Wil Reidie and the Honeymoon Campfire Potatoes
In celebration of my wife and burnt food
If a film is either remotely formulaic or has anything resembling one of Chekhov’s famous guns, my wife Silja will predict how it ends within the first 20 minutes. It’s a remarkable thing to see and entirely infuriating. I mean, I was so excited about her watching Soylent Green for the first time not that long ago.
She figured out they were eating the old people within minutes.
In the decade and change that I’ve known her, I think the only film ending she hasn’t seen coming is The Crying Game, which even to her felt like 3 separate films smashed into each other.
And talking of interesting love stories, Silja and I met in an east London pub best known as a good place to score low-grade drugs or getting a pint glass smashed into your face, called The Dolphin. That was Easter Friday 2013. Without ever having lived together, or even in the same country for that matter, we were engaged by summer 2015. This all led us to being in a Floridian branch of Dick’s Sporting Goods in late August 2017.
Which is where the story I’m sharing with you today begins.
We were on our honeymoon. And, even though I hadn’t driven since my early twenties, and Silja refused to at all following some kind of traumatic experience with a reindeer and a highway in northern Sweden, we had decided to take a road trip from Fort Lauderdale to New York City via New Orleans, Nashville and DC. We were in “Dicks” on the hunt for the very cheapest tent America had to offer, a few sleeping bags, and, as long as the price was right, a travel pillow or two. These were for a brief camping diversion we’d had planned for our drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
We’d been married just a few months then and, thinking of it now, it’s weird to think how little we knew each other, at least compared to now. Though entirely in love, entirely at ease with each other, we really were still coming to terms with how different we both were. Are, I should say really. I could write an essay on those differences alone. Take this for example: if I take a bite of a sandwich and it registers as anything more than mildly disappointing, I’ll often throw it away. Even if I’m really hungry. I have no problem with spiting myself to let that sandwich know how little I think of it. And what better way of really putting it to a piece of shit sandwich than consigning it to a bin.
Silja, quite rightly, thinks I’m an idiot for doing this. Like any normal person, she’d eat the thing. But that’s not to say I’m irresponsible with money. I am, after all, the son of a man who proudly admits to being a “Scottish skinflint”. I don’t use the phrase skinflint often, and my Scottishness largely extends to wearing an Ally McCoist football shirt in 1996, but if there’s one thing I’ve inherited from my Scottish roots it’s a willingness to keep a tight fist around my money.
That was particularly the case in that Florida branch of Dick’s when we were tent shopping. Which I was so keen on since said tent wasn’t flying back with us once the trip was over.
Following a quick but rigorous Google search to confirm bears aren’t driven to charge at objects of a certain colour like those bulls in Spain, we left Dick’s with a fetching red tent and two heavily discounted sleeping bags. I’d never seen sleeping bags with a fluffy exterior before but the price was right and, besides, the tent promised “99% protection from even heavy rain”. Silja didn’t like it when, having questioned the importance of the unaccounted for 1%, I suggested she worries too much. It was an endlessly sunny Florida day after all. Sunny enough to render even the possibility of rain laughable.
Is America the most exciting country in the world? It sure felt it to a boy who grew up in a small English town whose chief claim to fame is being home to a statue of an elephant made of concrete pipes. During those 3 weeks of honeymoon, we watched incredulous as wild iguanas joined us on bar terraces in Florida. The nightlife and gin fizz in New Orleans was like nothing we’d experienced. In Clarksdale, “home of the blues” Mississippi we listened to a kid called Kingfish play the most ridiculous guitar I’ve ever heard.
I can’t say it was more than we’d expected, we were too naive to “expect” anything at all. It was simply overwhelming. Entirely new to us. Be it the AW root beer that tasted like medicine or Hershey’s chocolate that tasted not entirely unlike vomit, it was all unfathomably different. And we loved it. And by the time we had made it past Knoxville on our unbroken, sun-baked way to the Blue Ridge Mountains, we were more than ready for a slower, gentler camping experience.
The first night of our camping adventure was at a farm just outside Roanoke. A woman on a quad bike welcomed us as we drove in through the entrance. Chasing her was a scruffy-looking dog whose tongue flopped out of its mouth like a flaccid slice of bacon. It didn’t seem like the kind of dog that would do anybody any harm.
And nor did its owner. Over the 2 nights we stayed with her, 2 nights of gentle warmth and clear skies, she wasn’t shy about offering us some unique on-site entertainment. During the day this involved enthusiastically showing us around her organic farm, though, having not let us in her greenhouses, I couldn’t tell you what she was growing there. We must’ve made a nice impression though. By the second evening she had us in her front room watching Buster Keaton films along with an old man she referred to only as “brother”. Brother didn’t say much, but he did serve us a homemade spirit poured from one of those ceramic whiskey jugs I’d only ever seen in cartoons. It tasted like something you’d clean rusty screwdrivers with but I didn’t wake up blind (or lying next to anyone unfamiliar) the following morning.
Lovely as our time was at the farm, we left on the 3rd day before the sun, dog or brother had risen for our journey to our next stop: the Peaks of Otter campground.
I should have been suspicious of the fact we were the only ones there. Because, by the time we arrived, we were witnessing rain for the first time since we landed in the country nearly 2 weeks earlier. And it didn’t stop. We hid in the car at first, the windows steaming up like that scene from Titanic but with none of the fun they were having. Eventually we made a fire in a conveniently covered firepit on which I roasted sausages and potatoes picked up on the way from Roanoke.
I managed to burn both and, true to character, was close to throwing them all away before Silja warned me it would absolutely attract the bears and that the potatoes did, in fact, taste quite nice even with a bit of burn on them.
The storm, what I’d later learn was the remnant of a hurricane that had followed us out of Florida, hit our campsite an hour or so later, just as we were settling down for bed.
Here’s a tip for you: 1% of a hell of a lot of rain is still a lot of rain to have sloshing about in a tent. It wasn’t long before I started to get irate toward the closest breathing thing to me. Silja. My feet were wet. My fluffy sleeping bag increasingly soaking up pints of rainwater. All I could think of was why Silja hadn’t given in yet. Why hadn’t she said something along the lines of “Wil, do you remember that beautiful lodge literally a 2 minute drive down the road? Let’s go there for the night”? Not even “let’s sleep in the car, Wil, this is a nightmare.” She wasn’t even doing the polite thing of telling me what an idiot I was for buying a discount tent in the first place. The longer I put up with her hateful silence, the more I wondered how she could be so spiteful. And I refused to be the one to admit how terrible the terrible situation was. Was this really the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with? How could she let me do this to myself? What a dreadful, dreadful mistake.
The next day the sun shone with all the joy that summer is capable of offering. We hiked up and down the biggest of Otter’s two peaks. We grilled more sausages, heated up some beans, and I even burned the potatoes, on purpose this time, because man Silja was right, that burn flavour tasted good.
After the perfectly dry night that followed and with our camping finished, in a ceremony I remember as almost purifying, I threw that bastard tent and my ridiculous fluffy sleeping bags in a large bin at the campsite exit.
We were getting to the end of Skyline Drive, close to the lodge we’d booked to stay at in Shenandoah National Park, when I brought up the stormy night for the first time. I asked her what had been going through her mind, whether she had been close to giving up and heading to the car as I had been.
“No,” she said. “I’m stubborn that way. We’d looked forward to the camping. I wasn’t going to let it bother me.”
“You’re no more stubborn than I am,” I said.
“Yes,” she was silent a moment. A “but” hanging heavy in the still car air. “But,” I told you, “your stubbornness doesn’t do you any good. I’m stubborn in a not giving in kind of way. You’re stubborn in a 4 year old shitting his pants kind of way.”
Silja reserves her swearing for when she wants to make a good point.
“You do throw a lot of perfectly good sandwiches away, Wil.”
I kept my eyes on the road, not for the first or last time, a lesson was being formed, offered by the calm, typically Finnish stoicism Silja would go on to demonstrate frequently in the following 7 years.
Silja can always predict even the most remotely formulaic of films. I suppose, when it comes down to it, she has a better feel of cause and effect than me. I wonder if she saw it coming, our camping disaster at the hands of my cheap tent. Being that much more intelligent than me, I think she was intelligent enough to let me make my own mistakes as well.
That day, on our way out of a US National Park Service campground in the shadow of a dying hurricane, the only lesson I could conjure was a basic one. An idiot’s lesson I guess, but a lesson nonetheless.
It went something like this…
Don't let yourself buy a tent on a sunny day again, Wil.
How to make my burned Honeymoon Campfire Potatoes
To replicate the hot coals of a campfire in my home kitchen, I use a cast iron ridged skillet pan. I feel using a pan with grill bars is important because the heat transfer is less direct than a flat bottomed pan.
Get your pan on a medium heat. These potatoes cook long and slow, you don’t want to totally incinerate them before they cook through.
Take a double thickness of aluminium foil and place some floury/high starch potatoes inside. Drizzle over some oil and plenty of salt. Seal the foil neatly (don’t scrunch it up) so you can open it easily to check them later.
Place the foil envelope on the skillet and let sit for an hour before checking they’re cooked through with a knife. If they still feel firm, just seal up again. If you want to encourage heat preservation, place a lid on top of the foil.
Don’t be afraid of the bottoms getting burned, that really is the point. When done on the hot coals in the middle of a hurricane remnant, this is unavoidable. The burn, in my experience, is thin enough to eat whole, but even if you have to trim some off, it leaves a lovely charred and smoky flavour throughout the potato. Great as a side dish to anything a nice baked potato normally goes with.
And for more favourite recipes of mine that involve burning the hell out of things, I recommend these:
Our first ever night in a tent we got flooded out and had it moved to higher ground by a bunch of very considerate Scouts. We were very drunk (the rain had torrented down whilst we’d spent 4 hours in the nearby pub) and even more grateful than drunk.
I've also experienced flooding due to a faulty tent. Annoying in the moment, sure, but it's those memories that last the longest. Thanks for sharing your story!