Mountain Meal

Another reprint of an old Toastmasters speech from the Storytelling manual. Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving in many places.  There was a Denny’s in San Diego.  And that time that power went out in Seattle and my family ate by candlelight at the only open restaurant within 60 miles.  I’ve eaten Thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws, my parents, with grandparents, aunts, and uncles.  I’ve even celebrated that most American of holidays in a tiny apartment in Germany, complete with turkey and apple pie.

But one of the most memorable Thanksgivings happened in 2002, on top of a mountain.  I had just moved away from Austin to Atlanta, and my good friend Dan and I planned a reunion backpacking trip.  We decided to meet generally half-way in Arkansas, the Ozarks.  In addition to the two of us, we also invited Mike and Jodi, who are now married, and Erin, whom I later married.  We didn’t know it at the time, but romance was in the air that trip.

Our meeting place was at the foot of White Rock Mountain, near Fort Smith, Arkansas.  Erin and I arrived first and shivered in the dark until the other three showed up.  The night was bitterly cold, the wind was blowing, and it wasn’t long before we turned in.  It felt late, but was probably only about 7:30.  Night comes early and hard in the mountains in late November.

While the others rolled into their tents, I looked about for a bare patch of ground.  Because you see there’s a slight complication when backpacking with 5 people…most tents are made for two.  So with Dan and Mike in one and Jodi and Erin in the other, it left me out in the cold…literally.  Fortunately, this was a time in my life when I was going a little bit crazy when it came to backpacking.  I had decided to be an ultralighter.  Ultralight backpacking is based on the idea that you should give up as much as possible…good food, comfort, warmth, whatever in order to carry as little as possible.  So to save my knees, I was carrying 3 days worth of gear and food in a 25 pound bag smaller than most school backpacks.  This included a bivy sack, essentially a waterproof liner for your sleeping bag that has all the advantages of a tent, except for the room, comfort, and aesthetics.

But that’s enough whining.  I made it through the night, and felt like all the more of a man for it.  Thanksgiving morning dawned bright and clear, and we packed up (me in about 3 minutes, everyone else in 30) and set off down the trail.  So while millions of Americans were waking early to start the turkey, or sleeping in and dreaming of the Madden multi-legged turkey, or staking out deer blinds in the forests, we were hiking in the Ozarks, majestic views of mountain valleys clearly seen between leaf-free trees.

That’s right, I did say deer blinds.  We were hiking at the height of deer season, so not only did we feel a little out of place wearing big backpacks, we also got to wear obnoxious orange vests.  Better that than getting mistaken for a 12-point buck, at least.

The 6 mile hike to the top of White Rock Mountain took most of the day, and we enjoyed every bit of it, always looking forward to the feast we had planned at the end of the day.  For you see, we weren’t skipping the traditional Thanksgiving meal, we were just planning to eat it on top of the mountain.

And eat we did.  Our main course was ham, presliced and grilled on the backpacking stove.  The meal was eaten in courses, since we only had one stove, so instant mashed potatoes were next.  Canned candied yams provided some more starch and a little sweet, and can of green beans was a nice substitute for the traditional green-bean casserole.  By this time, we were all stuffed, as is appropriate for Thanksgiving, and gazing contentedly at the rising moon.  But all this was simply the prelude for my backcountry masterpiece dessert…cheesecake.

Thanks to modern technology, you can get just about anything in a can or a box.  There’s a mix for everything from jambalaya to brownies to pancakes to chicken alfredo.  But the one that I enjoy most is the combination of my two favorite things in the world…Jello and Cheesecake.  Jello instant cheesecake doesn’t really taste like cheesecake, but it’s not pudding or Jello or anything else, either.  But it is perfect for a backpacking dessert.  After all, it includes everything you need, and the only preparation is really to mix the powder with some water and let it chill.  Chilling was no problem on this 40 degree night, and mixing…how hard could that be?

Well, we didn’t have an electric mixer, or even just electricity, so we had to improvise on the directions immediately.  The instructions said to mix this stuff for like 6 hours on high…tough to do.  So as a compromise, we decided on the shaking method.  We had 1-liter, wide-mouth Nalgene bottles that would hold the water and powder perfectly.  Capped off, they could be shaken as long as needed and then poured out into the tasty graham-cracker crust.  So we combined everything and set to shaking.  And shaking.  And shaking and shaking and shaking.  We each got a turn.  Finally, it looked like it was beginning to mix well and it was time to pour.  Here’s where our naivete came into sharp focus.

The directions were to beat and pour and chill.  They assumed you’d be in your air conditioned kitchen…70, 75 degrees for the mixing and pouring, the fridge for the chilling.  We, on the other hand, managed to do our mixing in the fridge, so to speak.  So the Nalgene bottle, which had a plenty wide mouth when it came to pouring water, became a trap for our cheesecake.  Have you ever seen the traps they set for monkeys, where they put a piece of fruit in a box with a hole that’s wide enough to reach into, but when the monkey makes a fist, the hole’s too small?  The monkey won’t drop the fruit to retrieve his hand, and is easily captured.  This was kind of like that, as we struggled for the next hour to extract the maximum cheesecake-stuff from a now-tiny bottle using at best a spoon that reached halfway in.

Needless to say, my dessert plan didn’t work quite the way I intended.  But that night, we crawled into bed, them in tents and me in my bivy sack, stuffed and satisfied, content that we had shared a Thanksgiving meal that few others had…traditional home cooking on top of a mountain.

The remainder of the trip passed quickly.  We had beautiful scenery, we ate filling freeze-dried meals, and didn’t get shot by any of the hunters we saw.  But at the end, we ran into a site that made me stop and think.  There in the hillside, high above the road where our car was parked, was a dug-out cabin.  A natural cave had been further hollowed out and the entrance blocked in with stones to form a mountain home that was long abandoned.  And it occurred to me that the man who lived there would have thought nothing of ham and yams and mashed potatoes in the mountains.  He may have looked at us quizzically with the cheesecake, but with most of the rest, I realized that our recreation was his daily life.  I guess the world comes full-circle sometimes, and I wonder what do we do now, that 100 years from now will be for our great grand-children, their “mountain meal?”