Person of the Week: Shirtless
We now diverge from our previous paradigm for recounting the misfortunes of me and Chandler to a new one; following our second day, much of our experience flows together in my mind in such a way that I can more easily recall specific events rather than entire days. So, rather than try to describe each individual day with a full post, we will, beginning with this post, explore significant situations that took place on indeterminate days over the course of the hike. They will be posted more or less in chronological order, but bear very little relation to one another and cannot be attributed to any specific day with much accuracy. With this in mind, we begin with the pancake dinner.
As I’ve mentioned before, two of our (my) biggest mistakes in preparation were the meal planning and equipment selection. One night, these two relics of my ignorance came together to create a compound monument of failure much larger than I thought possible when considering the constituents.
The precursor—something of an omen—to our impending meal issues came from a piece of equipment completely unrelated to food preparation: a hammer. Originally, having only used a tent once—to practice for the trip—I thought we would need a hammer for the tent stakes; it seemed a forethinking thing to bring. I carried the hammer in a loop on the outside of my backpack everywhere I went, garnering more than just a few comments and questions. Almost everyone we encountered let us know that a hammer was a completely unnecessary extra piece of weight. To their credit, in most places the ground was indeed soft enough to push the stakes in with my hands. Nonetheless, stubbornly determined to make the hammer somewhat worthwhile, I used it every single time I set up the tent.
So, when I saw a somewhat older man at our campsite slaving over his tent stakes (his tent had a ton of them) with a rock in hand, I was excited; not only was the hammer going to be useful, it was going to be a catalyst for making a new friend and helping someone out! Wishful thinking from the amateur. Walking over to the man—later to be identified by another hiker by his trail name, Shirtless—I called from a slight distance:
Hey! We’ve got this hammer if you’d like to use it!
With a perfunctory look over his shoulder, he replied:
Eh. I’ve got a good rock.
Somehow, rather than just a useless piece of dead weight, the hammer managed to be an active force of discouragement and signal of incapability to the world around us.
Licking my wounds, I walked back to mine and Chandler’s tent to help prepare dinner. The night’s offering was set to be a delicacy: chocolate chip pancakes or, preferably, flapjacks. We set up our camping stove, filtered water from the nearby stream, and added it to our powdered mix. Feeling something like the hypothetical son of Rachael Ray and Bear Grylls, I added a little olive oil (a backpacking essential) to our pan. Contrary to what Nicholas Cage might tell you, the problems began with the addition of heat.
You see, Chandler and I bought our cookware set at an army surplus store. It had everything we needed, seemed sturdy enough, and was wonderfully compact. However, upon first use, we discovered several issues (pro tip: always test ALL of your equipment before hitting the trail, not just the tent). For one thing, in order to be fully collapsible and self-contained, the handle was detachable; a nice design feature, right? Unfortunately, it didn’t fully attach at all; pressure had to be maintained on the handle to keep it pinched around the lip of the pan. That wouldn’t have been too difficult if it hadn’t all been made of of the same cheap material.
But it was.
After only a few seconds over the flame, the handle became exceptionally hot and difficult to hold. Wrapping a dirty bandanna around the handle, we pressed on, determined to enjoy our flapjacks even if we had to hold our cutlery with our feet.
But the complications didn’t end there. Despite my best efforts with the olive oil, the flapjacks stuck and burned to the pan every time. We eventually tried cooking each one in a shallow pool of water, but that only created different problems. As we cooked on, consuming our lumps of amalgamated raw mix and charred chunks while we went, the pan started to warp; I can’t imagine what else a cooking pan might have been made for, but it did not hold up to heat as though it were made for that purpose. We cut our losses, cleaned the warped piece of garbage as best we could, and prepared for bed. (It’s mildly relevant to note that Shirtless had long since gone to sleep at this point.)
Hanging our food bags (thank goodness this site had bear cables), we called it a night after the sun had gone down. We woke briefly in the morning when the sun came up—we usually got our best few hours of sleep while it warmed the tent—just long enough to hear Shirtless hiking out. With a casual “Don’t sleep all day, boys!”, he disappeared down the trail in the direction opposite ours, never to be encountered by us again, and we laid our heads back down to doze awhile longer.
How Not to Hike the Appalachian Trail 