The special delight of camping, as anyone knows who has tried it, is that life all at once becomes so simple away from the high-pressure world of telephones, time-tables, dinner engagements, and other necessary evils. That is the essence of outing pleasure. The fishing, the canoeing, the hunting, climbing, or what-not are really relegated to obscurity in comparison with this one great boon. When our physical system runs down, we take medicine; when our mental system gets out of gear, we crave a dose of the open, which means of simplicity.
Along the Deschutes, the "River of Falls." "It roars and rushes, in white-watered Cascades"
Copyright 1911 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
A canoe trip is simplicity personified. In the first place, you are launched into the wide world of out-of-doors with your entire household, from dining table to bed, concentrated in a couple of bundles that repose amidships in the craft which is the beginning and the end of your transportation possibilities. The rest is "up to you." If you would get somewhere, it is necessary to paddle, always exercising due diligence to keep the craft right side up and escape fatal collisions with vexatious rocks and snags. In that department—locomotion—there is just enough active responsibility to keep it thoroughly worth while, and more than enough relaxation, as the current carries the canoe along with only now and then a guiding dip of the paddle, to make it all a most pleasurable loaf.
Every stopping place was a new experience, and, it should be said, each seemed even more beautiful than its predecessor.
"There's a bully place. See—there under the big pine."
With a stroke or two of the paddles the Long Green arrived gently at the bank beneath that pine, and out would come the box of grub, the gunny sack of pots and frying pans, and the rolls of bedding. Then the canoe was drawn from the water, and, inverted, pressed into double service as a table and a rain shelter, in case of need. Our waterproof sleeping-bags were supposed to do as much for us, and on two occasions showers dampened our slumbers, if not our spirits.
The important work of camping, which is not work at all, but play, is in the commissary department. It has four stages: lighting the fire, cooking, eating, and cleaning up; the third is, by all odds, the most popular.
Concerning fire making, volumes have been written. It is quite possible to learn from these incendiary publications exactly how to prepare the proper, perfect kind of a fire under any and all circumstances. Study alone is required to master the art—on paper! But in reality, making a quick and satisfactory camp-fire, like creating frying-pan bread, is a subtle attainment that can be mastered only by practice. No two people agree; it is easier to start a dispute over the details of a camp-fire than about anything imaginable, not even excepting the "best trout fly made"—and that, every fisherman knows, is a matter of piscatorial preference that has disrupted humanity since the days of Izaak Walton.
Camp cooking is another art. There, again, place not all thy faith in books, for they are deceivers when it comes to a bit of bacon, a frying pan, some corn-meal and flour, and a pinch of baking powder. The only satisfactory rule is to have as few ingredients as possible and to have plenty of them. Flour, corn-meal, bacon, dried apples, butter, hardtack, sugar, salt, coffee, baking powder, beans—those form the essential foundation. There is an endless list of edibles that may be added, which run the gastronomic gamut from molasses to canned corn. But the way to learn real camp cooking, and by all odds the best procedure for happiness in transportation, is to take a small variety and keep each article in a cloth bag, which insures few troublesome packages and no disastrous leaks.