Campfire Cookies (18 page)

Just in case you don't know, I am not the only one at Moonlight Ranch who thinks living without a phone is basically RETURNING TO THE STONE AGE. Honestly, it is as if we each expect to encounter DINOSAURS, WOOLLY MAMMOTHS, and COVERED WAGONS on the path to North Corral, and when we don't, we are all really, really, really surprised.

So now I am going to tell you why it was IMPERATIVE that I use the iPad that I just happened to remember was still in my turquoise trunk even though I wasn't supposed to have it. And when I do tell you why, I know you will forgive me and possibly even apologize for ever getting cranky.

Here is the reason: I had to look up on Google whether it is possible to bake cookies over a campfire and also how you do it.

Spoiler alert: It is possible, and how you do it is use lots and lots of foil.

Why I had to look this up is long and complicated. One day, when I am safely grown up and you are in a really, really, really good mood, I will tell you. The important part is that we, THE MEMBERSHIP OF THE SECRET COOKIE CLUB, were helping to fix our counselor Hannah's LIFE after her stupid evil boyfriend dumped her.

In other words, it was exactly the kind of noble, generous, and selfless project you and my Sunday school teacher, Miss Oakley, are always encouraging me to undertake.

So now you cannot POSSIBLY be angry at me anymore.

Right?

I miss you and Jenny and Ralph and even
Troy, my star-athlete brother, the one you love more than me now that I got in trouble at camp and am a disgrace to the Baron family name.

Love for all eternity from your penitent daughter, Olivia

P.S. If you are wondering about the upside-down stickers, it is because I ran out of sad-faced ones and had to use happy faces.

August 13, Saturday

Dear Lucy,

I have just received your amusing letter and am writing back immediately so you will have this note before you leave camp to come home.

It tickles me that so many Moonlight Ranch traditions remain unchanged from when I was a camper there long ago. In my day, we also looked forward to Pack Trip at the end of the summer and competed vigorously
for Best Chore Score and Top Cabin. We also believed there were invisible sentries silently prowling Boys Camp for girls and Girls Camp for boys. Looking back, I realize that of course the sentries were a fiction invented by Buck to keep us all behaving ourselves.

Clever Buck! The phantom sentries were probably more effective than real ones would have been, not to mention they never expected to be paid!

It also tickles me to learn you have a kooky sense of humor like your father's. Lucy, I know he hasn't been much use to you, but one day you will grow up and maybe he will, too (!). God willing, then you'll have a chance to get to know each other. Anyway, my point is that your altering your voice and calling, “Who goes there?” when you heard people coming on the path is something I can imagine him doing too.

It must have been hard for you to contain
your giggles when the answer was straight out of “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

I wonder if by now you have fessed up, or if you're going to let your bunkmates think they really encountered one of the dreaded sentries. If the latter, you are perpetuating Buck's myth, you know!

As for the failure of your matchmaking scheme, have you ever heard of a line of poetry written more than two hundred years ago by a Scot named Robert Burns? According to it, “The best laid schemes o' mice and men often go awry.”

In other words, plan all you want and things still may not work out. You girls seem to have found the truth in this. I'm glad to hear that even without a new romance, she (Hannah is her name, right?) has cheered up after being so down in the dumps. Maybe she has come around to the view that boys aren't everything.

Like you, I'm surprised your mother's love spell didn't work. If anything, she seems to have too much success with them. Has she told you how it is going with the Arizona highway patrolman she met when she drove you to camp? He sounded like a decent fellow, and at least he has a steady job.

Change of topic: Things are fine here in beautiful Santa Barbara. Unlike where you are, we have ocean breezes to mitigate the summer heat. Maybe sometime before school starts, you can come here for a visit? If those triplets you watch can spare you, that is. I bet they and their mother miss you desperately!

Hope to see you soon, and lots of love,

Aunt Freda

(From the Moonlight Ranch Handbook for Families)

The culmination of summer activities is the annual Pack Trip, which promotes self-sufficiency in a natural outdoor setting, teaches valuable camping skills, and encourages appreciation of the power and beauty of the rugged Southwestern environment.

With their gear packed on their horses, campers ride beyond the boundaries of Moonlight Ranch to scenic Ocotillo Lookout, a promontory with a panoramic view of the vast Arizona landscape. The approximately four-hour trail ride gives campers the chance to utilize, consolidate,
and reflect upon the equestrian progress they have made during the course of the summer program.

As with all Moonlight Ranch activities, appropriate breaks for hydration and allergen-free nutrition are built into the travel schedule, and campers are consistently supervised by well-trained and caring professional staff.

Upon arrival at Ocotillo Lookout, campers grouped according to cabin assignment set up their own outdoor kitchens and sleeping areas. This unique opportunity to customize accommodations enables each group to practice teamwork and to explore and realize their own potential for enterprise, creativity, and ingenuity.

During their stay at Ocotillo Lookout, campers cook and clean for themselves in addition to caring for their horses. At the same time, they have the opportunity to enjoy a curtailed schedule of educational and recreational activities, including athletic competitions, nature hikes, trail rides, and singalongs.

All in all, it's easy to see why campers and counselors alike call Pack Trip a highlight of the summer.

Special note: In past years, some parents have expressed concern over the necessarily primitive nature of “bathroom” facilities during Pack Trip. Road access at the Ocotillo Lookout property is limited to passenger vehicles, and plumbing is nonexistent. For this reason, we must rely on time-honored strategies for waste processing and disposal. Of course, our methods are fully compliant with established best practices for hygiene, water quality, and the natural environment as outlined by the United States Bureau of Land Management (Publication No. 16-2783).

Most campers become comfortable with our old-fashioned arrangements as a matter of necessity. Please feel free to call Paula in the Moonlight Ranch office should you wish to discuss the particular needs of your camper.

Before Hannah caught Olivia with the iPad and confiscated it because she had to or she would lose her job and there were tears on both sides and drama on Olivia's side only, Olivia had the presence of mind to copy out the campfire cookie recipe she had found online.

But perhaps you have heard of a line in a poem by an old poet named Scot. It goes: “The best laid recipes of mice and man often get messed up.”

Perhaps Scot had tried making campfire cookies for himself.

Believe me, there are many possibilities for mess-ups, something I know because we experienced every single one during Pack Trip.

How you make campfire cookies is make normal cookie dough, then build a miniature oven in the shape of a hollow cube out of at least six layers of aluminum foil, drop cookie dough on the bottom of the oven, fold the foil over the top to seal it, and put the whole thing on a grill on top of a campfire.

Here is what will happen: You will burn the bottoms of lots of cookies, and lots more will stick so you have to eat them together with foil or not at all.

After a while, the foil will tear, and bits of dough will fall into the fire, where they will smoke for a long time before finally flames shoot up and they become charcoal briquettes. After this, you will raise the oven farther from the fire, and then your cookies will first be raw and later be dried out and hard as hockey pucks.

You will fight with all your friends and blame each other.

And you will feel stupid! Because you are the Secret Cookie Club! And if you can't even bake an edible cookie, what good are you?

If there is a world's record for amount of cookie dough wasted in three days, we probably broke it during Pack Trip.

I felt really guilty about this. With some of my friends at home, I volunteer at a food bank, and I know there are hungry people in this world. What kind of sense did it make to literally incinerate ingredients in, over, and around a campfire?

I said this to Grace on Tuesday afternoon. It was our
last day at Ocotillo Lookout, and we were still trying to get the baking right.

Ocotillo Lookout is a mesa (not a butte!) that rises about one thousand feet off the desert floor. Because the country around it is rugged, flat, and treeless, you look out to the cloud-studded blue forever in all directions. It's like being a speck on top of the world.