From the Archives: My First Cell Phone

Introduction

I was very late in getting a cell phone; by the time I got my first one, in February of 2006, virtually everyone I knew had been using them for years.  This monumental purchase brought about a flurry of mini-epiphanies that I wrote about in an e-mail to my brothers.  It seems fitting to post this now, after having blogged about my first smartphone last week.

My First Cell Phone - February 7, 2006

After holding out for years against the incredulous entreaties of my friends and colleagues, I’ve finally gotten my first cell phone. It's funny: once I made up my mind to buy a phone, and started looking at the different models, I got the strangest feeling. I can only describe it as consumer lust. No, that's not quite it—maybe more like consumer romance. It's a warm, familiar, almost relieved feeling … the visceral sense that once I have this new piece of equipment, everything's going to be okay. Once I have a phone, that I picked out, that is mine, that I’ve set up my way, sitting in my pocket like a talisman, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice, then maybe I can get through this difficult life a little more easily.

I think all consumer goods are a bit like that. We humans live in fear. Fear not just of death, but of the other, of the big wide world we’re in and all the strangers we share it with. We take great comfort, I think, in the familiar. This comfort derives from taming our environments—not just decorating our homes the way we like, but cutting our world down to size by sticking to a few familiar establishments, carving nice ruts between our offices, our shops, and our homes. (Perhaps this is why travel, while exciting, is also ultimately draining.) We even dress according to some corollary of the Golden Rule: thou shalt dress the way your friends and family would have you dress (that is, basically how they do). Most of us even apply to our bodies our own signature scent—deodorant, perfume, or even cologne—which is a bit like a dog or cat marking its territory.

So after careful deliberation, I chose this hot little Pantech number. I believe it is a fitting representation of my no-nonsense yet elegant sensibility. It’s a flip-phone, with a little caller-ID display on the lid so I can screen calls. I like to flip open the top, because it has a nice spring-loaded action that somehow seems, well, sprightly. Occasionally I toy with the little antenna, which only pulls out a few inches and so far hasn't been necessary. But the antenna seems frail, so I get nervous and poke it back in.

I've customized the wallpaper and the screen-saver with photos I took with the phone itself. I chose a ring-tone that I have to say qualifies as ironic: it's a very simple electronic ringing sound, but just enough like an old-fashioned, non-electronic, bell-based ring that you suddenly realize the ring-tone is quadraphonic, or polyphonic, or whatever that term is that means “really cool advanced ring-tone that could even recreate the human voice if it wanted to, as opposed to those embarrassing, tinny, Atari-like ring-tones of those primitive early phones.” It's high-tech pretending it's low-tech, and you're in on the joke.

I, Me, Mine

I was on a business trip back in the era of corporate boondoggles, and had to share a hotel room with a colleague I didn't know. I saw his toiletries laid out next to the sink and was overcome with revulsion. He had a different brand of everything—not one consumer item matched mine. It is a testament to the power of brand loyalty that this array seemed almost an act of open hostility. Prell shampoo, Aim toothpaste, some brand of shaving cream I'd never seen in my life, a funny-looking razor … only when I pondered my reaction did I come to realize how much comfort I get from the familiarity of the products I use.

Beyond merely choosing our consumer products, we get to increase their cozy me-ness by customizing them. Even the simplest product can give that pleasure. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I can well imagine the pleasurable routine coffee entails. A minute ago that cup of coffee belonged to Starbucks, but when I paid for it and took possession, it became mine, and when I put in just the right amount of sweetener (white sugar? Sugar-in-the-Raw? Equal? my choice!) and just the right amount of creamer (skim? whole? half-&-half? fat-free "half-&-half"? powder? my choice!), and stirred it with the stirrer of my choice (red & white plastic swizzle stick? wooden Popsicle stick? plastic spoon?), that simple cup of coffee became totally, uniquely, personally mine, as individual as my fingerprint. Thus armed, I can brave even the most crowded elevator with my identity not only intact but bolstered. Every sip reinforces my sense that amid the tumult of the vast universe, I still exert control—several times a day—over my own little patch of it.

A cell phone gives even more such opportunities: ring tone, wallpaper, screen saver—and that’s just the electronic part. Cell phone accessories comprise a whole other industry. Sure, lots of people have this Motorola phone, but who else has paired it with the cream teal pastel face plate and earth tone plaid holster?

Safety in Numbers

Consumer products become an extension of ourselves, and the cell phone does even more: it ties us to our friends and family. However far we stray from our normal environment, at least we’re not so alone anymore. Struck down by an existential crisis? At least you’ve got a vast contact list embedded in the phone. The simple act of scrolling down the list might give some comfort, and if that’s not enough, just press Send.

Even the phone number of my cell gives me subtle sense of distinction. It was blind luck that I got a number with no ones or zeroes in it, because it resolves to a really cool alphabet mnemonic (which I’m not going to provide here lest it get scrawled on a bathroom wall by a malevolent reader). And because cell phones now offer number portability, that number is mine forever. No matter what phone company contracts I sign or break or accidentally re-enroll in, no matter what happens to my physical phone, whatever happens to me myself for that matter, no matter how badly somebody insults me, no matter how out of place I feel at a cocktail party where everybody but me knows everybody else, nobody can ever take that phone number away from me.

Even the area code gives me pleasure. I'll never forget my pride in finally getting a nationally renowned area code, 415, when I moved from Santa Barbara to Oakland, and then how crestfallen I felt when my area code was suddenly changed to 510. Ha! I should have been grateful they didn't give me something even worse. Until relatively recently, phone switching technology made it impossible for area codes to have anything but a zero or one as the middle digit; consequently, area codes with anything else strike me as so Johnny-come-lately.

As it stands now, my home phone service provider could change my area code anytime they want, but with the cell phone I'm safe. The towns and cities of America can continue subdividing at their cancerous rate, spawning all kinds of new area codes with any damn middle digit at all, so that new numbers in Albany got an area code like 572 or something, and I'd still have that classic 510. I could even move to a different city and keep it—heck, I could move out of state and still take that little bit of California with me.

Smartphone

I got a BlackBerry. I have to say, it’s a pretty spiffy device. Are you annoyed with me for saying so? If not, I will proceed to enumerate its qualities. I can peek real quick at my e-mail, and calendar, without going to my PC and logging on. I can look at an online map when I’m lost, or check the Giro d’Italia results when I’m at my kid’s soccer game. It has a camera, and I can send the photos right to my e-mail instead of paying a cell phone company to transmit them to somebody. And I can “tether” my PC to it and enjoy wireless Internet access virtually anywhere.

Okay, now you’re annoyed. Good. I needed to get you to this place to prime you for my forthcoming examination of why such a seemingly innocent device can make normal people seem annoying, or at least bring out the latent annoyingness in all of us. (I also wanted to acknowledge the worth of this device, lest I seem hypocritical. Having become accustomed to its convenience, I wouldn’t want to give it up.) Finally, though this post isn’t a review of the BlackBerry or iPhone or any other smartphone, I’m hoping the proximity, in this sentence, of “review” to “BlackBerry” and “iPhone” will cause Google searches to direct people to my blog.

So, what is it about smartphones that gets people's heckles up? Let’s take an inventory.

Aesthetic issues

A phone doesn’t have to be very smart to be annoying. Obviously, simple musical ringtones can pollute any public transit or marketplace atmosphere. The common hands-free cell phone functionality makes it impossible to tell the real crazies from ordinary people having a heated argument with an unseen party. And I often see some joe walking down the sidewalk engrossed in conversation and—without realizing it—holding the clip-on microphone right near his mouth, without any idea what a total idiot he looks like. The devices themselves don’t look bad, but just add humans and you get some pretty unpleasant spectacles.

The fancier the technology, the worse this gets, as illustrated by the Bluetooth receiver that clips onto your ear. Are people really so lazy, or so often on the phone, that this thing could possibly make sense? The first time I saw a Bluetooth ear thingy, my unspoken reaction was “Aw, poor guy, I guess he’s mostly deaf, and needs the most powerful, clunky hearing aid on the market.” I was shocked to learn it was a non-essential accessory worn by choice.

Outside of the devices themselves, the hype their creators have generated becomes tedious. My seven-year-old asked me recently, out of the blue, “Daddy, which type of Blackberry do you prefer: yours, or the touch-screen kind?” Aghast, I asked where she’d heard of the touch-screen model. “You know, those bulletins along the highway,” she replied. Aren’t these devices popular enough without ubiquitous billboards advertising them?

Behavioral issues

Invariably, these modern electronic devices are equipped with useless little electronic games. Often I see people—upscale, well-dressed, presumably gainfully employed people—on the train playing Tetris or Solitaire on their PC, smartphone, or whatever. On the one hand, how they spend their time is really their own business. But on the other hand, I find this behavior offensive. I truly believe I could find totally useful ways to fill a 36-hour day, and I’d still go to bed every night lamenting the things I couldn’t find the time to do—and yet here these guys are, killing time as ruthlessly and pointlessly as Buffalo Bill and his ilk when they slaughtered all those buffalo, shooting at the innocent beasts from their train windows as they passed, out of sheer boredom.

At a trade show recently, a guy in one of the expo booths saw the corporate logo on my shirt and thought maybe I could help him with his BlackBerry. (I work in telecommunications.) He joked that if I could solve his problem, he would guarantee that I’d win the bike they were raffling off. I said I’d do my best. His complaint was that when he played Brickbreaker, a little game on the BlackBerry resembling the first Pong video game ever invented, he couldn’t get past a certain advanced level because the software would lock up. How could he get past this?

This was a real dilemma. On the one hand, I had no idea how to help (having only briefly examined Brickbreaker before dismissing it from my life forever). On the other hand, I didn’t want to seem unhelpful. Fortunately, in a college rhetoric class I had learned some useful tricks, such as “slipping between the horns of the dilemma.” In other words, I could offer this fellow an alternative solution: “Get a life!” Of course, being a nice guy who is representing his employer, I didn’t put it this way. I suggested instead that instead of Brickbreaker, he take advantage of another BlackBerry feature wherein you can rearrange the icons on your device’s desktop to your liking. It’s like a game—whenever you move one icon to where you want it, you disturb the ideal location of another icon, just like a sliding-number fifteen puzzle—except that when you’ve finished “playing” you’ve actually accomplished something. Plus, this application never crashes. (As you may have guessed, the guy didn’t like this suggestion.)

I think the strongest reaction against smartphone-using behavior comes from those who don’t appreciate the trajectory that these technological advances tend to take. In the beginning, the hi-tech device confers a rare advantage on the user—a lucky thing for him, without any effect on anybody else. (For example, the smartphone user can read his e-mail even when he’s not at his desk.) Then the new capability becomes something others can count on, which creates a new burden for the user. (Having a smartphone means being available to others on e-mail all the time.) Eventually, the technology becomes sufficiently widespread that everybody counts on everybody else having it, and those who refuse to adopt it cause actual resentment. If you don’t believe this, think about your reaction last time you tried to phone somebody and he didn’t have voice-mail or an answering machine. Or, imagine how annoyed you’d be if a friend or relative decided to renounce the telephone entirely.

Arrogance , showiness

Of course the main complaint people have with the early adopters of a slick and expensive new technology is the smugness these adopters tend to have. There’s a propensity among these people to go out of their way to use the new technology right in front of you, ignoring the fact that unless the technology is Botox or a padded bra, it isn’t doing the onlooker any good at all. It’s just an obnoxious display of one-upmanship—bad enough when the technology truly is impressive, and even worse when it’s not.

Somehow, the silent features of the smartphones make the user think he’s not only inaudible but invisible. Many cell phone users have, by now, figured out that they should step away from a public space to make (or field) a phone call, but the texters and e-mailers have evidently not. For example, a colleague from another branch, who invited me to lunch, spent most of the meal trying to buy something at an online auction. (I was not impressed.) Or consider our babysitter, who tuned out from our (albeit inconsequential) conversation to exchange some (doubtless utterly worthless) text messages. I’ve seen people in meetings go from letting their eyes flit momentarily to their smartphones to sharing their attention equally between the smartphone and me, to eventually forgetting they were in a meeting at all and peering with utter absorption into their smartphone screens. Miss Manners would see fit to have these people electrocuted.

Sometimes it’s not the use of the device but the mere display of it that is showy. I refer you again to the clip-on Bluetooth receiver. The second time I ever saw one of these was (coincidentally) at a Vegas trade show. A really cheesy guy, in a suit and tie and looking like Dilbert’s boss, was taking a parade lap of the convention hall with a hired bimbo on each arm, looking exceedingly proud of himself (as though anybody in attendance thought for a second he hadn’t just hired the bimbos like people used to hire a team of horses to pull their carriage). His glittering Bluetooth receiver was of a piece with his suit, his grin, and the spectacle of his bimbo parade. My colleague Brendan, as disgusted as I was, couldn’t take it and ran up to the guy. “Sir, sir!” Brendan cried out. “There’s something in your ear!”

Eye of the beholder?

The problem with diving right into this righteous indignation is that we’re prone to finding fault that isn’t really deserved. For example, what if I’m organizing the icons on my BlackBerry’s desktop—a perfectly reasonable thing to do—and you incorrectly assume I’m wasting my time on a dumb game? Or, consider my brother Geoff’s observation that people like to show off their fancy phones by setting them on the table when having a meal or coffee. For years I, too, thought of this as a needless display. But when I got my Blackberry I came to realize why people do this. It isn’t to show off the phone; it’s because cell phone buttons (especially on older, non-flip-top phones and modern smartphones) have a tendency to get pushed when you sit down with the device in your pocket. Once, as I sat down to lunch with a colleague, my Blackberry dialed the last number in memory, which turned out to be his. Imagine his surprise when the caller was—me!

Which brings me to an e-mail exchange I had with my brother Bryan. The first time I tried out the Blackberry camera feature, I discovered that I could e-mail photos directly from the phone. Of course I had to test this (and, yes, show off), so I sent a couple of photos of my daughters to my brother. I should have known I’d be in for it.

The Footer

Of course I knew about the footer, “Sent using Blackberry,” that would be attached to the e-mail to my brother, and I had a pretty good feeling that a) for good reason, and b) because he’s my older brother, Bryan would be commenting on that footer. I was not mistaken: click on the e-mail snapshot below to read his message.


(For the record, I don’t have cocktails before lunch, nor do I own or drive a luxury sedan.)

Bryan doesn’t explain exactly how my “Sent using BlackBerry” puts him at relative ease. I'm guessing it’s that he figures my use of this header is unintentional, that the footer is factory-configured, and all the footers from BlackBerry users are also unintentional, and thus people aren't as pompous as he’d feared. And I think he’s partially right. I propose that there are four main categories of smartphone user, which I will describe in descending order of annoyingness.

The first category comprises those who really are that proud of their smartphones, their connectedness, their with-it-ness, and their high-flying wi-fi ways. These people would go out of their way to put a “Sent using BlackBerry” footer on their messages even if it weren't pre-configured.

The second category covers the people who might be on the fence about whether or not to boast openly about their BlackBerryness, and would have to think hard about whether to set up the footer, but who don't have to decide because the footer is sent by default and they're perhaps glad the decision was made for them.

The third category consists of those who don't like the footer and wish it wasn't on there, but can't figure out how to remove it. (This process is not actually very straightforward, which is possibly by design.) These are the ones who, whenever e-mailing from their Blackberries, feel the “wince of remorse” my brother imagines.

The fourth category consists of those who don't like the footer and remove it. Of course, we have no way of knowing how many BlackBerry users fall into this category, because they're invisible. Their messages might as well have come from an Ethernet-connected PC.

Which brings me to my own case. As it happens, I don't fall into any of the four categories I set forth above. (Makes you wonder at their validity, eh?) To begin with, I was inclined to delete the footer. Before being issued a Blackberry of my own, when I got e-mails from Blackberries (or iPhones, which carry their own footer), I had always found the footer slightly boastful too, though thankfully I never said anything to anybody. (“You all without sin can cast the first stone....”) But on the verge of deleting my footer, I paused, reconsidered, and backed off. Why?

Well, for complicated reasons you surely wouldn’t care to hear about, I’m pretty sure my employer wants to promote Blackberry. That may be part of why they pay for my phone.  And so, as a good corporate citizen, who gets to enjoy the capabilities of this actually rather groovy device, I would feel pretty shabby removing the footer, or changing it to something like “Sent while driving.”

Evolution

I think the growing success of smartphones will eventually eliminate the ostentation of their users. We’ve seen this evolution before. Remember when phone answering machines were new? People would go out of their way to record funny, often elaborate outgoing messages. Many corporate types recorded a fresh outgoing message every day, announcing their general availability and such. But I don’t come across such custom messages anymore. (Do you?)

It also seems to me the cell phone culture has become more subdued. When cell phones were only in the hands of the elite, it seemed like those who had them talked a lot louder, and more often, in public. Whether through natural evolution or the efforts of businesses like restaurants prohibiting them, this activity has died down, even while the number of cell phone users has skyrocketed. I have read that the ringtone industry peaked in 2003 and has since died down quite a bit; apparently cell phone users eventually realized that custom ringtones just aren’t that cool after all.

Other technologies, too, have mellowed out or disappeared. Car alarms, once a must-have for anybody who thought his car (and/or car stereo) valuable, have gone from an epidemic to a blessed rarity. When e-mail first took hold, the number of forwarded jokes threatened to paralyze us all until people evidently tired of participating in the e-mail-tainment (though spam has stepped in to perpetuate our annoyance). Maybe in time the smartphone will evolve from a gee-whiz cutting-edge product into a basic, uncelebrated tool, and smartphone-originated e-mails won’t carry the “Sent from…” footers anymore. Indeed, I can foresee a world where the standard reaction to such a footer would be, “Well, duh!”

Book Review: Cowboy Sam

Introduction

One great reason to have kids is that it gives you an excuse to read the children’s books you enjoyed in your youth. You can find just about any book now through the online resellers, even books long out of print. The first book I ever read was Cowboy Sam by Edna Walker Chandler. I just couldn’t get enough of it, and begged my mom to read it to me again and again until I had it all but memorized. (To this day, if you mention the title she’ll groan retroactively at the remembered tedium of this.) No other children’s book had the same effect on me back then.

Remembering Cowboy Sam’s impact reminds me of the odd compulsion my childhood friend John and I had to listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” over and over. One day we even heard, on a radio talk show, about a child welfare group that was trying to censor the song based on both its addictiveness to teens and its alleged Satanic backmasking. Intrigued, we messed around with John’s parents’ turntable until, to our astonishment, we discovered that the song really does have Satanic backmasking: “My sweet Satan,” clear as a bell. (I probably shouldn’t admit this, but Alexa has taken to the song and now begs us to play it for her. I’m assuming this is based on the quality of the song, not the clever gimmick she doesn’t know anything about.)

Cowboy Sam isn’t quite so compelling to my kids, though Lindsay has taken a shine to it lately and will make me start from the beginning if we’re interrupted during a reading. Yesterday she stared intently for some time one of its pictures, of a herd of cows. “That one looks angry,” she says. And it does—look.









Lindsay goes on to say, “The others are all sad and worried and he’s saying, ‘It’s all my fault!’”

I decided not to psychoanalyze my daughter about this utterance, but I did take a moment to correct her pronoun: “You mean she looks angry.” After all, it says right in the book that these are all cows. And then it hit me: why all cows? Not a single bull in the book, and not a single steer. And meanwhile, not a single female human. What’s up with this oddly compelling book with no women and this very angry, guilt-ridden cow? I decided that, as had “Stairway to Heaven,” this book warranted closer inspection and analysis.

The Truth About Sam

Sure enough, Cowboy Sam starts off like a lads’ mag (e.g., Gear, Stuff), showcasing Cowboy Sam’s possessions. Okay, I’m kidding—that’s a perfectly straightforward beginning to an early readers’ book. But very quickly it becomes clear that Cowboy Sam himself is the sole focus, the other characters serving as mere bit players.

“Look ... SAM’S RANCH,” Lindsay says, pointing at the sign above the corral. “It’s only his, not theirs,” she declares emphatically.
Granted, this book is entitled (literally) to have a central character, but it’s odd how the other characters are described only in terms of their relationship to him. “Here is Big Bill. He makes good things for Sam to eat.” No mention of Bill’s intrinsic value. “Here is Shorty. He is a cowboy, too. He helps Sam.” Nota bene: these two are not united in a common cause—it’s Sam’s world and Shorty just helps. We never even get Shorty’s real name. (You think it says “Shorty” on his birth certificate? What, were his parents clairvoyant?)

Sam, we quickly learn, is the quintessential alpha male. It’s as though he won’t tolerate any other strong male figure in his world. Remember, while cows feature prominently in the book, we never get a single bull. The only other male mentioned is Black Wolf, a clear adversary who must be vanquished. Sam will not acknowledge that wolves naturally eat other animals, including cattle, as part of nature’s plan. He declares his feelings very bluntly: “Black Wolf is bad.” On first reading, or perhaps the first hundred readings, it may seem as though Black Wolf is the instigator in this conflict, sneaking up on Sam and the cows as they sleep. But what is Sam doing sleeping on the ground, in the middle of nowhere, with his cows? Simply this: he has set a trap—using his own cows as bait! When Black Wolf falls for this, out comes the rifle. (Obviously the phallic representation of the gun needs no exegesis, but I will say that I vividly remember being inexplicably thrilled, as a boy, by the fact of, and sight of, that rifle.)

Does the narrator use the Black Wolf episode to take Sam down a notch? Maybe hand him a minor defeat, or at least some unexpected remorse after he takes the life of one of God’s creatures? Of course not. This being a children’s book, the wolf doesn’t take a bullet, but the outcome is even more perfect for Sam: the humiliated creature literally runs away with its tale between its legs! Black Wolf is totally shamed by Sam, run right out of the book. The cowboy’s triumph is complete.

Conclusive Evidence

The astute reader may wonder if I’m reading too much into this—could it not be that Sam is just a cowboy, after all, with a less than totally sophisticated view of the natural world? And isn’t it natural to defend your cattle against predators? Well, in the sarcastic words of another macho man, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Indeed, closer inspection shows that Cowboy Sam systematically undermines the self esteem of everybody around him, to ensure his dominance within his little realm.

First, we see his contrary reaction to every one of Shorty’s suggestions. When Sam sets out to look for Black Wolf, Shorty asks, “Do you want me to ride with you?” The most logical answer, in my book, is yes—after all, wouldn’t two cowboys have a better chance against Black Wolf? But no, not in Cowboy Sam’s view. He must do this ... ALONE. But if he’s going to deny Shorty, he could at least be polite about it. A simple “No thanks,” perhaps? Instead, you wince at the brittle reproach, worthy of Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, when Sam says icily, “I want you to work on the ranch.” (In today’s vernacular he’d be saying, “I want you to work on the ranch, bitch.”) Later in the book, Shorty—obsequious as ever and perhaps chastened by his earlier rebuke—asks, “Do you want me to work on the ranch?” Sam, far too imperious and contrarian to accept the suggestion, once again counters it: “I want you to ride with me.”

You may still think I’m quibbling. A coincidence, you might say. Or, perhaps it’s Shorty’s fault—maybe he’s just a pest, maybe he can’t read the situation. Well then, what defense would you give when Sam outwardly disses Big Bill? This happens when Sam is leaving to hunt down Black Wolf. He doesn’t state his true intentions; he says, “I am going to take the cows to water. I will look for Black Wolf.” The implication is that he’s just going to keep an eye out for the wolf during a daily errand. He makes this more explicit when he says, “I will come back soon. I will want a good dinner.” Bill, as accommodating as Shorty, replies, “Good-by. I will make a good dinner.” But one hundred readings later we realize that Sam has no intention of being back by dinnertime. Not only has he brought his dinner along, he’s brought his bedroll! Even after getting rid of Black Wolf, Sam spends the rest of the night under the stars. His petty ego must get some satisfaction in imagining Bill eventually realizing he isn’t coming home, and throwing out his dinner.












A Shocking Revelation

Sam’s snub of Big Bill notwithstanding, the central relationship in the book is between Sam and Shorty. Not only is Shorty eager to please Sam, but he’s openly solicitous—protective, even. Shorty offers him the snake bite box, and Sam replies, “I will take it.” But he doesn’t. Later, when Sam takes leave of Shorty out on the range, Shorty patiently offers him the snake bite box again. This gentle but persistent reminder ... what did it make me think of? Ah, yes ... Walter Mitty’s wife. Shorty and Sam are like an old married couple! No, I’m not going to suggest they’re gay. (Cowboy Sam came out almost fifty years before “Brokeback Mountain.”) But I had a sudden epiphany when I examined this picture carefully:

















Shorty looks uncannily small, doesn’t he? The first hundred or so times I saw this, I figured Shorty was somewhat in the background, but then I noticed that the snake bite box is in front of Sam’s arm. Something just looks wrong: men that short tend to be much stockier than that. Something about Shorty’s physique suddenly struck me in a new light, and I quickly flipped through the book looking for other clues. Confirmation came with this one:

There can be no doubt—Shorty is a woman! No wonder she’s content being so submissive—she’s faking it as a man, just to be included in this rancher’s world, and doesn’t want to make waves and have her secret discovered. (In fact, she looks a fair bit like Teena Brandon, aka Brandon Teena, in the movie “Boys Don’t Cry.”) In this context, an odd comment she offers toward the end of the book makes a bit more sense: “I like a cowboy’s work.” And she clearly does.

Whether or not Shorty is in love with Cowboy Sam, she obviously feels a certain tenderness for his fragile male ego; consider her litany of praise at the end of the book: “You did good work. You shot Black Wolf. You looked for water. You shot two snakes. You helped Dandy.” Never mind that Sam didn’t shoot Black Wolf (he missed); that on the occasion in question he never did find water (though Shorty herself did, twice!); that he shot one snake only after it already bit Dandy and shot the other for no good reason; and that he was able to help Dandy only because she, Shorty, had finally managed to get him to take the snake bite box. As far as we can tell, Shorty is by far more competent as a cowboy; unsurprisingly, Cowboy Sam’s response is far from generous: “You helped, too.”

So what, exactly, is the author, Edna Walker Chandler, up to? In 1951, when this book was first published, a book with an outwardly feminist theme could only have served a niche market. To inject a message into mainstream children’s literature, she would have been compelled by necessity to be very subtle, and I think that’s what she has done. The key that unlocks the hidden message is the angry cow that Lindsay noticed. It’s as if the cow is saying, “Look, we’re all getting screwed here by the arbitrary authority of this unenlightened [male-dominated rancher] society, and so long as we allow ourselves to be herded along like this, things will never change.” Only Shorty herself, by infiltrating this society and this book, seems to have taken the first cautious step in turning things around.

Conclusion

Does Shorty’s scheme get us anywhere? Yes, eventually. Eleven years later, in 1962, Shorty finally gets equal billing in the series with Cowboy Sam and Shorty, in which she even has an acknowledged triumph when Cowboy Sam forgets to put gas in his car and Shorty gets to tow him home, with a bunch of other cowboys as witness. Finally, in 1971, came not just one but two books in the series that openly admitted female humans (Cowboy Sam and Sally and Cowboy Sam and Miss Lilly). (I’ll confess that I haven’t sprung for these two titles.)

And what of the author’s undertaking? Was Edna Walker Chandler successful in infusing her children’s books with subversive proto-feminist messages? Hard to say. Who can tell what incremental attitude shifts she may have achieved in the malleable minds of our youth? It’s a much more solid bet, however, that the male-dominated publishing establishment eventually caught on to her little project, for the entire Cowboy Sam series, along with Chandler’s adult title Women In Prison, have long been out of print.

Airport

I’m on a business trip. I’m a nervous traveler, always checking my watch and re-checking my bag for my wallet, and my wallet for my driver license, and confirming for the tenth time that I have my boarding pass. When I’m in the security line I take off my belt and wristwatch and stash them in my bag long before I reach the x-ray and metal detector. Then I go to check my watch again and it’s not on my wrist and I freak out for a second.

The heightened security measures at airports are so obviously absurd and useless that they don’t bear mention in this—or any—blog. A few years back I did have an especially odd episode at the airport in Munich, though: I was made to leave behind the rubber tip from my gum stimulator and my toddler’s plastic-coated fork. I thought about asking the security guy if he really thought I was going to gum the pilot to death, or try to injure him with something designed for a small person with shockingly poor motor skills. But the security guy in question was carrying a machine gun and didn’t look like he had a sense of humor, and I sucked it up.

What with the economic downturn I’m a bit out of practice with business travel, and found myself this morning getting into the wrong security line at SFO—I was in at First Class instead of Coach. I had a pretty good idea where the right line was, but I held out some vain hope that if I engaged the guard she would take pity on me for being lost and would allow me in the First Class line. The trouble was, I couldn’t come up with the word “Coach” and was having trouble finishing my sentence. All I could manage was, “Excuse me, do you know where the line is for the, uh … unwashed masses?” I hoped the guard would have a sense of humor. She didn’t. She gave me a resolutely dour and humorless stare, and didn’t even answer my question.

A couple other guys were just getting into the line and overheard me, and one of them chuckled. At first I was gratified that somebody thought I was funny. But then as he said “It’s over there,” he gestured toward the coach line a little too emphatically, slicing the air with his arm as he pointed, like a referee. I realized his chuckle was actually born of the little extra pleasure I’d given him in the exclusivity of his First Class status. The physical distance between the lines is like the curtain in the airplane between First Class and Coach, separating the wheat from the chaff, and he seemed to enjoy banishing me from his line. I’ll confess I was slightly irked, but only slightly. After all, at least he did point me in the right direction.

As I started on my sad Coach-class way, the security guard finally spoke. “You have a boarding pass?” she asked. I produced it. “You can use this line,” she said. And so I found myself in the rarified elite line, right behind the First Class guy. He looked startled to see me. “They let you in the First Class line?” he blurted out, before (I suppose) realizing how petty this sounded. I told him it must be my lucky day.

That was the high point of my airport experience. From there things unraveled predictably enough. Unlike last time I flew, I did manage to remember the quart-sized Ziploc bag for my toiletries (if we American travelers carry our deodorant and toothbrushes in anything but a quart-sized Ziploc, then the terrorists have already won), but I forgot to take my laptop out of the case and was roundly chastised at the X-ray. I boarded the plane and in stashing my stuff realized I’d forgotten the cord to my headphones. The flight attendant said over the loud speaker, “After stowing your bags please step out of the aisle and let life pass you by.” No, that’s not what she said, but it’s what I heard as I smashed myself into my seat, knees around my ears because the airlines would rather have nobody to assist the crew at the Exit Row than to give these superior seats away for free.

But then I took a moment to relive my little victory at the security line. I’d really turned the tables on the established social order, hadn’t I? Part of what those First Class travelers are paying for is their separation from the likes of me, and yet—mere moments after snubbing me—this elite guy had to share a line with me. How did it happen? Perhaps the security guard, already beaten down by carrying out arbitrary procedures all day, decided her First Class passenger was just a bit too smug in directing me to my lowly place.

Tax Day

Every year at tax time, and of course at other times as well, we hear about simplifications to the tax code. I’ve generally assumed these were a ruse for the rich (damn them) to pass more of the tax burden on to the likes of me, and I’m all for adding a few new line items if I can save a bit of money. But this year I finally came around and have thought of several improvements to the code.

Software

The software should be free, and it should be made by the WordPerfect folks in Orem, Utah, who wrote the last software of any kind that actually worked. Tech support should be live, and free. I had a problem with my Intuit product this year, and was astonished, and then immediately thereafter totally resigned, to learn that their tech support is e-mail only and has a 48-hour turnaround, which is absurd for a) any Californian (state motto: “we don’t have time for this crap”), and b) anybody waiting until the last minute to do his taxes (i.e., everybody). My e-mail to Intuit included the sentence “I am livid,” which is usually a sign that a company has earned a lifetime boycott by me.

To describe how the IRS software free tech support should work, I’ll cite a real-life example: my own phone call the other day to Electrodyne, makers of a modem line tap I occasionally use at work. To give you an idea how outdated this instrument is, the “high speed” version goes all the way up to 2400 baud. (Note to Homeland Security blog eavesdroppers: a modem line tap isn’t as sinister as it sounds. It’s no more dangerous than a TCP/IP sniffer. Now go look up “sniffer” on Wikipedia and stop bothering me.) I went to the manufacturer’s website because I feared I had the wrong power supply for my instrument, and within moments found a toll-free number listed. A guy picked up on the first ring, and he sounded like just the kind of crusty old veteran who could be of great help, which he was. “I’ve got a 2400A modem line tap and I need to know the current for its power supply,” I said. He didn’t even take time to scratch his head. “That will run about 800, 900 milliamperes,” he said. (You think Microsoft is that savvy? Huh. Their spell-check dictionary doesn’t even have “milliamperes.”) I told him what I had (700 milliamps), and he asked the voltage. He said I’d be fine. Done. IRS: take note. This is called customer service.

SASE

Unfortunately, on the day I finished my taxes, which was not coincidentally April 15, I’d had a hard workday, squinting at my modem line tap output on another venerable device, the Navtel datascope. The Navtel is more reliable than, say, a modern Blackberry, which due to an inscrutable user interface did a unilateral spell-check substitution recently such that I accidentally e-mailed a colleague to ask, “Do you still have a navel?” Fortunately, she was cool about it.

The Navtel’s screen is small and blurry to begin with, and the data on it very hard to decipher. I’ve added some extra blur to this picture to show you how it looked to me by 4:30 p.m., and because there could be sensitive data on there. (Note to Homeland Security blog auditors: see? Totally illegible. Now go bother somebody else.)

So anyway, I was already mentally fried when I went to finish of my last-minute tax effort. I managed to pull everything together, only to not have any luck finding an envelope. I looked everywhere, becoming increasingly annoyed. I finally decided to stop at Safeway on the way to the copy shop and get some COM10s there. Why was I even having to do this? The IRS should send us self-addressed stamped envelopes, and serve refreshments. My sense that this should be so only increased when I got to Safeway and discovered they don’t even sell envelopes. You can buy a three-hole punch there, and thirty different kinds of toothbrush, and chemical products for the home that probably shouldn’t be allowed to exist, but no envelopes. I’m this close to boycotting them for life.

Copy Shop Fee Holiday

On April 15, the government should subsidize tax return photocopying at copy shops nationwide. This would reward good corporate citizens like me who don’t do their personal photocopying at work. Now, I know it seems petty, me complaining about the $1.96 I spent on two envelopes and fifteen photocopies, but it’s not about the money. It’s about the time. I went to a small family-run copy shop, and they couldn’t make change from my twenty. (I’m not quite shameless enough to put $1.96 on my Visa card.) The register drawer didn’t have any fives or tens, and neither did the cashier. The owner, or maybe it was her dad, didn’t either. The manager, or maybe her uncle, finally dug out his wallet and produced the missing bills, and I was out of there in under ten minutes. But just under.

Coordinated Government Websites

Okay, the IRS is a government entity, as is the US Postal Service, and they work hand-in-hand to supply tax forms and accept completed returns. Why don’t their websites support each other? The first thing you see on either website around tax time should be a field where you type in your zip code (which surely usps.gov knows all about), so the website can tell you the hours, on April 15, of your local post office, and the location of the nearest post office that’s open late. I thought about rewriting the tax code such that every post office in America is open late, but that might bankrupt this country since every town in America, including Oscuro, Colorado (population zero), has a post office. Anyway, I wasn't exactly in a rush to get to the post office, figuring it would be open late, this being Tax Day and all.

I showed up at my local post office branch at exactly 5:01 p.m. Imagine my delight when I was greeting by a uniformed postal employee at the door. Coffee, sir? Doughnut? Now imagine my crushing disappointment when I learned that he was standing there simply to bar me from entering. He told me they were closed. I said I just had two envelopes to drop off and could he please, please take me in? His reply? “Sorry, we can’t. There’s only one guy working back there.” I almost pointed out that there would actually be two guys working back there, if he’d simply lock the door behind me and report to his post, but I’ve learned never to try to reason with government employees, at least the kind who interface with the unwashed masses like me. At least I got him to tell me where the closest post office was that would still be open.

Dammit to Hell

So that is how I spent an hour and a half driving around the tangled headphone cord of highways that tie Albany and Berkeley to Oakland, and within the screwy yarn-ball of Oakland itself. Of course I got lost, totally lost. I’m hopeless to begin with, even when I haven’t spent a day staring at network protocol violations and have had my anger turned up to 11 by a postal employee. While I drove I had to listen to a radio report about how Obama has vowed to simplify our tax code. I hope he reads this blog.

When I finally reached the post office I didn’t even see it, because it was just too huge for me to make out, like an ant trying to identify an elephant from an inch away. I blew right by, as I only eventually discovered. When I got to the port of Oakland and the giant cranes that inspired the Imperial Walkers in “The Empire Strikes Back,” I turn around and headed back. (Otherwise I’d have ended up in the Pacific Ocean.) On the return trip I spotted the post office by the protesters out front, whom I considered running over with my car. How idiotic is it to protest taxation, when your audience is here to get tax dollars back?

I suppose if I were really clever I’d recommend a tax code enhancement that would keep me from getting lost, but I’m not that clever, and it’s been a long day.

Refreshments and Entertainment

Tax Day could be a really fun experience for Americans, almost like Cinco de Mayo or Carnaval, if the government made a little extra effort to liven up the post offices where so many Americans drop off their tax returns. At first I thought this was what they’d done, as a nice spread of coffee and pastries was set out on card tables, but this was only for the extra employees they’d hired to stand alongside the road and accept envelopes from passing motorists. (Yes, California is the king of the drive-thru.) Standing in the long line, I wished for something to break the ice among all the taxpayers. Music? A live band? The Las Vegas airport has a nice take on the boring security checkpoint video: they made their own, with real, famous actors and Vegas performers, some in silly costumes. The IRS and the Post Office could team up and make this American Tax Day institution more like a happy hour.

The highlight of my wait was when a woman came and asked if this was the line for dropping off tax returns. During my snottier teen and college years, I’d have been tempted to deliver some witty and rude comeback designed to convey what I’d have felt was the stupidity of her question. Instead, I basked in the realization that I’m not actually the most hapless person on the planet. This more modern reaction is called wisdom.

There was actually one other guy there who was less savvy than I. He was wandering around asking people in line for the address to mail his tax return to. (See “SASE” above.)

Corn Cob

On a recent ride with my bike club, I got some ribbing about this blog from my friend Marty. (Marty can give me all the flak he wants, because the first words I ever spoke to him, back in’88, were “I have no respect for you,” in a heated moment after he beat me in a bike race.) Apparently referring to my tendency to blog at great length on trivial topics, Marty suggested I write a blog about corn cobs. Corn cob, in this context, refers to a rather small bicycle gear cluster in which each cog is just one tooth bigger than the next. This gives a racer great precision--but no range--in choosing a gear to pedal in.

"You could write an essay about each cog," Marty teased, "or better yet, you could write a sonnet, an ode to the corn cob!" So, here it is.


Ode to the Corn Cob

When I was nine I had a ten-speed bike.
I loved it, though it suffered from the curse ooooooooooo2
Of tires not as thin as I'd have liked,
And of a spoke protector, even worse.

We didn't call them spoke protectors though,
As "pie plate" better mocked how big they were. ooooooio6
They caused the largest cog to seem to grow--
A mean illusion, awful to endure.

A bigger cog meant lower gearing, see;
The stuff of weaker boys, embarrassing. ooooooooooooo10
We longed for smaller clusters, finally free
Of pie plates. Lack of metal was our bling.

At age eighteen I realized my dream:
I ran a straight-block corn cob, plate-less, clean. oooooo14


oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 
Footnotes & Commentary

Line 1: Bike

I got the bike when I was nine. It was a Fuji Junior, bright red, and it’s still on the road today, now piloted by my nephew Jake. That’s him (with his mom), on the very Fuji of my childhood, in the photo above. This was my first bike: my brothers and I were unique in a) being pretty late in getting our first bikes, and b) getting ten-speeds long before any other kids. What a glorious day that was when I had my very own bike to ride and no longer had to run alongside my brothers and their friends as they rode up and down our neighborhood streets.

I really did love that Fuji, and defended its honor passionately when my brothers called it the “Fudgie” and told me that it was made by “Fuji Heavy Industries.” My brothers also loved to tease me about my bike being called “Junior,” as opposed to their coolly-named Motobecane Nomades. It’s hard to imagine why I was so ashamed of “Junior,” but clearly I was, because at some point I actually painted over the decals with red touch-up paint. (As for Fuji Heavy Industries, they don’t make bikes. They make Subarus.)

The bike had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Honda Acura Integra Basilica XLS, Sport Series). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

Missing from the Fuji now are the toe-clips. I know I had them because—like everyone—when I first got them I kept forgetting to loosen the straps, tipping over again and again.

Line 2: Cursed

The bike was not cursed—I was. I wasn’t alone, of course; also cursed was every other kid who was painfully aware of the uncoolness of his bike based on its not resembling a pro racing bike in every detail. Kids—heck, humans—make a lot of trouble for themselves scrutinizing everything and placing it within a rigorous, heartless hierarchy like this.

Line 3: Tires

The original tires were 24 x 1¼ inch. (The small wheel diameter made it possible for the frame to be a reasonable 18 inches while still allowing me to straddle the bike.) I dreamed of tires that were only 1 1/8 inch wide, which is what my brothers had by then. Oh, how they lorded that eighth of an inch over me. I became fairly obsessed about it. Eventually my brother Geoff crashed his bike (I believe he was riding at night and hit a brick) and totaled his front wheel. Unable to find a replacement 24-inch wheel, my dad bought a 600C, which had an aluminum alloy rim instead of steel and was thus much better. Not wishing to reward Geoff for his foolishness, my dad put the 600C wheel on my bike and Geoff got my old wheel. This was all well and good until the mandatory bike shop safety inspection a couple weeks before my first bike race, the Red Zinger Mini Classic, in 1981. My bike failed the inspection due to worn-out tires, and the shop only carried the 600C tire in the 1 3/8 inch width! Man, that is really fat. The mechanic lectured me at length about how tire width really doesn’t matter and skinny tires won’t make you go faster. His unspoken assumption was that aesthetics shouldn’t matter to a kid—but why not? I guarantee his tires were nice and skinny! To my great relief, my dad found a 600C x 1¼ inch tire in Denver for me.

Line 6: Mockery

Not all the mockery was in the direction of pie plates in general. Much of it was directed at my pie plate in particular, which my brothers convinced me was even larger than theirs. That my bike was different from theirs singled it out for all kinds of contempt. It didn’t matter that their French bikes had those awful plastic Simplex shifters and derailleurs. To this very day, despite having spent his teen years as a bike mechanic wailing about the awfulness of French bikes, my brother Bryan won’t concede that my Fuji was better. “Are you kidding? Never!” he says. “The Motobecanes were elusive, romantic French bicycles, with light-weight derailleurs and wedge-shaped tires! I remember loving that Nomade like it was a girl. Your bike was made by a Heavy Industries factory in Japan, mine by French people, who made racing bicycles, and knew about love and stuff.” My dad had bought the Motobecanes at Basque Sports in Boulder, and every time we drove by the store in the car, we’d all chant its name, both in homage and because it was such a hard name to pronounce. The “–sque” butting up against the “S” in “Sports” created a hissing effect that, since we couldn’t avoid it, we ultimately accentuated: “Basques-ssk-ssk sports-ssk-ssk.” (Nobody ever knew or cared where my Fuji came from.)

Line 8: Awful to endure

It wasn’t just the size of the pie plates that rankled us. I couldn’t find room within the sonnet to address the issue of pie plate rattling, so I’ll mention it here. Mine didn’t give me much trouble, but my brothers’ pie plates rattled like crazy. Finally Geoff couldn’t take it anymore and figured out a solution: he took a length of surgical tubing, maybe half a centimeter in diameter, sliced it lengthwise down the middle, and ran it along the edge of the pie plate, so it was held in place by the spokes. This worked for awhile, though the tubing tended to peel off eventually. He solved this by sewing it on there with kite string or dental floss or something. Eventually the tubing turned yellow and brittle in the sun, making the pie plate look more ghastly than ever. As you can see from the photo above, the pie plate on my old Fuji is going strong. I doubt it has ever occurred to Jake to despise it.

Line 9: Gearing

It seems intuitively obvious to me, as it did when I was a kid, that a larger cog indicates personal weakness. When I really think about this, I see that math is involved, and it wasn’t until I read my sonnet to my wife, Erin, that I realized how much I take for granted when it comes to the proportions of bike components. Imagine: she can look at a large freewheel and not pity the bike owner at all! But then, she didn’t have, as a pre-teen, a gear chart taped to her stem, showing which front/rear gear combination represented the next highest or lowest gear. Bryan, at fourteen or so, actually wrote a computer program to plot the gear inches on a logarithmic scale. Gear inches refers to the number of teeth on the chainwheel up front, multiplied by the wheel diameter in inches, divided by the number of teeth on the rear cog. Any teenager I rode with then knew by heart not only that, say, 52 x 13 was a 108-inch gear, but exactly how fast that gear would propel him at top cadence. Bikers were nerdier then, I think.

When I started racing, my brothers helped me strip down my bike, ditching the reflectors, replacing the stem-mounted shifters with down-tube ones, and removing the so-called “chicken” or “suicide” levers, those brake-lever extensions that made it possible to brake while riding on the tops of the handlebars. I distinctly remember Geoff, at age thirteen or so, sawing off the chicken-lever stubs with a hacksaw so the bolts would sit flush. We/they also removed the chain-guard on the crankset, which now strikes me as a step down aesthetically (it was a giant, pretty, chrome thing, and I remember well how often I had a grease print of the chainring on my pant leg after the chain-guard was gone). The rear mech is a Suntour V-GT Luxe, which my dad installed along with a larger freewheel to give me—you guessed it—lower gearing, which of course was a bit humiliating. Why me? Was I such the runt that I alone needed lower gearing? Oddly enough, the larger freewheel actually made the pie plate look smaller—but just try telling my brothers that. The bike never did shift very well after that “upgrade,” which is why in races I’d often get dropped in either the highest gear or the lowest. This doesn’t mean I didn’t get dropped when using other gears—I mostly used those two gears, and always got dropped.

Line 14: Straight-block

When I upgraded from the Fuji to my first Miyata, I went from a 32-tooth large cog in back to a 28, and I was thrilled at the sleeker, racier look. It still had a pie plate, but it was aluminum, and not as shiny, thus less conspicuous. A couple of years later I bought some wheels from my brother Geoff that had the same 28-tooth cog, but with no spoke protector. That was a huge step forward; I think my ego doubled that day. At age fourteen I started racing in the United States Cycling Federation races, where your smallest cog couldn’t be smaller than 17 teeth—far lower maximum gearing than I’d been riding in the Mini Zinger. (The idea was to save the youngsters’ knees.) It was practical to run a straight-block freewheel with that limitation; even with only six cogs, you could do 17-18-19-20-21-22, with 22 being a totally reasonable gear for getting up just about any hill in the Boulder area.

The next year I moved up an age group and was allowed to have a 15-tooth cog, and I went to the new Suntour 7-speed freewheels, and had an almost-straight-block of 15-16-17-18-19-20-22. Still, a 22 was the freewheel cog equivalent of sensible shoes, and I wanted something more bold. Finally, I switched to Shimano gear cassettes and for the first time could easily create custom combinations for specific races; for example, if I was racing with the adults I could use a 12-tooth cog. At last, I could build the highly impractical gearing combinations that fully satisfied my vanity: for criteriums or bike club photo-shoots I’d set up a 12-17. (Shimano wasn’t doing 7-speed yet.) What a rush that was as a teenager, to look down and see not a giant cluster with a humiliating pie plate, but this tiny little freewheel, a man’s freewheel, a svelte cluster fit for a real racing bike, and above all a highly visible manifestation of my strength. It was like the bicycle equivalent of giant muscles. It never occurred to me that to most people, perhaps even to you, it’s just a bunch of damn sprockets and whatnot that don’t really mean anything.

So did I outgrow all this macho nonsense? Of course not. I still snort at pie plates (though they’re made of plastic now). After a couple of months of dating Erin (back in ’92) I quietly removed the pie plate from her mountain bike. (She never noticed.) As for gearing, the modern-day equivalent of a giant rear cog is of course the triple front chainwheel, which accomplishes the same thing (i.e., addresses the same weakness). A triple requires a longer derailleur cage, which I equate—with a shudder—to that old V-GT Luxe on the Fuji. If a friend, new to cycling, asks me about triples, I’ll tell him they make sense given the hills around Berkeley. But a triple for my own bike? Are you kidding? Never!
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Easy Camping Recipes

Burgers Tartare

1 pound grass-fed beef, ground
6 sourdough rolls
Heinz ketchup
Mustard
Sliced tomatoes, pickles, onions
Ice

Before you leave for the camping trip, slice the tomatoes, pickles, and onions. The pickles will need slicing because they’ll be the whole-cucumber kind, and good ones. The onions should be sliced so thin you could practically read through them. This guideline always applies, but especially when you’re camping, and overconsumption of raw onions goes from “annoying” to “dire” within the confines of a tent. (Slicing these things ahead of time might be the one thing you get right on your camping trip.)

This is a great recipe for that first night at a hike-in campground when you’re exhausted and it’s totally dark by the time you get your tent set up. Say, for example, you tried to use a bike trailer but didn’t know that half a mile of the 1½-mile hike is along the beach, where a fiendishly strong, cold wind is blowing and the deep sand makes it almost impossible to push the bike along (much less ride it), and suppose also that the trailer breaks before you get to the trail and it takes another hour to drag the lurching, tipping thing to camp, and that you left the headlamp in the car and can’t really see what you’re doing, and that the wind is howling through the campsite, blowing steel plates off the table, and from the tent your children are whining about the cold and one says, “All my memories of this trip will be negative.” This is a perfect night for burgers tartare.

Separate the ground beef into six balls and smash them angrily into a large frying pan. Ignite a burner on a large heavy Coleman camp stove, setting the flame so that the burner gasps and wheezes. As the burgers cook, dink with the stove a lot, pumping more air into it and wondering what the hell is wrong with it. When by dim flashlight you can see that the patties have shrunken a bit, tear a roll in half and submerge it in the fat in the pan. Eat this. Assemble the rest of the burgers , not forgetting the condiments. (Note: it is never okay to serve a hamburger without sliced tomatoes, onions, and pickles—no hardship excuses this.)

Halfway through your first burger, shine the flashlight on it and note how raw and red the beef is beyond the thin membrane of cooked exterior. Note also that your entire family is making yummy noises. Finish this burger and eat another. Delicious. You have introduced your family to burgers tartare. (Ssssh, don’t tell!)

Smordités

1 bag marshmallows
1 large Hershey bar
1 box graham crackers

This is a handy variation on the traditional s’mores recipe. Obviously, the enduring popularity of the s’more stems from its alignment with the slow food movement, but nutritionists are now questioning the health effects of charred marshmallows and dirty sticks. Meanwhile, our global warming crisis has become sufficiently dire that environmentalists are now becoming critical of that favorite camping institution, the campfire. Not sure where you come down on this one? If it’s too cold to even think about gathering firewood, and too windy to light a match, and too dark to see if your campsite even has a fire pit, the decision is obvious—but just try telling your kids there won’t be any s’mores.

Preparation couldn’t be simpler. Thrust a graham cracker, a square of chocolate, and a marshmallow into the hand that extends greedily from the tent. Enjoy.

Chocolate pancakes

Pancake mix
Water
1 large Hershey bar
Cooking oil

One of the challenging things about camping is that even if you thought you brought enough supplies to sink a ship (or break a bike trailer), you’re bound to have forgotten something. Say, for example, maple syrup. Voilà! A new recipe is born.

Prepare the pancake batter according to the directions. Oil the pan liberally. If you run out of fuel halfway through the first pancake, no problem—you are now actually glad you schlepped in that extra gallon can of fuel. Feed the botched pancake to the raccoons and start over.

After flipping the pancake, break some pieces off the chocolate bar and place them on the top. When the corners of the chocolate pieces start to get rounded and the text of “HERSHEY” begins to warp, serve the pancake. (Click to enlarge photo.)

Instruct the eager diner to spread the chocolate around with the underside of her fork. Exquisite.