(Wild) Camping & Nourishment
From the Front #1
Early Autumn.
Eventide at…Latitude 42°09 North.
Eventide at…Longitude 8°50 West.
(An owl hoots).
The sun was about to sink on the horizon when one of us suddenly remembered: dinner should be prepared. “Ah-ah,” the rest of the crew grumbled simultaneously — an astonishment for our triumvirate. That meant cooking almost in the dark. An inconvenience, compared to cooking during the day, with sunlight illuminating every inch of the pot, the cookware, the camp, the leaves, the woods. The sunshine was everything to us; but at that time our bodies were ruled by hunger.
It was a race against the clock. Our first obstacle was dealing with the disarray of our car’s trunk. The car, as a matter of fact, was not only a mode of transport but also a tight cabin for our belongings: luggage, knick-knacks, some surfboards and more than a dozen plastic bags scattered around the compartment that contained our food supply. Fumbling for the right bags — those with food and old cooking devices — was a challenge in the looming twilight. Each one of us dodged this mundane task.
The goal was to set up our portable kitchen before dusk, while there was still a little bit of brightness to see by. Usually, when we looked for a camping area we took into account any camping infrastructure; picnic tables, for example. Which meant that sometimes we cooked on a wooden table, sometimes on a sort of mantle, spread over the ground and with all the cooking stuff on the top of it. Suffice to say, this mantle was a well worn kids sleeping bag. It was repurposed from an uncomfortable heap in the car to a useful piece of kit. In the course of time it would become unrecognizable from dirtiness.
Headlamps on, it was crunch time.
The chopping & peeling task began, and soon tiny tomato cubes and little piles of garlic and onions popped up. “The more garlic, the better,” assured one of the blokes and this was his perennial cooking motto. After the prep task, we threw this small Everest of chopped vegetables in the piping hot pan along with canned food and random seasonings and expected a decent result. Surprisingly, the food was often up to standard, occasionally even flavourful. Shakshuka was every day’s special and became our ace in the hole. Fortunately, the other fellow among our threesome proved to be a hell of a cook and able to prepare an edible meal from the meagre ingredients that we had.
It used to take an exceptionally long time for the meal to be ready. The cooking process was slow due to the limited capacity of our portable camping stove; there was only one burner despite its high consumption of gas balloons. We perched on the mantle, around the stove, and patiently waited for the faint flame to heat everything up. Slowly the sauce began to bubble over and small balls exploded on the surface. A bittersweet aroma hung in the air for a while — a whiff of tomato sauce.
By the time food was ready, we were often famished. The feeding was quick, rudimentary, almost savage. We didn’t own any dishes, so the food was lavished on shabby-looking tupperware, rationed precisely in three equal portions. For some reason, being assembled without any words, just with the noise of forks scratching the aluminium and mouths chomping remained etched in my memory as a glorious moment of the day. Every so often the local fauna sneaked in to feed on the scraps; squeaking mice on the surroundings of the Soustons lake bank and a darting fox — looking ravenous — behind Playón de Bayas. To avoid this sudden lunge in the dark, we had to quickly get rid of any traces of food, washing and packing down our wandering scullery every night.
In fact, it was very pleasant to lie down in the open grass positioned between our tents after the cooking. The humid air was soothing, brought in by the sea spray during the day. In the middle of the vast grove a gentle breeze blew towards the sea by night-time, making the leaves rustle of the high treetops — a relaxing sound. Depending on the spot we were in, the breeze boosted and swung into a moderate gale, fluttering the tents incessantly and threatening to launch into the space all the other objects sprawled around the camp. We were driven to retreat to our respective sleeping quarters, hastily grasping at everything in the area to bring it inside. From the wilderness to our fleeting comfort, a cheap nylon hut that we started to call cosy home.
