Cold Storage
My father and I were camping on a remote pond, one with ice-blue water, and I had just unpacked a six pack of beer.
I looked over at my dad putting together his spinning rod. “How are we going to keep this beer cold?”
“Who says it has to be cold?” My father served in the Pacific in World War II, an area where I imagine a cold beer was not the norm.
“I am not a big fan of warm beer.” I pouted.
“So, Idgit (my father’s usual appellation for me when, in his opinion, I flashed my ignorance), think!”
I thought. Then I sought and found the inlet stream to the pond and stashed the six pack in the middle of the bubbling brook that showed my breath when I leaned down next to it, it was so so cold. Problem solved.
That is part of the fun of living in the outdoors, making do without all the amenities of suburban home life. But sometimes the “conveniences” of suburban home life provide challenges that are greater than trying to find a location to chill your beer.
Consider that household item, the refrigerator. The earliest one I remember was the rather short, white Kelvin refrigerator that stood guard in a corner of our Bronx apartment kitchen. There was a round cylinder on top which whirred at some moments. The storage was small by today’s standards, but my mother managed to fill every nook and cranny.
Polley once shared with me the premise of an article which postulated that people are more stressed out in our society because of the multiple decisions we have to make in everyday life. The first cavepeople killed a goat—they ate goat. We enter a fast food chain and the decision-making process begins with forty options of hamburger and sides. Buying a refrigerator runs the same stressful risks.
Our first refrigerator as a married couple in a small apartment had three shelves, two ice trays, and a freezer that could barely accommodate a filet of flounder. My mother was appalled, especially when she visited with two hundred pounds of roasts, chickens, sirloins, pork loins, and gallons of gravy (tomato sauce for you non-Italians). The problem was eased slightly in winter when we used the small porch of the apartment to store my mother’s supply train. In warmer weather we had to do a great deal of eating.
When Polley and I moved to our suburban home, a refrigerator was, of course, on our appliance list. My father-in-law wisely cautioned us to not purchase a fridge with an ice maker. “One more damn thing to break!” Our budget allowed us to buy a five shelf refrigerator with a freezer on top, the Polar Ice 5400. It served us well for a number of years until it suffered from Freon blockages or bad circulation and worked only sporadically. So we parked our Polar Ice 5400 in the garage to serve as our second cold storage device.
We did our research and settled on an Arctic Explorer 9000, and oh what decisions we had to make. Door device which dispensed water, crushed ice or ice cubes or four rather mundane ice cube trays, color choice: ivory white, silver gray, seaweed olive, six or eight shelves, freezer top or bottom, left hand or right hand door, vegetable keeper, extra bright refrigerator light, multiple freezer settings—cold, colder, coldest, etc.
Our budget and my father-in-law’s advice made the decision—the no frills seaweed olive Arctic Explorer 9000. And the seaweed olive Arctic Explorer served us well for several decades, but even though my family dwindled to just Polley and me as the kids went off to get learned, it seemed our refrigerator requirements expanded. For one thing, the door on the seaweed olive Arctic Explorer 9000 was on the wrong side and frequently collided with an open oven door. The freezer was on top, and consequently most of the things we wanted to obtain were in the refrigerator proper which meant more stooping over to get the Genoa salami. So we did our research again and headed to the appliance store while the Arctic Explorer 9000 found a new home in the garage replacing the Polar Ice 5400 which retired to a junkyard pasture. Emptying the Arctic Explorer was an adventure unto itself. We discovered foodstuffs that had fallen into inventory oblivion.
The freezer had freezer bags of meat which were unidentifiable, the labels unreadable, and unless the label read “Use before the end of this century” the contents were disposed of. So was the container of macaroni with a green crust which I hoped was pesto sauce, but I knew better, and I was unwilling to absorb a hit of penicillin….so into the trash it went. As did the mysterious inhabitants of Polly-O containers and remnants of exotic cheeses whose expiration dates were in previous centuries. The garbage can was ultimately filled with leftovers that in days/months/years past were placed in the refrigerator with promises of future usage. Alas, the price of short memories.
If emptying the old refrigerator was a challenge, purchasing the new one presented a host of decisions. In the store the wide and tall refrigerators dominated the appliance landscape. We debated color—whalebone white, martini olive, Lone Ranger silver. We told the salesman that so many modern fridges seemed to be silver. We were corrected. “The up and coming trend in refrigerator color is white.” [this blog prides itself on keeping subscribers hip to the modern trends in appliance coloring] Again, heeding my father-in-law’s wisdom we chose not to purchase the updated fridge door which dispensed water, shaved ice, ice cubes, and refreshing Mai Tais (an optional feature was a dispenser of garnish: gardenia and umbrella.)
We were shown the newest model, an Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000. The Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 had enough room inside to fit a sixties Volkswagen. Its shelves were interchangeable just in case we decided the Cranberry juice belonged on the left side of the fridge and the Tiramisu Greek Yogurt belonged on the right side of the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000. There are compartments: one for keeping vegetables fresh and crisp (could I put my potato chips there?); a fruit compartment (pears and apples and kumquats apparently do not like to rub stems with celery, carrots, and turnips); a Glide and Serve drawer (so would my salami and mustard sandwich emerge fully concocted from this drawer?). The freezer of the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 has two huge compartments including a sliding drawer for small items like that leftover barbequed hot dog. And the refrigerator light, when set on the highest setting, could serve as a beacon for the entire Eastern seaboard.
The Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 was entered by two massive doors, probably inspired by a scene in The Lord of the Rings, and, in order to open them, we had to increase our stretching repetitions for our biceps at the gym. There were thermostats for different sections of the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000, total control over the temperature of every radish and half-eaten chicken leg. The manual for the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 was heavier than the instructions for the Apollo Missions, and I would need to spend several decades studying and mastering the operations of this behemoth of cold storage.
The salesperson at the appliance store assured us that the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 was the pinnacle of refrigeration evolution. I guess this meant that over time the bugs were weeded out from Admiral Perry Sled Dog models 1 through 3,999. We believed him.
Now the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 looms like a sentinel over our kitchen vista. Every time I look up from my coffee cup and see it in all its immenseness, I am reminded of the Monolith in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. On its first day in our abode, we could not imagine filling the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 with foodstuffs. After the first week we were pushing past bottles of fruit juices and cans of gravy and jars of items attempting to find the mustard.
The Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 seems content doing its job minute after minute, second after second. Occasionally when we are sitting in our family room reading or watching television, the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 will erupt into a belching of mechanical whirring sounds that would lead us to wonder if a 747 Passenger Jet mistakenly landed on our lawn. At first we thought it was the fridge’s ice maker until we realized…..we had not chosen that option. The machine is probably just recycling through its four million sensors and making certain that every leaf of lettuce is the right temperature.
The sounds that the Admiral Perry Sled Dog 4000 make are often annoying and always fearful. Personally I prefer the sounds of a chilling, babbling brook rushing over my beer, but it is the price we pay for having the latest evolutionary device in cold storage.