Singing and eating, tilling and planting

Eager to intersect with other park visitors in a non-trail setting, I attended two Indiana Dunes public programs. I went to a diverting singalong in the Visitor Center (theme: silly songs) where 10 local musicians had 45 of us singing about topics like napping and roadkill; when all of the songs’ authors turned out to be men (e.g., W.C. Fields, Flanders and Swann, Loudon Wainwright III ), I thought: These hippies oughtta listen to some Nellie Lutcher or The Roches.

One morning I joined eight other volunteers tilling soil and planting spinach and Swiss chard at the park’s Chellberg Farm, established in the late 19th century. I loved talking-while-tilling with two older volunteers, both named Sue, who made me feel better about my slightly remedial farming skills. My greatest contribution that morning was informing one of the Sues that sage leaves are at their most interesting when battered and deep-fried.

Knowing that I’d be car camping (my car was parked 20 feet from my tent), I’d decided to try to cook or prepare most of my meals myself; to inject this decision with rigor, I’d bought two kinds of chili mixes at REI.

The first, by Good To-Go, had me adding two and a half cups of boiling water to the pouch, which held the beans and other ingredients. The second, by Omeals, required no outside heat source. You place cold water into the Omeals pouch along with a cottony, two-inch-by-two-inch heating element that looks remarkably like a feminine hygiene product. I did so; soon my Omeals pouch started burbling like a tiny, possibly ill, motorboat. Steam poured out of its vent. The pouch rocked back and forth on my campsite’s picnic table. Upon removing the chili from its pouch, I found that the heating element was still groaning and hissing. Fearful that the pouch might explode, I dumped out the water and ran the pouch and the heating element 50 yards to the campground’s dumpster. But then, worried that I might set the dumpster afire, I removed the pouch and heating element from the dumpster, threw them on the ground, and stomped my boot heel into them like a Glock-wielding Smokey Bear. What’s the Visitor Center reward for that, I wondered.