There’s something special about camping food, and not the type of food

cooked in an oven then eaten in the outdoors. The kind where the oven is your fire
and the food is scarce unless you got lucky and hooked a good-sized fish. It could be
as simple as a hot dog skewered by a nearby or as grand as a filleted trout wrapped
in tin foil with peppers and lemon, all are things to be savored in the wood. One
factor to this heightened appreciation for nourishment is that when your camping,
your moving, you’ve burned calories from hiking or paddling, collecting wood and
working to make your area comfortable. Of course your body is craving some
reimbursement for it’s work, but along with that there are the subtle flavors in the
food from the wood used to cook it, it’s a lucky camper that comes along a good
hickory tree.
One such occasion that I can remember where my outdoor meal seemed
especially satisfying is my fishing with my father over the summer. We were
canoeing in the Green Mountain Reservoir, a lake in a mountainous area of Vermont.
It was mid-June and I had just gotten back home from school, my dad had already
had the trip planned and had gotten us fishing licenses and lures for the occasion. I
looked at the lures and imagined the type of fish that each one would catch, one
looked like a tiny crab holding a metal plate but was split in two and connected
through its mid-section, this was so that when reeling in the crab will swivel back
and forth catching sunlight with the metal plate thereby getting the attention of the
fish; trout. Another was a complicated piece of work, it looked like a hanger with a
Koosh ball on one side and fan on the other, when using this one you’re supposed to
reel in fast so that the lure will skim the surface of the water so the fan will spin
again the water and attract fish; bass.
We first paddled out to our campsite, we were a good half hour from the
drop-off, which was good because that guaranteed a buffer zone between us and all
the families that try to get their screaming toddlers in touch with nature. After
setting up we shipped off and cast out, we had brought all preparations for our
catch; peppers, onions, tin foil and, of course, tartar sauce. No luck with the crab
lure, I decided to switch to the hanger. We had been a good hour in the lake, no
need for Ipod’s or laptops here; the surrounding mountains provide ample
distraction between conversations of this and that. No fish yet, but I had faith in my
hanger lure and kept it on. Mountains in the east have a different feel from the ones
out here; they’re just as green as the ones in Northern California, but with shorter,
fatter trees, mostly pine. This makes Vermont’s rolling hills a bit more forbidding,
with trees growing more out than up you find very little room for walking around
and would have to find a path if you wanted to walk around without pushing
through. The sun started getting close to the horizon and I felt that my big fish
wasn’t coming, so I cast out with a worm thinking that even though I wouldn’t get a
full meal with a worm at least I might have something to do. I ended up catching
three perch, the smallest edible fish in the lake. I was determined to use the little
meat these fish had in our meal, it was like surgery, at this time we had been
paddling for five hours with nothing but a couple nutri-grain bars. After an hour of
pain-staking cutting and peeling we finally got the food cooking, nothing had ever
smelt so good. It only took a few minutes to cooked, wrapped up with the
vegetables in a make shift tin-foil bag with the vegetable and salt. Eating was bliss,
an entire day dedicated to that one moment of satisfaction, the food didn’t last long
but the feeling did. Soon I was asleep, fat and happy, ready to start over again
tomorrow.