Fighting "Saudade"

A new knife and a good book...

According to Google SAUDADE (noun) is a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament. If you look SAUDADE at Wikipedia they go over a very long page trying to explain the inexplicable, but Nascimento and Meandro cite Duarte Nunes Leão's for what may be a proper definition of SAUDADE: "Memory of something with a desire for it."

Anyhow, my wife has been in Brazil for the last five or six weeks and yesterday I had a particularly strong case of saudade. So, I left work earlier than usual, stopped downtown Traverse City for a couple errands, started filling hungry and decided to treat myself to a proper dinner.

I stopped at Maxbauer Meat Market and bought a beautiful T-Bone steak for main course and a kielbasa and a weisswurst for appetizer. Before I reached the cash register I added four small young potatoes to my plans.

As I arrived home the small USPS box on my mail box greeted me with news that a new toy I was anxiously waiting for had arrived, but I controlled my urge to open the package in order to first start the fire on my Big Green Egg.

Once the fire was burning, and the potatoes and sausages were on the grill, and some oldies were playing on the radio, I turned my attention back to the small USPS box. From its guts came the most beautiful and well made friction folder one can conceive. The Michael Morris knife was made from an old file and the comfortable handle is made of micarta. A nice design feature is that the tang doubles as a bottle opener. I didn't even feel like having a beer, but felt compelled to try the built-in bottle opener! My expert opinion is that it works better than most bottle openers I've used to date.

While the Green Egg imparted its magic to the sausages I went on reading a couple chapter of Jim Harrison's Just Before Dark. The celebrated Grayling, MI, native discusses why "Small portions are for small and inactive people" along with observations along the natural order of really important things: first eat, then love! Considering I always told people that my stomach is the most important part of my anatomy, I can relate to Mr. Harrison's passion for food, that lesser souls could consider gluttony.

By this time the sausages were perfectly grilled and while they rested to allow the juices to incorporate with the meat I salted the T-Bone steak and placed it on the grill, taking time to assure the potatoes would not burn. I finished the beer while savoring the appetizer, and really building a bigger appetite.

A couple more pages and the steak was ready.

...and a great meal helps one to feel better!

In order to complement the magic that lump wood charcoal imparts to food I split the potatoes and seasoned with table salt, butter and olive oil. The texture and flavor was just out of this world. The simple dinner was washed down by a small (or maybe not so small) amount of a special edition Jameson Irish Whiskey.

Desert was just one Sonho de Valsa, the popular Brazilian bonbon made of chocolate and cashew nuts filling, and unchanged since 1938.

All this happened just before dark what is the time that saudade strikes most powerfully, but the new knife, good reading and great food helped keep it at bay.

An Unexpected Encounter

The Mitsubishi "Hobo" Knife

To say that as a child I had a rather fertile imagination and unconstrained curiosity would possibly be an understatement. My grandfather, Vô Tô, was a great contributor to that and fed me uncountable Tarzan and likely heroes stories, and the house that I grew up housed many "secrets". And while my father could have been considered a realist, he did not create barriers to my many exploits, even when they took me to his office desk, fishing box and other private and personal assets.

From a very early age I understood that every adventurer needed to have some special gear, a knife being first and foremost the most essential and valuable item. And do it happened that during one of my many visits to my father's "things" I found an extraordinary object.

This was a "survival knife" even if I never heard the term until Rambo First Blood movie came in a decade and a half later. It was a big folder with eleven "blades" that include almost everything from a clip point main blade, to saw, scissors, can and bottle openers, cork screw and even a spoon and a fork. The contraption was housed on a leather sheet decorated with multiple tackles. While really interesting, the heavy folder was not really practical. Since none of the "blades" detached one could not use the knife and fork simultaneously.

Sometime after the discover my father gave me that "survival knife", and that was probably my very first knife. It came even before my Beyer Tarzan knife!

I carried the thing around my waist to a lot of places and social functions, which is just a name to extended family barbecues, and I took good care of it. And then some time during my teenager years the knife mysteriously disappeared and I never saw it again.

And then last week while I was exploring the internet, on e-Bay I came across a Vintage WWII JAPAN Camping/Survival Knife Fork Spoon (hobo) Mitsubishi *RARE*, and surprise, surprise it was exactly the same knife that my father had given me almost forty years ago!

I really doubt that this knife even existed during WWII. The complexity and amount of material required to make it, plus the fact that Japanese people use chopsticks and not knife and fork, would put it completely out of place in Guadalcanal or the Kwai River bridges.

Of course I could not avoid buying the rare Mitsubishi hobo knife immediately and then the terrible waiting for its arrival began. I arrived home yesterday night from a business trip and inside my mail box was a small USPS box with the seller's Florida address on it.

My new old knife is in good, but not great, shape. In my opinion there a bit more rust than patina, but my original knife was in even rougher condition. The smaller sheep's foot blade does not open all the way, and some of the smaller "blades" have some play. But irrespective of the condition this knife brings memory from a very distant past.

I probably will never take the Mitsubishi Hobo Knife to the great outdoors, be it in northern Michigan or anywhere else, but every time that I will handle it I will have found memories of my father presenting me with an unique piece of cutlery.

The Best Tool Ever Created

The Hunter and the Huntsman

Excellence is the only word that could describe or be attributed to the iconic Swiss Army Knife.

When I was a child growing up in Brazil most of the men I knew carried at least one pocketknife, but only a fortunate few had a Swiss Army knife. The Brazilian economy was very “protected” against imported products, and basically the only way to acquire one of these magnificent tools was to travel abroad or have someone that traveled to bring you one.

I remember when I was ten or eleven years old that one of my father’s friends traveled to Europe and brought him a Swiss Army knife. I am quite sure that it was a Mountaineer. He immediately took it to Seo Lavezzo, the local saddle maker to have a pouch made, and my father carried that knife for years, until I liberated it. Eventually my dad got a SwissChamp, a thirty-two-tool monster that is almost impractical in my personal view.

Personally I have been carrying Swiss Army knives on an almost daily basis in one form or another for the last quarter of a century, give or take a couple years. The only reason that I don’t carry them everyday is because of the existing air travel restrictions on carry-on luggage that were put in place after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. My current strategy is to have spares knifes in the facilities that I visit most often.

When I started my professional life after college I still carried my knife on a belt pouch, and that was immediately noticed by some of my colleagues, to the point that I received a copy of a fantastic chronic by Brazilian writer Fernando Sabino “Homens de Canivete” that I will include without permission at the end of this blog.

Currently I use a belt clip and carry my Huntsman in the right back pocket of my trousers. I consider the Huntsman the perfect balance between size and usefulness and this is one tool I would take with me to a desert island.

My wife continuously complains that this is an expensive habit and it wears down on the same particular spot therefore reducing the useful life of my clothes, but I just can’t go around without my trusted companion. However, she did not complain when my knife had the only can opener around our new house a couple weeks ago, and saved the day by allowing her to cook an excellent sweet potato casserole.

Even having a nice collection of custom knifes I only took with me on safari my inseparable Swiss Army knife and a custom-made single blade friction folder that my father gave me. Make sure that your knife has scissors, tweezers, corkscrew, and bottle opener. Good beer doesn’t have twist caps, South African wine is very good and the scissors and tweezers are very useful for end of the day surgeries like picking thorns or rounding toenails.

As a final notice I must say that only a Victorinox rides my belt. I can’t even get used to Wenger, even if the same company owns them. As for any copy, forget about them, they are not worth the trouble.

Homens de Canivete

Fernando Sabino

"Os homens, incidentemente, se dividem também em duas categorias: os que são e os que não são de canivete.

Eu, por mim, confesso que sou homem de canivete. Meu pai também era: tinha na gaveta da escrivaninha um canivete sempre à mão, um canivetinho alemão com inscriçõesd e propaganda da Bayer. Não se tratava de arma de agressão, mas, ao contrário, destinava-se, como todo canivete, aos fins mais pacíficos que se pode imaginar: fazer ponta num lápis, descascar ma laranja, limpar as unhas.

É, aliás, o que sucede com todos os homens arrolados nesta categoria a que honrosamente me incluo – os homens de canivete: são pessoas de boa paz e que só lançariam mão dele como arma defensiva quando se fizesse absolutamente necessário.

Alegria de criança que não abandona o homem feito: a de ter um canivete. Era de se ver a excitação de com que meu filho de dez anos me pediu que não deixasse de lhe comprar um na Alemanha. È perigoso – advertem os mais velhos, cautelosos – cautela que não resiste à minha convicção de que o menino saberá lidar com ele como é mister, pois tudo faz crer que virá a ser, como o pai, um homem de canivete.

Os mineiros geralmente são. Quem descobriu isso, penso, foi o Otto, que não deixa de sâ-lo, ainda que de chaveiro e, certamente, por atavismo – pois me lembro da primeira pergunta qe lhe fez seu pai ao chegar um dia ao Rio:

- Você sabe onde fica uma boa cutelaria?

Sempre fui um grande freqüentador de cutelarias. Quando o poeta Emílio Moura aparece pelo Rio, não deixo de acompanhá-lo a uma dessas casas para olhar uns canivetes – pois se trata de um dos mais autênticos homens de canivete que eu conheço, e dos de fumo-de-rolo. Entre meus amigos mais chegados, embora nem todos o confessem, muitos fazem parte dessa estranha confraria. Paulo Mendes Campos não esqueceu de recomendar-me determinada marcad e canivete ao saber de minha viagem – e, se bem me lembro, seu pai é um dos infalíveis portadores de canivete que se tem notícia. Rubem Braga também deixou-se denunciar numa esplêndida crônica, “A Herança”, que pode ser lida em Borboleta Amarela, a respeito de um irmão que abria mão de tudo, mas reclamava do outro a posse de um canivete.

Alguns continuam sendo homens de canivete, mesmo que hajam perdido o seu ainda na infância. Aliás, os homens de canivete vivem a perdê-lo, não sei se pelo prazer de adquirir outro. Para identificá-lo, basta estender a mão e pedir: me empresta aí o seu canivete. Se se tratar de alguém que o seja, logo levará naturalmente a mão ao bolso e retirará o seu canivete. Foi o que fez Murilo Rubião, por exemplo, que é outro: ao chegar da Espanha, a primeira coisa que me exibiu foi seu belo canivete, adquirido em Sevilha.

Para terminar, digo que não há desdouro algum em não ser homem de canivete. Há homens de ferramenta, de isqueiro, de chaveiro e até de tesourinha. Graciliano Ramos não era homem de navalha? Homens de revólver é que não são uma categoria das que mais admiro: até parece que não são homens, para precisar de uma proteção que lhes poderia propiciar, em caso de necessidade, um simples canivete."

Bugle and Friendship

"Hunt Tales" & the CORNETA (Bugle) Knife

The first time that I met Eloir Mário Marcelino my daughter Maria Eduarda was a baby on her diapers. She is a senior at University of Michigan now. Another friend, Mr. Sandor Hauser and his wife, took my family and I to Eloir's business (www.recargamatic.com.br) in the picturesque city of Tietê (SP - Brasil), so I could buy a die to reload .38 Special ammunition. The next time was in Uruguay, in 2009, a week after my father's funeral.

Due to the fact that hunting is basically illegal in Brazil since the ill conceived and never regulated “Wildlife Protection Law” (Brazilian Federal Law No. 5.197 from 3^rd January 1967), Eloir came to Uruguay to spend his birthday hunting perdiz (Notura maculosa).

When he came into the lodge I recognized him immediately, and we started talking about common friends, firearms and hunting. Sometime during those few days in Uruguay I invited Eloir to come hunting in Michigan, and he did that the following November, spending both “Opening Day” of deer season and Thanksgiving with us. He tells about that trip in his book “Contos de Caçadas”.

Before his departure Eloir presented me with a CORNETA (Bugle) folding knife that belonged to his father. CORNETA (http://www.cutelariacorneta.com.br/) is a very traditional company that originated in Germany and was nationatilized during World War II. They make both cutlery and auto parts. I love knives in general and folding blade knives in particular, but it was hard for me to accept such a unique gift, especially considering the emotional value that it had for Eloir.

However, the greatest gift Eloir gave me is his friendship.