There has been a slight change in the clean-up arrangements for the evaporator. On Saturday, the 30th, I packed the refilled L-P gas cylinder and the evaporator parts, that I had brought home to clean up, back out to the sugarhouse. (The recent rains had made it too soft to drive to the sugarhouse, so the pack frame was called out of temporay retirement and taken down off the nail in the basement.) The smaller of the evaporator pans has a small leak--an unsuccessful repair from late last season. It reopened at the start of this season, and we simply made due with it. A little syrup would leak out occasionally and become sugar and burn sealing the leak temporarily. We found out last year that the seal is dissolved by the sour sap, which resulted in quite a mess on the floor of the sugarhouse. This year I wanted to avoid such a mess. When I returned to the sugarhouse on Saturday, it was clear that our temporary fix was not working, so I emptied and disconnected the smaller pan to avoid any more flooding of the sugarhouse and to bring it home to clean. It is now in my garage in a kiddie wading pool. I am using some milk stone remover to loosen the scale. I applied some elbow grease to the project last evening, and it appears to be achieving the desired results. I will tackle it again later this week. Hopefully, with the additional effort the pan will be clean and ready for a return trip to the welder for another repair attempt.
This week I have been reading William Kittredge's Hole in the Sky. I am halfway through the book and find myself thinking that I will start over as soon as I finish it. It is a little like reading a foreign language in which I have very limited facility. I understand the story in terms of the facts and events, but the author's description of his emotional response to these facts and events is quite indecipherable. He has what appears to me to be a very obtuse style when he speaks of his subjective interpretations of and the meanings he ascribes to the events and fellow actors in his life. I don't think he is intentionally trying to be cryptic or enigmatic. At the outset, I thought I would catch on to the author's style after a chapter to two. Such has not been the case. His vocabulary is simple and common enough. What it is that eludes me eludes me still after 125 pages. It may simply be the brevity with which he speaks of these things. There appears to be an absence of adjectives and other descriptive words in his writing. It is mostly nouns and verbs in succinct declarative statements. Many of the sentences are grammatically incomplete which makes them mysterious at least to me.
Mr. Kittredge has an interesting story: he was in the Air Force during the Korean War and in graduate school working on a MFA (University of Iowa, Iowa Writers' Workshop) in 1968 during the Viet Nam war. (He had earlier earned an undergraduate degree in 1954 with a major in agriculture.) There was a certain parallel in those two conflicts especially as he experienced them. Between the Air Force and graduate school, he operated a ranch in southeastern Oregon. He was third generation rancher in that area. He speaks of the not so glorious side of fathers and sons and the choice of careers. Maybe what I thought was particular to the 60's is, in fact, typical of every age.
Now, am I being obtuse and enigmatic?
