Gayla Marty

Tamarack

On the earliest map of the land that became the Marty farm, 1851, the wetlands are labeled “Marsh” and “Tamarac swamp.” Zoom out and “Tamarac swamp” peppers the map.

But growing up there a hundred years later, on a farm full of trees, I never saw or even heard of a tamarack. It was news to me to learn of this venerable tree's association with my home state when a Minnesota magazine named a prose contest after it in the mid-1980s.

Tamarack, also called larch, is one of only two conifers that loses its short bundles of soft needles every winter. It’s the northernmost growing tree on the continent. My favorite tree reference book says for centuries its roots were used by indigenous people to make canoes.

The reason tamarack appeared all over that 1851 map was the main reason I never knew tamaracks on our farm: Those trees were like gold. The mapmakers had railroads in mind, and tamarack was prized for railroad ties in the days before creosote. The Lake Superior–Mississippi railroad would be built between Duluth and St. Paul in 1870 along what became the east border of the Marty farm.

Memory of Trees remembers oaks, maples, elms, birch, apple, spruce, pines, cedar, and even the Bible tree, fig. But it never mentions tamarack.

Later I asked my brothers if they knew of any tamaracks on the Marty farm. Yes, they said, but only on the Anderson place where our mother grew up—in a marshy spot, of course—nearly inaccessible. On a spring walk through the woods I got to see them for the first time, just a couple of drab trees standing in snowmelt.

Today walking across the campus of Michigan State University among evergreens and bare hardwoods, a single golden tree came into view. I had never seen anything like it but recognized it immediately. This is a tamarack.

It really was gold. Under the blue autumn sky it was dazzling.

“Larch,” my friend said.

“Tamarack,” I said. I felt wonder. I reached up to touch the needles, so delicate.

Thanksgiving 1979

I lived in Tunisia in the fall of 1979, a year when American Thanksgiving fell on the heels of the Muslim New Year. A few weeks earlier, hostages had been captured at the U.S. embassy in Iran, two time zones east of us, setting the world on edge. Ripples reached us on that southern shore of the Mediterranean.

Entertaining had been on my American roommate’s mind when she found her apartment in Tunis. She had many colleagues and friends at the language institute up the street, where she taught. I was a newly arrived undergraduate. She couldn’t believe her ears when I told her I had learned how to roast two 25-pound turkeys per weekend while cooking at the historic hotel in the Minnesota town where I grew up.

“Can you cook a live one?” she asked me. “I mean, go to the market and pick one out,” she said. “They’ll behead it and pluck it…I think…”

“Sure,” I shrugged. I figured that if my Gramma Viola could butcher her own chickens on the farm, I could certainly figure it out. I wanted the apartment so badly that I had to say yes. Besides, it seemed so far in the future.

Seven weeks later, the holiday appeared like a kind of harbor on the horizon. Geopolitics heaved, leaves fell, and the cold rains commenced. Among the half-dozen new Tunisian and American friends I had made, the little group of us shared not only bureaucratic disappointments, financial setbacks, and culture shock, but a miscarriage and a far-away father’s unexpected death. We needed Thanksgiving.

Our apartment didn’t have a dining room—just a plain, high-ceilinged room occupied by bookshelves and a set of painted lawn furniture. Nevertheless, as a central location, our place was chosen for the meal.

Cooking it was another matter. Our kitchen consisted of a shallow sink with only cold water, a cupboard full of mismatched dishes and cookware, a marble slab for a counter, my roommate’s small new refrigerator, and a two-burner gas stove with an oven no bigger than a large toaster. The turkey would have to be roasted in the oven of our friends’ apartment up the street.

 

Turkey, dressing, and gravy were my assignment—plus a pumpkin pie, which I had figured out how to make by then. In the market I had discovered pumpkins so big the vendor chopped off chunks of orange flesh with a machete, weighed it by the kilo, and I took it home to cook it down for hours, which had the benefit of warming the apartment. To make the crust I had learned to substitute olive oil for lard or shortening; to roll it out, I used an empty olive oil bottle turned on its side for a rolling pin, which I could not find in a suq or store anywhere.

I looked everywhere for turkeys. Dinde is the French word, which made me think of Yankee Doodle Dandy and Ben Franklin’s proposal that the wild turkey be our national bird.

“Est-ce que vous avez le dinde?” I asked at every market I passed, to be met with a shrug or motion, no. A Tunisian friend assured me that turkeys probably would not arrive in the market until the week of Thanksgiving when those smart vendors knew Americans would be looking for them. Unlike sheep for Aïd, turkeys are not taken home to live for a few weeks before the feast.

Wild rice, I learned quickly, did not exist in Tunisia. Ris sauvage made me sound crazy. In fact, my American friends had no idea what I was talking about either and had never heard of wild rice dressing. It had not occurred to me that this native American staple was Midwestern. I wrote home with pleas to send a cup but none arrived. I went over to La Passage market and got white rice instead, and a pound of European butter.

I didn’t know the French words for the spices I needed, much less the Arabic, so I stood in the markets smelling everything. Thyme. Sage.

I bought a baguette and cut it into pieces and made my own croutons in our toaster-sized oven.

On the morning of our feast, we found turkeys at the central market, far too small, no big showy tails, just red waddles.

“Celui ça qui est le plus grand,” I told the vendor. The biggest one. He scanned the motley flock, pointed toward one of them, and I nodded. He asked me a question and I struggled to understand. “Coupez le tête,” I said plainly. “Aussi les pieds.” Cut off the head. And feet. I think he was trying not to laugh because it was a bad translation. The vendor asked me something else I couldn’t understand.

“Plucked?” my friend translated hoarsely, her head down.

“Oui, s’il vous plait,” I nodded.

It was strangled mercifully quickly, its feathers stripped. It happened so fast I couldn’t believe the vendor was handing me a large bundle wrapped in pewter-colored butcher paper, heavy and still warm. Every turkey I had ever prepared had come to me ice cold, the giblets in a damp package within. I handed him my dinars and we headed home. I summoned Gramma Viola as we walked, her no-nonsense, practical confidence. This is a basic task, dressing out a bird. You can do that.

In our cold-water sink I washed and gutted the small turkey, tenderly removing the familiar parts, gizzard, heart, liver, the bitter crop that must not break; stomach and entrails. The giblets were simmered. Onions and celery were chopped, rice cooked, dressing assembled. I stuffed the turkey and we carried it up the street to our friends’ modern-sized oven. For five hours it roasted until the leg joints swung loose. When the turkey came back to our place, I made gravy smooth as cream.

Everybody arrived. One went to work assembling a huge salad. The couple from the far suburb had brought two kilos of green peas, which we shelled and steamed as we peeled potatoes, boiled and mashed them. The couple up the street brought yams in orange juice and sugar. My roommate, who was swamped grading exams, furnished croissants and wine. No wild rice or cranberries.

In Tunis, we were seven that night, five American women and two Tunisian husbands, modest pilgrims of the 20th century, thankful for friendship, food, and shelter. Perched in a circle on makeshift furniture, we ate slowly in the candlelight—tender meat, dressing, potatoes, and gravy, freshly shelled peas, yams in brown sugar and orange juice, elaborate salad, croissants, pumpkin pie with whipped cream and coffee.