There are many things in life that cannot be repeated. Birth and death are the big items, but ranking a close second are all of life’s firsts – the first time you meet your best friend, first love, first child. And first 52-all-natural-freshly-picked-ingredients soup which many foretasters have thought to be the best soup in history. Striving to replicate such a soup for A Channeler’s Cook Book would carry the great risk of not only failing, but in the act of failing, to taint the memory of the original experience with disappointment.

The particular cauldron of that soup that Quinn first tasted as a 19-year-old was prepared – or as Quinn would later insist, was self-assembled, given that human intent is as much a natural, unplanned phenomenon as any of the other ingredients of the soup – over the course of two days, the second day being that of the partial eclipse of the moon on August 17th, 1970, in a homestead on the west shore of the Sechelt Inlet, not far from Storm Bay, British Columbia.

To get there you take a boat out of Horseshoe Bay, where the mainland highway ends, and hug the west shore of the Sechelt Peninsula, up through the Agamemnon Channel and around the northern tip, passing by the terminus of the rain-drenched Sunshine Highway and then south along the sparsely populated east shore. There are no landmarks to tell you when you’ve arrived. The homestead is on the sheltered lee of the peninsula and the house sits on a natural rocky shelf halfway up a low rise behind a stand of Douglas fir. The property ends in a long gravelly beach, so there isn’t a permanent mooring – the water is shallow a hundred feet into the inlet. The homesteaders’ boat is dragged up off the beach to the base of the ridge and can’t be seen from the water until you’re already passing it by, though if you do cruise too far south it makes a fine landmark on the way back.

The best way to find the place is to locate a beach at about the right distance down the inlet – and there are a few of those – and then look for chimney smoke coming up out of the trees further back. You might still wind up at the wrong homestead, but just mention Fred and Shirley and they’ll set you straight.

It is a soup-ingredient-friendly part of the world. There is a stream that has carved out a small gully in the ridge and bottoms out below so that the water is lazy moving as it empties into the inlet, perfect for wild leeks and certain riparian tubers. Atop the ridge is an open field perfect for those rural relations of onions and garlic and many narrow- and broad-leafed plants. In the shaded conifer growth are the fiddlehead ferns that you saute in butter like asparagus. And on the beach, oysters.

Quinn arrived the afternoon of the first day, when the soup base had been at a low simmer most of the day. It fell to him to keep the cauldron at just the right temperature until later in the night, while Fred and Shirley started on dinner prep and listed out the ingredients for him. There were 52 varieties of local plants, all taken from a radius of no more than a kilometer from the house, that went into the soup, in addition to the barley and oysters. Even the barley, said Shirley, was legit, meaning not store bought but sent them by a friend with a farm outside of Regina who for some reason planted a half acre in barley each year just for his own use. 31 ingredients went into the pot on day one. The soup would be allowed to ‘rest’ over night before the remaining 21 were added, in the correct order, the next day.

Fred and Shirley listed the ingredients in full while Quinn took the sort of notes you take when two people are talking simultaneously and using names that you’ve never heard of and you have to stop, stoke and stir every few minutes. As Quinn poked at the burning wood and lifted the cast iron cauldron lid to stir the contents, Fred chuckled and said, “This is just the dumbest way in the world to make soup. We’d starve to death if we did it this way all the time.”

Soup Day was an annual event, held the Sunday before the summer solstice. Fred and Shirley had scheduled the first one, back in ‘64, for the solstice day itself and discovered in doing so how common it was for extremely rural types to have preexisting mating and drinking rituals already lined up for what was commonly held to be a day of energetic significance even by the old timers who’d been homesteading the inlet since the 30’s and 40’s and had not yet received the news about the Age of Aquarius.

So they billed 1965’s Soup Day as a lead-up-to-the-day event and got excellent attendance. This year they’d pushed it way back into mid August because of the eclipse. This meant the day would be shorter than the usual Soup Day. No 9 PM forays down to the beach for swimming in broad daylight. It would have to be a twilight swim, but then you could haul yourself up to the house, slather your body with Deet, stretch out in an Adirondack chair and watch the first stars come out, very shyly to begin with, as the full moon had got there first, but with increasing self confidence as the evening wore on.

Like everyone on the eastern shore Fred and Shirley had flirted with embracing do-it-yourself electricity, but the union had never been consummated. I know where to get fire wood, Fred would explain. But I don’t know where to get electrons. Maybe a generator? would come the puzzled reply. Might do, says Fred, but those make noise whenever they make all the electrons. Besides, what would we do with all the electrons if we did make ‘em? Well, you could get a refrigerator and some lights. And isn’t that just the slippery slope? Fred would point out. One minute I need some electrons, which are free, and the next minute I’m spending half our Social Insurance checks on a loud machine to make the electrons and the other half on all kind of expensive things to put those electrons into. Quite a scam, eh?

So this Soup Day was going to be starlight and kerosene lanterns when the long twilight eventually qualified as night. Starlight, lanterns and the very faint glow of the fire pit, where later on the harvested oysters will have grilled, the very faint glow being not all that terribly far in wave length from the very faint glow of the cosmic microwave background that embeds both star and lantern.

Soup Day morn Quinn woke early, checked in on the soup and then with the farm knowledge he had gained in the third grade, milked one of the goats into a glass canning jar, then swung by the hen house for however many eggs were on offer, which he scrambled alongside a simmering pot of steel cut oats, enough for any of the celebrants arriving hungry. Shirley and Fred had already been down for a long swim in the freezing water and were now huddled over the stove, utterly delighted in the warmth and laughing about something small and private.

In Quinn’s mind the arrival of the sea plane was nothing short of cinematic. Looking out to the water there was nothing to see at first – just the sound as the plane passed overhead, then the change in pitch as it circled around, then the soft coughing of the engine cutting out and suddenly the plane coming right to left from out of the frame, the pontoons bouncing off the placid surface of the inlet and then the unhurried taxi toward shore.

Fred said to Quinn, “Our son, who’s far too busy making money to travel here for Soup Day has spent some of that money flying in our granddaughter Morgan. And our friend Evelyn from Oregon, who piggybacked the flight.”

By the time Quinn and Shirley and Fred got down to the beach the passengers were wading out of the water and onto the gravel beach. A girl, perhaps seven years old wearing jeans darkened by the salt water, a pink sweatshirt, pink beret and oversized dark glasses with pink frames. And a 40ish woman, tall and lanky, with long brown hair in a pony tail, dressed in bib overalls and carrying a small pink valise in one hand and her sandals in the other.

Shirley and the little girl ran into each other’s arms and Shirley started twirling around until the girl’s body was laid out horizontally. The woman set down the pink valise and waded back to the plane where the pilot was at the cargo door with a large bundle that Quinn guessed was a tent, and a backpack. She carried them back to shore, the engine fired up and as the plane taxied out and lifted off, they all wound up the narrow dirt path, like a hippy safari, toward the house.

The Storm Bay communards arrived in stages – a boat with the two kids and most of the adults, and later in the morning, Peter and Rosie in a huge open water kayak. They brought along some empty gunny sacks because Storm Bay doesn’t have a good oyster bearing beach. The two kids and Morgan were given the sacks and a ruler, pointed toward the beach and told to collect oysters while the fire pit was dug and the fire started.

By the late afternoon three more boats lay at anchor off the gravel beach, the passengers brought to shore in the kayak. At a time before the term “diversity” had come to refer to the celebration of rigid orthodoxy, the Soup Day guest list was a diverse mix of NDP socialists, Social Credit conservatives, those who would walk away cursing from any political conversation, hardly any religious people, and all glued together by homesteader leave-me-alone-ism and a fanatical devotion to the Canucks. Many a scientifically valid double blind crossover study has demonstrated that home brew can be consumed by people holding any position on nearly any issue, and what would a Canadian homestead be without a lot of home brew? (The reader is advised that this is not a rhetorical question.) So there was an abundance that day of home preserves, it being too late for tree-ripened fruit, and very stout stout. And what would a remote hippie commune be without a few cannabis plants, the fruit of much loving care, given how much they would rather be growing further south?

At 19, Quinn was dead set against alcohol and tended to look down on those who weren’t, a most un-Canadian way of thinking and one that he kept to himself that day. He wandered out with Peter and Rosie to where the goats were because Shirley didn’t allow smoking inside, and introduced himself to a few lungsful of Storm Bay Hey! They played with the goats for a while, then Quinn walked back to the house where he would – under the direct guidance of Fred and Shirley – work the final alchemy on the soup. And where he would, in the space of a few moments, fall, both into an epistemological black hole and in love.

He walked into the kitchen just as Evelyn was laying out dollops of biscuit dough on a floured cutting board, rolling them flat then using an empty tin can to stamp out the rounds. Fred and Shirley appeared with a small wicker hand basket full of plants. Fred opened the stove’s fire box and fussed with the flame, coaxing it down to embers. “Slow heat is what we need now,” he explained. Shirley stripped leaves off the plants and used a pair of pinking shears to cut them to bits. “You expose more crosscut area with the zig-zags you get with pinking shears”, she said. “But first, the ‘before’ tasting.”

Fred took a dish towel and lifted the lid from the cauldron. A wooden spoon was passed around. When it came to Quinn, he took a bit from the cauldron, sipped and was speechless.

“The phrase you’re trying to think of,” said Shirley after a moment, “is ‘great but somehow not quite there yet.’”

“Am not,” said Quinn. “This is perfect!”

“Ah, be careful with that word. It’s dangerous when misapplied. No, we’re still a good half hour from perfection. The rest is herbs as ritual and ritual as herbs over a gentle heat. Here, take these” – and she pointed to a pile of snipped plants – “and stir them into the pot. Slowly.”

Quinn sprinkled the large handful of pieces of something light green into the pot and gently teased it below the surface.

“Order is important at this point in the procedings,” Fred said as Shirley handed Quin a second pile of snipped plants.

“Stir it gentle as a wish” said Shirley.

Eight kinds of plant later it was done. They waited 15 minutes for the newcomer herbs to get settled in and then Fred lifted the cauldron lid and put it to one side. “Now for the ‘after’ tasting. Then the final benediction and then we feed the assembled throngs who’re doubtless too drunk by now to appreciate it.”

Before the spoon came his way, the smell alone had transported Quinn to someplace where soup is one of the handful of natural elements – earth, wind, fire, water and soup He thought that tasting it would be an afterthought to this olfactory transcendence. But then he sipped. It was as if his mind was in his mouth and began to expand outward, to expand beyond his body. He had enough wherewithal to realize that it was the best soup that had ever existed, then the expansion accelerated, Quinn lost track of everything both inside and outside, and then suddenly it was done, there was nothing left. The significance of the moment, its transcendental quality, its largeness – all collapsed into one simple moment where there was just some soup. Soup made of things nearby. Soup that wasn’t trying to be noticed. Soup in no need of evaluation, description or commentary. Soup that simply spoke for itself with a soupy eloquence that could never be said better by other means.

And Quinn laughed softly. It was the expression of a sudden delight that sees no obvious way to express itself and so enquires of laughter whether it would be alright to borrow its sound for just a moment. Evelyn now faced the stove and raised her hands for the final benediction.

Ingredients, meld into the broth
Thine essence fuse and magic froth
Creation named thee long ago
Leave all thy tasters pleasured so

It is much more rare, of course, but love-at-first-hearing is every bit as experientially overwhelming as its visual counterpart. In North American English, the word “so” is not a diphthong. It is a single, plain syllable. But Evelyn was from outside London and her “so” had two syllables. Not two hard syllables, like “pepper” but soft ones, like “giant”. Evelyn’s “so” can’t be recreated from written letters. The closest you might come would be a rough approximation and maybe auditory pattern recognition would take it from there. It’s “SAH-yew” with the syllables crammed together and the second one confined to the far back of the throat. It can be heard most easily in the phrase “I dah-yewn’t knah-yew.” Austrailian and New Zealand accents have a version of it. Nothing remotely like it can be heard at Oxford and Cambridge.

Unless future advances in brain imaging some day demonstrate otherwise, there is probably nothing inherently sexually or romantically appealing about the sort of accent Evelyn spoke with. Quinn looked at her, just as cute as she could be with a spot of pure white flour on the tip of her nose from rolling out the biscuit dough, especially cute for an older woman, cute with those ridiculous clodhopper work boots and denim overalls that so clearly set off her femininity, cute with the long brown pony tail that bounced every time she spoke. But it was that diphthong which by way of some mystery took Quinn from appreciatively attentive to crazy with desire.

And then, just as the combination of transcendental culinary sensation joined with the sort of intense desire that everyone has experienced but never often enough, Quinn acted with a level of maturity well beyond his nineteen years and in the whole history of humans rarely accomplished before or since by those who’ve just been brought swiftly to their romantic knees by unexpected longing. Quinn realized with a great and calm certainly that at that moment there was nothing in the whole world that could possibly come out of his mouth, aimed at Evelyn, that he would not instantly regret the second he heard what it was. And so he smiled at her, turned to Fred and Shirley, said “That soup!” and walked out into the front of the house looking for Peter and Rosie and some more of that Storm Bay Hey!

At half past ten, the moon begin wandering into the edge of the earth’s shadow. Fred, white of beard, had a few minutes earlier become the oldest person Quinn had ever rolled a joint with. He and Quinn sat on a blanket, watching this little cog in the solar system’s greater works turn slowly round. Quinn held in his hands a half empty bowl of soup. He put his face against the open top and breathed in and wondered once more what he could possibly do to describe the taste and the smell – the whole sensation – to anyone? He couldn’t even describe it to himself. Then he began to worry that he wouldn’t be able to remember it – not really, not past a faint if pleasant echo of the experience. Was he condemned to an eternally partial recollection of the golden moment when he tasted the finished … the finished event, really, since the soup wasn’t just a thing but rather a whole happening. Would he ever be able to share the quintessential beauty of Fred and Shirley’s creation with anyone who wasn’t there? Or would it always be like trying to convey color to a blind person? Or for that matter the absence of color to a seeing person?

Fred listened placidly as Quinn explained it. Fred shrugged. “Hell, think of how many people you’ve talked to who wanted to tell you all about the joy they’ve felt, or the love, or just what it meant for them to step out into a perfect day, but who couldn’t summon up the words. Why, you might be surrounded constantly by people who live very deeply but who can only communicate shallowly because words have their limits. Think what you might have learned from them but never will. It’s a little bit sad, eh?”

With this, Fred wandered off in search of Shirley. For some time Quinn watched the fuzzy shadow on the moon grow larger while he continued to churn. When he noticed Evelyn sitting next to him he didn’t know how long she’d been there. She leaned close to him, reached her hand out, tenderly took hold of his face and turned it toward her. “Stop!” she said.

“What? Stop what?”

“Stop thinking. You were thinking silently but your lips were actually moving.”

“Oh. There’s something I can’t figure out.”

“You and everybody else, Ducky.”

“It’s driving me crazy.”

“Hence my admonition.”

A breath of air off the inlet, born warm during the day but experimenting with being cool, blew a mosquito away from Quinn’s ear. “Just stop and be thou not crazy,” she said.

“You mean stop thinking?”

Evelyn considered the question. “Are you into Zen?”

He shrugged. “Heard of it. You get enlightened all of a sudden or something.”

She laughed softly. “Probably not. Look. Sit here, keep an eye on the eclipse and I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” She got up and walked toward the house.

Morgan came running by but stopped when she saw Quinn. “Whatcha doing? Watching the eclipse?”

He looked up at her and nodded.

“I thought the moon was supposed to disappear,” she complained.

“Well, it did a little bit.”

She gave the moon a hard look. “Not really. I can still see it all. I was going to tell about the eclipse in show-and-tell when school starts.”

Evelyn came back and sat down in front of Quinn. She held a quarter in one hand and a bottle of rubber cement from Shirley’s desk in the other.

She looked directly at him. “Listen carefully. From time to time, in your brain and without warning, an immense white whale will rise to the surface. And that whale will rise over and over and over again, throughout your waking life.” She held up the coin for him to see. “I set thee this task. As the white whale comes to the surface – not sometime afterwards, but right as it comes to the surface – you cry out silently, to yourself. You cry, ‘He breaches!’ Do this and you may take this Spanish doubloon.”

She leaned in and glued the quarter to his forehead. Morgan laughed. Quinn was lost in the feel of her touch on his forehead. Quinn, entirely missing the white whale’s first appearance, asked, “Will this help me figure out how to communicate the experience of that soup?”

“Ahhh. That’s what you were…” She turned to the girl. “Morgan. If you wanted to share how good  you thought the soup was with a friend, what would you do?”

The two Storm Bay kids came running up, laughing. “Cook it for
them!” shouted Morgan as she ran off with them.