Camping | chasing piggens

It may look unappetizing to the uninitiated, but that is what is known in my neck of the woods as The Chocolate Cake. After you’ve tasted The Chocolate Cake, you can never eat other chocolate cakes without regret. It’s a Cook’s Illustrated recipe for “Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake” if you’re interested. Sean made it for the first time on my 20th birthday, and I shamelessly hid it from all of my friends and devoured it in secret. It’s that kind of cake.

It’s smooshed up in that baggie because we decided to go backpacking to celebrate Sean’s birthday last week, and the vacuum sealer was (er… is) still on the counter from all of the bacon-processing. We took the cake, took Friday off, and took to the woods with our friend Morgan (we were later joined by friend Andrew) to have an adventure on the Sylamore Creek section of the Ozark Highlands Trail.

By the time we reached the trailhead on Friday, it was 2:30. We’d had to de-mildew our gear and take care of the critters and run a few errands before we could leave, and the drive took nearly three hours. We planned on camping out and meeting Andrew a mile or two from the next trailhead (he’d hike in from that direction a little later in the afternoon). That afforded us a six or seven mile hike for the afternoon. Satisfied with the plan, decked in blaze orange, and full of chicken-salad sandwiches, we set off.

The trail is mostly well-marked with white blazes, though it clearly sees little use. We did the crunchy-leaf shuffle for miles, the rustling so loud that we couldn’t carry on a conversation. The leaves on the ground sometimes obscured the path, and we once lost the trail completely and had to just aim ourselves north until we hit a jeep road that we recognized from our map. Getting lost in the woods spiced our afternoon with adventure, but it also cost us some time, and when it started getting dark we still had miles to go. The moon was huge that night, and it broke the horizon orange like an egg-yolk, but not until much later. For the last hour or so, we walked in full dark, navigating from bright blaze to blaze along the trail and then following the wide swath of a jeep road. At one point Morgan stopped, turned off her light, then turned it on again. “It’s spiders!” she said, “there’s hundreds of them! Their eyes are glowing.” She handed me her headlamp but I couldn’t see it, no matter how I tilted the light.

We reached a wide-open feed plot at around 6:45, but it felt like midnight. The stars were bright on the sky like I’ve heard the eyes of spiders are bright on the forest floor. We built a fire in the middle of the jeep road and set up camp. We roasted home-made venison sausages and baked sweet-potatoes in the coals. Andrew joined us later that night, ready to hang out by the fire, but by then we were all half-asleep, curled up in our nests around the coals.

I got up just before dawn, chilly beside the ashes of the fire, and lit my stove to make myself some tea. When I sleep out, seeing the sunrise is a priority for me. I feel like a sunflower, smiling at the sky, getting my bearings for the day. I loaded up a bottle with hot tea, stuffed it into my sweater, and grabbed my camera. I found a nice corner of the woods and let the world light up with me in it.

When I got back to camp, dragging some dry wood, everyone else was still asleep. I re-lit the fire and built it up a little, then crawled back into my sleeping bag with my hot-tea-bottle to warm my toes. I pulled out Harry and read a little by the breaking light of the sun and the flickering light of the fire.

Too soon, everyone else was up, hustling to get coffee ready and start breakfast. We had bacon and eggs (ain’t nobody does deluxury backpacking like us folks) cooked in paper-bags over the fire. You rub the bacon on the bag to grease it, then make a bacon-nest in the bottom. You crack an egg into the nest, fold the top of the bag over, then spear it on a stick and hold it over the coals. To tell you the truth, a foil-pack works better, but the paper-bag scheme has a cool-factor that foil packs don’t offer, plus you can burn your cooking implement when you’re done, instead of packing it out. At one point, my bag caught fire and burned down to the bacon, but we slid the charred remains of the bag into another bag and I cooked on with great success (and at great length, this took something like an hour)

As you can see, my egg is seasoned with paper bag ash

We spent Saturday on the trail and came across our first hunters only a short walk from our camp. Saturday was opening day for deer season in Arkansas, and we’d been concerned about hunters coming upon us early in the morning, especially sleeping as we were in the middle of a feed plot. I heard four-wheelers and some shots in the early morning, but there was another feed plot down the road a stretch, and our sleep had gone undisturbed. The hunters we met looked bemused to see us tromping through the woods, all decked out in orange and with heavy packs and no guns, but they were friendly and chit-chatted with us a while.

We filtered water twice in some cold pools in the bottoms. They weren’t flowing (trickling at best) but we pushed our concerns back and drank up. We’re still fine.

We looked a little smurfy in our bulletproof hats, but our ears were damn warm.

Sean quite liked these funky formations.

We were forced to abandon our filtration mission at this pool with the cool rock wall when Andrew went for a swim. Brrr!

We camped the next night on a north face, and I pointed my hammock east. I didn’t have to break my cocoon to watch the sun come up: I just basked under the pink sky and read about Harry’s adventures at Poudlard (that’s french for Hogwarts, it seems). After a time, we all got up and reluctantly stuffed our aching feet into our frosty shoes and boots and set off down the trail to the next road crossing where we dropped our packs, hitched up our pants and stuck out our thumbs. A young man, unsurprisingly in a pickup loaded up with hunting gear, stopped for us, and (surprisingly) he didn’t make us ride in back but allowed our stinky selves into the cab. We chatted about spray-foam insulation and pheasants as the red hills swooped by, and he left us at Andrew’s car, ready for a pizza.

If there is a picture of homecoming that is etched on my heart, it’s the sun setting over Belfast harbor on an August evening. I see one set of lights like the ones you see when you come around the bend in a road and catch sight of your city, illuminated, and your heart lifts up, but then I see another set of lights in the trembling reflections in the water, bursting as we pass and disappearing in our wake.

If I have an anthem, it is the thrum of a motor, the seashell swish of the murky water (quieting for the evening as the wind lies down) rushing by the hull. It is the deep clanging of the red bell buoy by the ledge as it rocks in our wake.

Happiness tastes like salt on my skin, in my hair, in the warm shore breeze, in the very fabric of the comforter wrapped around my shoulders.

It’s a sunburn, the rocking of the earth when you come ashore after days on the water, salt ocean stinging a barnacle-cut foot, a three-strand dock line passing over a palm.

Sunset from Little Pickering

We spent last week in Maine with my family, mostly on the boat. Dad said my eyes got bluer with every passing day, and I could feel the cotton clearing from my chest cavity, the fog clearing from my mind. Summer in Maine is a pure shot of light.

Sean’s friend

Sean’s friend meets mayo: my mom makes a killer lobster roll.

That charm? I come by it honestly.

I totally vanquished my foes and conquered the island of Catan in Seal Cove.

Bre and TimZ came out with us for an adventure, and took advantage of the opportunity to recover from a night of ginsntonics with a boat nap.

We set up camp on Little Pickering island, the paradise of my childhood.

Incidentally, as my father was snapping the above picture from the bridge, he was running the boat aground on a sandbar. The tide was outgoing, and it was a bit of a disaster.

Bre, Tim, Sean and I invited my folks to join us for dinner, and we had a spare tent set up for them in no time. We wrapped potatoes and corn in foil and roasted hot dogs over the fire. Bre played her ukulele and we sang along. The sunset, the smoke, and the sound of waves on the beach were soothing, and we soon retired to our tent. Mom and dad didn’t sleep: they spent an anxious night hoping Islander wouldn’t roll and then waiting for the tide to come back in to float her again.

I woke in our tent at midnight to the sound of the waves of the incoming tide burping through the swim platform. I unzipped the door and looked out at the great hull, glittering in the moonlight. Dad was rowing the dinghy around on captain’s business, and mom stood on the beach, watching. I threw some wood on the embers of the fire and walked down to the water. Glowing algae was spilling off dad’s oars like smoke. I splashed my hands in the water and they glittered.

We dragged the kayak down the beach, and I woke Sean up to paddle around a bit. It was eerie, coasting behind the beached trawler, lit only by the helm LEDS. It felt like a ghostly shipwreck: the only sound was the slapping of wavelets against the hull and the swish of the kayak pushing aside the water. It was beautiful though: the campfire glittered at the high tide line, the wake and every dip of a paddle lit with bioluminescence, and the sky was full of sparkle. I stood on the beach with my mom and watched for shooting stars. We saw a few, and before long the tide had lifted the boat back to a float and my parents took off to anchor nearby for the night. I sat by the fire and watched for a few more shooting stars.

In the morning, we had breakfast tacos, which consisted of scrambled eggs and bacon stuffed in pancakes. No plates needed! It’s been a while since I’ve been luxury camping. How delightful to have a frying pan and a cooler! We went swimming and paddling and gathered sand dollars on the sandbar, and in the afternoon we said goodbye to our friends in Buck’s Harbor.

For the next few days, we explored Merchant’s Row. Sean and I dinghied into Stonington for a few more jugs of water and some lobsters, and we anchored off of McGlathery, which is reputed to have a wild sheep population. We didn’t run across any woolies, but the island was beautiful, and Hell’s Half Acre, our next anchorage, was, if anything, more beautiful still.

Mom and Dad and their boat in the background

Shadow mermaids

We stumbled across this sweet creek on McGlathery.

At Hell’s Half Acre, Sean and I floated for a half hour with the wind, just watching the sky go by.

On our last night, I stepped out on deck to brush my teeth. The tintype moon hung in a fog sky, and my heart cracked. Maine is my native country, and it’s beautiful, and I will go back someday to my home by the sea.