There are moments in life when the most compelling urge is to bitch-slap yourself silly. Peering beneath the pot she’d been simmering, Jaclyn looked up at me and asked, “Where’s the gas flame?”
An empty propane bottle was the obvious culprit, and not being a dumbass cheechako I always keep a twenty-pounder in reserve for moments just like this. But it quickly became evident that I was in fact not smart enough to have the channel locks needed to undo the brass fittings to swap the tanks out. Standing there looking down at the two tanks and the woeful Leatherman pliers in my right hand (far too small), I asked the gods, “What is life that I must drive forty minutes into town and back right now to buy a pair of channel locks?”
Jaclyn, super-smart lady that she is, quickly hit upon a solution. We would eschew the cookstove altogether and go old school–the Dutch ovens and our tried and true fire pit. After all, she pointed out with her inimitable logic, it was a sunny night.
“I’m doing baguettes with baked beans in the Dutch oven anyway,” she said. “We’ll just cook the beans and bread over the coals instead of in the gas oven.”
I’d learned a bit of Dutch oven cookery on a float trip a few years earlier. Slowly I pulled myself together and built a spruce fire; it’s not a great cooking wood, but it’s mostly what we have around here. We put the kid down for the night with a wet-wipe bath. She babbled and smiled, blissfully unaware that she’d drawn a pair of writers in the parents lottery.
Outside we let the fire burn down to coals and set the heavy Dutch oven with the beans atop two charred sticks. The white hot loose coals beneath crunched and tinkled like a chandelier under the cast iron. The idea is to keep the air flowing into the coals to keep them hot while the cooking happens. I used my barbeque tongs to place more coals atop the lid for the sake of an even heat. Among the tricks I absorbed on the Colorado River was that you don’t want to pile shovelfuls of coals atop the lid; a cupful does the trick nicely.
As the beans began to simmer I gradually started feeling less and less like the dumbest guy who ever lived. It’s a difficult feeling to outrun. But there was the fire, some weed and red wine. I rarely drink, but this was a difficult moment on life’s road. The conversation, as I recall, touched on Sara Gruen’s novel Water for Elephants and the tropes of circus-based novels.
One cannot have camp beans and bread without the bread, so we carefully sliced the uncooked rolls of baguette dough into three-inch sections and put them into our second Dutch oven. I scraped new coals into the cooking bed, set the pot in place and piled coals atop the lid.
Any fool can simmer beans on a fire, but baking in a Dutch oven is a whole other kettle of fish. The heat is much more critical, both in temperature and placement. It was a long twelve minutes of anxious pacing, mostly by me with Jaclyn watching with her usual detached amusement. So much can go wrong in life and more often than not your only recourse is to worry obsessively. Any parent will understand this.
But life is also full of small victories. When I drew the lid back the bread was risen (somewhat) and the bottoms golden brown, if a bit crisp.
“Victory at sea,” I said. We dished it up and ate. Both bread and beans were plenty edible, and my angst over the rookie move of no channel locks ebbed. Jaclyn gently patted my thigh as the fire crackled and a pair of camprobbers perched on a nearby stump, watching the food more keenly than us.