The Blacksmith's Journal · Field Journal No. 2

A Homecoming at Cardinal Village

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You are our guest, lay down your burdens. You are home.

Welcome back to the Field Journal, where we leave the workshop to spend time with the people and places that make cooking worth doing. This time we flew a pan 200 miles over the mountains to Aspendell, California, where four generations of the Cluff family run Cardinal Village: a general store, a lodge, and a ring of cabins that once housed the miners from the gold mine up the road. They have a wood-fired pizza oven. We had a question. The video below has the answer. What follows is Dan's account of the day, which turned out to be about a lot more than pizza.

Lead Home

By Dan Patterson

When asked what I do for a living, my answer goes something like this: “I run an ornamental metals shop, we make gates, doors, railings, furniture, etc. Aaaand we make cookware.” This often results in a quizzical look because of the seeming disconnect between those two industries. I then spend the next minute or so relating them to each other, in preparation for the inevitable question of “why?” It seems like a lot of trouble to immerse oneself in basically two different businesses. Well, yes it is, but there is a kind of spiritual payoff of the cookware side that is hard to quantify and is dear to me. It gets to the core of what it is to be human, to be in a family, a clan, and among friends. We are making tools to facilitate and enrich the human experience through the act of preparing and sharing meals together. I believe that human connection matters, and to the extent that connection can be made more profound through the preparation of good, healthy food, so does the food and the tools used to prepare it.

The act of breaking bread together is a sacred thing. Across cultures, humans have treated the shared meal as an intimate act. Truces are made, differences set down, pacts formed, and unions created. Hospitality is extended and consummated through the breaking of bread. To invite a stranger into your kitchen is to say, “You are our guest, lay down your burdens. You are home.” This is the experience of being with ShaleAnn, husband Ken and son Aidan Cluff at Cardinal Village Resort in Aspendell, California. They exude the kind of hospitality you feared might have died out sometime in the mid 20th century. In that sense, it is a step back in time beyond just the rustic setting. The air is clean, crisp and thin, and maybe that explains the lightness I felt as I stepped out of the rental car and into the grounds of Cardinal Village. The day we spent there was the kind of day that shimmers in memory, a truly marquee day. I came away full, not only my belly but in my being. As I’ve pondered our visit, it has been difficult to put together a concise synopsis, much less one that feels focused on advancing our brand or anyone else’s; there is just too much personal symmetry with our hosts and deep connection with the location. To that end, I put forth that there are some combinations of times, places, and sensory stimulation that reach us in the deepest, most foundational places; you know it when it happens, it’s like a longing that has awakened for something so pure and precious that it aches. It clears the mind and spirit. It reorders priorities. It fosters reflection.

What follows are some reflections from a truly wonderful day at Cardinal Village. Bear with me, it may seem meandering, but it does lead home.

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I cannot overstate the love I have for this part of the earth. The setting is spectacular, with snow capped peaks surrounding the valley dotted with aspen groves, streams, and waterfalls. It is quiet, elemental. It is difficult to take it all in because you can’t, our senses have limitations, but it is more than that. There is a primal connection reaching back to some of my early memories, the travels of my childhood. In our growing up years, we had put in the hours on long road trips all over the southwest and beyond. We did it old-school. No tablets, phones, or even CDs. Just cassette tapes, drawing pads, pencils, and the long hours gazing out the window at the vast expanse we call America. In the way that time seems immeasurably long to a kid, those hours in the car seemed eternal. My mind felt dull, empty, as I entered a trancelike state as the hours dragged on. But my mind was far from idle. The best word I can use to describe what was happening would be to say that I was being imprinted. Imprinted with a deep love for the topography of the West, the vast expanse of it all; the call of far off peaks, the colors of the manzanita, live oaks, and aspen leaves as they seemed to twinkle in the breeze.

And the sounds; my mother’s voice as she sang, laughed, and at times cried because road tripping with 4 young kids is exceedingly difficult. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons interspersed with Paul Simon’s Graceland just audible over the hum of our family van, giving way in the evening to the whisper of wind through pines as we set up camp. The happy chatter around the table as we ate various cylindrical meat products (hot dogs, summer sausage) and things that fit into the broad category: casserole. We ate like the Lords of all Creation. We ate as a Family, and the legacy of these experiences is rich. Many are the happy meals we have shared, assembled around the table, the camp fire or the picnic blanket, in the campgrounds and open spaces of the American West. At the modest cost of the conveniences of home we gained the shared memories that knit us together as a family, a tribe. We have since become uncles, aunts and grandparents, and watched as our children have become nieces, nephews, and cousins. We still eat family meals together. It is fabulously messy, and sacred.

In later years, I would grow to appreciate the beauty and mystery of meeting a stranger. Chance meetings that turn friendly, which turn into friendships. Some last a day, some years. All are tied to a place and a time, a circumstance which crossed our paths. In their own way each feels fragile because the events leading up to a chance encounter turned friendship seem so improbable, so far-fetched. One certainty: if we had never left our house our routine, if we had never looked someone in the eye and smiled, if we had not had the courage to engage, we would never have experienced the gift of friendship borne through random (I say ordained) human encounters. As of this writing, there is a wedding invitation hanging on our fridge from a young woman my wife met while brushing her teeth in the bathroom at Yellowstone National Park. From sharing a sink to sharing a wedding, life is full of little gems like this if you are open enough to receive them.

Visiting Cardinal Village was pure joy. In reflecting on it, I was profoundly grateful that a place like that still exists. I was thankful for the Cluff family, their openness to our joint enterprise, but even more for their openness to us. Reflection is difficult in the modern world, and requires stillness borne of discipline, as if you are cultivating an appetite for it. As I get older, I feel it has become more important that I do take time to reflect. It’s like rediscovering a part of me that I didn’t realize was fading. Usually these are the parts that are the most important to hold on to, the things that ground me as an individual. I feel that this exercise has resulted in a more attuned capacity for human connection, for hospitality, for compassion, and to impart the same experiences and values to my own children.

To my mind, Cardinal Village is situated at the intersection of profound natural beauty and (for me) a deeply spiritual sense of homecoming. What ShaleAnn, Ken and Aidan are doing up there is special. All the ingredients are there: the setting, the hospitality, the convivial mood of the place, all of the charm of a multi-generational family business and the pizza, which is next level. We brought ourselves, a pan, and a heartfelt openness to whatever the experience might bring. We were filled (stuffed, really) with pizza and hospitality. More importantly, we connected as people, building that singular thing that is so unique to humanity: friendship. We left with a sincere desire to return, and soon, with the comforting knowledge that when we return to that kitchen, it will be a homecoming.

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Cardinal Village is at the end of the road above Bishop, California. Cabins, breakfast, and the general store are at cardinalvillageresort.com. They carry our pans in the store, so if you're headed into the Sierra without one, you can fix that on the way in. The pan in the oven was a Sonora Roaster.

We'll see you at the next one.