It is less than forty-eight hours since the cross-pole was laid; and, using a little common sense woodcraft, the camp has already attained to a systematic no-system of rest, freedom and idleness. Every man is free to "loaf, and invite his soul." There is good trouting within an hour's walk for those who choose, and there is some interest, with a little exercise, in cooking and cutting night wood, slicking up, etc. But the whole party is stricken with "camp-fever," "Indian laziness," the dolce far niente. It is over and around every man, enveloping him as with a roseate blanket from the Castle of Indolence. It is the perfect summer camp.
And it is no myth; but a literal resumé of a five days' outing at Poplar Spring, on Marsh Creek, in Pennsylvania. Alas, for the beautiful valley, that once afforded the finest camping grounds I have ever known.
Never any more
Can it be
Unto me (or anybody else)
As before.
A huge tannery, six miles above Poplar Spring, poisons and blackens the stream with chemicals, bark and ooze. The land has been brought into market, and every acre eagerly bought up by actual settlers. The once fine covers and thickets are converted into fields thickly dotted with blackened stumps. And, to crown the desolation, heavy laden trains of "The Pine Creek and Jersey Shore R.R." go thundering almost hourly over the very spot where stood our camp by Poplar Spring.
Of course, this is progress; but, whether backward or forward, had better be decided sixty years hence. And, just what has happened to the obscure valley of Marsh Creek, is happening today, on a larger scale, all over the land. It is the same old story of grab and greed. Let us go on the "make" today, and "whack up" tomorrow; cheating each other as villainously as we may, and posterity be damned. "What's all the w-u-u-rld to a man when his wife is a widdy?"
This is the moral: From Maine to Montana; from the Adirondacks to Alaska; from the Yosemite to the Yellowstone, the trout-hog, the deer-wolf, the netter, the skin-hunter, each and all have it their own way; and the law is a farce—only to be enforced where the game has vanished forever. Perhaps the man-child is born who will live to write the moral of all this—when it is too late.
CHAPTER VII More Hints On Cooking, With Some Simple Receipts—Bread, Potatoes, Soups, Stews, Beans, Fish, Meat, Venison
We may live without friends, we may live without books,
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
IT is probably true that nothing connected with outdoor life in camp is so badly botched as the cooking. It is not through any lack of the raw material, which may be had of excellent quality in any country village. It is not from lack of intelligence or education, for the men you meet in the woods, as outers or sportsmen, are rather over than under the average in these respects. Perhaps it is because it has been dinned into our ears from early childhood, that an appetite, a healthy longing for something good to eat, a tickling of the palate with wholesome, appetizing food, is beneath the attention of an aesthetic, intellectual man. Forgetting that the entire man, mental and physical, depends on proper aliment and the healthy assimilation thereof; and that a thin, dyspeptic man can no more keep up in the struggle of life, than the lightning express can make connections, drawn by a worn out locomotive.
I have never been able to get much help from cook-books, or the scores of recipes published in various works on outdoor span. Take, for example, Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing. He has more than seventy recipes for cooking fish, over forty of which contain terms or names in French. I dare say they are good—for a first-class hotel. I neither cook nor converse in French and I have come to know that the plainest cooking is the best, so that it be well done and wholesome. In making up the rations for camping out, the first thing usually attended to is bread. And if this be light, well-made bread, enough may be taken along to last four or five days and this may be eked out with Boston crackers, or the best hardtack, for a couple or three days more, without the least hardship. Also, there are few camps in which some one is not going out to the clearings every few days for mail, small stores, etc. and a supply of bread can be arranged for, with less trouble than it can be made. There are times however, when this is not feasible, and there are men who prefer warm bread all the time. In this case the usual resort, from Maine to Alaska, is the universal flapjack. I do not like it; I seldom make it; it is not good. But it may be eaten, with maple syrup or sugar and butter. I prefer a plain water Johnnycake, made as follows (supposing your tins are something like those described in Chapter II): Put a little more than a pint of water in your kettle and bring it to a sharp boil, adding a small teaspoon full of salt and two of sugar. Stir in slowly enough good corn meal to make a rather stiff mush, let it cook a few minutes and set it off the fire; then grease your largest tin dish and put the mush in it, smoothing it on top. Set the dish on the outdoor range described in the previous chapter, with a lively bed of coal beneath—but no blaze. Invert the second sized tin over the cake and cover the dish with bright live coals, that bottom and top may bake evenly and give it from thirty-five to forty minutes for baking. It makes wholesome, palatable bread, which gains on the taste with use.