Ranger Vick's Food for Thought: Why Camping Matters
For the past two years I have had the honor and fun of introducing readers to recipes I felt may enrich their camping experience. As an ode to the possibilities for cuisine, I have scoured books and memories to bring forth a recipe for your culinary enrichment. As a humble devotee to the outdoors, I would like to now shift our focus to the broader world of camping and everything else it entails beyond the cook fire. I hope to share tips and knowledge I have obtained first hand through trials and many, many errors. As I type, I recall these experiences…
My head was covered in spaghetti sauce and I was lying at the bottom of a large dumpster in Glacier National Park. My wife, whom I had married one month prior, was standing outside the garbage bin rolling with laughter. I was in a state of disbelief because she was supposed to have been holding my feet as I reached into the dumpster to retrieve a camping dish I had just dropped inside. We were at the park on our honeymoon, camping our way across our dream road trip. It was from the bottom of this dumpster, in between my own fits of laughter, that I reminded her of our current situation. Northern Montana in late September sees a beautiful spectrum of color in the leaves, a crisp cool breeze foretelling of the winter to come and an incomparable need to gorge on calories for Ursus horribilis, aka Grizz, aka the Grizzly Bear before hibernating. Grizz would be out there looking for food that night and she was sharing a tent with me.
Early spring in Grand Tetons National Park at a campsite next to Jenny Lake. An early evening storm had just ripped through the area. My best friend Dan and I were sitting at a picnic table in the still heavy air. The incense of juniper smoke from the firepit hung over our heads. The shadows from our campfire danced against the canopy of Ponderosa pines towering above our temporary home. Dan had brought an ipod and speaker with him and was softly playing a live album by one of his favorite bands. The lead singer’s stage banter was hilarious and we laughed non-stop. We shared stories of what was going on in our lives. We sat in the quiet that is comfortable and familiar to old friends and to the mountains. Dan and I had shared so many camps and fires together throughout our years. It was our routine to meet this way. This night in the Tetons stood over time as one of our finest together. We reminisced on it years later when I traveled to Chicago to say my final goodbye. If only we could go back and share that fire again. The mountains were calling and we needed to go. The hills hadn’t aged in the ways that we had and they were still ours for the taking. Dan passed away from cancer 10 days after I said goodbye; seven days after his 40th birthday. It is now only the memory of him that I can talk to anymore.
A life is composed of moments and memories and it is not how a person dies that matters, but rather how they chose to live. Our society, over the last few years, has (hopefully) gained an appreciation for the true meaning of the word “moment.” In the blink of an eye things can change, opportunities can pass. We then find ourselves lamenting on our misfortune in comparison to the good times we had. The vivid memories stand out the brightest. Smells and tastes come to mind yet we can’t recall them fully. The only thing that is certain is that we are aware of an insatiable need to experience them again. To go back. A campground serves as a place to not only set up a tent and sleep on the ground. It is the setting for good meals, laughs shared, fears realized and memories to be made. A campsite serves as the launching place of these future memories. Camping matters because it may not be how we spend all our time, just some of our best times. To be able to look back and recall a night spent under the stars can be priceless. With fondness we ruminate on a moment with good food, a friendly breeze, the call of the wild, a laugh or two. These experiences cannot be manufactured. They simply happen. The recipe for this memory needs only a place in nature and a willingness to be vulnerable and open to the moment. A patch of dirt is calling and I must go.
Happy camping my friends.