1999
Uncle Wally's Weirder Than Real Paddling Adventures (cooking)
by Uncle Wally
Dontcha hate it when you forget something, especially when it's something to eat? I mean, there you are in the middle of a trip, say, 60 miles down the Whatchacallit River, tryin' to make dinner and BAM!, one of the key ingredients is missing. I hate it when that happens. And it's always where there's not a grocery store for more'n a hundred miles in any direction.
Well actually, we didn't FORGET the milk powder, we lost it en route, which is even worse. But that's another story. And we knew it was missing (along with a few other things) from our very first morning in camp. So it wasn't really a big surprise either. But who coulda guessed that being a little short on powdered milk would have such a disastrous effect on dinner, or at least dessert?
'Bout halfway through our trip, the dinner menu called for pudding for dessert. Ever try making pudding without any milk? I don't recommend it too highly. But by this time, we'd been paddling and portaging for several days and we were a pretty hungry bunch. There were no substitutions available in the food pack. So our cook was willing to keep an open mind on this issue of lactose-free pudding. And we were all hungry enough to think it would be better than nothing at all. Boy, were we wrong!
It was interesting stuff, though, this milkless version of instant lemon pudding. Mix that stuff up with plain water and instead of being smooth and creamy it turns out sorta viscous and rubbery. I felt a door slam shut in my hitherto open mind as soon as I was served out a big glob of it. I tried eatin' it, but I just couldn't do it. Not that it tasted bad, mind you. You could lick it for hours like an all-day sucker. It was the degree of difficulty involved in maneuvering it from plate to mouth that undid us. About halfway up it would always kinda crawl right off the spoon and back onto the plate. You could stretch this stuff about half a mile without it ever breakin'. You couldn't cut it. And even if you turned the plate clean upside down, it refused to slide off. It just clung there, a quivering, colloidal mass of pale yellow translucence that defied any attempts to consume it. It looked kinda like something that might ooze out of a space alien that was being attacked by pan-galactic raiders. I suddenly found I wasn't nearly as hungry as I thought I was.
Well, there were a lot of leftovers that night. And that sparked some interesting, campfire discussion about what we should do with it all. We knew we ought to pack it out. But ours was a large group and most of us had opted out on dessert. So the sheer volume of it was daunting. Some of us thought we ought to give the stuff a decent burial on the spot. Others thought that it had a sort of undead look about it already and that to bury it might be the wrong thing entirely. Another contingent questioned whether or not this stuff was truly biodegradable anymore. Someone suggested we build it a funeral pyre and cremate it. Someone else said it looked more like a fire extinguisher than a dead, Viking warrior. So we kinda gnawed the disposal options longer than we'd tried to chew the pudding.
I don't really recall what the final verdict was. I hit the sack long before any consensus was reached. If we buried the stuff, it's probably still out there, malevolently oozing skyward from its shallow, unhallowed grave. I personally think we packed it out. 'Cause a year or two later this weird toy came on the market. It came in a miniature, plastic trash can and was a viscous,rubbery, slimy stuff-a lot like our ill-fated dessert. Somebody musta taken it home and patented it.
Anyway, make your list and check it twice before you leave on YOUR next canoe trip. Or else you may one day be forced to create some Frankenstein's monster of a menu item from borrowed parts in the backcountry. Then you might have worse than mutant, lemon pudding, oozing like cosmic cytoplasm, creeping into your dreams for decades to come.
*****
Well, 'til next time, keep your paddle wet. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Mickey McBride, 8191 Belden Blvd., Cottage Grove MN 55106 OR mickeymcb@worldnet.att.net. Let me know if you've ever lost anything, or anybody, while you've been out paddling. Remember, all these stories ARE true, mostly. And Uncle Wally promises to 1)tell the truth so no one would ever believe it anyway and 2)never reveal your true identity to anyone, not even Julia Child.
