Adventures With Uncle Wally (Winter Food)
by Uncle Wally

Ignorance may be bliss. But bliss is seldom more than a transient state of affairs.

I’ve already told you about some of the bliss Charlie and I experienced on our very first winter camping trip in the Porkies. But not all of it. There’s only so much bliss a person can stand... or admit to ... at one time. So I left a little out. But maybe you’re ready for the rest now.

Now, you gotta remember that winter camping is a distant and slightly disreputable relative of regular camping, the kind you do in relative comfort at any other time of the year. It’s kinda like you and your second cousin twice removed on your father’s side: it’s possible you share the same last name without even vaguely resembling each other. So just ‘cause they’re both called "camping" doesn’t mean they’ve got all that much in common.

Sure, you’re not gonna need a key to get into your domicile whether you’re sleepin’ in a tent or in a quinzee. And when ya gotta answer the call of Nature at three AM, you gotta go outside, whether you’re campin’ in July or January. But after that the similarities thin out considerably. So what you know about camping in the summer may not help you too much when you venture outdoors overnight in the middle of winter. It’s an entirely different game with an entirely different set of rules. You gotta adapt.

Well, Charlie and I are pretty adaptable guys. So we figured we’d do OK, one way or another. Besides, we thought we had this winter camping thing all figured out. We figured we could take the frigid reality of our frosty venture and actually turn it to our advantage. We figured we could beat Winter at it’s own game. But maybe we were just doin’ the math wrong.

Plannin’ the food for our little foray into winter’s wonderland turned out to be a bit of inspired bliss, I must admit. We figured since we were gonna be travellin’ through Nature’s deep freeze anyway, we might as well take advantage of the conditions. We wouldn’t hafta settle for eatin’ those pasty little backpacker snacks masquerading as dinner. We’d just carry frozen food to start with. That way we could carry anything fit to freeze and we could eat like kings.

So we got ourselves a coupla nice big steaks to put in the freezer to get ready for the trip. Then we rounded out the menu with a stroll down the frozen food aisle at the grocery store for potatoes and peas and stuff. We briefly considered havin’ ice cream for dessert but decided that might be too much of a good thing.

We did pick up some hash browns and sausage for breakfast. But we were a little stymied over what to do about the eggs. Freezin’ eggs was somehow outside our scope of experience, even addin’ our two vast and varied experiences together. We weren’t quite sure how it was done and there didn’t seem to be any good references on the subject. So we experimented. We froze a few intact in their shells and broke a few more out and froze ‘em between waxed paper in those little clamshell hamburger containers. Then we were set. All we had to do was clean out the freezer into our packs and head for the frozen hills.

Of course, there was a price to pay for all that hearty fare that was makin’ our mouths water just thinkin’ about it on the drive to Michigan. It was kinda heavy. In fact, I’m not sure but I suspect it mighta been the weight of that big slab of frozen meat in the top of my pack that made me do that face plant into a snowdrift as we were skiin’ down to Lake of the Clouds. I mean, otherwise I’m such a well balanced fellow.

We got down to the lake pretty early in the afternoon, which was a good thing for a coupla reasons. For one, we still hadta put a roof over our heads for the night. And there could be nothin’ so easy as just pitchin’ a tent for Charlie and me, nosiree. We hadta build us an igloo. You may remember how we had to compensate for a few minor design flaws in our snow shelter when the first model came crashin’ down around our ears in a spectacular cloud of snow just as we thought success was ours. Leastwise, it came crashin’ down around Charlie’s ears: I was the outside man on that job. But eventually we worked it out.

The other reason was that days are pretty darned short in January. By the time we got done messin’ around with our modified snow shelter, the sun was declinin’ toward the horizon and it was time to start workin’ on dinner.

Engineering architectural disaster is pretty hungry work. We were ready to eat. But it wasn’t like we could just pop our frozen dinner into the microwave and enjoy almost instant gratification. We hadta get the home fires burnin’ first. I got out my old reliable Svea stove, lit it, and watched it sputter and spit out the feeblest, licking flame I ever saw come outta a stove. For the first time in its existence, it didn’t wanna work. It was just too darned cold for it to pressurize. Eventually Charlie got tired of waitin’. He doused it with a liberal libation of white gas, stood back a respectful distance, and lobbed a lit match at it. Thereafter, it warmed to its work and burned obediently.

The first order of business was to get some water hot for our first course soup and hot drinks. So we packed a pot full of snow and put it on the stove to melt down for water and we waited. And we waited. And waited. Seems to take quite a large volume of snow to make quite a small volume of water. Not to mention the large volume of fuel required to convert it from one state to another. Then there was the small matter of progressing from nearly frozen to hot enough to cook with. Let’s face it, the journey from an ambient air temperature of, say, minus 10° to 212° is a pretty long hike. That’s when I first started to get a sad, sinking feeling about those two nice big slabs of frozen meat still in our packs. Given the rate of progress we were seein’ with the snowmelt water, we probably could cook those babies from now ‘til midnight and still have to settle for steak tartare!

And speaking of sinking feelings, after a while it seemed like the snow under the stove was melting faster than the snow on top of it. ‘Cause that hot little Svea slowly but surely started to sink into the snow like the Titanic into the North Atlantic. Fortunately, the stove, unlike the ship, could be saved. We dug it out of the snow and kept it afloat on a little wooden cutting board Charlie keeps in the bottom of his cook kit. It was the first time it had ever been pressed into service as insulation.

By this time, we’d pretty much realized that there was no defrost setting on Nature’s deep freeze, at least not ‘til about April, and that our steak dinner just wasn’t gonna happen this trip. Necessity bein’ the mother of first-rate, second-string plans as well as of invention, we dined in fine style on instant soup and grilled cheese sandwiches that night. We’d eat like kings after we got home when the steaks thawed out... maybe Wednesday. In the meantime, we had the small consolation of knowing that winter is the only time of year the camper is allowed, even mandated, to bring food into the tent. And we had bedtime snacks. Gotta keep those internal furnaces stoked throughout those long, cold, winter nights.

Charlie’d brought along a sizeable stash of candy for our midnight refueling. But once again Winter showed us we had a thing or two to learn. Do you have any idea how easy it is to dislocate your jaw on a frozen caramel? I mean, they make pretty good all day suckers in their frozen state but don’t try to chew ‘em ‘cause they’re not much good for instant gratification. Good thing Charlie had diversified his candy portfolio with foods of lower melting point like chocolate and malted milk balls. Those would probably still crunch peaceably between your molars even at 40° below zero.

I don’t even wanna talk about breakfast. The sunny side up eggs were almost edible. But the hard boiled egg woulda been better used for a game of handball instead of for breakfast. Or maybe broomball, seein’ as how we were camped on the ice. At least we had plenty of those all-day caramels to suck on as we herringboned our way back up the hill toward the truck. And maybe we’d be lucky on our way home and find one of those diners that serve breakfast all day.

Well, the good news is that ignorance, unlike stupidity, is a curable condition, if you’re willing to swallow the big dose of humility that goes along with it. Charlie and I sure took the cure that weekend in the U.P. What we knew to begin with may have gotten us less than passing grades in any number of subjects from Backcountry Ski Technique to The Architecture of Snow Shelters in the Upper Midwest to the oxymoronic Cooking on Ice. But the two-day intensive crash course we got in our Hibernal School of Hard Knocks did lead to a sort of GED in Winter Survival Skills. We’re a heckuva lot smarter now. So our next trip won’t be anything like so blissful... or so hungry.

Well, ‘til next time, keep your paddle wet. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Rich Furman and Morgan MacBain, 901 East Geranium Avenue, St. Paul MN 55106 or editor@canoe-kayak.org. Let me know if you’ve ever planned a thoroughly uncooperative meal, winter or summer. Remember, 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 Roald Amundson.