Shenadoah Trip, July 2009

"In the long history of humankind (and animalkind, too) those who have learned to collaborate and to improvise most effectively have prevailed." –Charles Darwin

“I adapt to any and all situations; that’s why they call me the pimp of the nation.” –Kid Rock

Perfection isn’t rare when you’re easily pleased like me. Any trip to Shenandoah National Park, with all its flora, fauna and spectacular views from Skyline Drive, defines a perfect summer weekend. Laura and I hadn’t been to the park since October, and when other plans fell through on a late July weekend, we jumped at the chance to do an overnighter. Laura said she was counting on plenty of bears and blackberries, and I went to bed Friday night with the camping bin packed, and visions of wild blackberry pancakes sweetening last moments before sleep.

And I woke up at three in the morning, miserable. My seasonal allergies (April through October) are so severe that I sometimes can’t tell whether it’s allergies or swine flu. I’ll spare the details, but symptoms persisted through morning, and when we hit the road, I was feeling anything but perfect. Even a fresh-from-the-hot-grease, apple cider donut from Apple House couldn’t fully elevate my spirits.

Still, I was so happy to enter the park at Front Royal and feel the slight cooling from elevation as we wound our way up Skyline. It was even hazier than usual, humid and in the 90s in the lowlands. But a relatively cool spring with plenty of rain had all the greens full and lush, the roadsides thick with wild bee balm, black eyed susans, tiger lilies, coreopsis, yarrow.

We made it to Mathews Arm campground ahead of noon and found a newly vacant, densely wooded site. We set up our small tent, the REI Half Dome, mostly mesh and great for warm summer nights under the stars. Camp made, we entered the brush. Wild blueberry bushes abounded, but the berries were all green. Firewood, however, did not abound. I spotted two logs with potential, and we had at them with our tip-broken handsaw. And man, was it hot. By the time we’d cut two logs, we were both sweating like boxers in the tenth round. Much as we like the manual labor and getting stuff for free, we were actually going to have to buy wood. “We should’ve replaced the saw,” Laura noted. And so began the list of things we should have brought but didn’t, including:

Can opener (had to hack into can with knife)
Eggs (had to buy)
Syrup (went without)
Fruits, vegetables (to cut the sausages and starches)
Some form of dessert (had no s’mores, no hobo pies)
Food for two lunches (had only dinner, breakfast)
Small backpack for hiking
Change of underwear for next day

While Laura drove up to Elkwallow to buy wood, I lay down in the tent to try and recover from the bad night’s sleep and heat stroke. When she returned, we threw a bottle of water into her big backpack and set off on a hike to Overall Run Falls, the highest falls in the park at 93’. Let’s say this was our sixth time camping at Shenandoah – we’ve attempted to find the Overall Run Falls at least three times before and failed. But this time I got a map with explicit instructions from a ranger, each turn highlighted, additional notes written in. And off we went, into the humid woods and up, up, up some rocky ridges. The hike got long; we heard no trickling water. Doubts arose. By the time we figured out where we’d gone wrong, we’d made one big strenuous circle, not to the falls but to the parking lot at the bottom of the park. I went ahead and cried a little.

But such sorrows can be assuaged with a cold beer and a good fire, so back at the site, we produced both. A deeper look in the woods brought forth plenty of kindling, what you need when the fire is young, and we settled around it, feeding it, listening to the hiss and crackle. It was burning perfectly. Ice cold Budweiser made a perfect thirst quencher. But Laura had her eye on some fluffy, rolling clouds. “Should we put the fly on the tent?” she wondered, and I said, no way, that it wasn’t going to rain. And it was as if my words drew the vapors straight down from the sky. Suddenly we weren’t beneath the clouds but within them and we got good and drenched getting that fly on the tent in time to keep our gear dry. We sat out the cloudburst in the car. The fire was intact when we emerged because I’d put down the grate and stacked wood over it. It was nothing to get it raging again.

Luckily, we’d gotten our rain shelter back from Kyoko and Jason, and they’d taken excellent care of it. It’s basically a large tarp with a center pole and four corner poles, and the picture on its packaging makes it look neat, sturdy and easy to assemble. In fact, it never worked as intended, and setting it up is always an exercise in cooperation and improvisation, meaning an awful lot of cussing takes place while ropes get tied to trees, and the flimsy poles bend under stress. I was shoving the center pole (and its pot-lid topper – another jimmy-fix) up toward the sky when the next storm split open directly above me and I left the pole to the lightning and ran screaming toward the car.

But a funny thing happened the next time the rain cleared, afternoon sun drawing steam from pavement and perfumey milkweeds. Just as we got the shelter worked out and discovered with glee that the Half Dome’s floor was still dry as a bone, our neighbors began to pack up all their wet tents and head out. People were giving up.
“Hah! Quitters!”
“Yeah; wow, some people are so soft-core. This isn’t even too bad.”
“No, not too bad at all.” We got awfully superior about our coping abilities.

So we poured one shot in honor of the rain shelter, under which it was possible to remain outdoors on a summer night of fickle weather. We cooked chilidogs and campfire potatoes, dousing the hot, tender potatoes in chili and shredded cheddar. Oh, and the salty sauciness did a damp body good. We even saw some stars before we slept, though storms rolled through until morning.

But what a bell-clear morning it was. Laura made a huge stack of moist, sweet pancakes, Bob Evans links and scrambled eggs. With all that fuel to run, we decided to have a perfect Sunday, to make up for all of Saturday’s foibles. Forget damned Overall Run Falls, we drove south on Skyline to the Hawksbill Mountain Trail. It, too, had its superlative feature – at 4050’, it’s the highest summit in the park. And it was a lovely hike, perfectly steep and taxing for the first mile and a half. At the summit, there’s a 360 degree view from an overlook called Byrd’s Nest, the craggy, exposed summit rock contrasting with the smoother lines of surrounding Appalachia, all verdant after the night’s rain. I lay on a ridge, rock disappearing beneath me. The rock was sun-warm, the wind was cool, humidity lifted. This was the reward, and I felt like I’d earned it, not just by my legs but by perseverance.



We took a longer route back to the trailhead, hiking part of the Appalachian Trail along a scenic ridge. When we came down from the mountain and headed back up Skyline homeward, we finally saw some bears, one single and one with a cub. Bears are easy to spot on Skyline Drive, not just because their solid blackness stands out, but because traffic in both directions backs up so folks can get a glimpse and maybe a photo. So when we ran up on such a traffic jam with no big black beast in sight, we were puzzled. I rolled down the window and a man walking toward me yelled “Snake!”, pointing down. A few feet from the car, it slithered through the grass, stretched long, its rattle raised in warning. Crotalus horridus, the timber rattler, highly venomous but relatively non-aggressive, it was the first rattlesnake I’ve ever seen in the wild.



We all need places where we go to re-create ourselves, where we find respite, refreshment, renewal. I know that sleeping on the ground among deadly creatures doesn’t do it for everybody, but it does it for me. My yoga instructor always asks, “What did you experience on the mat that you can take with you off of the mat?” I ask the same of camping trips: what did I discover in the woods that I can take out of the woods with me? The desire to re-create is a quest, after all. And when you know you love a place, and you go to it with gladness, with expectation, with an open heart, you want it to be perfect. What if it isn’t?

Chances are, there will come times when it won’t be. And I don’t want to summarize with some Sally Sunshine platitude, the old “best-way-out-is-through” business. (If the rain had never let up, perseverance would look like the wrong decision.) But I’ve never been let down by my best efforts to be patient within a situation, by using whatever I’ve got to make the most of it. When I’m camping, I’m determined to have a good time, whatever the conditions, so I’ve learned to cuss the rain tarp into functionality, to protect a fire so it can burn long, to laugh off the storms with a beer and some hot nourishment. What parallels can I draw between the realities of camping and daily realities? If so much depends on attitude, I figure I’m better off betting that perseverance brings unexpected rewards.

In Honor of Hemingway's Birthday

“Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. " _Ernest Hemingway, Postscript to letter to Ivan Kashkin (19 August 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

It was hot last Monday. I’d spent all day outside and when I got home I had to shower off the sweat, tempera paint and creek water. The sun was still hard, intensified by rush-hour exhaust as I walked up the block and down thirteen steps into dark, cool Quarry House Tavern. On half-price burger night, you can’t afford not to go, and my god, it makes a Monday, especially a Monday when the next weekend seems totally unachievable.

I took a table in the red back room, a long reach to the jukebox on one side and the bar on the other. I was the first customer back there, and as I sat waiting for Laura and drinking my cold Stone IPA, I watched the tavern door swing open over and over, reflected in a beer mirror. Laura came in and I ordered her amber while the door kept swinging and the place filled up around us. The beer, the people, the mixed rhythms of simultaneous conversations and a flux of waitstaff –in with trays of bottles and pints, out with fluttering tickets—brightened and animated the whole bar.

Laura ordered mushroom and swiss, me, pico de gallo and pepperjack. It was a compromise, you see, because I couldn’t decide between the two, and though Laura kind of wanted grilled onions and provolone, she relented. She called for a refill on the amber and I tried a Wolaver’s IPA (which I liked loads better than the Stone) and we each played the jukebox. I remember “Whipping Post” sounding particularly fine, and Laura played “Gotta Be Starting Something,” even though I’d opined that tribute time was over. When the song came on, every hipster that passed us looking for a table picked up its groove and chattered about Michael Jackson.

In the ladies’ room, that low-ceilinged sanctuary behind the stacks of beer boxes and the rockabilly stage, I took a break between beers and lingered to read the grafitti on the yellow walls. Some dipshit misquoted Hemingway. She wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true,” and maybe even spelled Hemingway wrong. I came back to the table vowing to return with a Sharpie and deliver a memorable lesson.

The burgers arrived, steaming with that grilled meat smell that tickles something deep in your brainstem and triggers lusty salivation. On the side, mixed greens with a thick homemade blue cheese, so good we’d later smuggle home an extra cup. And the meat, grass-fed, organic, three-quarters of an inch thick with a skin of good grill char and pink straight through – it just yielded to tooth and slaver. Juices of the meat and the toppings came layered and reached balance while I chewed. My stomach received it well and peace spread from there. We toasted to our neighborhood bar, and to the best burger anywhere, every single time.

The sun set as we walked the block home. Upstairs, we turned on some music and got loose. I suppose we talked of the usual things: work is hard; money is tight; time is precious. But, as is often the case when one’s belly is full of good meat and one’s spirit is high on good ale, our talk turned to travels, pleasures, loves. I poured two shots of Mount Gay into souvenir shotglasses –probably recent acquisitions like Memphis, Asheville—and raised another toast to summer, this summer, lived full from the Mississippi Delta up to Michigan and back, a toast to the potential still left in the last third.

“To summer,” I said. “There will come a day when it never has to end.”

And Laura, clinking up, said, “'Isn’t it pretty to think so?'”

Southern Road Trip: The Beer and Barbecue Reports

The Beer Report

I sampled a plethora of fine brews on my southern road trip, not a bad one in the bunch. Here’s my ranking from bottom to top –all recommendations.

12. Pikeland Pils, Sly Fox Brewing, Phoenixville, PA. A decent, flavorful pilsner; a (much) better Busch, creamy and sufficiently hopped, good for a day when you’re in the mood to drink a hundred beers.

11. Mamma’s Little Yella Pils, Oskar Blues, Lyons, CO. Everything OB produces pleases me. This one is a crisp pilsner.

10. St. Charles Porter, Blackstone, Nashville. Laura’s choice. I only go for porters in winter, but this was clean, like a light-roast coffee.

9. Cottonwood Endo IPA, Boone, NC. IPA’s/pale ales are my favorite, and this one was a shocker. It is extremely malty for an IPA, good, but pushes the formula.

8. Sweetwaters 420, Atlanta, GA. Following an IPA with this one kills it, but it’s a decent, quaffable pale.

7. Sweetwaters IPA, Atlanta Georgia. An easy to drink IPA, almost creamy balanced by enjoyable sharpness.

6. Highland Kashmir IPA, Asheville, NC. I enjoyed this one with a catfish po’ boy at lunch and it was fully wonderful, strong but not too bitter with a citrusy hop.

5. Highland St. Terese, Asheville, NC. A nice amber pale with a good caramel malt and fragrant hop balance.

4. Yazoo IPA, Nashville, TN. A tougher, tarter version of the ubiquitous pale.

3. Yazoo Pale Ale, Nashville. I rank this high perhaps because I drank it most and developed fondness through that consistency. It’s amber, spicy, a bit sweet curbed by tart hops, and fairly full-flavored.

2. Lazy Magnolia Reb Ale, Kiln, MS. I rank this high because it was most surprising. Now I don’t typically judge a beer based on the politics of the brewer, but let’s say that by the time I cracked a cold one, I’d had my fill of the confederacy, so I was glad to see the label praising positive rebellion (as in progress and non-conformity) and not sounding a paean to ol’ Dixie. It was created to honor the big market for it in Oxford, and I just couldn’t stop cracking ‘em. Rosy apricot colored with moderate honeysuckle hops (or was that the night air flavoring it?).

1. Starr Hill Northern Lights IPA, Charlottesville, VA. So refreshing with whalloping grapefruity hops and nothing cloying about it.


The Barbecue Report

One goal pursued on my southern road trip was barbeque pork sandwich saturation. I’m happy to say I met that goal, regretting only that I didn’t have a higher tolerance – I would have liked a go at a couple more sandwiches to make it an even ten. Here are the rankings:

8. Rippy’s, Nashville, TN. An open air, corner bar on Broadway full of TVs and tourists to whom an awkward two-piece cover band prostituted themselves. The pulled pork sandwich was equally mundane, an average, mildly smoky, hastily seasoned meat moistened by middle-of-the-road sauce. But the onion rings were big and crispy and I got a free beer.

7. Rum Boogie Café, Memphis TN. Like Rippy’s, Rum Boogie was a corner bar catering to tourists on Beale, but with much better atmosphere and two cookin’ blues stages. Brick and dark with over a hundred guitars lining the walls and hung from the ceiling, guitars once played by bluesmen from Willie Dixon to Kenny Wayne to ...ahem…Jon Bon Jovi. But the sandwich was ordinary, in fact, nothing memorable about it whatsoever. Notable, however, were their fried green tomatoes, battered in cornmeal and spices and perfectly fried, served with ranch and horseradish sour cream.

6. Herb’s Pit BBQ, Murphy, NC. We were in a hurry to eat some Carolina-style barbecue in Carolina, and perhaps stopped too soon. Herb’s chopped pork sandwich had a nice vinegar to it, but it wasn’t as soft as it could have been and had no smoke to it at all. Sauce on the side was flimsy. Still, it ranks above the previous as fresher, more unique.

5. B’s BBQ, Oxford, MS. Never balk at a gas station bbq. A good smoker, meat and pit-person can produce anywhere. We got this recommendation off the internet and were not disappointed. It was a big, sloppy thing with vinegary tomato-based sauce on the side, subtle but savory. Sides of fried okra and pinto beans were plainly delicious.

4. General Lee’s, between Knoxville and Nashville, TN. Another truck-stop joint which also contained a “Civil War Room”. This sandwich was goosebump-inducing good, a well-done but still-moist chopped shoulder with a nice hickory smoke permeating. Great texture combination between soft, juicy meat and delicious chewy bits from the outer crust. Sauce on the side was orange and tangy sweet.

3. Station Inn, Nashville, TN. I picked one up from the snack window of a terrific, intimate, acoustic bar well off of flashy Broadway strip where we dropped in on bluegrass jam and ended up shutting the place down. You pass the prominent smoker on your way in and out of the bar. The meat, stringier than chopped shoulder, perhaps loin or rib-area, was smokaliciously delectable. It’s a tough call ranking this one third, but it’s like this: I know smoked meat should stand on its own – and this sure did – but I love my sauce. I like ketchup on onion rings, tartar on fish, butter on crab, and I like a side of sauce to play with when I eat bbq. No sauce.

2. Three L’il Pigs, Daleville, VA. The first place we stopped, a restaurant in a small strip mall near I-81, it didn’t seem as promising as what it delivered: soft, succulent, smoky pork, wet with vinegar and pepper sauce, slaw on the side. Although we were in Virginia, the menu touted this Carolina-style pork by giving the owner’s background: Carolina raised, a graduate of UNC, he started the restaurant in 1990 and expanded. They also served what they called Virginia-style sauce, which was like the NC vinegar we’d ordered, with tomato and sugar added. I love when a restaurant is so confident about their specialty that they set rules. The menu explicitly asked customers never to request cheese on their already-perfect product.

1. Apple House, Front Royal, VA. Only after I took my first bite did I realize that no matter how much I had consciously striven for new experience, in the back of my mind, my old familiar Apple House bbq was the standard by which all others were measured. The others were wonderful dalliances; Apple House’s sandwich is the one I can’t live without. The smoker’s name is Petunia. She’s pictured lovingly at the counter, smoking even in an ice-storm. Stopping at the Apple House on the way to Shenandoah has become routine. The smoky meat is coated with sauce bold in both spice and sweetness. It’s consistently good, but like any small-batch recipe, it varies just perceptibly from visit to visit. It was a comforting homecoming and fitting cap to my latest quest for porcine perfection.

Ohiopyle Redux

We raised our first toast to our own follow-through. Last August, Laura, Chris and I took an impromptu camping weekend at Ohiopyle State Park in Southwestern Pennsylvania and liked it well enough to promise a return trip. Last weekend, a mere fifty weeks from that first visit, we made good. The park is situated in Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands. Crossing in from Maryland, one remarks on the change from rolling, farm-quilted Appalachia to the greener, wetter, middle Allegheny Range. Strong rivers, like Ohiopyle's Youghiogheny (yawkigaynee) cut through rock giving the hills their amplitude, and when water meets resistant rock, rapids and waterfalls form. The scenery is a draw, plus the park lies in-between Ann Arbor and Silver Spring (though closer to the latter by about a 1:2 ratio), and we were hoping to get into the natural waterslides this year. Last year, it was way too cold. It's always something.

It's funny how quickly experience sets patterns in the subconscious mind. When June wanes, it feels like it's time to go to Michigan; the first change in the quality of sunlight in September lets a body know it's time for football. When August struck, already it felt right to head to Pennsylvania, and the pleasure of the first evening there was the pleasure of re-acquaintance. We walked through the campground trying to locate our old site, the park's ampitheater, the patch of sites where local weekenders park their pop-up campers and eight-person tents and dining canopies for weeks at a time. We got in the registration game late, so were stuck with the last walk-in site in the park. New knowledge: when your walk-in site is furthest back on the map, that means it's at the TOP of the mountain. That damn trail up got our legs warm many times a day. Mine might still be sore.

Firewood was plentiful and we had no immediate neighbor first night, so of course, we cleaned that site of wood too. First dinner included corn on the cob, steamed in the coals with just enough char in spots to give it flavor. Chris and I shared a sockeye salmon filet while the potatoes cooked. Steaks marinated in wine and herbs finished the meal, though by then we were too full to finish them and leftovers were cubed up for morning's breakfast.

Knowing we had a walk-in site, we opted to bring mixed drinks rather than beer, because, let's face it, it's hard to carry a hundred beers uphill. The first night we were drinking rum and Vitajuice, a juice so chocked with vitamins you're guaranteed not to wake up hungover. Still, pacing's tricky when drinking liquor. Heavy with food and rum, we stayed awake long enough to watch distant flashes of lightning close the starry hole above us, and went to bed when the rain started falling. All night, it hammered down. I had recently read on NOAA's website that 1 in 5000 people is struck by lightning every year—shitty odds if you ask me—and that a tent is no protection from a strike. Now, I have weathered plenty of storms in my tent, but this new information made me skittish and I counted after each thunderclap, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand… The heart of the storm drew ever nearer. When it struck right above us, thunder made the sound of a tree splitting almost simultaneous with its flash, and I made Laura run with me down that now-muddy mountain in a downpour to wait it out in the car. I may be getting a little soft.

Despite the storm, we got a breakfast fire on easily enough. Eager to put something in our stomachs, we began with the standard: Bob Evans Savory Sage. I folded mine into toast with Cabot Black Wax Extra Sharp Cheddar. Laura then began her steak and eggs project, searing leftover steak cubes in a pan. It was a delicious breakfast, and true, we've been perfecting our camping meat consumption over the years, but I don't eat that way at home, and all the walks uphill and log sawing you can do in a day doesn't burn off that many protein-and-saturated-fat calories. By the time we took our hike, my guts were punishing me. I remembered then that an older, and wiser, first breakfast is oatmeal and berries. Next time.

Our hike took us around the Ferncliff Peninsula, an appendix of land that juts out into the Youghiogheny and, as such, has a slightly different habitat that the rest of the Laurel Highlands. It's a bit wetter, of course, and apparently bird droppings have deposited tree and plant seeds there of species that grow in neighboring Maryland and West Virginia but are not typically found that far north. To the untrained eye, the habitat looked about the same as the "mainland": rhododendron forests, ferny meadows, tall hemlocks, mossiness. At the edge of the fast river, muddy from the night's long storm, we saw a sign warning hikers not to sit on the boulders as there were poisonous snakes about. On down the trail, we saw a little one swimming in a puddle. Other signage told us about the history of Ferncliff Peninsula a natural area and tourist attraction. When folks used to travel by rail, a local train station made Ohiopyle a tourist boomtown. We saw the overgrown foundation marking where a grand hotel once stood on the peninsula. Long before, much of the area was covered by a sea and islands teemed with tropical plant life. What looked like a tire-track in rock was an ancient fish fossil.

After our hike, we headed to the natural waterslides which had been too cold to get into last year. It was a steamy day, so we knew that wouldn't be the case. As we approached and heard the roaring water, we knew that it was not to be. Perhaps the wet spring is to blame, but already high water inundated with the long storm's rain made the chutes treacherous. A few brave kayakers went through, but they had helmets, wet suits, and from the look of it, a lot of experience. A plain old body would have surely been smashed. Still, upstream we found some calmer places to sit and cool down in the flux and beneath an overhang of rhododendrons that had strewn the rock path with blossoms.

God, we felt like a beer. We'd hiked all we cared to; we'd sat in the river; ahead of us lay another night of food and gin and in between, we all really wanted a beer. We went to the bar in the Ohiopyle Café, sidled up and got to talking with the barmaid. She put Ohiopyle's population at 56. She said the barracks where the seasonal (whitewater rafting) employees lived was quite the party place and there'd be an underwear drinking party that night. She recommended microbrews from the Troegs Brewery in Harrisburg, like Sunshine Pils and Troeganator Double Bock. The pils was strong and hoppy for a pilsener with a creamy head and the double bock was smooth as root beer at 8.2% ABV. I recommend both. Looking out the bar-door, I noticed the distant mountain growing less and less visible, the day ever darker. When the rain ripped down it brought hail with it, cherry-pit sized hail. What serendipity to be where we were in the bar and not at the top of our mountain.

When Saturday's storm cleared, we were given back a beautiful day. At the campground we finally found the ampitheater we'd enjoyed last year—not the new one with its fancy benches and electric hook-ups—the old one, adjacent to the new but let wild, built back when a lengthwise-split logs made perfectly good benches and a firepit, not a stage, was the focal point. For dinner, fire-steamed trout, spicy grilled chicken sandwiches with sharp cheddar and guacamole, yams, gin and tonics, and of course, lots of s'mores. For breakfast in the morning, superior bacon from Knight's in Ann Arbor, eggs and pancakes. I made blackberry pancakes with fresh-picked berries, and tried a bacon, egg and pancake sandwich. Yum! After breakfast, we made it down the hill in one trip (after all, we'd eaten half of what we brought up to the site). Chris's drive was much longer than ours; he was eager to get on the road and we parted.

What did I learn this trip, what did I take from it? I know I like beer while camping. I know I need grains, fruits, and vegetables to survive. And I realized that I've gotten soft, all these years of car-camping where most trips are also reunions and as such are marked by feasting and excessive celebration. When I tried to simplify (knowing it was a walk-in sight, I emptied non-essentials from the camping bin) I just wound up bitching about the stuff I wished I had brought to make things easier, or more delicious. Propane stove to make coffee in the rain. Salt, spices, brown sugar. Towels. There was a time early in my camping career when I got better and leaner at it, going from a big-ass tent and 10-lb, 2'' thick sleeping bags to terrific and small tents, and everything smaller, smarter, more useful. I fear I've slid in the opposite direction. I'm not sure yet whether in the future I'll settle a little guiltily for relative comforts and indulgences, or fight back toward simplification. My next camping trip will take me back into Pennsylvania to end the month of August, so I'll soon find out. I think the greatest lesson I took from this trip was: if it's a good thing, do it again.

November Interval: An Essay on Thanksgiving in the White Mountains

If you have ever considered camping in New Hampshire's White Mountains over Thanksgiving weekend, I say go for it. I say pick a campground in Crawford Notch, which is nestled directly south of the Presidential Range. Mount Washington, the range's centerpiece and the apex of the Northeast at 6,288 feet, rises bald and brown above its adjacent peaks; or it's suddenly white, given its notoriously quick-changing weather.

Don't try backpacking. Load up a vehicle with gear. There is no sense in going at it like an ascetic. No one else but you and your party will be around to impress with your ability to simplify. And it will likely be cold, so you'll need layers of clothes and your thickest sleeping bags. Pack ridiculous amounts of food--this is no time for granola and freeze-dried casserole. You are a mammal and it is winter. Your instincts will make you crave fat, meat, full-bodied beer. Besides, camping so far north in late November requires long-built affection for the place, and for the companions you'll bring along. It takes the kind of love you'd want to honor with a hearty feast.

Even Thoreau, living so deliberately at Walden, kept three chairs in his cabin: one for himself, "two for friendship, three for society." So bring a friend to your White Mountain Thanksgiving; make it a good friend because those New Hampshire nights get cold. Take another friend; of course, the third friend will want a sleeping-bag buddy too, so now you've got yourself some society. Let's say you're a society of four, best of friends, who share the notion that camping is one of life's deliberate pleasures.

When you have chosen your campground, gather great piles of firewood and kindling. Some carry an ax, but for my money, a folding handsaw is better. An ax is only good for splitting dry logs, and you rarely find those for free. There's satisfaction in finding your own dead wood, in sectioning it to burn, taking turns with the saw to chip-in and keep warm. You will find birch, which burns long, and evergreens, which burn bright. Whether the wood is split or wet, it will burn if you gather enough kindling. Accumulate heaps and heaps of the small stuff, more than you can imagine using; the small stuff keeps the big fuel burning fine.

Maybe you believe that you are the best fire-maker in your bunch. Maybe you think that a core of crumpled paper surrounded by a teepee of medium-width branches overlain with twigs makes the best foundation for a good campfire. Maybe you like the fire to burn your way, nice and hot with plenty of wood about to throw on for pure light. Well, you can't have your way all the time; you have to give your society their say. Sometimes someone else wants to start the fire. Sometimes someone else adjusts the logs in a manner with which you disagree. All you can do is sit back, drink your beer, and holler your second-guesses.

When the kindling and logs have burnt down to a deep bed of coals, keep it going. You'll need the coals for cooking. There are very few bears in the Whites and raccoons won't enter the firepit, so you can let your coals smouldering indefinitely and keep hot food handy.

Mornings, the first person who wakes should dress and emerge into frigid air, throw some kindling on the coals and break the ice that has formed on the water pots. Put two quarts of water into a kettle and place it directly over the fire; no need to wait for the wood to burn down entirely. When the water boils, take the kettle from the fire and stir in fresh ground coffee. Place the kettle amongst the coals to keep it warm, but don't let it boil up again. The grounds will settle to the bottom with the flecks of ash that have fallen in. The smell of coffee on winter air will coax your society from the naked comfort of their tents and zipper-joined sleeping bags.

The sun will be very white and low, its light attenuated, slicing through the trees as you make breakfast. You will want to cook bacon or sausage. Of sausage, I think there's no better choice than a savory sage blend imported from the Midwest where they know how to treat a pig, and if you are a savvy traveler, you will have purchased a few pounds in advance and stored it in your freezer for just such occasions. When the spicy pucks of sausage have achieved their crisp pan-caramelization, you crack and beat your eggs. You can't always find farm fresh eggs, and that's a shame, but even powdered eggs are better than none. Try to get real eggs in any case; if that's too tough for you, start worrying. After all, camping and feasting in winter is anything but easy and effortless.

On cheese however, you should not compromise, not with Vermont cheddar being churned and pressed in the state next door. That cheese is made with love you can taste, its milk drawn from blithe cows who graze in cheerful glades, and if you don't believe me, well, just go through Vermont and see for yourself. Choose the sharp cheddar; cut it into chunks with a use-dulled camping knife, the same knife that whittles walking sticks and opens cans.

Warm some hunks of bread on the fire pit's grate. If the pit doesn't have a grate, place stones amongst the coals and warm your bread on the stones. Cook the eggs. The sausage puck goes onto the bread first, then come the eggs, topped with a chunk of cheese and another layer bread to hold it all together. Give the cheese a minute to melt over the eggs while the sausage's savory oils permeate the bread. Take and eat the breakfast sandwich with uncommon hunger and gratitude; take and drink the smoky coffee with a splash of icy milk and a soul full of matinal joy.

And if you want to hike, you should do so, though you will not be able to reach the summits of mountains because the high granite is covered with ice, and the peaks have all been snowed on. Peaks aren't everything. As Melville wrote, "there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even the lowest swoop of the mountain is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." There are plenty of hikes in the gorges, high enough. One trail leads to Arethusa Falls, New Hampshire's highest falls at 200 feet. Another crosses the Appalachian Trail, then leads you in to Ripley Falls, a hundred foot cascade. The waters run down over pink and grey granite, coating the rocks and cliffs in ice, rushing down into other flumes or colleting in still pools. You'll be reluctant to leave these places, so you'll stay and look until you're certain they won't leave you.

When you're warm again, having returned to the fire for coffee or tea, you may want to share some reading with your society, get a sense of the place's history from books that are its archive. Perhaps you'll find a book about place names, and you'll learn about the Crawford family who settled the notch. If your enthusiasm and admiration for the Crawfords go untempered, your society may tease you. From then on, Ethan Allen Crawford may be known as your nineteenth century boyfriend.

Or perhaps you'll learn about the tragedy of the Willey Slide, where, in 1826, a mudslide pulled down the face of the mountain and the seven members of the Willey family. Samuel Willey left his reading glasses on the family bible, opened to Psalm 18, which says "the lord is my rock," and fled his house with his family, running straight into the mudslide. The slide split in two, sparing the Willey house where it stood on the mountainside. You might share with your society the Hawthorne story, "The Ambitious Guest," in which Hawthorne re-imagines the Willey Slide. It's a good campfire story, as are a few others in the collection which take place in New Hampshire, even if you never cared much for Hawthorne, thinking his moral imperatives heavy-handed. His New Hampshire stories may soften your opinion, and you'll give old Nathaniel another chance.

But maybe you'd prefer to read some poetry by New Hampshire resident Robert Frost, something like his Mountain Interval. Come to think of it, why not go over to his old, simple house. It's but a few miles up the road from your campsite. Walk around Robert Frost's yard, flip the flag up and down on his rusty mailbox and think awhile about those dark, deep woods that he considered one snowy evening. Think about the stoicism of Puritans in a hard land, about what it means to be their cultural descendants.

Or think instead about Frost's "Birches" while you walk back to the stream called Dry River, which lives in the birches that are white against November brown. Birch logs strung with icicles will cross the hymn-rippling stream, and all the round stones of the river bed will be blue and green and pink and mustard yellow, colors you never noticed before because there were bright leaves and flowers to look at and now there are none. The sun never climbs very high, so there beside the stream the smiling faces of your society, your most-beloved, will be cast chiaroscuro, and you may embrace each other for no reason at all. Or instead, you'll chicken-fight, knocking each other off logs as if all of you were kids again and the passage of time existed only to give you distinct and dear seasons. Then you'll think, as Frost did, "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

Of course, you don't need to open a book to remember "The Road Not Taken." Nor is it necessarily articulated that the reason behind trips like these is "knowing how way leads on to way," that changes come with each passing year, that your society will scatter. These White Mountains will not be your backyard forever. It is essential, then, this urge to celebrate the moment, the place, the present company.

So you should cook a Thanksgiving dinner for yourselves, right there in the fire pit. Don't hold back. Put the work into it. Bank up a thick bed of coals for the turkey. Put the bird in a covered pot with some water, some salt and spices, and set the pot right in the center of the coals. Dam some kindling around the pot's circumference; when it burns down, bank it all up again. Peel potatoes, wrap them in foil with sweet cream butter and slices of garlic. Open a can of corn and shove it into coals with tongs. Boil and mash a butternut squash, adding butter, brown sugar and a dash each of cinnamon and nutmeg. Heat sweet potatoes. Ladle some juice from the turkey pot and add starch to make gravy. Reserve a saucepan for some Stove-Top, best stuffing you can buy in a box. Let cranberries cool in the evening air. You're going to have to bring your pie already made, though. If there's a way to bake pie in a campfire, I don't know it yet.

When the food is all cooked, lay the feast across the picnic table. If you don't have a table, use logs. Put a little bit of everything on your plate. The hot food and complementary flavors may stimulate you to the point of tears. Try things in combination: turkey and potatoes, corn and squash, stuffing and sweet potatoes. Clear the palate with the tart smack of cranberries. When you've filled yourselves with so much American food, you'll rest again around the well-established, crackling fire. You will wonder what the animals are thinking when the aromatic spirits of Thanksgiving go weaving through the birches and up the slopes. You will think about all the families in houses down in the valleys below, around their tables, sanctifying the myth of our founding colonizers' fraternity with the first Americans, the people of this particular earth. And maybe you know it's in part a gluttonous lie; let it go. Be now. Be with your society, which is a family, too. Be transcendentally and pragmatically grateful.

You should have some strong beer on hand, a winter ale perhaps, and some warming liquor like brandy or even spiced rum. When the dishes are reasonably clean you should get down to drinking in earnest. It settles the stomach and invigorates the soul. Tell old stories over again, lest you forget them. Talk about the multitudes of stars so far from ambient light, about moose and whales, about all the roads not taken and the roads that lie ahead. And if you get silly and start to sing and dance, that's fine. There is no one else in the mountains to bother; you are the only human beings in the notch.

And if you tire of fire dancing, you can walk out to the highway and lie right down on the yellow line, staring into the celestial depths that lay beyond the black silhouettes of the mountains, and if you don't blink, the sky will draw closer and let you see it better. And even if a truck or two passes by, you will hear it miles before it reaches you. Maybe you and your society will hear it coming and you'll stand at the side of the road and moon the trucker as he pushes on by, and you'll laugh till it hurts, rechristening the notch White Ass Pass. But if the trucker gears down and rolls back in reverse, you yourself will probably run for the woods. Your society won't be surprised. They know you're a runner; you've always said so. But they also know you're a faller. So when you trip and your face hits the granite, it is you who will be shocked, and not necessarily your society.

Yes, if you want to camp in New Hampshire in late November, I say go for it. But be prepared, not only for the during part, but for the afterwards part too. Be prepared for the respect you'll get when you go back to work with granite wounds to the face, full of stories. Be prepared for each ensuing Thanksgiving, when you'll remember what a good time you had up there, back then. Because you won't be quite as happy cooped up in some urban apartment, the windows steamed from cooking, but not smoked. Nor will you be quite as happy all clean and dressed-up for some prix-fixe Thanksgiving brunch under tinkling chandeliers, which will only remind you of those birch-strung icicles. Go for it, I say, but be aware: it may ruin your sense of Thanksgiving gratitude for years.