An ode to hearty breakfast
A coping mechanism never tasted so good.
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The last time I let my protagonist sit down with me, he implicated himself in robbing a French gluten-free bakery and violently threatened the readers. So, it makes perfect sense that I would invite him back to talk about breakfast.
Breakfast.
Seven-foot Stomp Freedomfoot, in buckskin pants, sits next to me on a tree stump. He leans in and whispers:
Mmm. Breakfast. Say it again.
Breakfast.
Say it again.
Breakfast.
We are seated at dawn in a hemlock grove around an ember-filled fire pit. The morning is damp and foggy. The fire crackles. Dry pine needles smolder and pop. The wood reverberates with glee. We have a pack of thick-cut bacon and pancake batter and home-tapped maple syrup.
Even hobos in northern Michigan in the 1930s knew that the only way they would survive was through a sturdy breakfast. Your great-great-grandfather who stood in line for hard bread during the depression knew that life was difficult because they had no breakfast. Every great and terrible moment in history started with breakfast.
Facts.
That’s right. Breakfast is the foundation of my writing process. Breakfast is the meal that fortifies plot and builds character. When I struggle to find hope in life, there is breakfast. What about you, Stomp?
When I’m sad, I find a nice farmhouse with a big family, and I ask the mama politely with my fangs bared in a big smile to cook pancakes, and I ask the papa and all the children politely to put on blindfolds so that it’s a wonderful surprise for them, and I tie them all up so they don’t get too eager. Politely. Then everyone starts crying, and that’s how I know they’re excited to have this wonderful family meal with me.
That’s…that’s a home invasion. I don’t think that’s why they’re crying.
Sometimes when I’m done eating a tray of butter muffins, my sad tears get stuffed up and don’t come out no more. That’s how I know it helps.
That’s probably just the cholesterol clogging every pore. Anyway…
So tasty.
We’re gonna handle this a certain way. I’ll tell a story about a breakfast I remember, and you tell me a story about a breakfast you remember. And we’ll trade memories, nostalgia-like, and express our love for breakfasts as we cook a breakfast.
Okie.
I’ll go first. But let’s get this breakfast started.
Of course.
Stomp parses out the thick-cut bacon and treasures each slice as he lays them in the cast iron pan. I cut off an unwieldy chunk of butter and watch it soften and sizzle in the pan. The campfire is low-burning in the damp April morning and I can smell the heady bark and spring dew. The smoke curls up. A cloud of aroma hangs above a stream, delightfully drifting.
I take us back.
March 2023, Benezette, Pennsylvania
The winter and spring of 2023 was some of the darkest pain I’d felt in this life. I took off in my 2002 Hyundai Accent for West-central Pennsylvania – just looking for some forests I hadn’t seen. And elk. I was on an elk mission.
Like a true rugged outdoorsman, I rented an Airbnb and glamped all weekend. Friday evening I spent drinking Coors Light bottles and opening packs of 1987 O-Pee-Chee baseball cards. Saturday morning I awoke to a crisp sunlit wash of sun.
My phone – which flickered in and out of service – told me that there was a place called Rose’s Hilltop Diner about 40 minutes away in St. Mary’s. I was determined to find a hearty breakfast. I took off through winding mountainous backroads, searching for elk in every ditch, peering into drainage tubes and up into the crooks of trees. I expected I would find a big bull with gnarled antlers, a thousand pounds perched on the limb of an oak frantically gnawing an acorn.
Elks don’t do that.
Don’t interrupt, Stomp. This diner was a stout squat white building in a parking lot. It was packed. The entire Elk County region ate breakfast here. It was your classic Americana diner – squat stools and a sizzling grill and a clientele that knew every other by first name.
I sat next to a man named Dave who shook my hand. He was the town crier. By this I mean, he was the wellspring of gossip for probably 40 square miles. He knew everything.
“Do you live here or are you passing through?” he asked.
I said, “passing through.”
We talked about elk sheds, and the weather, and I ordered a stacked platter of French toast. I chomped a bite, then drizzled syrup, chomped a bite, then dumped syrup. It was imperative that this bread knew that it had no business staying dry. Full maple syrup saturation.
I sipped steaming coffee. I listened to the mingled chatter. It felt good to be among people. I left quietly and was properly fueled for a deep hike into the Quehanna Wilderness area.
There’s no climax to this story. I drove on rutted state forest dirt roads immersed in my heartbreak. I rationally recognized that I was trying my best to take care of myself – by eating large, buttery breakfasts.
That’s delightful. I wonder if Diner Dave tasted like French toast. All buttery and full of carbs.
Well, I don’t usually eat men, so I didn’t find out.
Me neither. But if I did…
Okay, your turn, Stomp. Tell me a hearty breakfast memory.
It was April 15th, 1865. I was in Washington D.C. on H Street at a wonderful little patriotic boarding house run by a Mary Surratt.
You were in D.C. on the day of Abe Lincoln’s assassination.
Poor Abe, yes. Pinkertons and Barnaby men were hunting me hard at the time, and I decided to hide in plain sight. Nobody was going to try to murder a sasquatch out in the open street in the very neighborhood that held the great emancipating president. It would have been a public relations nightmare.
That’s…that’s actually smart.
Mary Surratt let me stay at her place because I had made some questionable smuggling decisions bringing contraband back and forth for Confederate soldiers.
I can’t believe you smuggled for the Confederates.
What?! I smuggled for the North, too.
Of course you did.
Mary had some men over the evening before. They had stayed up late, brooding by candlelight. Ornery, conspiratorial fellas.
You literally stayed at the house where they planned the Lincoln assassination.
Well, in the morning, we all gathered round and she made this wonderful platter of griddlecakes. Wheatcakes and biscuits in gravy, hot-buttered and soft, black coffee, and charred fried potatoes.
So old-timey and delicious.
After breakfast, I was still hungry. This kindly young actor named John Wilkes Booth offered to barter with me. So, I traded him this dinky little Deringer pistol for his plate of hotcakes. Best trade I ever made.
You traded John Wilkes Booth a Deringer pistol. Oh, my God, Stomp. You gave John Wilkes Booth the weapon that killed Abe Lincoln.
Most delicious hotcakes ever.
Your story’s done. It’s my turn again.
Probably the best hotcakes I had until…November of 1963 in Dallas…
No more talking. My turn. Let’s go back to…
Spring of 2018, World’s End State Park, Pennsylvania
The rain poured down. We’d rigged up tarps around the campsite to keep our gear dry. The smoke billowed as the coals sizzled. A grate over the fire held one large-sized cast iron pan. In the pan, flecks of soot blended into bubbling scrambled eggs. Potatoes doused in salt and pepper sizzled and charred into butter-brown slivers. Diced green peppers and red onion softened as they sizzled. We watched it rain and cooked.
The fog was heavy along the creek. We were inside a cloud. We might not leave the campsite this day. We pulled out ketchup and Tobasco sauce. You know what?
What?
All of the memorable breakfasts happen in springtime.
Not uh. There’s summer good breakfast, there’s fall good breakfast—
Right, but I remember the springtime ones because spring is when I’ve experienced the most significant loss. One of my best friends was killed in April. Even 12 years later, re-experiencing the atmosphere of April brings it to the surface. It doesn’t go away.
Mmm. I can tell one like that.
Go for it.
Spring of 1770, Northern Tennessee
My family called me Brute. My father was a baker, my mother was a seer. Tennessee was not settled at this time. I could climb up a ridge and see herds of thousands of piebald unicorns down through the trees, their hides a-glitter in the sun. I could lay down in a loamy fern patch and hear the chatter of the owlpigs in the undergrowth. Then men came.
My family performed in the woods. Shakespearian drama and high-limb circus acts. I was a juggler, and the youngest and the littlest. I cooked for them every morning. They ate my food but I was still Brute.
We had been pressed up against men who came into the wilderness to hunt. My family tore a man apart one evening, after he shot my brother. I saved one of their party, a Dan Boone fella.
The morning before they left, I’d picked hundreds of tart apples. I boiled them in a pot. I had traded some little chunkets of gold I’d found in a creek to a group of hunters for a bag of flour. I felt bad ripping them off, but I wanted the flour.
You felt bad ripping them off? How big was the gold?
Like…this big.
Stomp makes a fist the size of a grapefruit.
Yep, you definitely ripped them off for that bag of flour.
I kneaded crusts and wrapped them around the tart apples. The crusts browned over the fire and the apples turned to beautiful mush. The April air was heavy with cinnamon and apple scents.
We call those dumplings now.
I made hundreds of these dumplings. My family gorged them in a stupor. The next morning, my family had left and I could not find them.
They left you.
They left. I could not find them.
And you haven’t seen them since.
Not ever again. The smell of apples in the April heavy rain floods me with them.
And now you search for them, and you don’t ever quit.
The bacon sizzles in our cast iron. The hotcakes have grown charred and browned. The woods are quiet and damp and misted. I put out a pair of paper plates on two tree stumps. We each fill our plates with bacon and pancakes.
At seven-feet-tall, Stomp hunches as he sits on the tree stump. I sit next to him. I could not say if his family is still alive. I will not mention it.
We eat, and we remember.
I’m so glad you came along for this breakfast banter, as our conversation turned from home invasions to reflections on loss. If you’d like to support the heart and energy that makes Stomp Roams, you can share the story or tap that little “subscribe” button.
How deep into this world do you want to go? Read Stomp’s last adventure, Stomp Bigfoot saves Dan Boone and robs trains with James, a speculative historical fiction tale about a family of theater sasquatches in the Cumberland Gap in 1770, and the drama of wilderness conquest and loss.
You need to turn this into a novel, or at very least a novel-in-stories.