In Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 short story “Big Two-Hearted River,” the protagonist, Nick, sets up camp after a long hike with a heavy pack that makes him desperately hungry. So before he goes fishing, he cooks a reckless meal: he mixes a can of pork and beans with a can of spaghetti and slathers the whole mess with ketchup. He says to himself, “I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it,” something every backpacker who’s ever lugged cans of food miles into the woods has thought.
Sound familiar? It does to me, right down to the beans and spaghetti with ketchup that would taste better than you think if you were hungry enough. That story was published thirty years before my own first clumsy attempts at childhood fishing and camping, but we were still carrying the same hand-me-down wood-framed canvas packs that weighed as much empty as the later aluminum and nylon jobs would full, not to mention canvas tents with oak poles and steel pegs, metal canteens, cast-iron frying pans, and food in cans weighing just short of a pound each. I remember the midwestern woods and lakes that had to pass as wilderness until we got older. I also remember staggering under brutal loads with unpadded pack straps chewing on my collarbones like angry raccoons. If I hadn’t thought that was fun, my course through life might have been different.
Being your own pack animal whets your appetite nicely, so early on I developed a taste for the high-calorie, high-fat canned goods that are now frowned upon by nutritionists—and as the great man said, I felt I deserved it because I’d carried it on my back. (Incidentally, many of the health-food bullies I’ve met have never hauled anything heavier than a roller bag, and then only from the lobby to the curb.)
Of course, as a child in the 1950s I knew nothing about nutrition; all I knew was what stuck to your ribs, as they used to say. Years later I encountered a food writer who said that if you’re eating poorly, you’re probably also living poorly. That sounded right in theory, but by then I associated eating poorly with the good life, although I did notice that this stuff tasted a lot better cooked over an open fire after a long, strenuous day than it did at the kitchen table.
Didn’t our mothers teach us better? Not really, but then, the homegrown, made-from-scratch nostalgia we engage in now was just antique drudgery to them, so when instant mashed potatoes, frozen fish sticks, and TV dinners arrived, they jumped on board, bringing Dad and the kids along for the ride. If you wanted what we’d now call authentic food, you’d have to ride your bike over to Grandma’s house.
During my brief career as a Boy Scout I became partial to a certain brand of canned beef stew, with its meat and vegetables packed in glutinous, freakishly orange grease. I didn’t last long as a Scout. The regimentation chafed, and I thought I was spending too much time tying knots in church basements and not enough time out in the woods. I finally drifted away, taking with me a lifelong aversion to meetings and a taste for that canned stew that my friends and I were still eating in camp when I turned sixty. We often cooked it right in the can to avoid dirtying an extra pot, but, sadly, you can’t do that anymore, because now too many cans come lined with the kind of plastic that gives off carcinogenic gases when it’s heated. No wonder we get so sentimental about the old days.
It was only last fall, camping with the old gang on a favorite river in western Colorado, that I began to sense the end of the honeymoon with this beef stew. I’d brought along the largest available can of the stuff (twenty-four ounces) and I offered it up for dinner every night, but the boys always voted it down in favor of something else. So when I broke camp one morning a day ahead of the others, I handed the can to Mike.
“I’ll just leave this with you guys,” I said.
“Uh, sure, okay . . . ,” he replied without enthusiasm.
This is the same guy who once volunteered to bring the food for a weeklong fishing trip and showed up with nothing but a cooked ham, three loaves of bread, and a pound of coffee.
Most of my early camps were simple by choice as well as necessity. My friends and I claimed it was for the sake of traveling light, but the fact is none of us could afford much in the way of gear anyway. We sat on the ground, slept cold, and got wet, and our meals ran to cheap, just-add-water stuff like dried soup, instant rice, and biscuits made with creek water and the ever-present box of Bisquick. Dehydrated meals for backpackers were available then, but although they’ve since improved, the early versions were hideously expensive and no better than Korean War–surplus C-rations.
And of course, we ate fish, or at least planned to, and for a while my fly-fishing gear included a secret matchbox containing an assortment of bait hooks and sinkers. I did consider myself to be a fly-fishing purist, but I also understood that while sport was a matter of style, collecting protein was an entirely practical business. Worms and grubs for bait could often be dug on-site, and later in the season there’d be grasshoppers. They were hard to catch, but if you got out early enough in the morning while they were still stiff from the cold, you could pick them off the weed stems like berries.
The ideal of rustic self-sufficiency was big then. Euell Gibbons was writing about wild edibles, Bradford Angier published books like How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and both left the impression that a smart outdoorsman could walk into wild country with nothing but a knife and a book of matches and gain five pounds. It was a nice thought, but even if you knew what you were doing—and few of us did—a balanced diet wasn’t easy to forage in the Rocky Mountains.
Sometime in the 1970s, three of us backpacked into a high mountain valley filled with beaver ponds, planning to go light and live off the land. We ate all the trout we could catch, backed up with black coffee and carefully rationed handfuls from the one small bag of granola we’d brought. Within forty-eight hours we were suffering from ketosis, also known as protein starvation. That’s where a lack of carbohydrates in your diet (exacerbated by exercise) causes your body to begin consuming itself, starting with stored fat and eventually moving on to the muscles and vital organs. The sensation is one of constant, ferocious hunger that not even a dozen beaver ponds filled with nine-inch brook trout can satisfy.
We stuck it out for four days before hiking out to the car and driving straight to the nearest truck stop. We had pancakes, sausage, and eggs, followed by cheeseburgers and fries. The waitress eyed us suspiciously. We looked a little rough, and she wondered if we had any money to pay for all that food.
For that matter, there were a few fall fishing trips on which I packed my father’s old Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver, hoping to bag a stray blue grouse that I would slow-roast over an open fire. But then when the chance came, I emptied all nine shots at the bird without ruffling a feather. It was at that moment that I realized this useless hog leg weighed more than a can of Spam, and that the Spam, though less romantic, was a sure thing.
For some outdoor types, a camp is seen as the open-air equivalent of a good hotel, complete with sumptuous, leisurely meals that can take hours to rustle up. For many fishermen, a camp is simply cheaper than a room and closer to the fishing, and the less time spent fussing with food the better.
We all know stories of the haphazard eating habits of fishermen, like the giant submarine sandwich from the last town that’s made to last for days while the bread gets hard, the mayonnaise goes skunky, and the meat turns a metallic green around the edges. And a friend claims that he once fried a brace of trout in a pan greased with fly floatant because he didn’t have any oil or bacon drippings. He said it wasn’t that bad, but he wouldn’t make a habit of it.
A fish camp that’s pitched within sight of the pickup—as virtually all of mine are now—allows for luxuries like lawn chairs, two-burner camp stoves, and ample groceries stored in the primitive refrigeration of a cooler, but the laws of physics still apply. Halfway through a warm fall steelhead trip to the Salmon River in Idaho a few years ago, my block of ice melted, my food spoiled, and I had to drive forty miles round-trip to the nearest store for fresh supplies. I missed half a day of fishing, but what really stung was the knowledge that a real steelheader would have just chewed some lichen off a rock and kept casting.
Few of my camp food memories actually rise to the level of horror stories. In fact, I don’t have that many camp food memories. In most cases, I recall the fishing and assume I must have eaten something, because I’d have remembered if I hadn’t. Otherwise, it’s mostly a matter of breakfasts thrown together carelessly (or skipped altogether because I was in a rush to hit the water) and dinners when I was too tired to do anything but plop a cold wiener in a dry bun and crawl into the sleeping bag. And late in some trips when supplies were running low, there were some improvised burritos that were pretty marginal, but still better than nothing. (In the context of camp cooking, the term “burrito” is taken to mean anything vaguely edible wrapped in a tortilla.)
But then some culinary crimes have risen to the level of tradition, like a friend’s signature “sunny-side-up” eggs that are greasy and raw on one side and so burned on the other you have to cut them with a knife. The only time I complained, he said, “Well, you can always go to the café across the street. What? There’s no café across the street? Well then maybe you should just eat your eggs and shut the hell up.”
For some reason, breakfast is the downfall of many camp cooks. On an Atlantic salmon trip to the coast of Labrador, our bush pilot volunteered to make breakfast one morning while we got our gear together and loaded the canoe. He started out frying a pan full of eggs, but broke too many yolks when he turned them and decided to imperfectly scramble them instead. They ended up looking like an omelet designed by a committee. While he was distracted by the egg problem, the bacon and the toast both burned black. When he served this mess he said, in his picturesque French-Canadian accent, “Remember, I am a better pilot than I am a cook.” One member of the party muttered, “God, let’s hope.”
Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t a little posturing in the way some fishermen eat: some rebellious bluster left over from adolescence on the order of “Who needs Mom’s home cookin’ anyway?” Or maybe it’s a remnant of the old he-man mystique whereby men on their own can manage bacon, beans, and coffee, but otherwise don’t cook and eventually have to get married to avoid starvation. A friend once wrote in an essay that I was a good camp cook. I was flattered, but I think all he meant was that I was willing to do it. There’s an old joke about a fishing camp where the rule is that anyone who complains about the food has to do the cooking himself. One night a guy looks at his plate and says, “This tastes like shit—but it’s good.”
Or maybe it’s just that we’re all more domesticated than we’d like to think, and sometimes the sudden freedom of a fishing trip makes us as giddy as dogs that have slipped their leashes and are free to eat or roll in anything they can find. For that matter, fresh air, fishing, and exercise generate the kind of hunger that resembles lust, so cold, three-day-old pizza with cardboard stuck to the crust can seem like a feast in the same way that the girls really do get prettier at closing time.
This is all part of the extreme-sport stance where the goal isn’t so much to catch some fish as to test the outer limits of your compulsion. So you fish till you’re dazed from exhaustion and faint from hunger, thinking that you’re straining the last ounce of value out of a trip. It’s an approach that makes intuitive sense, and we’ve all done it, but in fact you’ll last longer and fish better if you hit a stride you can maintain and stop now and then to take some nourishment. It’s the greenhorn who pushes too hard and hits the wall halfway through a trip, while the old hands fish on at a slower but inexorable pace.
The same goes for drinking. My friends and I—and one friend in particular—used to roll up our sleeves and get shamefully hammered in camp. So much so that once I passed out while blowing on a stubborn campfire and singed off half my beard. I guess it was fun, but I got tired of greeting beautiful morning hatches with a hangover, the shakes, and an empty stomach because I couldn’t keep food down. What seemed like morning mist on the river was actually an internal fog that wouldn’t burn off till noon, by which time the trout would have stopped rising.
But over the long haul, the head-banging resolved itself into something more sustainable. If nothing else, too much booze and junk food make you feel bad, either right then or eventually. In the short run, this can result in the kind of explosive emergencies that explain the roll of toilet paper stashed in almost everyone’s fishing kit. And in the long run, well, who knows? Some fare better than others, but the body’s miraculous ability to recover has its limits. Mickey Mantle said: “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
Part of this is cultural. We Americans do many things well, but feeding ourselves isn’t one of them. Much of our food is poisoned by refined sugar, preservatives, and saturated fats, but health-food snobs are sanctimonious enough to make you long for fast food anyway. We have an obesity rate of nearly 35 percent, while at the same time sixteen million children don’t have enough to eat. Meanwhile, government bureaucrats have replaced the word “hunger” with the phrase “food insecurity” in official publications. For the record, food insecurity is worrying that your soufflé will fall; hunger is something else entirely.
But back to camping, where eating well can still be quick and simple as long as you pay minimal attention to ingredients. I think it was Michael Pollan who said, “Even bread and butter can be a great meal if it’s really good bread and really good butter.” There’s no need to get elaborate about it. In fact, camp cooking is best when it’s straightforward and unpretentious. Like fly-fishing itself, the essential simplicity of it can easily be smothered under too much equipment and technique.
Once I was in camp with two friends who are good all-around sportsmen and pretty serious foodies. We stopped at a fancy market on the way to the river, where they stocked up on all kinds of fresh, organic, artisanal goodies, and in camp they insisted on doing the cooking because they really were good at it. It naturally fell to me to do the dishes, and there were a lot more of them than I’m used to, including utensils you rarely see in camp, like egg coddlers and garlic presses. (For that matter, my share of the groceries was five times what I usually pay for camp provisions.) I remember in a general way that the food was fabulous, but, oddly, I can’t recall a single meal. It’s possible that a gourmet spread is wasted on someone who’s hungry enough to see anything edible as nothing more than fuel.
At the other end of the scale were the elk tenderloins I brought frozen from home and cooked three days into a trip on the bank of a cutthroat trout stream in Wyoming. I hovered like a mother hen and got them perfectly medium rare on a portable wire grill over an open fire and served them with pork and beans. Quick, simple, and really good. On any fishing trip there can be a time and place for a celebratory meal—and sometimes the time is determined by when the meat will go bad.
It’s getting rare in these days of catch-and-release fishing, but in some places the great tradition of the shore lunch still survives. This is when you take a long-enough break at noon to build a fire and grill fish fresh from the water where they were caught, along with canned beans or fried potatoes and, if you want to get fancy, biscuits baked in a Dutch oven. This usually happens in far-flung regions that are so lousy with fish that being able to keep a few for lunch is a foregone conclusion. Closer to home, some fishermen still carry small, light frying pans in their daypacks, and one friend of mine has a dozen wire grills stashed in isolated places he likes to fish, although he usually also carries crackers and a can of sardines for slow days.
Sometimes when I’m out fishing I’ll stumble on someone’s old lunch spot. There’ll be a grown-over fire ring with disintegrating charcoal and, somewhere nearby, a pile of old steel cans that have rusted to what look like rinds of reddish-brown lace. Usually these are in a spot that’s shaded by trees and has a nice view of the water. Technically, this amounts to litter, but I’ve never minded.
I’ve also had some great food on guided trips where, as the pros say, the weather, the fishing, and the skill of the clients are all up for grabs, but meals are the one thing the guide can control.
There was a certain hot lunch on a river in Oregon that stands out. It was a raw, rainy day in February, with that humid, bone-deep chill you get in the Pacific Northwest. On the first run we fished right at dawn, a seam in my seven-year-old waders suffered a catastrophic failure and I went through the morning with my left leg wet to the crotch. At noon, our guide put my partner and me on a good-looking run, found a spot out of the rain, and grilled a couple of herb-marinated chickens on a hibachi. I was uncomfortably cold, but I think I was still this side of hypothermic, although it’s hard to be sure because judgment is among the first things to go. Maybe they were organic, free-range chickens, I don’t know, but they were hot and delicious and may have saved my life.
There was a wonderful lunch of pasties out in an open boat on Lake Superior. A pasty sounds like something a stripper would wear, but it’s actually a meat, rutabaga, potato, and onion–filled pie common in northern Michigan. They’re best when served hot, but even at ambient summer temperatures—and when you’re really hungry—they’re the blue-collar equivalent of beef Wellington.
I seem to remember a fancy shore lunch on the Eagle River in Colorado that began with paté on thin, fragile crackers, but that one is so vague I can’t swear it isn’t a product of my imagination. I mean, who do I know who’d serve such a thing?
And there was a chilly morning in camp on the Deschutes River in Oregon when I was up before dawn for a few hours of swinging with a spey rod, during which I watched the sun rise over volcanic cliffs and landed two steelhead. Then I headed back to camp with my stomach growling and walked straight into the unmistakable aromas of bacon, pancakes, and coffee. If you look up “happiness” in a dictionary, you’ll see a picture of me sitting down to that breakfast.