A mountain, a mistake, and eventually, a sandwich
When Nate and I were young and childless and not living through a pandemic — so, what, 67 years ago? — we used to go on pretty impressively active vacations. We’ve climbed Mt. Fuji, hiked the Inca Trail, and wildly misjudged hiking distances to get to the top of waterfalls in New Zealand. We feel lucky to have gotten to do those things and have learned a few things about ourselves and our relationship along the way. And the one that started it all was also the one with some of the hardest learned lessons about ourselves and hiking in general. That was hiking Half Dome in Yosemite way back when in 2014.
Now, Nate and I had been together a couple of years at that point, but this was our first vacation together that we’d planned together. Nate told me he’d always wanted to hike Half Dome and I said, “ok!” with the blind enthusiasm of someone jumping into a lake without toe-testing the temperature yet. At that point, I didn’t even own a pair of hiking boots. But(!) Nate had done a lot of hiking in his day, and I had Google at my disposal, so in my mind, I was fully equipped to take on a 19-mile round trip hike.
The tricky part of long hikes is finding a balance between carrying what you need and not carrying too much extra weight. I should note that I’m a terrible packer. I’ll pack a parka for a beach vacation, “just in case.” Nate, on the other hand, is ok re-wearing a pair of socks if he packed a pair or two too few. It’s something that I say doesn’t stress me out, but it absolutely does, Nate!
Anyhoo, after many a discussion, we agreed on exactly how much food and water to bring — and then I snuck in a few more cliff bars and an extra apple, just in case.
The hike up to half dome was pretty easy; We got a nice early start, we had a few breaks along the way, not section of the hike was too steep or grueling. But a little bit before we got to the top, I started worrying about our rations. We were low on both food and water. But, being the silly noob hiker that I was, I figured that you expend less energy on the way down, so clearly we just weren’t going to need as much.
Obviously, everything I learned about hiking, I learned from Looney Tunes cartoons.
But after a difficult final push up the steel ropes, we got to the top of Half Dome. There were beautiful views and terrifying drops. You felt like you were both on top of the world and also so insignificant to all of the things the world has to offer. It was really special and you definitely get the immediate rush of awe and accomplishment when you’re up there. Those emotions and feelings were apparent in every single person that crested over the final edge.
Like, the couple eating salami and cheese on a picnic blanket. Or the group of middle-aged friends all opening king size snickers bars to nosh on as they took pictures together. Or the people eating three-foot subs. Yep, all of them looked pretty entranced by both the peaceful beauty that you can only experience nineteen miles away from the closest thing to civilization and the high-calorie foods they were eating to refuel before they did the nearly ten-mile hike back to camp.
We, on the other hand, had little more than a cliff bar, half a bottle of water, and a pack of gum to get us back down. We did not plan well.
Spoiler: we survived (I know, phew! right? This story was a real nail biter). We dragged ourselves into camp starving, dehydrated, blistered, and sore, but we lived to tell the tale. And since then, we’ve become much better hikers and are much better at fueling ourselves appropriately.
It’s been nearly six years since that trip (that’s 852 years in 2020 time), but we think about it often. And it came up again this week as we were eating the sandwich that Massachusetts deemed the best representation of the cuisine their state has to offer. Massachusetts, one of the oldest states in our nation’s history. A state full of colleges, sports teams, and industry. There seemed to be so much possibility. Our hopes were high as we looked at the list and saw that this week’s sandwich was…the fluffernutter.
The fluffernutter, for those uninitiated, is a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. A sweeter cousin to the PB&J, it was invented in Boston (and thus became the only sandwich Massachusetts wants to stake claim to, I guess). I’d heard of them before, I’ve just never really cared to have one. It’s not that it sounded gross. It just didn’t sound satisfying.
So, we took the seventeen seconds it takes to make this sandwich and gave it our best Sandwich Sunday try. It was…fine. We wanted to say it was more of a dessert, but it didn’t feel “dessert-y” enough. There just wasn’t enough meat to it, literally or figuratively, to feel super satisfying. I highly doubt anyone ever made a fluffernutter, only ate the sandwich, and said, “ah! That hit the spot.”
But that got us talking about when and where a fluffernutter would be a good sandwich. At first, we thought it would be a good dessert for camping, and then the lightbulb went off over our heads: THIS is the perfect sandwich for a long hike. It’s non-perishable, easy to make, easy to pack, and a small number of ingredients. The marshmallow fluff is better than jelly because it won’t ooze through the bread. Its calorie-to-size ratio is perfect for when you need fuel, but don’t want to pack an entire meal. Finally, six years after we tackled Half Dome, we know what we should have packed.
Hindsight, it’s like foresight without a future.
As far as the fluffernutter lands on the arbitrary ranking of sandwiches, it’s kinda just hanging out in limbo in the middle. It doesn’t really belong on this list. It’s like bringing a pony to a horse race; technically it’s an equine, but it’s never really gonna compete, is it?
But at least the next time we go on a long hike, I know what we’ll be eating.
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