Some years ago, on a camping trip in the pine woods of northern Michigan, my friend Don brought along a copy of an outdoor cookbook that appeared on the best-seller lists at the time. This book contained many ingenious and easy-sounding recipes; one that Don especially wanted to try was called Breakfast in a Paper Bag. According to this recipe, you could take a small paper lunch sack, put strips of bacon in the bottom, break an egg into the sack on top of the bacon, fold down the top of the sack, push a stick through the fold, hold the sack over hot coals, and cook the bacon and egg in the sack in about ten minutes.
I watched as Don followed the directions exactly. Both he and I remarked that we would naturally have thought the sack would burn; the recipe, however, declared, “Grease will coat the bottom of the bag as it cooks.” Somehow we both took this to mean that the grease, counterintuitively, actually made
the bag less likely to burn. Marveling at the “who would have guessed” magic of it, we picked a good spot in the hot coals of our campfire, and Don held the sack above them. We watched. In a second and a half, the bag burst into leaping flames. Don was yelling for help, waving the bag around trying to extinguish it, scattering egg yolk and smoldering strips of bacon and flaming paper into the combustible pines while people at adjoining campfires stared in horror and wondered what they should do.
The wild figures that the burning breakfast described in midair as Don waved the stick, the look of outraged, imbecile shock reflected on our faces—those are images that stay with me. I replay the incident often in my mind. It is like a parable. Because a book told us to, we attempted to use greased paper as a frying pan on an open fire. For all I know, the trick is possible if you do it just so; we never repeated the experiment. But to me the incident illustrates a larger truth about our species when it ventures out-of-doors. We go forth in abundant ignorance, near-blind with fantasy, witlessly trusting words on a page or a tip a guy we’d never met before gave us at a sporting-goods counter in a giant discount store. About half the time, the faith that leads us into the outdoors is based on advice that is half-baked, made up, hypothetical, uninformed, spurious, or deliberately, heedlessly bad.
Greenland, for example, did not turn out to be very green, Viking hype to the contrary. Despite what a Pawnee or Wichita Indian told the Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, there were no cities of gold in western Kansas, no canoes with oarlocks made of gold, no tree branches hung with little gold bells that soothed the king (also nonexistent) during his afternoon nap; a summer’s march on the Great Plains in piping-hot armor presumably bore these truths upon
the would-be conquistador in an unforgettable way. Lewis and Clark found no elephants on their journey, though President Jefferson, believing reports from the frontier, had said they should be on the lookout for them. And then there was Lansford W. Hastings, the adventurer and promoter of Sacramento, purveyor of some of the worst advice of all time. He told the prospective wagon-train emigrants to California that he had discovered a shortcut (modestly named the Hastings Cutoff) that reduced travel time by many days. Yes, it did cross a few extra deserts and some unusually high mountain ranges; the unfortunate Donner Party read Hastings’s book, followed his route, and famously came to its grisly end below the narrow Sierra pass that now bears its name. According to local legend, the air in the Utah foothills is still blue from the curses that emigrants heaped on Lansford W. Hastings along the way.
People will tell you just any damn thing. I have found this to be especially so in establishments called Pappy’s, Cappy’s, Pop’s, or Dad’s. The wizened, senior quality of the names seems to give the people who work in such places a license to browbeat customers and pass on whatever opinionated misinformation they please. When I go through the door of a Pappy’s or Cappy’s—usually it’s a fishing-tackle shop, a general store, or a bar—usually there’s a fat older guy sitting behind the counter with his T-shirt up over his stomach and his navel peeking out. That will be Pappy, or Cappy. Sometimes it’s both. Pappy looks at me without looking at me and remarks to Cappy that the gear I’ve got on is too light for the country at this time of year, and Cappy agrees, crustily; then I
ask a touristy, greenhorn question, and we’re off. Cappy, backed by Pappy, says the rig I’m driving won’t make it up that Forest Service road, and I’m headed in the wrong direction anyhow, and the best place to camp isn’t where I’m going but far in the other direction, up top of Corkscrew Butte, which is closed now, as is well known.
What’s worse is that I crumble in this situation, every time. I have taken more wrong advice, have bought more unnecessary maps, trout flies, water filtration devices, and assorted paraphernalia from Pappys and Cappys with their navels showing than I like to think about. Some essential element left out of my psychic immune system causes me always to defer to these guys and believe what they say. And while the Lansford W. Hastings type of bad advice tells people they can do things they really can’t, the Cappy-Pappy type of advice is generally the opposite. Cappy and Pappy have been sitting around their failing store for so long that they are now convinced you’re a fool for trying to do anything at all.
Complicating matters still further is Happy. She used to be married to Cappy but is now married to Pappy, or vice versa. Happy has missing teeth and a freestyle hairdo, and she hangs out in the back of the store listening in and irritatedly yelling statements that contradict most of what Pappy and Cappy say. The effect is to send you out the door as confused as it is possible to be. What’s different about Happy, however, is that eventually she will tell you the truth. When you return your rented bicycle or rowboat in the evening, Pappy and Cappy are packed away in glycolene somewhere and Happy is waiting for you in the twilight, swatting mosquitoes and snapping the elastic band of her trousers against her side. You have found no berries, seen no birds, caught no fish; and Happy will tell you that the birds were right in front of the house all
afternoon, the best berry bushes are behind the snow-machine shed, and she herself just caught fifty fish right off the dock. She will even show you her full stringer, cackling, “You gotta know the right place to go!”
Of course, people usually keep their best advice to themselves. They’d be crazy not to, what with all the crowds tramping around outdoors nowadays. I can understand such caution, in principle; but I consider it stingy and mean when it is applied to me. There’s a certain facial expression people often have when they are withholding the one key piece of information I really need. They smile broadly with lips shut tight as a Mason jar, and a cheery blankness fills their eyes. This expression irks me to no end. Misleading blather I can put up with, and even enjoy if it’s preposterous enough; but smug, determined silence is a posted sign, a locked gate, an unlisted phone. Also, I think it’s the real message behind today’s deluge of information-age outdoor advice, most of which seems to be about crampons, rebreathers, and synthetic sleeping bag fill. What you wanted to know does not appear. Especially in the more desirable destinations outdoors, withheld advice is the most common kind.
I craved good advice one summer when I fished a little-known Midwestern river full of brown trout. Every few days I went to the local fly-fishing store and asked the guys who worked there where in the river the really big fish I had heard about might be. The guys were friendly, and more than willing to sell me stuff, but when I asked that question I met the Mason-jar expression I’ve described. I tried being winsome; I portrayed myself as fishless and pitiable, told jokes, drank coffee,
hung around. On the subject of vital interest, nobody offered word one.
I halfway gave up and began driving the back roads aimlessly. Then, just at sunset one evening, I suddenly came upon a dozen or more cars and pickups parked in the high grass along a road I’d never been on before. I pulled over, got out, and crashed through the brush to investigate. There, in a marshy lowland, was a section of river I had never tried, with insects popping on its surface and monster brown trout slurping them down and fly rods swishing like scythes in the summer air. Among the intent anglers along the bank I recognized the fishing-store owner’s son, one of the Mason-jar-smiling regulars. The experience taught me an important outdoor fact: Regardless of what the people who know tell you or don’t tell you, an off-road gathering of parked cars doesn’t lie.
In case you’re wondering, this particular good fishing spot was on the Pigeon River near the town of Vanderbilt, Michigan, upstream from the dam. It’s been years since I fished there, so I can’t vouch for the up-to-dateness of my information. But unlike smarter outdoorsmen, I am happy to pass along whatever I can, because I myself am now gabby and free with advice to an embarrassing degree. I noticed the change as I got older; I hit my mid-forties, and from nowhere endless, windy sentences of questionable advice began coming out of me. An old-guy voice takes on its own momentum, and I seem unable to stop it even when I have no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes when strangers ask me for directions on a hiking trail or just around town, I give detailed wrong answers off the top of my head rather than admit I don’t know. When my hearers are out of sight, my reason returns and I realize what I’ve done. Then I make myself scarce, for fear that they will discover my ridiculousness and come back in a rage looking for me.
Outdoor magazines I read as a child featured authoritative fellows in plaid shirts and broad-brimmed hats who offered sensible tips about how to find water in the desert by cutting open cacti, how to make bread from cattail roots, or how to predict the weather by the thickness of the walls of muskrat dens. I wish I had down-to-earth wisdom like that to impart, but when I search my knowledge, all that comes to mind is advice that would cause me to run and hide after I gave it. The one piece of real advice that I do have is not outdoor advice, strictly speaking; I think, however, that its soundness makes up for that drawback. It is true virtually every time, in all lands and cultures. I offer it as the one completely trustworthy piece of advice I know, and it is this: Never marry a man whose nickname is “The Killer.”
Other than that, you’re on your own.
(1999)