Where’s Dinner?
Ed always comes up with new gadgets to bring on canoe trips.
Last August he trotted out his latest invention: Instant fire.
He made it out of an old wire milk crate filled with a few small hardwood logs, kindling, fire starter sticks and a battery-powered igniter.
Ed invented instant fire to make lunch breaks less time-consuming. In theory, all we had to do was pull off the river, set the wire crate upside down on the ground, light it and grill our food on the bottom of the crate.
We'll never know whether it would have worked because the ignition mechanism was inadvertently triggered by an errant cast. It must have been a hair trigger, because I was only using a number eight hook baited with a wax worm.
The worm was the first casualty of Ed's instant inferno.
His duffel bag was the second.
We managed to douse the fire before Ed lost any more gear. The hard part was righting his canoe and getting the water out. It would have been easier if we weren't preoccupied fending him off with our paddles.
By the time we got Ed calmed down and his canoe squared away, we were totally exhausted. We barely had enough energy left to eat. Ed's instant fire sure would have come in handy.
We settled for cellophane packages of cheese 'n' cracker crumbs that Joe found in the bottom of his duffel bag. It wasn't much, but it tided us over until our afternoon floating buffet.
This is a standard feature of our canoe camping trips. One boat is designated the buffet barge, generally the canoe belonging to the steadiest paddler. We place a tray on top of the cooler and heap on our own version of hors d'oeuvres. (Which is French for “table scraps.”) We then take turns paddling alongside and helping ourselves.
We worked up quite an appetite jockeying our fully laden, 17-foot canoes alongside the buffet barge. By supper time, we were really hungry. That's when Ed unveiled the latest version of his automatic spit.
He began experimenting with it three years ago. The automatic spit involves a borrowed rotisserie motor, a stake for skewering meat and two pointy metal support rods, which are hammered into the ground astride the fire.
This seemed like a promising idea, but the first time Ed tried it the motor melted.
The following year, Ed added a heat shield. Which would have worked, except the new motor was too weak to keep four Cornish game hens spinning long enough to cook them all the way through.
If it hadn't been dark, we might have noticed this before it was too late.
At first, we attributed our intestinal anarchy to Joe drying his socks on the grill. But we later determined, through the process of elimination, that the Cornish game hens were to blame.
The latest incarnation of Ed's automatic spit included a bigger motor (which was probably strong enough to turn a commercial pizza oven). It was powered by a Harley-Davidson battery. Under a full load it sounded like a blender churning peanut butter.
Ed assembled his automatic spit and seasoned the game hens. Not wanting to spend the next day “chumming the water,” we decided to nap a few hours while the birds cooked.
Four hours later we began to stir, mainly because Ed was jumping up and down like a lunatic and screaming, “Where's dinner?”
While we were sleeping, the spit had toppled over and wandered away. We followed the meandering path where the rig had rolled from the fire to the edge of a clearing, but we lost the trail in the woods.
It could have ended up in the river. Or, for all we know, Ed's automatic spit could still be trundling through the woods, laboring under a load of mangled game hens.
If you're sitting around the campfire one night and hear what sounds like a blender full of peanut butter creeping up on you, don't be alarmed. In fact, if you're a seasoned camper and you've built up a resistance to certain pathogens, you may want to start rooting around in your cooler for some barbecue sauce.
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