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© St. Petersburg Times, published February 24, 2002
Dad had an old iron cherry piemaker that he packed in the back of the Scout truck when we went camping deep into the West Virginia spruce forest.
Once a month when I was young, Dad would take me for a weekend trek on laurel-covered strip-mine tram roads or into the wilderness, where he would teach me what he learned in the Army about camping. Dad made sure I learned every aspect of wilderness survival -- how to mend a snake bite, how to set up a shelter to sleep under, how to find the holes in the river that have thick trout in them, how to make cherry pies.
Dad taught me how to make a fire, a hot fire with orange coals that needed constant poking and rearranging "to burn efficiently," he always said. We snapped sassafras twigs -- sassafras because "it always stays dry in foul weather." We would set up the twigs and small branches in a tepee form on the rolled newspaper, and Dad would hold a long, lit wooden match to the heap.
We sat silently in the woods at night and watched the fire burn down, get good and hot enough to make cherry pies. Nobody I know ever made cherry pies like Dad could.
Dad would tell me over and over, throughout the years around the campfire, that it took a long time to make a great cherry pie. I never paid too much attention to exactly how long it took, but I know it seemed like a very long time as I sat under the moonlit mountain ridge at night waiting for the bubbling cherry sauce to run down my blistered lips.
"Takes a while to make it right. Be patient, Steve," he would say as he shuffled the iron piemaker deeper into the orange coals. "Gotta be patient, son."
It echoes memories of running, sprinting out of Sunday church service, rushing the foyer for the doughnut table, or pushing my small body, out of turn, to the front of the line at the Kennywood Thunderbolt coaster ride on hot summer days. It echoes memories of waiting for Mom to get ready for the company picnic.
"Mom's takin' too long; the hot dogs will all be gone."
"Be patient, Steve," Dad always said. I thought about it hard around the campfire while the pie cooked.
Then Dad would fetch the pie right out of the fire and toss it onto a fat, cut tree stump to cool, steam in the air -- cherry steam -- and I had a fork in hand to taste the first one of the night.
As I headed down to Smoke Hole Canyon to camp at a friend's cabin last fall, I grabbed the old iron cherry piemaker. It had been 24 years since I had seen Dad make a cherry pie, but I still remembered how he did it. I still remembered waiting and how good it tasted. I pulled the cherry piemaker out of the back of the Honda and announced in the early evening that all friends around the canyon would soon be biting into the best, most delicious cherry pies ever made in the West Virginia mountains.
"We will once again have a pie so cherrylicious, so steamy hot and tart, that there will be silence in this here remote territory," I yelled.
With pride, hope and former piemaking experience weighing heavy on my shoulders, I hunkered next to the fire and buttered the bread slices, spooned the cherry mix into the two open iron faces and clamped it shut. I poked the cherry piemaker into the fire's base, looked out into the black night and told my friends what Dad had always told me: "Takes a while to make it right. Be patient, y'all."
So, as all peered into the fire, I shuffled the piemaker about in the coals to keep the heat even around the clamped, burnt-black iron face. I waited and waited -- waited as long as it seemed Dad used to. When I pulled on the handles to remove the pie from the fire, they broke off and melted into the hot orange coals. The two faces popped apart and what looked like a black rubber drain stopper for an industrial sink rolled into the flames.
A friend mumbled, "That looks a bit shy of cherrylicious, Steve."
Dad's cherry piemaking reputation remains intact for now, unscathed by my attempt, which rose with the ash into the Smoke Hole sky. Dad's warm voice, smooth with the slow gray smoke of sassafras, echoed in my ears.
- Steve Snyder is a writer in Clearwater.