Killarney Cravings

    The sounds of Kid Cudi blasted from the van’s stereo as all of us remained silent.  The eight members of LandSea patrol A2 were headed to Grey Lake for our “solo” portion of our two and half week excursion into the Canadian wilderness.  None of us knew what to expect of solo.  We were only allowed our bottle of water, a journal, a pen, and a ground tarp.  I tried to keep my mind from worrying about the next 40 hours of loneliness that lie ahead, but there was only one thing I could think about: food.  While our LandSea leaders would stop by three times a day to deliver us iodine to refill our water bottles, we would be without food for the entire time. 
    On the night before solo, we gathered around the campfire to talk about my expectations of solo.  Many expressed their hope to learn more about themselves from such a tough experience.  Our hope of not having a close encounter with a bear was also common.  As LandSea as my first real camping experience, I knew nothing of dealing with a black bear.  My only guide to bears was a newspaper from the local town of Sudbury in one of the vans.  The newspaper said something like this:
“If a person doesn’t want a black bear to come closer, act aggressively.”
The thought of acting aggressive toward a 400 pound black bear by myself scared the shit out of me.  I decided that the chances of this happening were pretty slim, so I turned the page and tried to forget about it.  I found comfort in the next page of the newspaper, an advertisement for the Sudbury RibFest.  I would soon regret seeing this. 
    We got out of the vans, walked for 30 minutes to the aptly named Grey Lake, and waited to be taken to our individual sites by canoe.  I decided to let others go ahead of me, hoping that a miracle would appear so that I wouldn’t have to go on solo.  No such miracle materialized, so I was taken to my campsite.  Darkness soon approached as I set out my things, so I crawled into my sleeping bag underneath the stars, content and confident that solo wasn’t going to be as bad as I had thought the night before.  No bears, just myself and my journal to reflect.  If Gandhi could fast for weeks, going a little less than two days without food would be a piece of cake breeze.
   

    Boy, was I wrong.
   

    I awoke about an hour later to find that the beautiful sky of stars had changed into a dark mass that became the subject of my scorn for the rest of the night.  The rain began to pour down, so I wrapped myself up in my ground tarp (a method called burritoing) and tried to find a dry place under a tree.  In hindsight, sitting underneath a tree was a bad idea, but I didn’t really care.  Constant rain, rumbles of thunder that seemed to last for minutes on end and my longing for a hot bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese lead to very little sleep that night. 
    The rain continued on into the late morning and tapered off as the sun was able to finally break through.  After the hellish night I had been through, feeling the warm rays of the familiar sun was comforting.  I laid my drenched sleeping bag near the shore to dry off as I got my journal out to reflect.  As I tried to accurately describe the events of solo experience to that point, I realized one thing: damn was I hungry.  I made a list all of the foods I missed, from pizza to hamburgers to ice cream.  The thought of endless ribs from the Sudbury RibFest tortured me.  When the list was not enough, I began to go into detail about every food.  Hamburgers turned into two toasted buns with sizzling bacon, sharp cheddar cheese and a half-pound, medium rare burger hot off the grill.  I even picked out what kinds of ice cream I wanted on a triple scoop waffle cone at the Bob-In Again custard shop near my summer cottage in Petoskey, Michigan.  I felt a lot like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  In order to take my mind away from food, I thought that drawing might do the trick.  Instead, I found myself drawing pages upon pages of food, becoming mesmerized like some sort of food zombie.
    The day wore on and my stomach kept reminding me that it was hungry, as I thought of how pathetic I must have seemed to millions around the world who ate less than a meal a day.  This thought ended some of the self-pity, as a thunderstorm insured that I’d be getting little sleep.
     After a few hours of shivering in the rain, all of us were picked up from our campsites.  Having each others’ company and an apple were a huge relief.  While the quality of the apple surely paled in comparison to others I ate in the past, it was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.  The sweet, crisp taste of the apple left me hungry for more.  We walked back to the vans, which took us to a parking lot with a small convenience store owned by the park.  A Kalamazoo College trustee who was on the trip, Jim, met us there and bought each person a can of pop and a candy bar.  I never imagined that my spirits could be lifted from two simple items, but these small luxuries did just that.
    While I know that thinking about food for most of my solo experience made me hungrier, it also helped me get through the entire experience.  Those hours I spent listing, describing and drawing food helped me to escape from the boredom.  At a time I was so far away from food, I realized that I had never been closer to it.