What’s worth obsessing over before a scout camping trip? Why, a spork, of course
Digging through layers of unidentifiable dinner scrapings and junk mail soggy with coffee grounds in the kitchen garbage the other day, I came to an important realization.
Not only is one man’s trash another man’s treasure. It’s also true that one man’s treasure is sometimes his wife’s trash.
As is usually the case when my wife and I stumble hand-in-hand onto an ugly truth, this discovery was more my fault than hers.
The object of my hunt was a spork. A highly rated spork, in my defense, with stars and write-ups in prestigious publications that I’d spent far too long perusing before I settled on this particular model.
But yeah, still just a spork.
I’d paid top dollar for it, relatively speaking. I mean, it was only $12, but a more sensible person can pick up a box of a hundred ordinary plastic sporks for that price.
I wasn’t in the market for 100 ordinary sporks, though — just two tough ones. Two sporks that would survive a couple of weeks of being tossed in packs and bear-proof bags during a backpacking trip that my teen and I were planning with his scout troop in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico.
Well, “planning” might not be the right term for my role in the leadup to the trip. “Obsessing” is a better fit. “Descending steadily into madness” may be most accurate.
It was the spork that woke me up to the problem. Normal people, I was forced to admit, do not devote a good chunk of an evening considering the finer points of review after review of eating utensils.
My family beat me to the realization. Before my wife and I went out to a nice dinner recently, she laid down one rule: “No talking about backpacking gear tonight.”
My younger son had started cheerfully asking what I was planning for my next midlife crisis after the trip was finished and there was no gear left to research.
The teen let my preparation go without comment, but now I realize that’s only because as long as I was spending all my free time weighing the relative merits of each minor piece of equipment in our packs, he was free to go on living a sane life.
Someone had to look into the sporks, though, and the ones I’d found — mine yellow and his gray — were lightweight and still looked like they could take a beating.
But during those humiliating minutes while I was elbow deep in trash, I had to admit that the first quality meant that the gray spork bore a fair resemblance to the free plastic forks we’d thrown out from the previous night’s take-out dinner. And because the second quality was due to its construction from titanium, it was, sadly, worth putting some effort into a rescue.
The reason it needed rescuing in the first place was that I’d handwashed it when it came in the mail a little after the yellow one had arrived, and I’d left it out next to the sink to dry.
Next to the sink also happens to be where the kids tend to let takeout trash sit, evidently too sapped by long days tapping their phones to muster the strength to pivot in place and drop it into the garbage can.
So when my wife saw the spork sitting out the next morning near a Chipotle bag, the old sack and the highly rated spork got dumped in the trash together.
I’m happy to report that the rescue mission was a success. As I write these words, the spork is clean and stowed safely with the rest of the scout troop’s gear in the baggage car of a train that’s pulling us slowly up switchbacks into those mountains that we’ve been gearing up to hike.
We seem to be on track for all’s well that ends well, but I’m thinking about my younger son’s question.
Although he’s many years from having to worry about any midlife crisis of his own, I think he has the right idea about them. They should be planned out.
I’d hate to find myself digging through the garbage again and discover that this time around, I’d been chasing after real trash.
Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.
