We all mark the arrival of spring in our own ways. For me, the season has officially sprung when the cherry blossoms bloom, George Will writes his first-of-the-year baseball column (like the cherry blossoms, he burst forth early this year), and I decide, on some happy, unexpected afternoon, to lift the door of my spooky garage and wheel out my Weber grill.
This is a matter of some seriousness with me, though one filled with pleasant anticipation, too. My heart never fails to leap up when I haul the Weber into the backyard, raise the black dome, survey the accumulated spiderwebs and leaves and muck of its winter hibernation, and yell to my son that he really should do something worthwhile for once in his miserable life and get out here and clean the damn grill. He always ignores me, of course — he’s only seven — so I clean it myself, with grim purposefulness. But my labor is leavened with fancies of meals to come: burgers and ribs and luscious steaks, smoky and juicy and flecked with chunks of unhygienic crud because I never clean the grill properly. Spring has sprung!
Barbecuing is the main reason I moved our family from a city apartment to a house in the suburbs. I’m exaggerating only a little. The city’s rotting schools, crushing taxes, and general seediness also had something to do with it. But cooking on an open grill, generating enormous clouds of atmospheric particulates for the sake of dinner, seemed to me an essential manifestation of the freedom that is our birthright as Americans, and my neighbors were furious when I would do this in my apartment. In my new neighborhood, by contrast, I at once found a kindred spirit in the fellow next door. He was a Democrat, which meant that he grilled only fish and vegetables, but he knew his way around a Weber, and he instilled in me what pompous actors — which is to say, actors — all a sense of craft.
My neighbor’s devotion to the Weber grill, qua Weber grill, was deep and undying. He despised gas grills. There was nothing he couldn’t make a Weber do except sit, fetch, and roll over, and like the pudgy master in Kung Fu, he passed on many of his secrets to me. He taught me, for example, how to sprinkle dampened wood chips on the coals to produce maximum smoke. (And his wife worked for the EPA!) He got me to buy a stovepipe cylinder for the coals, which hastens the burning. From him I learned to test wind direction before lighting the fire, to optimize the flow of air through the Weber’s bottom vents; he even drew me a diagram to demonstrate the aerodynamic principles involved. And marinades? My neighbor knew marinades. And now I do too.
But he moved away. And over the two springs since his departure my own attachment to the Weber — which was, like his, cultish in intensity — has slackened a good deal. An uncomfortable truth has slowly dawned: Charcoal grills are terrifically inconvenient. The coals themselves are dusty and . . . well, they’re very black, and so are your hands after you handle them. The large amount of time it takes to prepare the grill and the coals and the woodchips, which I once enjoyed because it pleasantly lengthened the cocktail hour, now merely tries my patience because I’m trying to cut back on gin. The grill itself is difficult to keep in fighting trim and, as noted, absolutely impossible to get my son to clean.
The other day my wife, sensing my change of heart, dropped one of her mail- order catalogues in my lap. It was open to a page covered with pictures of happy yuppies cooing with self-satisfaction, looking as though they’d just looted the Ralph Lauren warehouse. And there in the center of the page was the object of their cooing: the largest gas grill I’ve ever seen. The picture was pornographic in its detail; you could hear the steaks sizzle and hiss. This grill was more than a grill. It transcended grillness. It had twin rangetop burners, a rotisserie, a built-in smoker system, a double boiler. I looked closer. My God — a wok!
My pulse quickened. The possibilities were endless. A new grill would mean I could prepare lavish meals. It would mean variety — rich sauces, inventive toppings, stir-fried vegetables and other delicately prepared side dishes. It would mean a cornucopia of nature’s fruits and meats. It would mean a happy, satisfied family. It would mean . . .
. . . more work for me! I snapped the catalogue shut and went out to the backyard. Sunlight filtered through the green traces of trees, and birds flitted from limb to limb. The Weber stood with its dome off, half-clean, just as I’d left it. “Hey!” I shouted to my son. “Get out here! This thing is filthy!” He ignored me and I grabbed the scrub brush to continue my rite of spring.
ANDREW FERGUSON
