The Potatoland Diaries - Chapter 12

Dutch Supper: A Missing Chapter from the Potatoland Diaries

Last year, about this time, I was chucking seed potatoes with Jim and the girls. Though I still vividly recall the migraine and gut-ache that I associate with Jim's birthday and that horrific pudding dessert that Angela concocted, I'm half tempted to get out the Playtex gloves, the long underwear, the dust goggles, the sack lunch, and get back on the Spudnik that throwed me.

What's more, it will soon be Eastertide, which means time for the Dutch Supper -- an episode from Potatoland that I apparently neglected to relate right after it occurred. Possibly my energy was low.

It was just after the russett stampede. Shawna and I cleaned up after work and showed up at the Manhattan Christian school just in time for our boss, Jim, all scrubbed and rosy, to pay our admission to the gymnasium-full of wonders. Dutch folk music echoed over the murmer of community as plump children in wooden shoes performed proud, embarassed clomping dances. We followed Jim's lead and ferried our divided plastic trays around a staggering gauntlet of mashed vegetables.

In folding chairs at long tables, we tucked spoonfuls of mashed rutabaga, mashed potatoes, mashed carrots, mashed something green (wasn't there something green?) into ourselves until it hurt to breath. Duty-bound, driven by some unspoken familial challenge, we soldiered through pigs in a blanket, black bread with butter and piles of firm little black beans that looked like rabbit droppings covered with brown sugar and bacon drippings. I felt for all the world like an overfed Dutch baby, who, approached by another spoonful of mashed anything, might just relax my jaw and let it fall back out onto the plastic tablecloth.

We sucked at coffee in styrofoam cups and ventured back into the fray to fill a plate with desserts. What was the name of that Dutch exchange student who made the little pancakes? Riet? Something like that. What were those crazy little pancakes called? I'm sure they'd be good, with coffee, if you were pretty hungry. But their appeal was defeated by the unruly compost of starch-based muck that preceded them.

After all but interring ourselves in the heaviest food I have ever encountered, Shawna and I drove on to the Norris Hotsprings to stand in the scalding water and listen to a bluegrass band. We arrived around dusk, and nipped into the chilly changing room to stretch insufficient black swimming suits over our distended guts. (Well, I'm speaking for myself -- for all I know, Shawna considered her swimming suit sufficient -- and I'm just making a wild guess as to the state of her gut at the time.) As I descended the wide wooden stair, I noticed that the entire pool was lined with men. It was like being in some steamy meat market version of Cinderella.

After us came more women -- women in bikinis, women bearing beer bottles and big boobs, but that didn't deter a few lonely and persistent fellows from trying to pick Shawna and me up. It's a very strange feeling, having an apparently virile, if apparently unstable, man come onto you with unabashed hope while you secretly know that you are not only uninterested, but you are filled to the chin with mashed rutabagas. It was sad and funny at the same time.

If anybody wants to be my date for this year's Dutch supper, let me know. I'll be the one packing an insufficient swimming suit.

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*The names in my diary have been changed for the sake of anonymity.