Do Not Eat This Sh*t Under Any Circumstances

When flying to Lake Clark, you are told to pack whatever food you intend to eat. However, since I was going to be in Lake Clark National Park for less than two weeks, I did not think to pack ingredients for pancakes. My friend J had a bag of amaranth flour that had a pancake recipe on the back, but we were missing several ingredients. I made an executive decision that anything missing that had a granular texture would be substituted with multipurpose flour, which J had in his tent cabin. Since we did not have maple syrup, I added a few tablespoons from one of my instant maple-flavored cream-of-wheat packets into the dry ingredients, then chopped up a white peach I had brought from Anchorage, sautéed the fruit in a precious pat of butter, and dumped half a can of mango juice to reduce into a syrup (having not brought sugar). What resulted was a satisfying stack of Lake Clark pancakes.

As I was making this breakfast, it occurred to me how scarcity deeply affects the value of things in our lives. In Anchorage, I frequently buy eggs eighteen at a time at Costco for a couple of dollars, and I think nothing of them. But for my short stay at Lake Clark, I brought only a precious three eggs. J gave me two more, but after today’s breakfast, I am down to only two. These last two eggs will likely be The Most Important Eggs of My Life. Not having what I needed to make pancakes also forced me to be a little bit resourceful. At home, I would have absentmindedly reached for the good Vermont maple syrup I keep on hand and hence would have never wandered into the white peach mango fruit chutney we ultimately had for breakfast.

Scarcity gives every resource here a multifaceted life. Everything used here has to be burned or taken back to a landfill in Anchorage. Everything eaten here has to be hunted, grown locally, or more likely (because the soil is so poor), flown in from Anchorage. In my few days living out of small boxes of food, it has become clear that waste is a luxury and curse of big city life. Port Alsworth, on the other hand, is a place built and constantly fixed with broken parts – odds and ends given second, third lives through the efforts of hardworking people. In this sense, I understand Port Alsworth.

It has also become apparent to me that the people of Port Alsworth have come here to be left alone. While everyone is very friendly and is genuinely happy to see you trudging up the path, there are few invitations into someone’s home or plans to get together. Despite this strange strain of indifference, I feel an overwhelming desire to feed this entire community, to say something in food to replace the silence of words.

J and I ended the day with yet another resourceful dinner in the form of old MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) found stored somewhere in a shop cabinet. As part of reorganizing the shop from floor to ceiling, the MREs had been alphabetized and placed next to the microwave for anyone to eat. J and I had sampled the Fudge Brownie and Pound Cake as fuel while bottling homebrew. I recommend both highly. J is of the opinion that the Pound Cake may be the best MRE ever. For our dinner snack tonight, however, he wanted to try something different. We had Cheese and Crackers, but I didn't have much appetite for dry stale crackers and cheese out of a plastic bag. The really scary MRE we sampled, however, was Omelet With Ham. It should have been more properly labeled as "DO NOT EAT THIS SH__ UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES." The Omelet With Ham tasted something like soggy cardboard. I've never eaten soggy cardboard before, but I think the taste is unmistakable. While I took no more than my initial bite, J polished it off. Boys are funny that way.