Translations:Prologue/5/en

And then we ate. Cheap food that was light in our packs but substantial enough to fuel us through the trip. Nothing ever tasted better. For dinner we’d chop up a brick of Spam and mix it with Hamburger Helper or a packet of beef Stroganoff mix. In the morning, we might have Carnation Instant Breakfast mix or a powder that with water transformed into a western omelet, at least according to the package. My morning favorite: Oscar Mayer Smokie Links, a sausage billed as “all meat,” now extinct. We used a single frying pan to prepare most of the food, and we ate out of empty #10 coffee cans we each carried. Those cans were our water pails, our saucepans, our oatmeal bowls. I don’t know who among us invented the hot raspberry drink. Not that it was a great culinary innovation: just add instant Jell-O mix to boiling water and drink. It worked as dessert or as a morning sugar boost before a day of hiking.