's demise vary, some stating that the company filed for bankruptcy in 1977, others in 1981.  I recall hearing at the time that Herter's had run afoul of the laws regulating importation of fur and feathers into the US.  The few bits and pieces left in my father's fly tying box, like the catalog, serve as a reminder of a vanished era of merchandising, a time when hyperbole was not the exception but the rule.  It's a hoot to read this catalog.  And I'm going to keep my eyes open for an inexpensive copy of Herter's Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices. 

Blood on My Hands reviewed in Traditional Bowhunter Magazine

David Tetzlaff wrote this review of Blood on My Hands.  It appeared in the June/July 2015 issue of Traditional Bowhunter Magazine and is reprinted with permission. 

Blood on My Hands

Gerard H. Cox

$23.00 Hardcover/$15.25 Paperback/$9.99 Kindle Edition

             Having shot his first big game animal well into his adult years, author Gerard Cox showed up late for the hunting party, but perhaps that makes this late bloomer better suited than some to offer a balanced body of work regarding our relationship with animals:

            As human beings in the world, we can avoid the extremes both of biblically-derived dominion, which treats all animals as means created for our own ends, and of Walt Disney-inspired sentimentality, which results in eating no creature that is cute.

            An acquaintance of this reviewer is employed by the Disney entertainment empire and she, not surprisingly, takes deep offense to any contrary inferences directed at the anthropomorphic themes of the Disney films. Yet much of society’s failure to grasp the basic processes of the natural world is certainly realized in certain overly sentimental movie making efforts. Such films often create a wide chasm between man and his place in nature. Embraced by the anti-hunter crowd, Disney’s Bambi is a mawkish example of man as the invader of peaceful nature as if nature is not in itself violent. Yet in other films, The Lion King for example, it is acceptable for large carnivores to kill to eat, but not for man. However, Cox wisely reminds the reader that man as hunter has for millennia been entwined within the ecosystem, not divorced from it.

However, as some cultures moved from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists a connection to the land and animals was lost. Man carved and tilled the land and no longer lived in communion with it. The blood on our hands no longer emanated from wild animals we hunted. Man cleared his hunting grounds in order to raise domestic animals thereby giving author Cox strong reason to state:

Pastoralists and agriculturists were no longer part of the land: they lived apart from it. They no longer were related to other animals.

Chapter Three of Blood on My Hands, “Putting Animals in Their Place” may, at first glance, give the reader a false perception—that animals are creatures to be demeaned, falling far down the rungs of a human engineered ladder of self-defined superiority. Au contraire, Cox’s actual intent is to put proponents of the animal rights agenda in their rightful place. He takes on Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights and Regan’s attempt to define those that can morally assume self-responsibility (moral agents) and those who cannot act on their own behalf (moral patients) who may be animal or human:

In attempting to give animals rights and thus make them more like us, Regan has paradoxically widened the gap between humans and other members of the animal kingdom.

Of course one of the leading arguments from animal rightists is the suffering that humans inflict upon animals, wild or domestic. Any ethical bowhunter who has ever wounded or lost an animal surely must have contemplated the result of an errant arrow. Yet is it society’s misdirected morals or our own conscience that seeks to harbor a deep measure of guilt in this instance? Or perhaps (with risk of exonerating the hunter from loosing a bad arrow) should we simply return to our historical place as just another predator?  Cox offers this sentiment:

But I find something over-righteous in dwelling on animals’ suffering: it smacks too much of a pornography of pain. In a state of nature, after all, predators kill with no regard for the suffering of their prey. Mother Nature is serenely unconcerned with sentience.

Author Cox is more than adept in his effort to place man squarely in his rightful place in the natural order of things, as predator or as potential prey. He reminds the reader that we are part of the natural drama, not masters of it. Cox astutely invokes Monster of God author David Quammen whose words serve as a firm reminder to those hunters who have shared the woods, here or abroad, with our large cats and bears: “….alpha predators have kept us acutely aware of our membership within the natural world. They’ve done it by reminding us that to them we are just another flavor of meat." Predator introductions have indeed stirred deep controversial feelings in the past twenty years, from Florida to Montana. Yet one cannot deny that wild is that much wilder knowing that the big carnivores are out there assuming their role as alpha predators. In recognition, and perhaps a profound dose of admiration, Cox states:

Our newly informed self-knowledge appropriately takes the form of humility before animals more awesome than we are.

Blood on My Hands encourages the reader to consider that perhaps we do not have to learn to hunt; instead we have to re-learn to hunt, a recovering of sorts of what is already stored deep in our DNA as hunter-gatherers. Cox goes as far to say that “hunting is a highly imaginative activity, one perhaps more intuitive than rational.” Humans do have an innate need to feel connected to nature. Hence the phrase by some photographers, “I hunt with my camera.” Not quite. The photographer is an observer. The hunter is a participant. Prior to his first true hunt, Cox spent the better part of three decades in the outdoors as a non-hunter and easily acknowledges that rather than being a participant he was “just another eco-tourist taking in the sights.”

Gerard Cox has certainly done his research for this volume. The book closes with extensive documentation of his footnotes, followed by a bibliography, and finally (which more hunting authors should do) an index.

            Two decades after Ted Kerasote’s groundbreaking Bloodties was published, Gerard Cox’s Blood on My Hands now comes along as another much needed read for the thinking man’s hunter as well as non-hunters, who in turn, must be made aware of man’s equitable place in the natural world. Cox leaves his reader’s with these hopeful words:

            Our planet is valuable beyond any meaningful calculation. We evolved here. The earth was not made for us; we were made for the earth. We have no other home.

Barsness's Big Book of Gun Gack

Full disclosure:  pre-publication, I helped John Barsness and Eileen Clarke proofread The Big Book of Gun Gack (RiflesandRecipes, 2015).  At that point the manuscript carried what became its subtitle, "The Hunter's Guide to Handloading Smokeless Rifle Cartridges."  As I later discovered when I Googled it, "Gack" has a rather startling range of meanings, but the subtitle is precise and illuminating:  this is a guide for hunters who wish to reload smokeless cartridges.  With the sole exception of the .303 British, all the cartridges covered here were first loaded with smokeless powder, so this book does not treat, say, the .38-55 or the .45-70.

Barsness discusses many, many rifle cartridges (I counted sixty, but I may have missed a couple).  The result is a big book indeed:  the size is 8.5 x 11" and it has 436 pages.  So, what does it offer that you can't find in a printed manual from one of the standard companies like Hornady or a recipe from an electronic source like LoadData?  Not only do these alternatives cover pistol cartridges, they offer even more loads.  I just checked LoadData, and it has 303,595 loads available.

What you get in The Big Book of Gun Gack is something entirely different.  Rather than being inclusive like LoadData, it is selective.  Rather than offering brief overviews of a cartridge together with fifteen powders, say, for each of five to eight bullet weights in a given caliber like the Hornady Handbook, The Big Book of Gun Gack evaluates the merits of each cartridge at some length.  Most reloading manuals have about a page's worth of background on a given cartridge.  Barsness typically has four to six pages (and remember, they're big pages).  His treatment of each cartridge concludes with a few loads that worked well in the rifles he used (the make of rifle, barrel length, and group size are always included).  It is indeed a guide for hunters.

The chief virtue of this book is that  it's written by John Barsness.  His skeptical intelligence is evident on virtually every page.  This is especially true in his treatment of reloading practices, techniques, and formulas.  His 4-to-1 Rule for Ackley Improved cases is here, plus rules for figuring out potential velocity when a given case is necked up or down and for figuring out velocity for different bullet weights in the same cartridge as well as how much powder will be required.  As for techniques, if you believe you are loading accurate ammunition, read Barsness's chapter, "Sizing Cases Straight."  I followed his suggestions in a test run of 7x57's and reduced run-out by 50%.  If you feel confident about reading signs of excessive pressure from external case measurements, read this book:  the life you save may be your own.

Publishing his dictionary, Dr. Johnson declared, "In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed."  The Big Book of Gun Gack omits little, and much has been performed:  its breadth and depth are truly remarkable.  If you are a hunter who reloads or are even thinking you might reload, John Barsness's The Big Book of Gun Gack belongs on your book shelf.  I know I'm going to consult it often, and I'm confident that you will, too.

Fish Fingers Come From . . .What?

"Fish fingers" is of course the English term for what Americans call "fish sticks."  The diamond jubilee of the introduction of fish fingers into Great Britain has occasioned a number of off-beat stories in The Guardian and elsewhere.  Introduced in 1955 by Birds Eye, the nearly tasteless fish finger made from cod, pollack, or haddock beat out competing products made from stronger flavored fish like salmon or herring.  (And in the UK, "fish fingers" likewise triumphed over the name I would have preferred, "cod pieces.")  Children, of course, typically love fish fingers and retain a fondness for them.

Recent studies have demonstrated, however, that a significant percentage of primary school children in the UK are more than a little confused about what constitutes a fish finger.  In a study by the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) of more than 27,500 children, 18% believed that fish fingers come from chicken.  Other findings from the BNF survey are that 10% of primary school children believe that tomatoes grow underground, while 29% believe that cheese comes from plants.

One would like to hope that enlightenment accompanies additional age, but a survey of 16-24 year-olds by the firm Rouse Honey points in another direction.  One in eight of these 16-24 year-olds think that bees have to be squeezed to produce honey.  One in seven--14%--believe that potatoes grow on trees.  And my favorite finding is that one in five--20%, that's twenty per cent-- of British young adults believe that fish fingers come from the fingers of fish!