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Boots here, your Badass Coffee Babe, hoping that life is treating you in a kindly manner on this very lively Friday morning.
You know how it is with travel. There’s something about any kind of travel that makes coffee even better. It looks better, smells better, tastes better when I am away from home — be that out on the trail and listening to some early-morning loon song echoing out over the lake or sitting at some busy sidewalk cafe in France or simply parking it at my favorite coffee bar in my adopted hometown. It’s all good.
Location is irrelevant. What is relevant is how travel makes my senses take a second look at something. And then another. Do some comparisons. Scribble down some notes in my Pay Attention Book. Take the time to just think about what is happening all around me. All while sipping my favorite beverage.
I sometimes think I don’t take this Better Sense of Newness into account when occupying my Home State. You know the place . . . we all have a Home State. It might be your front porch, your desk that looks out at the bird bath, your office with the funky view of the brick wall of Nash Hall. It’s your over-sized yellow kitchen table that is tucked into the too-tiny breakfast nook or your kind of messy desk in the loft or your easel with the broken leg that is balancing on an upside down apple crate. It’s that deck chair that wobbles funny while you are parking your back side. It’s the long bus ride to work or school.
The places that we call Home State are the comfort food for our senses. We go to them each day without a lot of thought. We sit and we think, write, paint, eat, take in the passing view from the car, train, or bus.
One thing all of these Home States have in common? Our morning Joe. That Cup of Reverence that gets us up and moving and feeling inspired.
Travel. I sometimes think that I don’t travel enough. I explore and I wander, but I don’t go a lot farther than my two feet can take me on any given day on the trail. I think I have too strong of a predilection for grabbing a mug of Joe and putting my feet up on the porch rail and taking in the view of the dogs sleeping in the sunshine and the cat prowling the woodshed. I guess I’m not the most sophisticated person in the world. But I sure do know how to enjoy a moment for what it is. I pour my second Cup of Reverence and think that life is pretty good in my happy Home State.
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I remember the morning Bill came skidding into the parking lot wearing some old WWII aviator goggles. The goggles being necessary as his windshield was blown out. When we asked him about it — how could you not? — he grumbled something or other about a Late Night and Trees that Jumped in Front of His Rig. Who knows what the real story was, but I am suspecting it had something to do with reading his fortune at the bottom of a gin bottle. You would have thought seeing some old Bull of the Woods cruising down the highway wearing these vintage goggles, his longish gray-black hair blowing back in the 55-MPH-generated breezes, would have been hilarious. Heck, he could have likely pulled over alongside the road and charged tourists good money for a ride in his plane-mobile. But to us? His chronic lateness stripped him of any comic relief. I can laugh now, but not so much at the time.
Howdy to all of you super-outdoorsy souls who are planning your menu for this summer’s camping, climbing, rafting, bicycling, kayaking, or hiking trip. It’s a general truth that dehydrated meals are the way to go when you’re going to be carrying any kind of weight on your back or in your boat . . . and it’s also a general truth that while some of these ready-made meals that you buy in expensive outdoor stores are pretty darned good, others are, at best, kind of mediocre. Why not set mediocrity aside and start each day on the trail with a fresh and energizing cup of Bircher muesli? It’s easy to make, it’s healthful, and it tastes great!
Bircher muesli is one of those meals that tastes good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It is a healthy and creative choice that tastes good if you roughly follow the script of oats, fruit, coconut, honey, nuts, berries . . . you get the idea. It’s made of good stuff that is easy to pack and you can prepare it in advance of the trip. And the best part? Muesli doesn’t require any cooking, which makes it an ideal choice for those trips that are going to include some dry camps. Easy, healthy, tasty, and easy to prepare . . . you can’t get it wrong.
I started packing my own version of Bircher muesli the summer that Mitch the Mobius joined the trail crew as Camp Cook. This particular crew worked trail up in the high High Country so the work season was short. We made summer base camp at one of the high lakes once the snow receded and the supply horses could make it up the trail. We operated as Trail Rovers who did trail maintenance, cleaned up camp sites, and packed out a whole heck of a lot of annoying garbage from the High Country. Depending on the destination, one might have to pack some overnight gear to cover the necessary miles — but, as a rule, we all generally did our best to return to camp each night to eat around the fire and sleep in our roomy, canvas wall tents.
We actually had it pretty good in camp, as it was stocked at the beginning of each season with gear and supplies, compliments of Sam, Jim, and Katy — our much-appreciated district pack horses. At the beginning of the summer, we had brief and glorious access to butter, eggs, cheese, and cream . . . and we even had an ice cream maker for our season-end Ice Cream Feed — the snowfields providing us with just enough “ice” to “freeze” the cream. Albeit, the ice cream ran a bit on the soft side, but it was pure 100% wilderness luxury.
Mitch the Mobius was what you would call an Unknown Quantity. He came from Havre, Montana, and was a self-professed jack-of-all-trades. I don’t know about the veracity of his self-professing, but one thing we were quick to learn about Mitch: He was an Ace Bull Shitter who ruled camp with a Mighty Spoon. What Mitch made, we were to eat . . . all according to the Rules of Mitch. And that was that. His was a simple system: Whatever we didn’t finishing eating the night before was added to breakfast. Whatever we didn’t finish eating at breakfast was added to dinner. And so it went. This might not sound that bad, but think back to your past few meals. And imagine combining them all together. Trust me. It’s a bad idea.
No matter how much complaining we did, Mitch stuck to his Zero Tolerance Policy of Leftovers. Mitch added dinner macaroni to breakfast scrambled eggs, and he then added said macaroni-scrambled eggs to beef barley soup for dinner. There was no end to the ludicrous chain of combinations. Leftover Morning Coffee was used as the liquid ingredient for dinner cornbread –> coffee-cornbread went into the next day’s breakfast pancakes –> coffee-cornbread-pancakes went into dinner biscuits. I think you get the idea. You had the sense that what had been served as our first meal our first night in camp was still morphing itself in Mitch’s Petri Pot of Anthropological Proportions — resulting in an enduro of marathon indigestion that would only end when we ate our final camp meal in early September.
This is when I started to make my own Bircher muesli. I could guarantee that I was going to start my day right with food that wouldn’t sucker-punch my gut later in the morning. And it was simple. I would soak my muesli in my mess kit the night before and hang it in the bear bag. Voila! Instant healthful breakfast awaiting my morning.
It all came round right when the district’s horse wrangler came up the hill to pack our gear out for the season. It was Tradition that the wrangler would come bearing berries for pie and cream for the ice cream maker. All of us were quite vocal, along with some strident cussing, that Mitch was not to lay the breath of a single fingerprint on our end-of-season Berry Pie a la Mode. No, as much as we all knew the rules of the trail to respect Camp Cookie, Mitch was not going to throw a tangle into our Ice Cream Soiree.
Love and happiness . . . this picture makes me feel good inside. It makes me think of a rundown little honky tonk in a tiny town . . . one of those towns with crooked streets and more taverns than there were bakeries, grocery stores, and churches combined. It was the place where my sister, Ranger, and I used to go dancing every Friday night. Friday night dancing . . . we wouldn’t have missed it for all the Joe in Latin America, Africa, and the Asia Pacific combined — the music was just that good.
Hey y’all. Boots here. And as we are going into hiking, camping, and glamping season, I am thinking about ways to keep your coffee hot and your coffee cold. In other words, we are going to be talking about thermal mugs, insulated containers, and the good ol’ homely, tried-and-true coffee thermos in the next few posts.
Now this thermos had to be one of the most trail-worn thermoses I have even seen. It was one of those tall green Stanley models that looked like it had been handed down through the ages since the dawn of Manifest Destiny. You couldn’t help but think of all the lunch hours and picnics that this thermos must have poured its way through to get that mean looking. It was scarred up, dented, and ugly, and it truly was a testimony to the quality of the Stanley company’s product line. It was still keeping the Banks’ family coffee hot through all of the abuse it had been subjected to.
One of them would pull the coffee boiler from the fire while the other readied the Sacred Stanley to receive its daily sacrament of Joe. Usually Bill poured and Doreen steadied. Doreen would cluck about the importance of being careful while Bill filled the Stanley to the very brim.
I dug for a spell until Doreen told me to stop. She laid Bill and the Stanley to rest, and I can’t tell you how enormous that moment felt. I have been to funerals before, and have shed my share of tears. But this. Seeing someone being laid to rest in one of his favorite spots on the planet in a damned thermos gave me pause. I could see how our physical selves all truly return to the ash from whence we came. The Cycle of Life is enormously dizzying and, if we are lucky, we have someone special in our life who we can hold on to to ease the spin.
When we returned to the campfire, I laid a blanket around Doreen’s shoulders. I poured her a Coffee Nudge and sat with her for a while. No one else knew that she had just laid her best friend and husband to rest. It surely does occur to me that hidden sorrow has to be one of the most difficult things that we carry with us in life.
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