Story Of An Unplanned Camping Event: Part 3

[This story has no point. It simply is.]

My tent is a “hot tent”, meaning can and do deploy a tiny wood stove within it. I lit the stove before I went to bed and the tent was super warm. I drifted off like a happy drunk lizard sprawled on hot sand. I woke up in the pre-dawn gloom with the fire dead out and the tent in the 40s or less.

I’d burrowed into a fluffy sleeping bag sometime in the night and was therefore plenty warm. But I haven’t gotten over the novelty of a fire heated tent. As much to play with a new toy as out of concern for temperature, I relit the fire. This once again turned the tent into an oven. I promptly fell back asleep.

I woke hours later; reasonably well rested. I didn’t have a hangover but I was warned of my misdeeds by the tiny echo of my body’s chemical displeasure. “Everything is fine, but quit pulling shit like that. Do it again this weekend and there will be a reckoning!” I heeded the warning! I also made haste to brew coffee.

I have a nice little camping percolator and a little tool bag that carries cups, spoons, coffee grounds, and assorted “coffee accessories”. I keep it more or less ready to go. Thus, I didn’t check the details when I left. I just scooped some coffee into one of the little containers meant for coffee (I inexplicably left the second container empty). Another container in the tool bag is usually jam packed with packets of sugar and creamer. This morning I opened the container to find nothing but packets of red pepper and Parmesan cheese. Whoops.

I pour a little bourbon to sweeten my coffee. My body does a face palm but I ignore it and enjoy the flavor. I tentatively plan to head to town this afternoon to scrounge up some sugar. Later in the day I find a dish of sugar packets near a coffee urn placed out for participants. I scavenge a few packets and call it good. My truck never left camp.

At the event there’s a presentation about Exhaust Manifolds. I skip it. Another one about the 2 stroke versus 4 stroke debate. I ignore that too. I just stay in camp, as do the majority of other participants. Dogs wander by. Kids wander by. People wander by. My “neighbors” are a cluster of 3 tents and 2 cars occupied by some unidentifiable number of people. They have a guitar and a ukulele and a dog the size of a football. One of the women from that group charms me. Every time she walks by my little camp she smiles “howdy darlin’” and “good cooking beautiful”. How nice is that?

Coffee percolation is a ritual and I bask in the joy of my happy little activity. I use up too much of my coffee grounds and boil cup after cup. Another neighbor brings his lawn chair over and tells me stories about the Navy.

After he wanders away, I rummage around in my cooler for bacon and eggs. Bacon from my own pigs! As I whip up a very late breakfast, the bacon smells delicious. The neighbor’s tiny dog is about to have a stroke sniffing the air! If they walked him past my spot I’d toss a morsel but I’m too lazy to deliver. Sorry pup. The woman wanders by again “you’re cooking, that’s so cute”.

Cooking is cute? How? What other method does one deploy to have breakfast? An airdrop? Obviously, I’m overthinking things. I don’t think she’s flirting. I think she calls everything, including brick walls and tax auditors, “cute”. Even so, I’m happy at the simple human kindness.

Once I’ve got the bacon grease I dispose of most of it (poured in an empty malt liquor mango something not-entirely beer-ish can). To my frying pan I add a can of spiced tomatoes. I simmer it down and poach eggs in the tomatoes. (The bacon is eaten during the cooking process.) This goes very well with the Parmesan cheese packets I just found. I ponder whether I’m cooking “English style” or not? Mrs. Curmudgeon tells via text it’s closer to Turkish than English. All I know is that I’ve “invented” the recipe on the fly based on the random foodstuffs at hand.

Unlike backpacking, “car camping” allows you to use cheap but heavy cans. If you’re car camping I invite you to embrace this miracle! I throw a bunch of cans in an old box and hope to have something I can use. The box may sit unused for months at a time (this time it probably hasn’t been restocked in 10 months!). Cans don’t care. Just have enough and do with it what you figure out.

When I devolved from wilderness (carry everything on your back) to vehicular (toss it in the truck’s bed) I also dispensed with planned menus. It allows more flexibility and is definitely “low stress”. If all else fails, I’ll always have some Mountain House as backup.

Observing the random, chaotic, campground I notice a lot less cooking than I’d expect. Several hundred people are spread over many acres. I should see several score pots and pans in play. Yet very few folks are actually “cooking”. I see one group has somehow run an extension cord to a half dozen crock pots. I see several with elaborate waist high folding tables topped with elaborate propane burners… but none are actively preparing even simple shit like bacon or eggs. I have no idea if this means anything or it’s all nothing.

After breakfast, I set off to check the displays and vendor booths. Like the campers, these aren’t tightly grouped either. I cover a lot of ground and my sprained ankle starts to hurt. Having bought nothing but enjoyed “window shopping”, I limp back to my tent and decide to take a nap. The goal is to relax.

The nap is nice and skipping the sessions had been fun. It lends the same sort of illicit joy I got from occasionally skipping school years ago. Unfortunately, by afternoon I’m feeling a little down. One mourns at a speed that happens unexpectedly in fits and starts. You don’t get to schedule it. That afternoon sorrow became what it was. I mope about and have no desire to cook lunch. I catch one session which is sorta’ fun and then start reading. I have Neil Pert’s “Ghost Rider, Travels on the Healing Road” on my Kindle.

I brew some hot cocoa (which my neighbor also calls cute) and read. This wasn’t wise. Neil took a depressing hit to his world. Instead of a shared experience lightening my mood it’s a second load on my shoulders. No complaints to Neil, what I’ve read so far is well written. I’m just too brittle to enjoy it.

Unwilling to cook lunch, I improvise and find a food truck within walking distance (given my ankle, it’s just barely within walking distance). The food is… Oh fuck it, I’ll tell it like it is, the food sucks ass! But it’s cheap and I don’t have to worry about rewashing my frying pan.

Feeling moody, when I get back to camp I try an experiment. Perhaps it will distract me? I have a brand new Stanley cook kit I bought for this purpose!

I strip off the little pot’s packaging and carefully soap up the outside. (Bar soap rubbed on the outside of pots is an old camping trick. It has no affect on the cooking but becomes the surface on which soot from campfires or liquid fuel stoves accumulates. Later, the soap will wash off easily; taking the soot with it.) My efforts at soot management are unnecessary. Camping cookware will accumulate soot if you cook over wood or “dirty” liquids like gasoline. That’s just a fact of life. It’s OK for that to be true. It gives camp cooking gear a macho “patina” which I should enjoy. For some reason I don’t. I scrub mightily to keep soot/carbon to a minimum. I don’t know why. Removing carbon that’s baked onto the outside of a camping pot serves no particular purpose. I do it anyway. (None of this applies to propane cookery which tends to stay soot free.)

I toss a strip of bacon in the pot and cook it over my little campstove. It works great and soon I’m munching on bacon. Now I have a pot with a fair amount of hot bacon grease in the bottom and that was the whole point. I pour a modest amount of popcorn into the oil and put the pot back over mild heat. I put on the lid, half expecting to create a burned unpopped mess. To my absolute amazement, it works flawlessly!

I add some “butter flavored popcorn salt”. Between bacon grease and fancy salt, my popcorn is world class! I only made a small serving because I was worried I’d overflow the little pot and make a mess. The little serving goes down well… better than the nasty food truck crap I stupidly ingested.

I’m proud of my little camp cookery experiment. I now have a new skill. It’s easy to pack (popcorn packs small!) and cooks in just a few minutes. A tasty trail treat! How awesome is that?

Despite a relatively inactive day, I run out of steam early. The sun sets and the moon rises. I retreat to my tent and start a cozy fire but cannot sleep. I listen to the happy chatter of the late night partying knuckleheads. I’m happy to hear their mirth. As for me, malaise returns and sits on my heart. I toss and turn; drifting into and out of sleep in small increments.

Sometime around 2 am I wake up with cramps that would kill a rhino. I hike to and utterly destroy the nearby latrine. Suddenly I feel better.

Mankind is such a strange being. Deeply personal grief or a bad food truck experience… which was my true nemesis? Had I self-diagnosed depression out of the sick stomach caused by a fucking cheeseburger? That’s so lame. I can’t tell what’s what. I call bullshit on a world so structured!

Regardless, I’m out like a light soon after. I don’t get up until almost 9 am the next day.

Stay tuned for more…