The Incident

My mom had a surgery, so I drove out to the valley to visit for a few days. In early September California was experiencing a heat wave, so I spent most of my time indoors baking bread. I'd already baked two loaves of banana bread with raspberry and almonds and a much less sweet, sourdough loaf with cranberries, the rest of the raspberries, and almond-chocolate toffee. On the morning of the incident I started two more batches of sourdough; a plain white loaf for sandwiches, and a double batch of sourdough english muffins.

By 7pm it looked like the english muffin mix was ready to be cooked, and I decided I had enough time to finish them before bed. To minimize the time I spent waiting for the muffins to cook, I loaded my mom's giant industrial gas stove with all three of her cast iron skillets, turned on the fume hood, and lit the burners.

The final step of preparing english muffins is to fry them in a skillet with butter like a pancake. In the interest of speed, instead of cutting a slice of butter into the pan I just picked up the lump and rubbed it into the hot pan.

Cooking commenced and english muffins were lining up on the cooling rack beside the stove. I went to butter the furthest skillet and the lump of butter, about half the size of my fist, squirted from between my fingers, bounced off the back of the oven, and fell into the inexplicably wide gap between the oven and the back wall.

Perhaps my reaction to this calamity wasn't as cool as Jack Swigert's on Apollo 13 when he reported the explosion that blew a hole in the side of their ship with:

"Houston we have a problem."

My reaction was a deep, mournful,

"OH NOOOOOO!"

Shamara came in to see what was wrong and left cackling.

The Problem

The butter was nearly as wide as the gap through which it fell. It was in the corner beneath a mounting plate for the electrical supply, and behind the rear foot plate, which made it inaccessible from beneath and nearly inaccessible from above.

The oven was hot, I'd been baking and nearly all the burners were burning under hot iron skillets.

The oven was too heavy to shift. My mom said it took two men to line it up and slide it into position. I just needed to shift it a few inches to get my arm back there, but even that was impossible.

Just like the apollo engineers I had to find a creative solution.

"Does mom have a trash grabber?!"

Shamara left while I hurried to finish the rest of the muffins and reappeared with a grabber. It was too short to reach the floor behind the oven and the grabby end was too wide to fit between the cabinet and the electrical socket plate.

"Where are your yardsticks?!"

I'd hoped to push the butter into a more advantageous position or reach it from beneath the oven, but this only revealed the existence of the invisible plate covering the rear foot and illustrated how the lump of butter was too large to slide underneath.

My mom came in and saw all the equipment on the counter.

"Just leave it and try to get it in the morning."

I couldn't. For all I knew it would be a puddle in the morning or too soft to grip.

The Solution

"Where's your masking tape?!"

My mom was already going to bed. I was working with a deadline.

"It's in the pantry near the sewing stuff."

I took that and the two longest dowels from her closet. My first thought was to tape a fork with some bent tines to her yardstick, but I remembered my mom has some weirdly specific utensils for picking up barbecue meat. They probably have a name among barbecue aficionados, but I don't know what it is or why my mom owns them.

Update: I looked it up, they're called 'meat hooks'.

The handle on the meat hook was thick, so I had to tape them to a narrow dowel to ensure I could rotate it in the tight space. I used a lot of tape because I didn't want to lose something else in that gap.

Then, leaning over the hot oven wearing a headlamp, with my face pressed against the back wall, I lowered the dowel contraption and carefully spun the skewer until it pierced the butter. Thankfully the core of the lump of butter was still cool enough to retain some integrity, and I was able to lift it out of the narrow space.

My mom came in and laughed when she saw me holding the makeshift spear with a cube of dusty butter on the end.

"Just throw it away and go to bed.

"No! I need to document this!"

Now this account has been published I expect movie executives to start lining up for the opportunity to make my heroic adventure into a feature film, possibly with Keanu Reeves or Dwayne the Rock Johnson as me, Dame Judy Dench as my mom, Danny Devito as the lump of butter, and Steve Buscemi in drag as my sister.