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As we waited for the film to start, Michelle and Stephen, in the row behind us, talked about their upcoming foraging workshop. Michelle was surprised that I hadn't signed up for it: "I would have thought foraging was right up your alley." Michelle doesn't know me well.
I've never even camped, I said. Shock was expressed by all. Michelle talked about the Girl Guide bike-riding camping trips of her youth (her mother was the leader).
After the movie I began thinking about camping. Was I right? Have I really never camped?
There was a Girl Scout camp that I attended once, when I was 11. It was a permanent campsite, so we stayed in cabins with bunks. What do I remember about it? Well, a couple of ear-worm camp songs such as "Good Morning, Mr. Zipzipzip, with your hair cut just as short as mine" and "Down by the old mill stream". Other than songs, I remember a fried egg. We (a baker's dozen girls) "cooked" a meal of bacon and eggs and toast. The toast was canned biscuit dough wrapped around a stick and held over the fire: burned on the outside, raw in the middle, for what preteen has the patience to cook it slowly while holding that little stick steady over the fire?
The bacon? No idea how we cooked it.
But let me tell you about the egg. Each camper was given her own empty three-pound coffee can with a two-by-three-inch opening cut at the bottome edge of the can. We took coals from the main campfire and set our coffee cans over our individual piles of red-hot coals. We put a pat of butter on the top of our make-shift stove (formerly the bottom of the coffee can) and broke an egg onto the flat top. Magic! The egg cooked! Who knew you could cook an egg without an electric stove and a kitchen?
In fact, the egg probably overcooked, depending on the intensity of the fire. Did we each have a spatula to turn and remove the egg? I don't know. But I know that this was the best egg I had ever tasted.
I've never repeated the experience, but I've never forgotten it. So there! I DO have camping memories.
Other than that pre-teen experience, the closest I ever came to camping was thirty-odd years ago when we rented a houseboat with another couple for a week on Big Rideau Lake. The owner told us that in the middle of the lake was an island and within that island, if you could find the almost-hidden entrance, was a small, secluded lake. We found the spot. We were the only people (the only boat) on that little lake, which offered us beavers and a pair of loons. We were surrounded by woods and wildlife, but we had all the comforts of our houseboat: a kitchen, beds, a toilet, running water. That's my idea of camping.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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