Beginner, eager to learn, quick-learner
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
a fine and pleasant misery. Modern technology has taken mostly misery out of the outdoors, camping is now aluminum covered propane heated foam padded air conditioned but grew flip top disposable and transitory hardship on a modern camping trip is blowing a fuse on your electrical underwear or having the battery peter out on your porter Shemer. A major catastrophe is spending your last coin un recorded nature talk and then discovering the camp comfort and sanitation center featuring forest, green tile floors, not showers, has pay toilets. There are many people around nowadays who seem to appreciate the fact that a family can go on and outing without being out, but I'm not one of them personally. I miss the old fashioned misery of old fashioned camping. Young people just now starting out and camping probably have no idea that it wasn't. But a couple of decades ago that people went camping expecting to be miserable half the fun of camping in those days was looking forward to getting back home. When you did get back home. You prolong the enjoyment of your trip by telling all your friends how miserable you had been. The more you talked about, the miseries of life in the woods, the more you wanted to get back out there and start suffering again. Camping was a fine and pleasant misery, A source of much misery in old fashioned camping was the campfire, a primitive contrivance since replaced by gas stoves and propane heaters. It is a well known fact that your run of the mill imbecile can casually flick a soggy cigar butt out of a car window and burned down half a national forest. The campfire, on the other hand, was a perverse thing that you could never get started when you needed it most. If you had just fallen in an icy stream or hopping around barefooted on frosted ground, uncommon now but routine then you cannot ignite the average campfire with a bushel of dry tinder and a blowtorch. The campfire was of two basic kinds. The smudge and the Inferno. This much is what you use when you were desperately in need of heat By hovering over the smudge. The camper could usually manage to thaw the ice from his hands before being kicked to death, even if the smudge did burst into a decent blaze, there was no such thing as warming up gradually. One moment the ice in your pants would show slight signs of melting, and the next the hair on your legs was going up in smoke. Many is the time I've seen a blue and shivering man hunched over a crackling blaze suddenly eject from his boots and pants with a loud yell and go bounding about in the snow. The front half of him the color and boiled lobster, back half still blue. The inferno is what you always use for cooking experts on camp cooking claimed you were supposed to cook over something called a bed of glowing coals, but what everyone cooked over it was the inferno. The bed of glowing coals was a fiction concocted by experts on camp cooking. Nevertheless, the camp cook was frequently pictured by artists who should have known better as a tranquil man hunkered down by a bed of glowing coals, turning plump trout in the fry pan with a blade of his hunting knife. In reality, the Camp Cook was a wildly distraught individual who charged through waves of heat and speared savagely with a long sharp stick at a burning hunk of meat he had tossed on the grill from a distance of 20 ft. The rollicking old fireside songs originated in the efforts of other campers to drown out the language of the cook and prevent it from reaching the ears of little Children meat roasted over a campfire. It was either raw or extra well done, but the cook usually came out medium rare. The smoke from the campfire always blew directly in the eyes of the campers, regardless of wind direction. No one minded much, since it prevented you from seeing what you were actually eating. If a bite of food showed no signs of struggle, you consider this a reasonable indication that it came from the cook pot and was not something just passing through aluminum foil was not used much in those days, and potatoes were simply thrown naked into the glowing coals, which were assumed to lie somewhere at the base of the inferno. After about an hour, the spuds were raked out with a long stick. Most of the potatoes would be black and hard as rock, and some of them would be rocks, but it didn't make much difference. Either way, successive layers of charcoal would be cracked off until white core of potato was uncovered. Usually the size of walnut or maybe a p. This would be raw. Sometimes there would be no white core at all, and these potatoes were said to be cooked through, or they were rocks.