With a few planks to saw up into lengths, and a few white birch saplings, a most attractive camp dinner table can be made. Over this a piece of white oilcloth should be laid and kept clean by the use of a little sapolio. It is best not to buy an expensive stove for the cabin. A second-hand kitchen range, which can be purchased for a few dollars, will do quite well for the cooking cabin or shack, and an open Franklin stove for the living cabin. If one is going to camp in tents and wants a stove in one of them, it will be necessary to buy a regular tent stove. Anything else would not be safe.
As far as actual furniture is concerned, except for camp stools or benches and camp chairs, if you wish to be very elegant, the camp is now furnished. But there are still to be considered the necessary utensils for cooking and other purposes. I will enumerate them again just as they occur to me, and not necessarily in the order of their importance: kerosene oil can, molasses jug, pails, a tin baker, a teapot, tin and earthen dishes, tin and earthen cups, basins for washing, pans for baking and for milk, dishpans, dishmop, double boiler, broiler, knives, forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, mixing spoons, pepper box, salt shaker, nutmeg grater, flour sifter, can opener, frying pans—one with a long handle for use in cooking over open fires—butcher knife, bread knife, lantern, bucket, egg beater, potato masher, rolling pin, axe, hatchet, nails, hammer, toilet paper, woolen blankets, rubber blankets, crash for dish towels, yellow soap, some wire, twine, tacks, and a small fireless cooker if you know how to use one. A good fireless cooker can be built on the premises.
Possessed of these articles, any one who knows anything about the woods can be most comfortable. They can, of course, be added to indefinitely. One may make camp life as expensive and complicated as one pleases. But to do that seems a pity, for it is against the very good and spirit of the wilderness life. The wood life and all its new and invigorating experience should take us back to nature. It is for that we go into the wilderness and not to bring with us the luxuries of civilization. Part of the wholesomeness of camp life lies in learning to do without, in the fine simplicity which we are obliged to practice there. Common sense is the law of the wilderness life, and let us be sure that we follow that law.
CHAPTER X
THE POCKETBOOK
One of the objects of some girls on their camping expeditions is to keep the trip from becoming too expensive. The maximum of value must be got from the minimum of pence. And I think that is as it should be, for, with economy, the life is kept nearer a simple ideal, is made more active and more wholesome. All sorts and conditions of camping have been my lot, the five-dollar-a-day camping in a log cabin (?) equipped with running water and a porcelain tub, and the kind of camping one does under a fly with the rain and sunshine and wind driving in at their pleasure. Although I do not advise the latter as far as health results are concerned, given that the party is in fair condition they will be none the worse for the experiment.
Camping for a party of four or five should usually cost something between eight dollars and eighteen dollars apiece per week. This rate includes a guide and a good deal of service, a rowboat, a canoe, and no care about food. But the longer I camp the more I am of the opinion that the simpler and more independent the life is, the greater health and pleasure it will bring. It has been said about camping, “Much for little: much health, much good fellowship and good temper, much enjoyment of beauty—and all for little money and, rightly judged, for no trouble at all.”
“TANALITE” WATERPROOF
WALL TENT.