So it was the @#$%ing Congo Bars that had me hiking halfway up a goddamned mountain*.
I made a batch of them for my nephew’s high school graduation party last month. I used Emeril Lagasse’s recipe** from Emeril’s TV Dinners, which means that they were guaranteed to be both pretty darned tasty and quite apocalyptically bad for you.
During the party, I manged to bring to bear enough willpower to avoid eating any of them. Problem was, the recipe makde enough bars that we wound up with about half the batch left at home. I brought a few to work, and stored the rest in my parents’ freezer (the Yucca Mountain of food we can’t be trusted to leave in the house) against the day we needed a dessert on the fly.
That day came this Fourth of July at my parents’ big family cookout and funtime-palooza. In addition to all the other great food, the @#$%ing Congo Bars made their encore appearance.
I don’t know. Maybe it was the good company. Maybe it was the inevitable consequence of attempting to maintain rigid self control. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve permitted myself a few exceptions, all of them centering on the confluence of good company and homemade sweets. Maybe it was just a moment of weakness. Regardless, I knew it was a bad idea. Like the idiot in the horror film who doesn’t know enough not to go upstairs, I should have known better. Yet like that idiot, I fumbled my way straight to my doom.
What I’m trying to say is, I slipped. I had a @#$%ing Congo Bar. It was a small @#$%ing Congo Bar, but it started weighing on my mind the second I savored that first decadent bite. I’m not sure why I took that @#$%ing Congo Bar so seriously, or why I was so worried that savoring dessert that one time would cause a dietary relapse. All I know is that I’m better able to meet my commitment to exercising and eating well when I do — or more properly, when I avoid — certain things, most especially alcohol, caffeine, and sugar.
Now I know; I’m the guy who’s all “a commitment to exercising and eating well shouldn’t be about sin and expiation.” But in this case I really felt a need for a little penance, if only to get the @#$%ing Congo Bar off my mind once and for all.
So halfway up the goddamned mountain I went. Specifically, up the Birch Brook Trail at Hopkins Memorial Forest. Now, you might think that the description of this hike on the trail map — “The trail climbs the steep, east-facing slope of the Taconic Range” — might have alerted me to the fact that this was basically, you know, uphill most of the way. You would think the words “steep climb” would have raised some red flags. You would be wrong.
Indeed, I found myself huffing and puffing and sweating my flabby, wheezing, out of shape way up a mile and a half of steep verticals with few level spots to mitigate the effect of climbing a big ol’ hill. Indeed, a few times I questioned the wisdom of continuing, and considered the possibility of turning around. I was hiking on my own. There was no one to whom I needed to prove myself. There was no one to judge me. There was no one to know I had turned back. Hell, on the most basic level, there was no reason aside from sheer bloody-mindedness and that @#$%ing Congo Bar to believe that setting my feet on this particular trail in the first place required me to follow it to the end. It would have been easy to turn around.
Now I’m not the most spiritual person in the world. Frankly, I’m too arrogant and stubborn to want to rely on any outside person or agency to help me. While I admire them in others, grace, humility, and patience are pretty low down on my personal roster of salutary characteristics.
But as I stood somewhere between the bottom of that trail and the top taking a pull from my water bottle, I experienced a moment of that I can only (reluctantly) call insight. Steep as the trail had been, and steep as it looked ahead of me, I was fairly certain there was more of it behind than there was left to climb. I was almost there, but did I want to get there?
As I put the cap back on the bottle and tried to decide which way I would go next, a clear thought popped into my head: the person I have been would turn back. The person I want to be would get to the top. Put that way, it was a pretty simple choice. Put that way, getting to the top of the trail had nothing to do with the @#$%ing Congo Bar, and everything to do with how I want to be in the world.
I don’t know; maybe I’m just using a not terribly nuanced thought to ennoble bloody-mindedness. Maybe struggling this much over a decidedly arbitrary and meaningless goal is a waste of time. Maybe I need to settle the heck down about the whole @#$%ing Congo Bar thing. I’m really not sure.
What I do know is I made it to the top of the trail, and a little farther on beyond that to boot. Arbitrary and stubborn it may have been, but I’m confident it also felt a hell of a lot better to push through the difficulty than it would have to give up and turn around.
Oh, yeah, and Hopkins Forest is a beatiful place to hike, even if you aren’t feeling especially penitent. The Birch Brook Trail climbs through some really nice — if really @#$%in’ steep — terrain on its way to hooking up with the Taconic Crest Trail. The Lower and Upper Loop trails comprise a nice figure eight of rolling pathways with a few nice inclines to keep the whole thing interesting.
*”up a goddamned mountain” copyright Warren Ellis and DC Comics.
**Mr. Lagasse refers to them simply as “bar cookies.” The recipe is fairly simple, and presented here in a way that hopefully conveys the basics of an extremely basic recipe without violating Mr. Lagasse’s copyright.
So what you do is you make yourself enough of a graham cracker crust to cover the bottom and sides of a large-ish baking sheet.
Then you dump whatever from the baking aisle suits your fancy over the crust; I’m talking here about a package each of your favorite chips (chocolate, peanut butter, butterscotch, etc. — two packages in all), a package of whatever nuts you happen to like, and a mess of shredded coconut (if that appeals to you; if not, then, regrettably, you’re just not my kind of people; I mean, I’m sure you’re good people, and I wouldn’t necessarily shun you or anything, but, yeah, I don’t know, man. I’m sure there are things about me that elicit the same reponse. I abhor mayonnaise [and, really, the whole pantheon of emulsified -aise sauces, including Bernaise and Hollandaise] for example.), and then drown the whole schmear in a couple cans of sweetended condensed milk. Then bake for a while until the ingredients get browned and crusty and bubble and delicious. Cool and cut into whatever dimensions seem prudent.
