fried bread and douglas fir

June 29, 2002

Today's Reading
Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks

This Year's Reading
2002 Book List

Today's Starting Pitcher
Derek Lowe

Yesterday I was talking with a coworker who was packing for a camping trip. He was packing his Braun coffee maker, a small refrigerator, and other luxuries. It's one of those campgrounds with electrical outlets on the trees. I pointed out that with the coffee maker and the refrigerator he could make iced coffee. That got me thinking about how the most ordinary things can become longed for luxury items when they're unavailable. Like iced coffee.

That reminded me how in China I found myself craving iced coffee and craving toast. Mainly toast. We had fried bread for breakfast, round fried things. In Beijing bread is either steamed or fried - not baked and definitely not baked and then toasted. And, of course, we had those crullers that I still think about. I can't figure out exactly what it is about those crullers that calls out to me -- the mysteries of Beijing street food I guess. I told coworker all about the wonders and frustrations of bread and coffee in Beijing, all the while developing a craving for some Beijing style bread of all things. I guess when you have toast you crave fried bread and when you have fried bread you crave toast.

This noontime I went out to lunch with another coworker (the camping one had to put in the roof racks for the camping gear and couldn't join us) at the local Chinese restaurant. And what to my wondering eyes did appear but fried dough at the buffet! What they labeled fried dough is a small version of the fried bread at the botanical garden restaurant. Strange that I mention fried bread for the first time in like a year and suddenly there it is on the buffet. Maybe if I mention the crullers enough, street vendors in Boston will start selling them.

In yet more proof that the world is really very very small, I was reading the new Oliver Sacks book, Oaxaca Journal, and there on page 48 he mentions "a magnificent Douglas fir on a precipitous outcropping". Without even reading the next sentence, I knew that was the stand of Douglas firs Zsolt discovered in 1994! The southernmost stand of Douglas fir in the world. Sure enough he goes on to say it was discovered by a botanist from the Hungarian Museum of Natural History. Alas, he doesn't mention Zsolt's name or the Dendrological Atlas Project. So I immediately emailed Zsolt about how he's almost sort of kind of mentioned in a book by a wildly popular writer. My mind is busy trying to figure out some way that this passing mention by a best-selling writer can help the project.

Yup. Fried bread in Littleton and Douglas firs in Oaxaca and me in a small small world.