Jonathan Norcross

A Taste of Civilization

The sign guarding the gate to the prestigious Hurricane Island Outward Bound warns: “This ain’t no Camp Dandelion.”  As we passed by it the bus driver addressed his thirteen-year-old passengers, “Hope you didn’t bring any food.” We were all wondering whether or not we would be able to keep the cornucopia of candies bursting from every one of our pockets. Apparently we had our answer. Upon arrival at base camp our belongings were thoroughly inspected and separated into necessities and non-necessities. Naturally candy did not make the cut. Among necessities were the food we were given, iodine to purify water, and a few items of clothing. Among non-necessities were the food we brought, toilet paper (plenty of leaves in northern Maine, most of which were not poisonous), more than two changes of underwear, watches (we would hike from dawn to dusk no matter what), and any device capable of producing fire (we could rub two sticks if we had to).  And with that we were divided into groups and sent off into a cloud of mosquitoes (repellent was not a necessity). 

Memories are buoyed by senses. The sensations that surface my memories of Outward Bound are the smell of musk (a combination of various natural elements and body odour), and the taste of said musk. Musk was omnipresent. It was in the air, the water and the soil. It was the smell and taste of the earth and the plants and the animals and ourselves. It was not entirely unpleasant but somehow raw and alien.  The forest was in need of a good disinfectant. By the third day the musk had permeated our clothes and our belongings and soon it was clinging to our skin like a parasite. In the morning we would wake up with musk in our mouths and throats as if we had gargled with it. It was everywhere on everything. 

By the end of the first week the musk had seeped into the food supply. It made little difference.  Food was a necessity. Taste was not. In the morning we had a sludge of flour and cold water, which we were encouraged to think of as cream of wheat. Lunch was falafel, nicknamed “feel awful”, which was something like grape nuts in brine. For dinner we could choose between several mixes of freeze dried grains and vegetables, which we could soak in river water and have lukewarm over the portable stove. Now with the added seasoning of musk every meal seemed dirty and contaminated. One almost wished food were not a necessity.

Likewise water was a necessity regardless of its taste. In every part of civilized America water does not have a flavor, not so in the wild. Not only did our water taste of musk, it had an alkaline flavor that varied depending on where we were. Mixed in was the plastic taste from the canteen along with the hint of iodine added to kill bacteria. There were also mosquito larvae, which registered no taste but provided a satisfying crunch with the knowledge that we were devouring the offspring of the ones that were sucking us dry. None of it mattered, thirst demanded to be quenched, and we had to obey it.

We were told to try to divorce the sense of taste from our minds. Forgetting taste would make life in the wilderness much easier. I was well on my way to doing just that until day thirty-two. Thirty-two marked the beginning of “solo”, a four-day period in which we would each spend alone, a half mile apart. In the diary we were required to keep for the posterity of future campers, I recorded that evening as “the night my tongue caught fire”. It was around six when a tent-mate who had broken solo found me. He was carrying something that looked surreal, somehow out of place. It was like seeing a wristwatch in an old medieval knights movie, or seeing someone in a tuxedo pumping gas. It was a bottle of Coke. More than that it was a piece of civilization. It was something synthetic, an object made by a machine made by another machine. It turned out a hiker had given it to him and he was willing to trade it to me for half of my meagre food supply. He should have held out, I would have given him all of it. I grasped the slender bottle in my hand, hardly believing it was now mine. I tore off the cap and inhaled the froth that erupted. My mouth was suddenly a war zone of a thousand carbonated explosions. My eyes watered as my brain was hit with a tidal wave of sweet. Sweet is everywhere in the American diet-read the back of almost any food product and you will find some sort of sweetener.  It is a fact one can never truly understand until one has gone a month without tasting something sweet. My glands were gushing out saliva faster than I could swallow it but I refused to spit with the taste still in my mouth. I drooled instead. 

“Better than sex isn’t it,” my tent-mate and benefactor said. A year or two later I discovered it was not, but I say to this day- it was pretty damn close. But it was more than the flavor of sweet liquid that made the experience so excruciatingly pleasurable; Coke was the taste of civilization. It was the taste of ball games at Fenway Park where I would have it with my hot dog, it was the taste of a good movie- popcorn on my left, Coke on my right. It was the taste of eating out; Coke always tasted sweetest coming fresh from a restaurant’s soda fountain. In the last two thousand years we have erected buildings taller than Babel, we have put men on the moon, and among societies greatest achievements is the art of taste. In society taste is a necessity; it is part of our culture, part of who we are. And now I am forced to ponder my tent-mate’s statement. Better than sex? No. But over the centuries has sex improved or evolved? Do we now gain any more satisfaction from it than the cave men did? I don’t really know, but I can say with great certainty that we enjoy far more satisfaction from our sense of taste.