Happy Trails to You

How do we spend our free time in this leisured, convenience-obsessed modern world? Why, doing things the inconvenient, time-consuming, old-fashioned way.

Instead of buying a fish at the market, we stand hip-deep in water and cast lures by the hour. We go horseback riding, even though a horse is not air conditioned, won’t go over 48 mph and has only one horsepower. If we really have time and money to burn, we buy a sailboat.

Of course, it’s not as if we actually want to go back to the old days. If your car started riding like a horse, you’d get the shock absorbers replaced right now.

Our reasons for doing things the hard way might seem contradictory. On one hand, there are the Teddy Roosevelt reasons--self-reliance and the blessings of the strenuous life. On the other, there’s the Walter C. Hagen reason--Hagen (1892-1969) being the fellow who wrote, “Be sure to smell the flowers along the way.”

This is why so many people hike. It’s plenty strenuous enough, and there really are flowers along the way, not to mention some fancy scenic views you can’t reach otherwise. Best of all, hiking needs less equipment than other forms of elective inconvenience.

The principles of trail food--including the specially packaged foods you buy at a sporting goods store--have always been the same. It has to be light because you’re carrying it. It should be dry so it won’t spoil. It should require a minimum of cooking. (Nuts and dried fruits, which need no cooking at all, were probably the first trail foods and are still among the best.)

Some parts of the world don’t have much of a repertoire because they don’t need to. In heavily populated East Asia, the traveler can count on finding a noodle shop sooner or later. But from Japan to Thailand, travelers often do carry balls of glutinous rice, often along with dried fish or pickled vegetables.

It’s in areas with sparsely populated mountains and wastelands, such as the Middle East, the Andes or the Arctic, that people have seriously studied the trail food issue--particularly in the nomad lands, the vast Eurasian prairies that extend from Mongolia to the Middle East. Their serious, necessity-driven trail food may not sound like gourmet stuff but, as any hiker knows, the open sky and ravening hunger are the best of seasonings.

* Campfire Stories: Scout cooking tips, hobo pack cuisine and recipes of a weekend bachpacker. H6