COOKING IN THE Great Outdoors

I remember the 1955 seafoam-green Ford station wagon. My parents slept in the back in sleeping bags that zipped together, and their air mattresses always seemed to go flat in the middle of the night. My brother, my sister and I slept in a small canvas Baker tent, a lean-to supported by two poles. Our sleeping bags had flannel linings with pictures of ducks in flight.

My father’s Army Air Corps footlocker had been remodeled into the camp kitchen. Standing on end on a Forest Service picnic table, folded open, it contained pots and pans, dish-washing soap, pot scrubbers, condiments, salt and pepper shakers, spices and herbs, cooking oil, pot holders, sharp knives, silverware, cups, mugs, plates, cereal bowls and mixing bowls, big spoons, a mounted roll of paper towels, a dish-washing drain rack and a small, yellow-handled metal spatula the perfect size for a camp kitchen.

When I marveled at their ingenuity not so long ago, my parents told me it had been none of their doing. They had taken a night class in camping at the university. “That’s when reusable plastic squeeze bottles first hit the market,” my mother told me. “Right after the war. We put everything from honey to peanut butter into squeeze bottles.”

I remember riding on the tailgate of the Ford, dangling my short legs over the edge, my father zooming down Oregon beaches, my mother telling him to slow down. My sister’s legs were longer than mine, and she etched a line in the sand with her big toe. I remember what the bottom of her big toe looked like when she discovered she had sanded it away.

We had come to Oregon to dig for razor clams and had taken up residence in a public camp ground of small plots placed between skinny trees near the beach. Campfire smoke hung low in the air. My father pumped furiously at the Coleman stove. A man wandered into the campground asking if there was a doctor around. He had tried to grab a razor clam in wet sand and had split his middle finger on the sharp edge of the shell right up to the first knuckle. He had wrapped fishing line around it to hold it together. My father, a dentist, cleaned and dressed the wound and told the man to get himself to a hospital to have it looked after. The man smiled, said, “Thanks, Doc,” and invited my father over for a beer. I remember the smell of razor clams frying in butter and the way my mother looked standing at the Coleman stove. I can close my eyes and taste the clams. Hatchets and axes were a big issue then. Chopping wood. Building fires. Poking sticks into the fire.

Now my voice rises a notch, the volume increasing incrementally, and I hear my parents’ frustration pouring out of my own mouth as I tell my son, Farrell, age 5, to please, for the last time, leave the damn fire alone. And I know full well it’s no use. In a few minutes he will be back, poking with a stick, making sparks rise up, courting a burn of some kind. Messing with the fire and watering the bushes and trees: This is camping, if you happen to be a little boy. This is different from life at home.

And so is the cooking, particularly where there are no prearranged campsites, no cement tables, no fire pits, no chemical toilets, no water faucets or showers, no cheek-by-jowl neighbors with boom boxes and loud sex lives. Just the three of us and some friends at the end of a dirt road, the car, the tailgate, folding camp chairs, the ice chests, a big board for a table, a circle of rocks for a fire pit, bats flying in low over a small, desert lake at dusk to scoop up insects, the air and rock and brush, and land turning color as far as it is possible to see. The fire smokes, and Farrell pushes another stick under the pot of bubbling chili. I suggest, if only to hear the sound of my own voice, that it isn’t to the benefit of the chili that the fire gets too hot. Farrell doesn’t know it now but in 30 years he will close his eyes and smell and taste that chili. He will remember how simple life seemed at the time. He will be able to close his eyes and strip 30 years off my back and make me look younger, in his mind’s eye. If he asks me, I will tell him about the ice-cold martini, the trouble it took to shepherd the ingredients to the campsite, the pitcher, the stir rod, the glasses all in danger of breaking, and why I was inclined to simply sit in the camp chair and sip at my cocktail and not say much and just look out at the country and the sinking sun and let him mess with the fire all he wanted.

At a certain point, however, there’s the cooking to attend to. I will have forgotten something, the bulb of garlic or the cuttings of fresh thyme or rosemary, and will have to improvise. I will have no counters on which to spread out, no cookbooks to scan. My work surface will be limited to the rectangle of a high-impact plastic cutting board. With only two gas burners, with a limitation of pans and the desire to eat food that is hot, I will have to be attentive to my timing. As the light fails, I will have to pay better attention to the sound and smell of cooking to know when done is done.

Camping with a few friends, I find, improves the cooking and the meal. Onerous tasks, such as washing dishes on which grease has chilled and hardened, become a shared event. Meals have been divided up ahead of time, each party bringing in their own food. We all struggle against the limitations, the elements, the children underfoot and forever threatening to kick up clouds of grit and dust in the “kitchen.” We all smell like the campfire, and so does the food. We eat with our coats on, hunkered down in folding camp chairs, paper cups of wine perched on top of ice chests.

Our muscles will be sore from something that day, from a long hike or from chasing a Frisbee for the first time in a long time, or from canoeing out into the lake and back. Our faces will be sunburned or windburned and our hair will be a little stiff. The children will drop off one by one and the conversation around the fire will change. When we fall into bed, into sleeping bags laid out on self-inflating foam mats, we will do so with the satisfaction of having eaten a good meal with friends in a way that predates the century. At night the quiet that descends upon us will be so complete it will roar in our ears.

I can remember a pot of chili 15 years ago in Saline Valley, and the flavor of the enormous lamb chops I grilled over mesquite in the Potholes five years back. I can taste a ham sandwich with the sharp bite of French’s mustard. I was 8 years old and had climbed up what seemed like a mountain with my brother and he built a small fire and boiled water and made tea to drink with the sandwich. It was the best ham sandwich I have ever eaten, and every time I order one at a lunch counter I can see the trees and the view of the valley below. I can smell the fire and taste the bitter edge of the hot tea. The ham sandwich I order is never quite the same, never quite as good. The cooking we do at a campsite, the food we eat together around a fire is indeed powerful stuff.

In the morning I will be up before anyone else, brewing and drinking coffee and stirring up the fire with the only sound the call of the meadowlark in the distance. I will dig through the ice chest to find the blueberries I secreted away, and I will make the buttermilk pancake batter from scratch and give it time to rise before everyone else is up, brushing their teeth and spitting into the dirt. The pleasure of flipping pancakes for everyone will be mine alone, standing there at the Coleman stove. I will use a small metal spatula. It has a yellow handle. It is the perfect size for a camp kitchen.

Food Styling by Minnie Bernardino and Donna Deane