So many memories. . . I can scarcely believe that five years has passed since Cooking for Adventurers hit the press. Now that I'm finally finding the time to work on Cat Hair in the Coffee Maker, I seem to have that old feeling, again. It's been so long since I've found the time to write anything meaningful that I'd almost forgotten what it meant to me. The simple act of putting written word to the page has, for as long as I can remember, been my chosen method of communication. It is, for lack of better terminology, the chief expression of my soul.
By the time I had done any meaningful work to CfA, we had been living in our current home for nearly five years. Sure, I had been working on the book for a while before, but in short bursts of productivity--mostly organizing recipes and jotting down the odd thought or two as they randomly appeared in my brain. It wasn't until we got to this spot that everything finally started to gel into a stream of consciousness that would become the guide that I had wanted. I would spend my days off from work traveling about the parks and boreal forests of the area cooking in the wilderness and taking photos. Along the way, I even made a pretty nice hobo stove and alcohol burner, though its use never found its way into the book. Much of my free time was either spent working on its writing, or finding adventures to increase its depth.
And the stories!
I actually wish I had put more stories in CfA. Though I wrote it to sound more like a story book than an actual cookbook, giving depth to the recipes and methods through the experiences that birthed them gives relevance to the book's existence. Learning how to cook bacon from a roving band of backpackers is all well and good, but the memory of Travis and I warming ourselves in the steam from our campfire-baked potatoes always brings a smile. Perhaps in the next book, I'll tell the story of the picture on the cover, when we got ourselves a little deeper into the Porcupine Mountains than we had originally intended. I'll definitely tack in the story of how my dad and uncle went out frog gigging, and managed to shoot a boat.
We will actually be in a different house by the time I am ready to put the next book to press. We are in the process of remodeling it, room by room, to make it totally ours. Kim and I never got the chance to build the house we wanted, but this will be the next best thing. We've done a finished basement before, and some interior design, but nothing quite as encompassing as this. We didn't settle into our current house so much as a family, but more along the lines of an invading army. We have beaten it into something that suits our needs, with work done to the kitchen and bathroom mostly, but that was about it. Cat Hair in the Coffee Maker will include an entire chapter on the kitchen remodel, in the hopes that mistakes I make will help others in similar circumstances suffer a bit less.
This is, if you'll pardon the obvious pun, a new chapter for me. The last five years have been a roller coaster-- changing jobs, building a workshop, moving the workshop, the constant chaos of four kids moving through school, the oldest going to college and the second moving across the planet with the Army, issues with a publisher that could care less and of course, losing dad in 2019. I may have lost myself along the way. My mantra has always been "we are all adventurers". Somewhere, I lost myself in the work and had forgotten to look for that adventure. I still have two kids in the house, and a lot of opportunity ahead--who's with me?
