Memory Monday – Canoe Trip “Food Fantasies” …
Food Fantacy Come True - Nechacko Trip 2004
While on canoe trips, most students would have imagined a much different menu than the one served out each day. “Food fantasies” ranged from the simple – a loaf of white bread, to the more elaborate – pizza and hamburgers and much more …
One alumni, David Jephson – made these fantasies come true for the Nechacko brigades over the years. The photo on the left shows the appreciation these students felt for Dave’s gift.
Can you imagine having hot pizza delivered by helicopter on your canoe trip? Now, that is a fantasy come true!
Send us your food fantasy stories – whether it be on a canoe trip, or perhaps a dog run, there would have been talk of food. We would love to share your memories. (Click on the title and scroll to the bottom to submit your memory. Click on the photo to see a larger version.)
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Funny, I was just thinking about this the other day. One thing I learnt on the Grand Portage (among many other things) was that once you have a full stomach you stop thinking ahead about where the next meal is coming from.
I remember we arrived in Fort Frances quite late at night and were paddling along beside the town when we suddenly realised we were headed in the direction of, and were, in fact, getting very close to, the spillway of the dam on the Rainy River. There was no boom or warning lights but there was an unmistakable sound of falling water. The entire brigade turned around at lightning speed and started paddling like crazy in the opposite direction. I don’t remember who was sitting in front of me, I think Brian Koster or Michael Hart, but I swear the way his paddle was going forward and pulling back, it looked like an electric egg-beater it was going so fast. Fortunately we were soon back in a safer stretch of the river.
We spent the night in a church hall and the next morning we received our allowance and were let loose in Fort Frances for the morning. I remember everyone had heard of a place called the Electric Bakery that sold the world’s biggest doughnuts. Many of us bought one. I couldn’t quite finish mine and threw the rest away. Which was dumb because of course I was hungry again a couple of hours later and would have welcomed the opportunity to finish it off.
That afternoon we travelled down the river and the day’s journey was rudely curtailed when the canoe I was in tipped in Manitou Rapids. Now my understanding is that it had been deemed nearly impossible to tip in Manitou Rapids because they almost completely disappeared after the dam had been built at Fort Frances – and although part of St John’s mission was helping students realise they could do what might be thought impossible, this wasn’t the kind of impossible they had in mind.
We had been paddling all afternoon. It was very humid and we were sweating a lot. The water in the river was considered too polluted to drink and as a result everyone was very thirsty. I remember as my canoe’s crew emerged, dipping, from the water someone asked if the water really tasted that bad. I hadn’t taken advantage of the situation to sample the quality so couldn’t help him out. With the river water undrinkable we had to send a search party with our three galvanised steel cooking buckets to locate water. There was a road running close to the bank and about a quarter of a mile away they found a farm where they filled the buckets.
Dinner that night was spaghetti. In addition to the powdered sauce we were also trying out this dehydrated soya extender imitation beef stuff called Creamettes (they sort of looked like rabbit food pellets). They took a long time to cook and sucked up a lot of water. That night they never really got done and were still a bit crunchy when the food was doled out in our aluminium mess tins. Furthermore, and proof of the old adage that too many cooks spoil the broth, two people doing the cooking had, each, separately, added more than enough salt to the pot. As a result we chewed our very salty, slightly crunchy dinner and our thirst continued to grow. If we used some of what water was left to make tea that night there can’t have been much the next morning. Setting out the next day I think we were possibly fantasizing more about drinking water than anything else.
That day we hit the town of Rainy River in the afternoon and got 50 cents spending money. I’d learned my lesson in Fort Frances and I convinced Hugo Marx to go halves on an un-sliced loaf of bread to keep and use to supplement later meals on the trip (I think that would have left us with enough change to each still be able to buy chocolate). And, despite the fact that Pierre Bedard, who was sharing Hugo’s tent, rolled over on the loaf and squashed it flat that night, I’d still argue that it was a wise investment. Soft bread seemed nicer than hard-tack and you could use it to wipe your mess tin. Then you could keep your hard-tack in the pouch of your hooded sweater where you could break off bits at breaks during the day.
By the next year, when we were doing the Churchill River, we were just that much older and wiser. When we had finished the portage at the Island Falls dam (the dam had been automated but the abandoned town site had not yet been demolished – ghost town kind of thing – the caretaker lifted the canoes across for us on his truck) we stopped across the river in Sandy Bay. If you read the entry for Sandy Bay in Wikipedia it includes a sentence that begins, “There is a local store in the village…” And when I read that I immediately thought, “Yes there is and I’ve been in it and that was where Pat bought the chocolate ring things.”
I remember that the lady who ran the store was really nice. One of the things in the candy shelf were these chocolate rings. They were about the size of an Oreo with a hole the size of a dime in the middle. They were chocolate on the outside. On the inside they had some kind of icing-like fondantish kind of filling that was bright pink (probably red dye 6 or whatever they used to make red smarties and which has since been banned) and mostly sugar. Anyway these were on sale at a huge discount (quite possibly because the locals were smart enough not to touch them). Well, all of the shop lady’s Christmases came at once that year because our group bought out her entire stock.
In the next couple of days during breaks, Pat Williams, who was bowman in my canoe, would line up a row of the chocolate rings on the canoe’s handle (the piece of wood that runs from one gunwale across to the other just behind the bow). As we paddled over the next fifty minutes or so until the next break, Pat, occasionally, when pulling his paddle through the water, would reach a bit further forward than usual with the hand on the top of the paddle and grab one of the rings. When his paddle blade came forward, the hand holding the candy would come back to his mouth and allow him to put the candy in it, without breaking stride so to speak. It took us a while to notice this and I don’t think at first anyone said anything. It became a minor source of entertainment as you began to guess at what point he would grab the next ring (was he going to eat them all in the first ten minutes or was he deliberately spacing out his consumption?). At some point we all broke out laughing.
We were in our mid-teens and we were growing and we were always hungry. But without doubt the most basic food fantasy I can remember anyone expressing (and with which I immediately empathised), was expressed by Rob Keegan, who was sitting behind me on the Churchill trip. We were pretty far into it, though I don’t think we’d made it as far as the Burntwood River yet. It was a rare sunny day and I remember Rob saying, “You know, if someone put a bowl of three-day old, cold mashed potatoes in front of me right now they‘d be gone in seconds.
And, in seconds, the other members of the crew had considered the idea and were nodding in agreement, as visions of bowls of cold mashed potatoes danced in their heads.
I was lucky enough to be on the last Nechacko trip with Saint John’s in 2008. It is indeed a special and one of a kind trip, as compared to any other, due to the all these detours and experiences. Especially on this trip compared with any others I did it provided some memorable food experiences.
During one particular day, an overheard/easily decipherable Mr. Thauberger satellite call tipped some of us off that the often rumoured and infamous pizza drop was to happen at some point during the day. Needless to say we were pretty excited and later that night, at a set of hot springs nonetheless, the pizza (along with ice cream) arrived. Having learned from the mistakes of contestants on the television show Survivor ,(I don’t mean to imply a canoe trip is as dire as a desert island, but let’s suspend some disbelief) where whenever they receive food rewards they usually eat as much as possible and get sick from it, I decided to enjoy it in moderation. Of course, nobody got sick. Unlike the 2004 trip, our pizza was delivered by boat rather than the far more glamorous helicopter arrival, although I’m sure it was appreciated just the same.
The Nechacko trip also allowed us the luxury to dine on crab several times throughout the trip, and with me being a big seafood fan this was right up my alley. At least until one particular time when we were cracking open the crabs shells in preparation for cooking, when one lashed (perhaps a slight exaggeration) out at me and put a nice crack in the nail of my middle finger. Thinking back, I probably ate more crabs after that incident just to spite them.
One of the later food excursions saw us stop over at a logging camp for the night, where we got to eat in their dining area with food prepared for us by a cook. After a cavalcade of food, I don’t remember the particulars, only that there was a lot and it was good, we dedicated our services to help clean up the dining room. With our Saint John’s kitchen crew mobile edition, we proceeded to clean up the area, just like any duty crew would after dinner. I’ll always remember that the cook was blown away by the cleanliness and the job we did, which always struck me as odd as it was a basic run of the mill clean. Which begs the question of what their cleanliness standards were before we came along and spread the Saint John’s kitchen duty way. It is a logging camp after all, I guess.
As great as the Nechacko trip was and all the “normal” food we go to have, I don’t think it holds as much weight or bearing if you hadn’t been on a “regular” canoe trip beforehand and never got to experience such amenities. My first canoe trip (Methye) was fun (in retrospect, not always at the time) because it was a canoe trip’s canoe trip without all the food divergences. On these types of trips, food was always a great motivator to keep going and plowing on ahead. You could burn through precious minutes just by dreaming up all the food combinations you would consume once you got back home. At the time, food from back home was literally the greatest thing and could be a hot commodity, it was our holy grail. Ironically, once I got home, I never really did indulge in any of these food fantasies, except for the request of some hot chocolate, which I’d already been enjoying on the trip anyways…
Gordon Kell on a 1974 Fort Carlton to Selkirk canoe trip entertained us for a couple hours as a storyteller with tales of the Pillsbury Doe Boy. However my recollection was not of tales of the wonderful food that can be created from simply cracking open a tube, dicing it up, throwing it in an oven and creating fantastic strudels and turnovers and the like; no, but rather his stories took on a more sinister bent as Gordon told us all in very descriptive and animated form what he wanted to do to the Pilsbury Doe Boy when he got his hands on him. Strangulation and putting him in the oven on speed broil were some of the solutions he had for this little man who tormented us with visions of something we could not have. That day Gordon had a captive audience in that war canoe and we were all eating it up with eagerness for more. (Strange the things you remember some thirty eight years later eh.)
My first years were hungry.
#1 Fond du Lac. Somebody couldn’t calculate. Supper was beans and bacon. Runny. 1 cup, half a cup for seconds. Breakfast was oatmeal, 1 cut, half a cup for seconds. Lunch was an oz of cheese and the bannock they gave you as dough the night before to cook on a stick.
At the end of the trip Doug Low met us, and had put on a stack of bread trays, and pail each of peanut butter and jam. All the way home we ate and ate and ate.
I found out later that most of the boys had lost 10-15 lbs. I know I did.
#2 Lockhart/Snare rivers.
Cold. Wood collecting most nights took an hour. We used our duffles and were collecting pencil size twigs. SJ style tripping doesn’t work very well north of timberline.
We’d build a next of twigs around a pot. Aluminum foil over the pot. Light the fire. As soon as the water boiled, throw the macaroni/rice whatever, stir, and pull the pot off the fire. Put the pot of water for tea on. As soon as it was hot, chuck the teabags in, pull it off the fire, and stomp the fire out. Anything unburned was saved for the breakfast when the whole process was repeated for hot cereal and tea or cocoa.
No fire for drying. Wring it out and night, and put it on frozen the next morning.
Doug Low ran a feet mill. He brought us a 100 lb sack of ground soybeans to experiment with. 1/3 soybeans, 1/3 margarine 1/3 sugar. Was just barely edible, but packed about a million calories per pound. When you’re hungry it was ok. Don’t serve it at a party. We had it at lunch every day.
#3 Grand Portage.
The first 6 days was like the Fond du Lac. First, some seconds. Not enough. Lunch was ok. 2 hard tack, P+J, nice hunk of cheese, but the other two meals were definitely half rations.
We reached the lodge at Gunflint Lake, our cook gets the food drop, and discovers there is no room in the boxes. Every meal that he’s made 1 bag of macaroni, there has been another bag. Every bag of oat meal was half a breakfast. We had to leave 3 days food at the lodge.
THAT week we ate well.
But we were windbound here and there. The morning of the day we would reach our food drop we had a sumtious breakfast of 1/3 cup hardtack crumbs and a scant spoon of jam.
We reached the lodge at Kettle Falls at 3 in the afternoon. Hot day. Hungry. Frank bought 4 restaurant size cans of pork & beans, a few loaves of bread, a sack of potatoes, since they had no hot cereal.
Ambrosia.
The following year I was with Corkett and Kelly on the Bloodvein. Corkett was brigade leader, and part way through started teaching me to cook. (Thanks John…) We had enough food that trip, but just.
I was tired of being hungry on trips. For the next 30 years I was cook, or training a cook or advising the cook in preps. (I exaggerate. There were 3-4 trips in there that I had nothing to do with the cooking. But then Schroder would do something stupid like not bring ANY coffee, and I’d take up my ladle again in self defense.
Food NOT to fantasize about.
Over the years, I became a pretty good cook, and I helped train several other voyageurs in the fine craft of culinary creation in a rusty bucket.
But it was not completely clear sailing.
On the Bloodvein, I was cooking in the dark, and put in a serving spoon of chile powder thinking it was tomato sauce. Nuclear Spaghetti sauce.
One other staff reached for the brown sugar in the pre-dawn light on a newboy trip. Added it to the Red River (aka sunnyboy) cereal. It was only on noticing that the texture was subtly wrong that he tasted it.
Gravy mix. Not brown sugar.
As a cook I discovered a few things:
Our diets in the bush are a lot heavier on carbs, and lighter on both protein and fat. The north American diet is typically about 30% fat, 20% protein, and the rest carbohydrates. Our canoe trip diet was about 10, 10 and 80. The protein content was sufficient, if less than we were used to. The fat left us craving, especially if it was cold.
* Put a cube of margarine into every pot. Oatmeal. Soup. Spaghetti. Amazing what this does to the popularity of rice or noodles.
* Even a small quantity of sausage or bacon or jerky make it feel like you had MEAT in your diet.
* Bring spices and use them generously. Not just salt and pepper, but things you don’t think about. Sage, and majorum, and dill, and mint, and nutmet.
* Don’t be afraid to experiment. I was attacked by a smoke demon, and dropped my handful of basil early — into the bucket of hot grapefruit drink. Actually quite good.
* Garlic is good in everything that doesn’t have sugar in it.
* There are 3 ways to make food real inedible. Too much hot spice — chile or cayenne, too much salt, and burning it. Almost everything else is tolerable.
After a few years of cooking my self assessment was ‘how many days can I get before I overhear the first McDonald’s fantasy. In my early days at the school, it was about 2 days. After I’d been cooking for about 10 years, I was routinely getting to 4 days. One trip I got to day 8. Probably wasn’t listening to the kids.
Chilli cheese dogs… always chilli cheese dogs for some reason… After salivating through every trip I did as a student, I finally got to live the dream as an alumni on the modified Methye I did in 92 or 93… Rick James and I got dogs on the beach in Fort Mac and all I can say is… what a disappointment…