Pater: banana chips... At right, my dad is in a very characteristic pose for him: enjoying some roadside wildflowers, near Wilson Meadow in the National Forest surrounding Mt. Lassen National Park, in June 2007.
Banana chips...
When the three oldest kids (Scott, Holly, and I) were old enough to hike a few miles while carrying a pack, my dad started taking us on some multi-day backpacking trips. There was one in particular that I went on several times (the participants varied): a day hike up to the Chimney Pond campground in the main glacially-scooped basin of Mt. Katahdin. This gorgeous mountain is the northern-most terminus of the Appalachian Trail, towering over the mostly-flat surrounding land. It's in Baxter State Park, which has a fascinating history and is full of all sorts of interesting things – as if Mt. Katahdin weren't interesting enough all by itself. I love that place, and wish I could get back there more often – but it's about as far as you can get from San Diego and still be in the U.S.
On those backpacking trips to Chimney Pond (see map at right), my dad would rent one of the Adirondack lean-tos that the park makes available. That made our packs lighter, as we didn't have to bring up a tent and the associated stuff – just sleeping bags, cooking stuff, clothes, and some food. Once we got to Chimney Pond, we'd stay there for some number of days, making day trips on the trails that radiate out from Chimney Pond. Quite a few “loop” trips are possible, which we really liked. Then as an extra added bonus, the site of the Chimney Pond campground is spectacularly scenic – for 270° around you there are steep granite escarpments. Chimney Pond itself is in the trees, but timberline is only a few hundred feet in elevation above the campground, so the view around you is nearly all above it.
Especially on the earlier Chimney Pond trips, my dad had to find ways to do things on the cheap. We didn't have much money (not that we really noticed or cared about that when we were kids), so instead of the “normal” things one might do for such a trip we had to find other means. One example: we didn't have one of those nifty light-weight stoves designed for hiking. Instead, we had a one-burner Coleman naphtha stove that must have weighed 10 pounds. We carried a lot more weight up that mountain than most people did! One thing that was particularly irksome for my dad was the food. I've noted before that food was important to my dad. But carrying his normal diet up the mountain wasn't really practical. He'd have loved to have the high quality freeze-dried food that was just becoming available (and on later trips, he did), but at the time it was priced out of reach. So he struggled to find acceptable food.
One thing he did was to haunt the surplus stores, looking for bargains on military surplus food designed for troops on the move. He had some notable successes in that area. He once scored an entire case of pemmican at a bargain price, and we ate those little cans of concentrated energy on many a hike. Another time he got some of the high-temperature chocolate the Army handed out in WWII – tasted a bit like candle-wax, but still, it was vaguely chocolatey and had lots of sugar, which meant it was great trail food.
One other time, however, his surplus purchase didn't quite work out as we expected. He bought a case of canned freeze-dried banana slices, again military surplus. These were not at all like the “banana chips” you often find at places like Trader Joe's; these weren't fried. In fact, they weren't cooked at all – just dehydrated. I found these in an online store; they look like the same thing my dad bought. Those military surplus banana chips were in some kind of very lightweight can, and they had removable tops of some kind – no can opener required. I remember us marveling at those cans, the first we'd ever seen. They looked perfect for hiking – light-weight, no cooking required, not even a can opener needed.
It was on one of those Chimney Pond trips that we first took along some banana chips from that purchase my dad made. I can even remember which trail we were taking the first time we ate any: we were on the trail from Chimney Pond that leads north, to the “table lands” (a big, flat saddle to the east of Baxter Peak). On the way up, in the morning, we opened one of those cans and started eating.
Those chips weighed next-to-nothing, and each chip was quite small, roughly the size of a nickel. And they were tasty – a nice, intense banana flavor. The texture was a bit weird (I suspect this is why most of them are fried, to make the texture more palatable), but they really were great trail food. We ate the whole can in short order, and shortly we opened our second can and ate all of that. In my memory, at least, I ate more of those chips than anyone else, though I'm not sure that's a high-fidelity memory.
Very satisfied, we had a drink at a spring and kept hiking up. It wasn't long, though, before I started feeling a bit strange. Bloated, like. In fact, my belly was becoming distended, and I was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable. At some point my dad figured out what was going on: those banana slices were re-hydrating inside our stomachs, and expanding. A lot. Fifteen minutes or so after I ate my last banana chip, the banana chips started coming back out of my mouth – they'd expanded so much that they quite literally forced their way back up. I wasn't vomiting in the usual sense, just ejecting the excess banana chips.
At some point a happy equilibrium was met, and the rest of the banana chips stayed down. I cannot remember today whether anyone else who had partaken was similarly afflicted, or if it was just me. Those banana chips are hands-down the most memorable trail food I've ever eaten, though. I'm not likely to forget that experience :)
My dad, I remember, was badly torn – between being concerned for my well-being, and rolling around in hysterical laughter over this boy who emitted banana chips. Even at the time I thought it was funny, and while it was uncomfortable, it wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as real vomiting is. It was such an odd feeling, to have your food expanding within you!
That night my dad did an experiment with one of those banana chips, putting it in warm water to see what would happen. That nickel-sized chip roughly doubled in diameter and tripled or quadrupled in thickness. It also recovered most of the texture of a overripe banana, too. We ate all those banana chips on future hikes, and we were sorry when they were all gone – they really did make good trail food. But you can bet that we ate them much more respectfully after that, and in significantly smaller quantities.
We did one other thing that night, too: we read the can. On there was a very clear warning, in big bold type, about eating too many of the chips. I remember my dad reading that part out loud, and there was a passage that went roughly like this: “If you are eating these banana slices directly from the can, do NOT eat more than one handful for a meal, and no more than two meals a day.” We all wondered how many soldiers had done the same thing we did. My dad didn't think anyone was likely to read a can – everybody was too familiar with cans. They'd just open them up and eat, like we did. We always read the packaging on trail food we bought after that, though :)
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