Have you ever had a meal taste so good that you’re not sure if it’s the food or something else?  For example, there’s a pizza place south of San Antonio that Michele and I occasionally go to after we’ve done a long bike ride in the area. We’ve never recommended it to anyone, because we  honestly don’t know if it’s great pizza, or just salty food that replenishes us after two or three hours on the bike. In my friend group we have a term “gas station nachos“. We use it to differentiate between food that is objectively high-quality from food that you as an individual enjoy. The term comes from the place that Melina and her dad went to as an outing and bonding experience while she was a kid, and pilgrimage she still makes when she goes home to visit. Another example would be the Dinty Moore stew my wife likes and the canned corn-beef hash I like. Objectively, they are both one small step from dog-food. Subjectively, they are comfort food of the highest caliber. 

For a while, my grandparents had an extremely rustic cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks outside of Newcomb, NY, a place so rural that even today it barely shows up on Google Maps. When I was a kid, it was even moreso. I think when my aunt and uncle bought it from my grandparents in the nineties, they might have installed running water and a flush toilet. But I’m not certain.  When I was ten or so, my grandparents organized a family expedition that took all three daughters and the four grandson’s (this predates Nate and Sarah) out to Goodnow for most of a week. The outhouse was a treacherous root and rock path away from the cabin, but I don’t remember any other extreme discomforts that an elementary age kid would have to suffer. Maybe bugs, if we went during the wrong part of the summer. I recall that my grandmother was an accomplished camp-cook, and the taste of fresh pan-fried perch and trout are among the fondest memories I have from that era, but I can’t claim to recall what we ate that trip. I can say with certainty that my aunts are still the kind of women, along with mom, who do not skimp on the provisions when providing for the clan. I can’t imagine how many marshmallows got roasted.

The camping itself is a blurry prologue to my most vivid memory from that trip, which is the meal we had when we got back “home” to Westport. Westport is a place from another era, literally. It was “a fashionable resort town” in the mid-1800s, and “began its decline” in the 1930s when airplanes let people from New York or Boston get their beach time in Bermuda or Hawaii, rather than horse or train to a mountain lake. Their loss, in my opinion, but Westport only nominally exists today, and my aunt and uncle are among the last of the die-hard residents. In the eighties, it still had a vibrant community of locals and tourists, and even one last fancy hotel with white linen dining. Classy enough that there was no hamburger or kid friendly menu. For some reason that’s where we went for dinner the day we got done camping. That night at the Westport Inn, I had stuffed filet of sole, for the first time, and it changed my life. I honestly don’t know why. It’s fish, spices, and some crab-meat, or something. It shouldn’t be the most vivid thing from a week with the family I love. It’s probably a stand-in for something much more profound and important, but that my ten-year old brain couldn’t process. Or maybe it was all the butter and lemon. I don’t know. For years afterwards, whenever I saw sole on the menu I would order it, only to be disappointed time after time, because it wasn’t the meal I had that night. That white fish became my white whale. I’m not even sure I could tell you what it tasted like, but the memory I have of eating it is pure bliss.