Pie for Strengh

Photo by Tom Tackett

This is an essay for my National Park Project:





Pie for Strength- Glacier National Park, June 2005

The crust is golden and flakes like shale when flicked with the tip of the fork tines. The filling is thick, but still juicy; sweet, but still tart; it stays in place within the wedge and doesn’t spill out onto the plate.

And best of all, the true sign of a perfect piece of pie, the edge crust – the part that’s tweaked and fluted and runs along the perimeter of the pie pan, is divinely edible. It doesn’t have to sit on the plate like some sad, abandoned orphan after the rest of the pie is gone. It is flakey, tender and tasty in its own right and can be used to sop up the very last remnants of the filling juice left along the edges of the plate.

The Park Café doesn’t seem like it would be special, it’s just an unimposing white clapboard cottage with a small wrap-around porch. It sits off the main two lane road running to St. Mary, a small town just outside the east entrance to Glacier National Park in Montana. Next to it is a gravel parking lot, but right away we could tell parking was a pretty casual affair – just pull in the best you can and try not to block anyone else.

When we stepped inside we were immediately in the dining area, which was just one room with perhaps a dozen tables of various sizes and a small lunch counter with five or six stools. The first time we visited it was breakfast. We had to sit out on the porch because all the tables inside were full. I ordered three-fruit French toast, but I had my doubts, a lot of times restaurant French toast is a soggy, limp, squashed disaster. So, I was surprised when the plate was served and there were three slices of thick hand-made bread grilled to perfection and fresh fruit, not the canned pie-filling gook, but real fruit – strawberries, bananas, and huckleberries; one fruit to each slice of bread. And it was amazingly delicious!

Over the course of the week we stayed at Glacier, we returned to the Park Café six or seven times. We worried at first that the help would think we were stalking the place – but soon figured out that wasn’t an issue. For one thing, everyone was too laid-back to notice how often any one person came and went, and for another thing, we rarely saw the same wait staff twice. We found out later that it was a popular place for young people who loved Glacier to come work for the season. They would work for a while, and then have time off to head into the mountains.

Although the food was unusually good, it was the pie that kept us coming back, and indeed, was their trademark. On any given day they had a dozen varieties. I got something different each time we went, and even though I prefer fruit pies, I sampled lemon, pecan, and chocolate with an equal amount of ecstasy.

I could picture the pie bakers in the back of the small kitchen, coming into work in the early dawn hours. “Hhmmm,” I imagined they would say. “What should we make today?” And they would look at the recipes, handwritten on little cards, stained from many years of use, and they would pick out twelve or thirteen different varieties, depending on the fresh ingredients they had available that day. Then they would commence to mixing and rolling dough, chopping fruit, cooking fillings; all while watching the sun slowly rise over the mountains, staining the snow peaks with light.

One day we had finished lunch and I was eavesdropping on the diners around us while I waited for my pie to come. There was a young couple there with a crowd of people who all seemed happy and chatty. As they were leaving, they ran into one of their college professors, an older gentleman who had just come in. They told him they were getting married the next day in a meadow on the mountain and invited him to come. As they talked, telling the professor all about their wedding plans, the young girl’s mother finished paying the bill and came up and was introduced.

The mother looked distracted, but happy too, as if she was in the center of a slightly befuddling, but joyous maelstrom. This was in mid-June and I remembered with a jolt that our oldest son was getting married in a mere eight weeks. In the isolation of vacation I was able to move that right off my radar screen. But, once we left the mountains and returned to Michigan, I would probably be a lot like that mother, who was smiling and talking but looked like she had a mental list she was ticking off in the back of her mind.

My pie was set before me on a real plate with a real fork – no plastic or, God forbid, foam anywhere in sight. “Pie for Strength” is their motto and, as I took the first bite of this concoction called “fruits of the forest,” I figured I could use all the strength I could get for the days to come.