Fencerows: On our own
John Luthens
It didn’t hit us right away. We were almost home from the airport before it started to sink in. We had just ushered the better half of the family, namely, my wife and daughter, into the friendly skies and thus into a week and a half adventure to sunny San Diego. Due to the four-letter word of work and the six-letter words of school and finals, my son and I were cast into the no-fly zone. We were on our own.
There were the first hints of freedom; two guys embarking upon our own adventure, nobody to boss us around. No one would tell us when to mow the lawn or take out the garbage. There would be no guidance as to how many hours of video games we could or couldn’t play, or how late we could stay up. Or how early we had to be home from a fishing trip, or if we even felt like coming back at all. Sweet freedom, by George, and as we pulled into the driveway it was coming through the open car windows with the sweet smell of impending summer.
A Dutch oven simmers over the coals.
Of course, there were also the faintest whiffs of something else; small, slobbering things that gnawed at our minds like a dog goes at a bone. There were the matters of cooking, washing dishes and doing laundry. Luckily, my son and I are old hands at camping, well versed in the arts of living in the backwoods, used to wearing the same clothes day in and day out and rotating our shirts and shorts by turning them inside out to get double mileage.
And as for washing dishes, if you’ve ever seen a mess kit used for a full summer without a proper washing, going from silver, to gray, to charcoal black, slowly flavoring everything eaten from it with the slightest hint campfire smoke and burnt bacon, well, then you would understand why we weren’t overly-concerned about eating from the same plate for a handful of days.
The rigor of cooking actual food was decided on a whim. No sooner had we pulled in the driveway from our airport shuttling, we pulled back out again and celebrated our impending freedom by driving to the nearest fast-food delicatessen and loading ourselves down with unhealthy choices. We high-fived with grease covered hands. A week and a half on our own would be a snap.
It went on like that for a few days. Finals were taken and school wound to a close. I still made my daily trek to work, not so much because I found satisfaction in the fruits of my labor, but because the fast-food tab was adding up faster than a hungry walleye gobbles up bait fish. We tried our hand at catching a mess of bluegill to mix things up, congratulating ourselves on the fact that we were free to fish as long as we wanted. The fish just laughed at us. We moved on to a stringer of frozen pizzas after that.
It was a short-lived blur of sausage and mushrooms and pepperoni, but the end of the frozen pizza parade has become a bone of contention that promises to have legs far into the future. Someday, I envision grandchildren sitting at a Thanksgiving table, me on one end and their dad on the other, listening to the accusations fly and wondering how in the heck it could be possible that three generations of this family could have survived to be alive and well in the same place.
Suffice to say, whether it was me or my son, one of us should have had the foresight to separate the cardboard bottom from the frozen pizza before plopping it in the oven. The house didn’t burn down, but any future grandchildren that set foot in our kitchen may still be able to catch the faint reek of burnt pizza.
Finally, in a last attempt to save face and have happy stories to tell when my wife and daughter flew back into the turmoil of a war zone that the house was quickly becoming, we grabbed whatever we could lay our hands on in the refrigerator and resurrected our Dutch oven from its hiding spot in the clutter of our camping gear.
Dinner is served.
For those not familiar, a Dutch oven is a cast-iron cooking pot with a lid. It is heavy and not well-suited to stuff in a backpack but as far as outdoor implements are concerned, for my money, there is no finer means of coal-fire cooking. Given a charcoal bed below and a few coals to layer on top, the Dutch oven is capable of baking anything from beef stew to fruit cobbler. I’ve even seen it bake a homemade pizza, which came out delicious and without a tricky piece of cardboard attached.
Our recipe was simple in design and I provide it here for your culinary pleasure: 2 pounds of potatoes and 2 packs of sausage, half an onion and what looked to be either half of a green pepper or a mushy avocado. We fired the coals and fried the whole mess together in the bottom of the pot.
Putting on the lid and ringing it with hot coals, we stirred in a dozen eggs, topping it off in its final simmer with 3 combined bags of cheese that were in various stages of openness and aging but, when melted all together, looked just fine to us and added up to well over a pound.
While simple in design, it was also interlaced with enough calories to fuel a party of climbers to the peak of Mt. Everest. The ramifications of my son and I eating the whole pot in a single sitting may not fully be understood by the medical community for many years.
Perhaps the greatest part about Dutch oven cooking is the clean-up. We filled the pot with water, stoked the fire a bit more, and left the pot to boil itself out far into the night. In the morning the pot was scraped out into the ashes and the iron guts (the oven’s, not ours) got coated with a fine layer of vegetable oil and stored away to await its next gourmet conquest.
The saner half of the family finally flew back home from their West Coast swing. They asked us how we did on our own. At the time, neither of us could quite frame into words a proper response. But at a Thanksgiving table set far into the future, I know we will both give it a proper try. Who knows? We may even end up baking the turkey in a Dutch oven.
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com