when you want, where you want.
Author Jeff VanderMeer Looks For Comfort Food When Fleeing a Hurricane
Photo-Illustration: Margalit Cutler
Novelist Jeff VanderMeer has lived in Florida most of his life. It’s where he spent his teenage years and where he’s written the majority of his books, including his latest, Absolution, a surprise fourth addition to the Southern Reach Trilogy (he’ll be in New York on October 24 as part of his book tour). He’s stuck around, he says, because he loves Florida’s range of community, and he especially loves being close to nature — well, some of the time. Two hurricanes in the past month have made for a slightly less scenic environment than he’s used to, and, this week, VanderMeer recounts a stretch of eating while fleeing from Hurricane Helene and waiting out the storm in South Carolina. None of the ensuing drama has affected his writing much, though. “I suffer less from writer’s block,” he says, “than from a complete inundation of ideas all the time.”
Wednesday, September 24
I wake groggy from lack of sleep, dreaming of dinner the night before. In a sense, I’m still cocooned by that dark bar at Sage, a favorite of mine in Tallahassee, with its Croupier-style bartenders who exude a sly sense of a secret life. I’d ordered a great Wagyu burger (medium) and Caesar salad at the bar, to go, and yet now I feel ethereal, made of mist, as I get out a frying pan, butter.
Every morning is the same: coffee, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, repeat. I’ll never not love scrambled eggs. Some of my friends joke that I’m a Komodo dragon. I eat five, but place roughly one egg on a small plate for our large elderly tuxedo cat, Neo. I make the eggs with one eye on the TV and updates on Hurricane Helene. Under the spell of hurricane spaghetti models cast by meteorologists, I clean Neo’s dish, prepare his carrier, and fill the dishwasher.
Do I stay or do I go? I’m going, but I’ve stayed in the past.
After breakfast, me and the cat, complaining, drive seven hours north. I take back roads up into Georgia, north toward Greenville, passing flurries of cotton fields divided by rows of genuflecting trees and roads named “Cotton” with lightly mowed verges erupting with stands of goldenrod.
A downpour unrelated to the hurricane has me stopping by the side of the road around the time of a phone interview. I’m having to speak louder than the rain, talking about the Tyrant — an alligator in my new novel — and thinking of the warnings back in Florida that flooding will make alligators appear in unexpected places.
Afterward, I don’t stop until I reach a Taco Bell in Sylvester, where I have my staple of road food: three Soft Taco Supremes with medium hot sauce. Every Soft Taco Supreme I’ve ever gotten tasted exactly the same and had the exact mix of ingredients in the same proportions. My stomach likes a constant Soft Taco Supreme, and a calm stomach is an important thing for a seven-hour road trip.
These tacos are packaged in tiny paper bags that allow me to scarf them down in the car with Neo; he is 18 years old and has kidney disease, so I worry about leaving him alone. But, if I’m being honest, scarfing down Soft Taco Supremes in the car is a road-trip tradition. Later, I stop along a rural road to respond to a New York Times Opinion editor pinging me. Apparently, I’ll be writing about the hurricane while fleeing from it.
With the storm still gathering strength, I arrive in downtown Greenville, check in to my hotel, and head straight to the Trappe Door. I order a charcuterie plate that feels like an indulgence. Famished, I eat every last bit: duck prosciutto, salami, tomme, Red Dragon, Seahive, chutney (peach, red bell pepper, blueberry, red onion), pickled vegetables, honeycomb, strawberries, marinated olives, grilled ciabatta, and crackers.
I’m already off my diet from stress and in a kind of fatalistic mood, so I go a step further and order a reserve bottle of barrel-aged Chimay Red. I drink about a third of it while thinking about how much upheaval is happening in my life over the next few months, even without evacuation for a hurricane.
Thursday, September 25
I order my standard on-the-road hypercharged coffee: black with two shots of espresso. I get further settled in the hotel room with my poor, confused cat and check the latest hurricane updates (180-mile winds headed right for Tallahassee). I scribble scene fragments as I finish drinking the coffee, and I sit there for a moment, staring at Neo, as if I’ve forgotten why I’m here. To hunker down. To escape. To, by chance, write about my food choices.
I head out again, not wanting to be alone with my thoughts. At Coffee Underground, I order a spinach-and-mushroom omelet after a disgruntling moment when I learn they don’t have oatmeal. But the omelet, which is just fine, makes up for it. No cheese, which turns an omelet into a gooey, unpalatable mess. Also: another black coffee with a shot of espresso. I have no idea why I’m a little jittery afterward.
After breakfast, I head to CVS for Neo’s food. He’s not eating his usual can of whatever, so I get several other varieties and thankfully he gulps down the first one I offer him. He’s looking at me with a thoughtful eye. I help him up onto the bed and he lies on my hand for a while, purring.
Restless, pacing, I find the rather flat omelet wasn’t fulfilling. I duck into the hotel’s café and order scrambled eggs, which come with a hash-brown patty that looks vaguely like a dish pad. The eggs are runny and underseasoned, but I’m grateful for them all the same.
At lunchtime, I irrationally stock up on books at M. Judson, a wonderful bookstore hidden in a historic stone building that looks like a catafalque. I buy a copy of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium (which I’m shocked to find is signed), Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, and Soetsu Yanagi’s The Beauty of Everyday Things. Lately, I’ve been very much into (1) reading more novels, (2) getting off the internet, and (3) not taking my surroundings for granted, so this selection makes me feel well provisioned to wait out the storm.
I try a nearby hotel restaurant, Spoonbread, for lunch. Like some places in the South, the restaurant wants to conjure up an approximation of British high-tea grandeur with that usual y’all twist that adds an element of the Gothic.
I order low-country-boil clam chowder and a salmon bowl with barley and vegetables. The salmon bowl is grim business, institutional. The fish is fine, but the barley appears steeped in floodwater — smells musty — and the circle of Brussels sprouts along the edge of the bowl feels ominous, like little decapitated heads. I eat just three of them and abandon the attempt, focusing on the fish.
That evening for dinner, early enough to avoid the high winds, I go to a restaurant called Camp and order the half-chicken. I consider asking them to hold the tomato, but figure it’ll be on the side. I have a real disgust for cooked tomatoes and a fraught relationship with tomatoes in general (except for fried green tomatoes), exacerbated by once seeing an explosion of tomato plants at a wastewater-treatment plant, apparently there, I was told, because of all the seeds people were, um, depositing into the system.
The half-chicken is moist and delicious. (The tomato is on the side.) I order salmon-and-shrimp dumplings to go and eat them back in the hotel room.
Later, article edited and one hand trapped under a purring cat, I celebrate by going wild with three of Alyssa’s Healthy Oatmeal Bites. I don’t know who Alyssa is, but these things are delicious, not too sweet, and they make up for the lack of oatmeal at breakfast.
The latest news is that Greenville is going to get hit hard by the hurricane, and I’ve had a stressful day in a meta sense, having to grapple with hurricanes for the article while also beginning to experience one, and being unable to contact my doctor about recent bloodwork results that have me on edge.
I’m also worried about Neo, as his back legs are extremely weak. I help him onto chairs, onto the bed, off of the chairs, off of the bed.
Friday, September 26
I wake up achy and worried from dreams I can’t remember; I have a feeling they were dark and disturbing. My body feels wrecked by a storm that hasn’t reached me yet. As the wind begins to assault the side of the hotel, I see something like a hard-top tarp flap off the roof of an adjacent building and float for a second before plummeting to the street below, as if it had suddenly gained weight. Below, I can see stormwater rushing down the street.
The electricity goes off and then comes back on as emergency generators kick in. Almost all of South Carolina will be without power, but downtown Greenville never wavers, lit up, sometimes in the most ridiculous ways, with public-art statues highlighted, while streets two blocks away are impassable from fallen trees and completely dark.
The river that runs through Greenville roars and rages, while the wind lashes the windows so hard I can hear a kind of buckling, or imagine I do. I keep the blinds down, cuddle the cat.
I take the stairs to the hotel café and order six scrambled eggs à la carte to go. I see the line cook come out to talk to the server about my order. He’s a scruffy-looking guy in a stained chef’s apron over a plaid shirt with the sleeves ripped off and an incredulous look on his ginger-bearded face. I can see him mouth the words “SIX? EGGS?” in a way I can imagine is similar to a bartender wondering if a customer needs another six shots of tequila.
When it’s ready, I tell the server that some of it is for my cat. It’s true: Neo needs eggs. Or maybe I just want to feed him eggs because it’s part of our morning routine and restores order to the events unfolding. Neo refuses the eggs and eats little else.
The latest weather reports indicate that Helene will miss Tallahassee by a hair, but the aftermath may hit Greenville directly.
For a snack, I have a chocolate coconut Quest bar and one of Alyssa’s Oatmeal Bites, which I’m starting to regret.
Lunch is spaghetti and meatballs with a side of Italian bread provided by the hotel, because all nearby restaurants are closed. I rarely eat spaghetti, but it’s welcome and warm and filling.
By midafternoon, the storm seems past and the sun is shining, wind gusts becoming rare. By dinnertime, I’m able to go back to Camp, to establish a vestige of a routine if nothing else.
The appetizer I order, lettuce cups with tofu and cabbage, is practically inedible. The coarse roughage clashes with the tofu, and the pepper slices render the entire thing a burning hell cauldron in the mouth.
Wagyu shank meat with white rice and vegetables offers relief from the temporary heat-death of my mouth. But the deconstructed apple tart after makes me believe deconstruction should forever after be relegated to fiction.
Neo teeters to his feet when I come back to the hotel and we watch bad TV together on the bed, his head resting on my hand.
Saturday, September 27
I wake early and can’t face another plate of runny eggs, so I venture out down Main Street. People jog and walk their dogs, surrounded by evidence of the hurricane: uprooted trees, piles of cut branches, fresh stumps, a hundred thousand oak leaves spilled across every surface in a tapestry that reflects an artificially induced fall. Most of the traffic lights don’t function. The smell of ravaged trees has a peevish freshness.
My first breakfast consists of a prosciutto scone at M. Judson, along with some great dark-roast coffee. I sit in a flimsy chair in the marble antechamber to the inner tomb and am distressed by the waterless daisies in a vase on the table. As I sip my coffee, devour my scone, I am more and more undone by these flowers. I have to either end their suffering or save them, so I get a cup of water from the café. They’ll die soon with or without water, but at least I am less anxious now.
I walk farther down Main Street, with the river surging across the rapids and city workers collecting debris, cutting off branches. The roar of chainsaws competes with the sound of a guy on a motorcycle, whose blaring music changes to an equally blaring “you have reached the end of your allotted amount of free music on this app,” until he manages to turn it off.
When I’ve walked as far as I can, I start back and get a second breakfast of a butter croissant from a place with a very long line. I sit in a little semicircular area overlooking the river park and tear off pieces of the croissant. I eat each bite slowly, still trying to reconcile the immediate aftermath of a hurricane with baby strollers and kids playing Frisbee.
I don’t feel stressed, but maybe I am because I continue seeking the perfect breakfast. To my left is the Passerelle Bistro; I ditch the bag of croissant crumbs for a third breakfast. I order a spinach, mushroom, and goat cheese omelet from a cast-iron chair and table that overlook the river’s suspension bridge.
This feels pleasant, like I live in one of the condos nearby and I do this every morning. Maybe I even bring my cat on a leash some days. Maybe the waitstaff knows me and I wave good-bye to them and take a post-breakfast walk along the river.
Which I do, actually — take a long walk after third breakfast. I’m stuffed again, uncomfortable, and beginning to feel stir-crazy in Greenville. There’s a feeling of stasis now, a sense of being stuck. This preternatural downtown all lit up, surrounded by the aftermath of storm damage.
I go back to the hotel to find out from my neighbor back home that a giant pine tree became uprooted in the hurricane but fell so gradually that it has settled on my carport roof and dangled at its farthest point just above the roof of our house, a giant fist of gnarled branches.
At dinnertime, I go to Bricktop down the block because of good reviews online. I take a seat at their swank and blazingly white bar and order probably the plainest thing on the menu, to go: grilled plank salmon with asparagus and mashed potatoes. I’ve chosen their most basic dish, in part so Neo will have some salmon to eat.
But Neo doesn’t touch the fish, just drinks some water, and then wants to be up on the bed with me. We stay like that for a couple of hours, watching football on the TV, in places far removed from storm damage.
At 10 p.m., Neo gets up, looks right at me, and goes into a shuddering series of seizures. I stare at him, frozen, then get him on his side and make sure his tongue doesn’t block his throat, carry him to the floor, and hold him there until he’s done. Neo has never had a seizure before. I’ve never seen anyone have a seizure before.
I gently place him in the cat carrier and head out into the night, to an emergency hospital that won’t answer my calls. They might be open, they might be closed. I’ll find out.
Two blocks from downtown Greenville, all the streetlights and traffic lights are out, and I’m navigating almost by feel through the night, the roads empty, the wind still gusting in places, skirting fallen trees.
Sunday, September 28
My early breakfast, at 1 a.m., consists of five nervously consumed mints provided by the emergency vet hospital and a coconut KIND bar. I’ve been pacing back and forth for hours, to the rhythm of the emergency generator. Almost all the lights inside are off; the generator’s only at 40 percent, and they have a backlog of patients.
Neo is in the back, on an IV while they do blood tests, and I can’t see him until they’re done.
“My dog’s bleeding badly,” one woman says, but the attendant just nods and says, “We’ll see him soon.”
No one in that waiting room has electricity. Some of them had to cut branches away from roads to get here. They’ve formed a camaraderie over the past hours that I’m too tired and worried to breach. I stand over in a far corner, apart, and eat my KIND bar and take in every detail of the place: the tired, broken coffee maker; the inspirational sayings on the walls; the worn surface of the floor; the crisp, clean intake counter; the way those on duty wear a kind of armor both for their own protection and for ours. The smell isn’t quite medicinal, but medicinal adjacent.
Eventually, I’m led into an exam room and a vet comes in, sits down, and in a matter-of-fact yet compassionate manner lays out the situation.
No, the Tallahassee vet who diagnosed Neo with kidney disease just a few days ago was wrong: Neo is in pain, and it will only get worse. We can rehydrate him, but that may affect his heart and will only be a temporary fix.
Some of my relatives and friends have kept cats alive too long by extraordinary means, then regretted it. I think about prior cats where we should have been merciful sooner. I think about how, yesterday, Neo’s heart against my hand on his chest beat like a hummingbird’s and how I thought that can’t be right, that can’t be how it is now.
“These big, doglike cats really want to please you,” she says, “and they’re used to being strong, so it’s hard to tell when they’re hurting.”
I nod, and I’m thinking about how far from home I am, how far I’ve traveled this year. “He was always too strong for his own good,” I tell her, crying and thinking of how much like a linebacker Neo was: an athlete but not graceful, always a little clumsy in an endearing way. Now, I hug him close and he’s such a fragile collection of bones and fur. His eyes are clear but in his demeanor he’s confused, not sure why he’s on the table.
Together, the vet and I hold Neo as she gives him the injections. I tell her in a quiet tone of voice all of the wonderful things about Neo, all the ways in which he was extraordinary and how much he meant to us. I feel like I’m letting go of something so profound I can’t put it into words — I can only tell her the true anecdotes, the little moments and the little joys that added up to something big.
I feel his body relax under the warmth of my hands.
And then he’s gone, and a part of me is gone with him.
I stay up until 4 a.m., eat the last Maple Donut bar, even though I know it’s not good for me. I text everyone important who should know. I try to convey that I am okay, but I’m not okay. I have two more days here now, so I can collect Neo’s ashes. We are not our bodies, and Neo was gone the moment his heart stopped beating, but some part of me rebels against leaving his remains here, in a place foreign to him, that he did not know, and was brought to involuntarily to escape a hurricane. There are kinds of illogic that are meant, I think, to help us, to preserve us and our memories. This is one of them.
Hollowed out, I rise early and walk to the Passerelle Bistro on the edge of Greenville’s Riverwalk. I order scrambled eggs and let them bring the sausage and hash browns too. I don’t really care what I eat right now, just that I need to eat something.
Afterward, I walk back to the hotel. I look at all the cat food I had amassed and the towel with the catnip toy I’d placed on the floor for him, and none of it makes any sense to me. I sleep through lunch. When it’s time for dinner, I go to the Bricktop, again, because it’s close. I order their “low-country sushi,” which is crab with a red dot of sauce, surrounded by rice, with a butter sauce infused with herbs and a bit of heat. It’s an amazing meal, the rice in combination with the crab giving you the full experience of the crab without the need for a bib. The butter sauce is indescribably tasty.
I lean back in my chair. It is odd and yet mundane to sit there waiting and watch people walk by the window on the street and be consumed by what seems to be a secret sorrow, a grief that is about a cat you loved but also about the circumstances by which I came to be in this bar, on this street, in the first place.
I think of Tallahassee, teetering on the fulcrum between a place I know but that is not yet home and a home that is soon to become just a place I lived, once. And I try to savor what I eat, a remnant of the culture of a place I’ve never visited, served up by a restaurant that specializes in American cuisine.
I won’t know that I’m wrong about my self-diagnosed cancer for another day. I won’t know the full extent of the damage from a pine tree that’s fallen on our carport until I get home. In so many ways, I don’t know what waits for me there, except to know my life is changing and I don’t know what’s next.
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