The Cider Mill Guidelines

Knowing that time was not on my side, I dug out and dusted off my checklist of all things Autumn….

“Knock the bee's nests off the lawn furniture and put it all away”- Check.

“Knock the bee's nests off the barbecue and put it away” – Check.

“Knock the bee's nests off the shed and get it ready for winter.” – Check.

“Take a trip to the Fly Creek Cider Mill”……………

The Fly Creek Cider Mill is not what you might expect. Actually, it's a cider mill, and it's located in the little hamlet of Fly Creek. The ambiguous name certainly throws many people. Located just a few odd miles from Cooperstown, New York, it serves as a nice spillover from the National Baseball Hall of Fame. After wandering the murky corridors of a museum dedicated to the single most boring pastime on the planet (watching the guys at Wal-Mart mix paint will send more thrills through a crowd than baseball), the Cider Mill seems like the place to be. And since its autumn in Upstate New York, it's on my “to do” list.

  Backing up just for a moment, I need to stress that, for me, there is that one moment that solidifies SUMMER in my heart and in my mind. It's something so simple, and yet gives me such a warm bubbly feeling inside that I can barely contain my encroaching moisture. It's this- Parking on Grass. It seems silly, but it gives me a wonderful feeling of being complete. Many a summer event that I have driven to pales in comparison to that feeling when a guy in an orange vests leads me out into a grassy field to park. It's worth the eight dollar parking fee! It's worth every penny!!! There is that brief shining moment when my wheels stop crunching on gravel and then all is silent except for the hum of the motor. The vehicle creeps silently over a varied landscape of soft grass and unseen crevices and ravines, as this ghostly figure in orange beckons me to follow. I do this without question. For a few minutes, I believe that there is a God.

As summer fades and fall begins it's descent upon the land, a similar event takes place: Parking on MUD.

And this is always the first step of the Cider Mill experience.

Parking my vehicle in a vast landscape of slippery mud, I trudge my way to the Cider Mill itself. Past the rows of neatly manicured apple trees, over the one lane bridge, and down into this wonderland of sights, smells, and stuff to buy. Tromping up onto the porch, I pound mud off my heels for several minutes and then, holding my breath for just a moment, I open the door.

The place is packed.

I guess it should have been obvious. I had just navigated a parking area roughly the size of Houston, filled to near capacity, and walked to a building about the size of a Taco Bell.

I push my way inside and now I cease to be the individual you all know and fear. Now I am part of the crowd. I am merely a cog in the great machine, spinning in my counter-clockwise rotation as children and seniors alike bound off me repeatedly as they make their way through the spider-web-thin confines of the Mill. They, like myself, have made the great pilgrimage through the ocean of mud to compete for free samples of 1001 foods made from apples. Apple salsa, apple butter, apple barbecue sauce, apple chips, apple pretzels, apple dip, apple pork chop glaze, and even apples that are chopped up and reformed into something that looks and tastes just like apples. And the best part is, the whole place is a cornucopia of free samples, all laid out in plastic two-section catfood dishes.

It would all be so much more fun if there was an angry German man there shouting directions through a bullhorn. This would give it all a sense of order, and the great cider machine would work so much more efficiently. “Select pretzel!!”, he could shout. “Dip pretzel in special apple garlic dressing!” “Lift pretzel to mouth!!!” “Chew!” “Smile!!”

“Keep moving!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Instead, children push and scream and knock over neatly piled pyramids of apples. Old people lose track of each other and wander in circles repeating things like “Mildred?” or “Edgar?”. People, who a few hours earlier were asleep on their feet at the Baseball Hall of Fame, suddenly find themselves confused under the bright lights, mingled with the overpowering aroma of apples being tortured in a water-press. Me, I can see a freshly filled catfood dish with apple salsa and chips to sample, and by wrenching my arm out of it's socket and stretching through the crowd like someone in a prison cell reaching through the bars to try and get keys that a drunk guard has dropped to the floor, I can almost, but not quite, not get any at all.

And why do I do this? I can't lie, I LOVE coming here!

And so the frenzy of sampling and shopping for delicious treats goes on, and eventually we are squeezed out the opposite door like watermelon seeds and we take stock of what we have emerged with. A bag of Cortland apples, rock hard and somewhat tart (in a word- PERFECT), some cheese curds, a bottle of hard cider brewed with champagne yeast (a wonderful concoction. I highly recommend it), some fudge, and ten sticky fingers from thrusting them deep into dish after dish of free samples.

Then we realize that we have forgotten the whole second floor.

Pushing and slamming our way past Mildred and Edgar, who have still failed to locate each other, we enter the structure once again. What happens now is sort of a reverse flow of what we have already endured, only now we must navigate a staircase as well. Up we go to the second level, feeling much like role-playing gamers with enough experience points to climb from their status of “First Level Consumer” to that of “Second Level Consumer armed with +2 Credit Card”. The air is clearer up here on the second floor, and the calls of Mildred and Edgar fade away.

The second floor is filled, refilled, overfilled, and then overstuffed, with all things Christmas. This reminds me that, while only 2 weeks earlier I was faced with the scorching heat of summer, that Christmas is on everyone's mind. Halloween will soon open the gates of the Christmas Steamroller, which is all fueled up and ready to roll over anything that tries to stop it. Thanksgiving has now become “Christmas Jr.”. Way up here on the second floor of the cider Mill, where the air is thinner, it all becomes surreal.

Oh, and then there is the Cider Press itself! Small crowds gather on a rickety balcony overlooking an area where apples are piled between presses and smooshed into oblivion, by men who have no fear of bees, or are highly sedated, or perhaps both. There are bees everywhere. In the air, on the apples, on the workers, on the walls, on the press, on the spectators, on the rickety balcony, and on Edgar, who has given up his quest for Mildred and is now munching on a red delicious. Oh, and there are bees on the red delicious as well. We all gather, and when the moment comes, the apples are crushed like a cider mill patron in a sea of consumers. The runoff is then trapped, capped, and slapped on ice.

But you must admit, this stuff is delicious.

We find ourselves deposited outdoors once again, and we find that an hour of sampling free food has made us quite hungry, so off we go to the snack bar. The Fly Creek Cider Mill snack bar has some wonderful treats! Delicious soups and stews served in hollowed out bread bowls, fantastic baked goods, Hershey's Ice Cream, you name it. It's all delicious and served up with a smile, amid the deafening roar of roughly a bazillion bees. It's almost as if the bees in the press area are in training to be aggressive little bastards that attack you, unprovoked, at every opportunity, and that once they have perfected their particular style and learned their mission, they can then move out to the snack bar where they can cause all kinds of chaos. What did these insects do before outdoor dining was invented? Long before man emerged on the planet, did they simply hang on the sides of trees, long frowns on their faces, wondering what they were going to do to kill the weekend?

With our bellies stuffed even more, it came time for me to move along to what is, as everyone knows, or at least suspects, my absolute, number one favorite pastime in the whole world.

Trimming my toenails.

No, actually the correct answer is “feeding ducks”, although trimming those toenails is, always, a top thing to do.

We went out back by the pond to feed the ducks, as we always do. This year, they also had chickens and roosters running around. Now, there was one rooster who was rather clever. He KNEW where the chutes were on the cracked corn dispenser machines, and hovered near them, eager to feed. He was a feathery menace in the farm yard, and everyone was being cautious of him. He frightened small children. He was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. He loathed us, but was dependent on us for food, and so he loathed himself. This always makes chickens more dangerous.

  I wasn't going to let him spoil my fun, and I was determined to get some cracked corn for the ducks, one way or another. Still, he hovered near that machine like a rooster possessed by demons. To look into his eyes was to flirt with madness.

  I dropped my quarter in the crank handle, and shooed him away. He clucked a bit, wandered off, and I put my hand under the chute to dump it all into my hand…..

…… and suddenly………..

This thing came out of nowhere, at lightning speed, and latched onto my hand that was clutching the corn. WHACK! The corn flew out of my hand as I realized that I was bleeding. Yes, he had broken the skin. The corn went everywhere, and the deadly rooster was lost in the crowd of ducks and chickens that gathered around my feet in a frenzy of feeding and squawks. The people around me pointed and gasped. I stood there bleeding as my feet were lost in a sea of feeding ducks and murderous chickens. I caught of glimpse of one of Mildred's shoes lying in the mud, and I knew that doomsday was upon us all.

  As I watched my hand bleed, I realized I was still grasping a few kernels of corn. Unfortunately, the rooster realized this as well.

  He launched himself from the ground at my hand again. For a second he hung there, suspended in stopped time as a 360 degree camera swung around us. He was the Neo of the “Chicken Matrix”, and he seemed to have the ability to warp time and space at will. I was powerless to stop him. He launched himself at me again and again. Sometimes I didn't know what direction he was coming from. If you've never seen a chicken go "bullet time", it's an amazing and terrifying thing.

  I dropped the corn.

  Now I know why children fear chickens. They are fiendish, devious beasts, and they are not to be trusted.

Ever.

  But it made me wonder what would have happened had I lived in the Marvel Comics universe, where EVERYTHING starts with a simple bite..........

  If the chicken had been radioactive, a bizarre mutation brought on by a unique, one in a million combination of the chicken feed and some fermented apple skins left over from the cider press, twisted at the cellular level, would I then go on to become a human with all the powers of a chicken? Could I possibly shed this dull grey starchy persona and BECOME "The Human Chicken"? Does "Chicken Man" sound better? What about "Rooster Boy"?

  I'll start with my 3 super powers. Along with my red suit and cape (it's got to be red, or I'll just stay at home and play video games in my underwear and let crime run rampant in the streets of Gotham) I would have 3 main powers that make me a crime fighting force to be reckoned with........

  1) The ability to scratch in the dust and gravel with my deadly spurs.

  This is a good power. A super-villain (For arguments sake, I'll say it's my arch-enemy "The Colonel") will sometimes drop vital clues in the dust and dirt. Most superheroes will walk right past them, but Rooster Boy can scratch up even the most hidden clues, and maybe some grubs for dinner!

  2) The ability to invoke "The call".

  My cock-a-doodle-doo is an ear piercing shriek that will have evil-doers clutching their ears in agony, dropping their sacks of money from the bank (you know, the big white sacks with the dollar bills on them) and rolling on the ground in agony. This will also alert any sleeping Police in the area. If the bad guys falls into dust and gravel, I can combine this power with the scratching of the spurs (power #1) and that will be my super-secret power. Still, I will only be able to perform this once a week or so, with MANY HOURS of resting afterwards. This is a time I am vulnerable, and my enemies know this.

  3) The ability to become delicious when roasted in a pan with new potatoes at 400 degrees for an hour.

  Unfortunately, much like Daffy Duck's "gasoline and match" trick, this can only be done once.

  I am toying with the idea of growing a large freakish beak as well. This is how the original radioactive rooster nailed me, and so I think I need to have some razor sharp beak of some kind. It COULD be something that grows on my mutated face, but then it makes it hard to give kisses to my adoring legions of fans, all of whom will be fabulous babes (I am putting Cameron Diaz in charge of my fan club, by the way). If I had some kind of beak that was part of my costume that could be removed during romantic encounters, it would certainly make life easier. Then again, with a large mutated freak-beak I could have a great pickup line utilizing the word “pecker”.

  It does make one think of the possibilities.

  But alas, the time had come to leave this happy place. With moist eyes, a heavy heart, and a bleeding finger, we made our way once again over the one lane bridge, past the rows of manicured apple trees, and through the muddy parking area, clutching our delicious purchases and savoring the memories of another apple season passing us by. The winter snows would soon start to fall, and time as we knew it would slow to a crawl (that rhyme was purely coincidental, I assure you). As for the Fly Creek Cider Mill, I know that next year I'll be eager to get over there and once again make the rounds and sample its wonders. I also know that he'll be there, waiting for me, crouched somewhere, his devious mind plotting once again to take me down.

The rooster, that is. Not Edgar.