...
The Best Food In The World...
...is cooked on sticks.
I'm convinced of that now after my first ever camping trip. Of course, as promised, there are extensive snaps. Here's a not-so-brief rundown of the adventure in the woods:
***************
The first night of camping was at Dolly Copp campground in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. To get there, we passed through three states in which I had never been before: Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire (or as I like to call it, "New CAMPshire") itself.
Fischer managing the fire at Dolly Copp.
Remember that "food on sticks" thing? Yeah, from the title of this very post. I can't tell you how many hot dogs on sticks we ate. They were nothing short of delicious.
Ben busted out the classic Jiffy Pop, too.
The signature beverage of the trip: luke warm cans of Bud. It's funny how tasty things like that become when the only other option is boiled pond water!
Fischer, in mid-fireside-introspection.
Ben dubbed this picture "roughing it." Yeah, s'mores, Bud and food cooked in tinfoil is how the cavemen used to survive.
This was our "ceiling" at Dolly Copp.
The first (of many) camping lessons I learned was how to light a fire. The second was how to tie up the "bear bag" and hang it from a tree.
The second day we arrived at Baxter State Park in Maine.
Camping is something I wasn't sure I'd love, but didn't expect to love that much. It totally feeds my "separation from everything" anxiety, which fuels my need to get away from New York, away from the job, the chaos, from EVERYTHING, good & bad. To be able to be truly distant, just think & relax.
But this trip wasn't all Budweiser and relaxing. The first full day at Baxter, we did a 10.7 mile hike. We started at 8:52AM. Fischer and I finished around 7 that night, Ben and Aimee came in shortly after.
This was just the beginning. Don't they look happy and energetic?
Fischer, overlooking our two ponds. The one further in the distance is where our campsites were.
Aimee, Ben, and Fischer take a break on the way up the first peak.
This was the look on my face after about two hours, when Ben laughed and said "welcome to the brutally un-fun world of hiking."
Parts of the hike were EXACTLY what I have the urge to do in the city: climb around on rocks! There were giant fields of rocks and boulders of all sizes along the hike trail, walls of rock that we had to scramble & run over, following the tiny little blue paint marks that kept us on the trail. Other parts were dense forests with a small path through it, with sticks and leaves slapping your legs (if you choose to wear shorts like I did you feel them a lot more). Sometimes you're running over bare dirt, sloped at an angle that causes you to slip on little mini-landslides, and at other spots there are fields and patches of delicious blueberries. You can pick them and eat them right off the bushes. Of course none of us expected the hike to be as brutal as it was, and none of us packed enough water. Some parts of the trail, especially at the beginning, were gruelling in their simplicity, but after a few hours my body practically went on auto-pilot. Sometimes it was actually easier to jog than to slow down... it's the loss of momentum that can kill you.
But the reward for all the hiking and exhaustion is breathtaking views of nothing but silence as far as the eye can see. Mountain ranges of Maine, the sky, the sparse clouds, trees, rivers & lakes, the home of hundreds of thousands of animals and plants, the rest of life that I forget about at home. We're visiting their collective home. It's beautiful and tranquil, so silent that a scraping leaf sounds thunderous.
Ben, after we reached our first peak, the Peak of the Ridges, elevation 3225 feet.
Yours truly, at the peak.
The four of us at the peak.
Our "guides" along the way.
Fischer, after scaling one of the precarious rock walls.
Note my shoe at the bottom of this snap. I was hoping to give some semblance of the angle of this rock hill.
This was another peak, the Traveler, Maine's highest volcanic mountain.
After the hike while we cooked dinner, this little guy decided to come say hi.
Ben, morning after the hike.
My/Fischer's tent, outside...
...and inside.
Here's some natives of South Branch Pond:
Every night we sat around the fire, cooked dinner, drank Budweisers, told stories. We ate a lot of hot dogs, corn on the cob, potatoes. The night of the hike we made rice & beans & beef stew. I've realized that the principle of relativity constantly comes into play when camping: relative clean-ness, for example. When you fill a small plastic cup with boiled pond water, and there are little pieces of dirt and sticks and shit floating in it, you look at it and think "meh... clean enough," and you slug it down and it's delicious. Same goes for the food: when you've been hiking for 10 hours, rice & beans & beef stew in a little aluminum bowl is like ambrosia. Most meals we'd stand around shoveling food in our mouths, so hungry that the eating itself only takes two or three minutes.
We also canoed all the time at Baxter. Both of our campsites were on the edge of South Branch Pond, and it's either a short hike from the ranger's station, or a short canoe. More often than not, we'd canoe. One afternoon Ben and Fischer and I canoed over to the adjacent pond, connected to ours via a rocky stream. I had no sandals or aquasocks or anything, and walking across the jagged rocks was nothing terribly enjoyable. To get myself across, I wound up having to "Samurai Jack" myself to get the mental strength to do it. It was painful, especially considering the almost-11 miles of hiking the day before. At one point, I stopped walking and told myself out loud, "Be Zen. Just walk." Once I told myself that, my posture straightened, my feet got stronger, and I just walked. I made it much faster and more gracefully, until Ben was able to float his sandals downstream to me. From that point we could canoe, and we made our way through the other pond to a rock jump that some kindly Maine hippies tipped us off to. We jumped a couple times from about 25 feet, jumping OUT to avoid the rocks on the way down. My second jump took about 30 minutes, just sitting on the edge of the rocks. I sat and thought about everything and nothing, and when my body and mind agreed it was a good idea and they were ready, I slowly pushed myself off the edge. It was really hard. I don't exactly know why. The next day, Aimee and Ben and I went back. I didn't jump.
Ben, overlooking the jump.
These were taken with my repeat-shot feature:
The last two nights at Baxter we stayed in a lean-to. It was different than being in the tent, namely because the entire front wall is open to the world. It made it a bit more communal though. We spent much of the last day in various states of exhaustion, sitting around playing Yahtzee and card games.
Our lean-to.
Lunch: sardines. I refrained. Check out the sunburn on Aimee's arm, a testament to the fact that she should have used my SPF 45 Panama Jack.
Needless to say, the fire was always a worthy snap subject:
Fischer and I. Check the beard growth! I came home looking like Grizzly Adams.
Our source of light, other than flashlights.
This was my waking view from the lean-to.
This was the other one.
One afternoon while we relaxed and ate, this enormous bug paid us a visit. I don't know exactly what he was, but he was bigger than any roach I've ever seen in New York. He was friendly though, just checking us out. He was also kind enough to pose while Fischer & I snapped him. Afterward, Ben picked him up and dropped him back in the forest.
I passed all kinds of little personal tests on this trip: the rocky stream, the jump, the hikes, even sleeping outside was new to me. Learning to start a good fire, live in the woods, set up a tent, use those valuable canoeing skills I got in college. Seriously, it was a gym elective, and I learned to canoe in the campus pool and the Yellow Breeches Creek behind Messiah College. I was officially a certified canoeist, and I still proved myself to still be somewhere between competent and good, both solo and tandem.
Fischer and I went out on a photo expedition one morning.
This is one of mine.
This is one of his.
The morning of our last full Baxter day, I went out for a little solo hike. Ben told me of a short hike to some waterfalls he and Aimee had done last year, so I set out to find them.
Find them, I did not. BUT, I did find this narrow river of cascades, about 30 feet below the hiking trail beneath a rock wall. Again, my climbing urge took over and I scaled down the wall to dunk my head in the stream. I expected the water to be ice cold, but it was actually perfectly swimmable, and had it been deep enough I would have gone in. It was nice to go on a short hike alone.
The cascades from above.
Yours truly before scaling down the rock wall.
Easily the biggest caterpillar I've ever seen, inching along the road on the way back.
For the whole trip, I was sore all over, my arms and back from canoeing, and everything else from the hikes. Sleep was so deep out there. Everything shuts up and just lives. The fire slowly dies & the burning embers tell stories. I saw entire worlds form and die in seconds in those embers. When darkness falls completely, the stars are out in the thousands. I wish I knew the constellations better, because there's a whole soap opera going on up there. The stories of hundreds of lives are painted there for us if we can only decipher them.
As a final send-off to the vacation, on our final night we enjoyed some fine cigars Fischer brought back from his recent trip to the Dominican Republic.
I got to see so much of the rest of life that I forget in my day-to-day. I needed to slow things down & escape. I know my sanity is at risk if every now and then I don't get away from EVERYTHING around me. Plus, I had been meaning to find legitimate uses for my Swiss Army Knife. Using it around the apartment doesn't count!
I think what I'm getting at with all this is, I'm doing really well. As long as I can take small moments to just turn everything else off, I can relax & restore. It's like karate class: 90 minutes to relax and focus, but also physically exhaust myself. This whole trip was like an 8-day karate class. I got to infuse total chill-ness with gruelling physical activity. Although camping is a bit less violent.
And I still came home exhausted, but restored.
***************
That's the rundown, thanks for sticking with me! As usual, these snaps are my faves from what I took (which crested 250 pictures). Look for some of them in the 2005 Favorites, coming in February!
*****N*T*G*****
Never hesitate to comment!
I'm convinced of that now after my first ever camping trip. Of course, as promised, there are extensive snaps. Here's a not-so-brief rundown of the adventure in the woods:
***************
The first night of camping was at Dolly Copp campground in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. To get there, we passed through three states in which I had never been before: Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire (or as I like to call it, "New CAMPshire") itself.
Fischer managing the fire at Dolly Copp.
Remember that "food on sticks" thing? Yeah, from the title of this very post. I can't tell you how many hot dogs on sticks we ate. They were nothing short of delicious.
Ben busted out the classic Jiffy Pop, too.
The signature beverage of the trip: luke warm cans of Bud. It's funny how tasty things like that become when the only other option is boiled pond water!
Fischer, in mid-fireside-introspection.
Ben dubbed this picture "roughing it." Yeah, s'mores, Bud and food cooked in tinfoil is how the cavemen used to survive.
This was our "ceiling" at Dolly Copp.
The first (of many) camping lessons I learned was how to light a fire. The second was how to tie up the "bear bag" and hang it from a tree.
The second day we arrived at Baxter State Park in Maine.
Camping is something I wasn't sure I'd love, but didn't expect to love that much. It totally feeds my "separation from everything" anxiety, which fuels my need to get away from New York, away from the job, the chaos, from EVERYTHING, good & bad. To be able to be truly distant, just think & relax.
But this trip wasn't all Budweiser and relaxing. The first full day at Baxter, we did a 10.7 mile hike. We started at 8:52AM. Fischer and I finished around 7 that night, Ben and Aimee came in shortly after.
This was just the beginning. Don't they look happy and energetic?
Fischer, overlooking our two ponds. The one further in the distance is where our campsites were.
Aimee, Ben, and Fischer take a break on the way up the first peak.
This was the look on my face after about two hours, when Ben laughed and said "welcome to the brutally un-fun world of hiking."
Parts of the hike were EXACTLY what I have the urge to do in the city: climb around on rocks! There were giant fields of rocks and boulders of all sizes along the hike trail, walls of rock that we had to scramble & run over, following the tiny little blue paint marks that kept us on the trail. Other parts were dense forests with a small path through it, with sticks and leaves slapping your legs (if you choose to wear shorts like I did you feel them a lot more). Sometimes you're running over bare dirt, sloped at an angle that causes you to slip on little mini-landslides, and at other spots there are fields and patches of delicious blueberries. You can pick them and eat them right off the bushes. Of course none of us expected the hike to be as brutal as it was, and none of us packed enough water. Some parts of the trail, especially at the beginning, were gruelling in their simplicity, but after a few hours my body practically went on auto-pilot. Sometimes it was actually easier to jog than to slow down... it's the loss of momentum that can kill you.
But the reward for all the hiking and exhaustion is breathtaking views of nothing but silence as far as the eye can see. Mountain ranges of Maine, the sky, the sparse clouds, trees, rivers & lakes, the home of hundreds of thousands of animals and plants, the rest of life that I forget about at home. We're visiting their collective home. It's beautiful and tranquil, so silent that a scraping leaf sounds thunderous.
Ben, after we reached our first peak, the Peak of the Ridges, elevation 3225 feet.
Yours truly, at the peak.
The four of us at the peak.
Our "guides" along the way.
Fischer, after scaling one of the precarious rock walls.
Note my shoe at the bottom of this snap. I was hoping to give some semblance of the angle of this rock hill.
This was another peak, the Traveler, Maine's highest volcanic mountain.
After the hike while we cooked dinner, this little guy decided to come say hi.
Ben, morning after the hike.
My/Fischer's tent, outside...
...and inside.
Here's some natives of South Branch Pond:
Every night we sat around the fire, cooked dinner, drank Budweisers, told stories. We ate a lot of hot dogs, corn on the cob, potatoes. The night of the hike we made rice & beans & beef stew. I've realized that the principle of relativity constantly comes into play when camping: relative clean-ness, for example. When you fill a small plastic cup with boiled pond water, and there are little pieces of dirt and sticks and shit floating in it, you look at it and think "meh... clean enough," and you slug it down and it's delicious. Same goes for the food: when you've been hiking for 10 hours, rice & beans & beef stew in a little aluminum bowl is like ambrosia. Most meals we'd stand around shoveling food in our mouths, so hungry that the eating itself only takes two or three minutes.
We also canoed all the time at Baxter. Both of our campsites were on the edge of South Branch Pond, and it's either a short hike from the ranger's station, or a short canoe. More often than not, we'd canoe. One afternoon Ben and Fischer and I canoed over to the adjacent pond, connected to ours via a rocky stream. I had no sandals or aquasocks or anything, and walking across the jagged rocks was nothing terribly enjoyable. To get myself across, I wound up having to "Samurai Jack" myself to get the mental strength to do it. It was painful, especially considering the almost-11 miles of hiking the day before. At one point, I stopped walking and told myself out loud, "Be Zen. Just walk." Once I told myself that, my posture straightened, my feet got stronger, and I just walked. I made it much faster and more gracefully, until Ben was able to float his sandals downstream to me. From that point we could canoe, and we made our way through the other pond to a rock jump that some kindly Maine hippies tipped us off to. We jumped a couple times from about 25 feet, jumping OUT to avoid the rocks on the way down. My second jump took about 30 minutes, just sitting on the edge of the rocks. I sat and thought about everything and nothing, and when my body and mind agreed it was a good idea and they were ready, I slowly pushed myself off the edge. It was really hard. I don't exactly know why. The next day, Aimee and Ben and I went back. I didn't jump.
Ben, overlooking the jump.
These were taken with my repeat-shot feature:
The last two nights at Baxter we stayed in a lean-to. It was different than being in the tent, namely because the entire front wall is open to the world. It made it a bit more communal though. We spent much of the last day in various states of exhaustion, sitting around playing Yahtzee and card games.
Our lean-to.
Lunch: sardines. I refrained. Check out the sunburn on Aimee's arm, a testament to the fact that she should have used my SPF 45 Panama Jack.
Needless to say, the fire was always a worthy snap subject:
Fischer and I. Check the beard growth! I came home looking like Grizzly Adams.
Our source of light, other than flashlights.
This was my waking view from the lean-to.
This was the other one.
One afternoon while we relaxed and ate, this enormous bug paid us a visit. I don't know exactly what he was, but he was bigger than any roach I've ever seen in New York. He was friendly though, just checking us out. He was also kind enough to pose while Fischer & I snapped him. Afterward, Ben picked him up and dropped him back in the forest.
I passed all kinds of little personal tests on this trip: the rocky stream, the jump, the hikes, even sleeping outside was new to me. Learning to start a good fire, live in the woods, set up a tent, use those valuable canoeing skills I got in college. Seriously, it was a gym elective, and I learned to canoe in the campus pool and the Yellow Breeches Creek behind Messiah College. I was officially a certified canoeist, and I still proved myself to still be somewhere between competent and good, both solo and tandem.
Fischer and I went out on a photo expedition one morning.
This is one of mine.
This is one of his.
The morning of our last full Baxter day, I went out for a little solo hike. Ben told me of a short hike to some waterfalls he and Aimee had done last year, so I set out to find them.
Find them, I did not. BUT, I did find this narrow river of cascades, about 30 feet below the hiking trail beneath a rock wall. Again, my climbing urge took over and I scaled down the wall to dunk my head in the stream. I expected the water to be ice cold, but it was actually perfectly swimmable, and had it been deep enough I would have gone in. It was nice to go on a short hike alone.
The cascades from above.
Yours truly before scaling down the rock wall.
Easily the biggest caterpillar I've ever seen, inching along the road on the way back.
For the whole trip, I was sore all over, my arms and back from canoeing, and everything else from the hikes. Sleep was so deep out there. Everything shuts up and just lives. The fire slowly dies & the burning embers tell stories. I saw entire worlds form and die in seconds in those embers. When darkness falls completely, the stars are out in the thousands. I wish I knew the constellations better, because there's a whole soap opera going on up there. The stories of hundreds of lives are painted there for us if we can only decipher them.
As a final send-off to the vacation, on our final night we enjoyed some fine cigars Fischer brought back from his recent trip to the Dominican Republic.
I got to see so much of the rest of life that I forget in my day-to-day. I needed to slow things down & escape. I know my sanity is at risk if every now and then I don't get away from EVERYTHING around me. Plus, I had been meaning to find legitimate uses for my Swiss Army Knife. Using it around the apartment doesn't count!
I think what I'm getting at with all this is, I'm doing really well. As long as I can take small moments to just turn everything else off, I can relax & restore. It's like karate class: 90 minutes to relax and focus, but also physically exhaust myself. This whole trip was like an 8-day karate class. I got to infuse total chill-ness with gruelling physical activity. Although camping is a bit less violent.
And I still came home exhausted, but restored.
***************
That's the rundown, thanks for sticking with me! As usual, these snaps are my faves from what I took (which crested 250 pictures). Look for some of them in the 2005 Favorites, coming in February!
*****N*T*G*****
Never hesitate to comment!
posted by JMP at 12:31 PM
3 Comments:
allow me one very girly moment to admit that this post thrilled me, as it is the first time i've seen my boyfriend in weeks.
and another, where i admit that you are clearly of heartier stock than i. i'd say it would have taken me at *least* half an hour to jump off a cliff, as i am just the kind of person that would fail to jump out far enough, and would end up enjoying a simpsonsesque head-over-feet tumble down the rocks. it would take far longer for me to gather the nerve to sleep outside, especially after meeting a spider the size of my fist in the bathroom on our trip to Tahoe a few weeks ago. (and i have big hands.)
not to mention that it took me about 4 or 5 hours to settle down and get back to sleep after having a bear snuffling around 2 feet from my head...
yea, i love the hiking, the cooking, the drinking around the campfire... but i'm still not very good at the whole camping thing.
fnee fnee fnee...
allow ME just a moment to admit that this post thrilled me also because i haven't seen me in weeks either.
awesome entry joe. percy b would be proud.
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