Making a Maildrop

Have I mentioned lately that I have no idea what I'm doing? I feel like I don't say it often enough. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING.

It sounds like such a simple assignment: go to the store and buy a big basketful of high-calorie snack food, then divvy it into five parcels. But it's taken me six trips to two different stores to fill THE FIRST BOX. This is the maildrop for Warner Springs, the box that ought to report to the post office sometime in the next week. It should be easy. I'm not trying to eke a resupply out of a tiny backcountry corner market; I've got a full-service northwestern hippie town with three large grocery stores in walking distance. Nevertheless, I'm struggling. I go to Safeway and stand staring at the endless shelves of brightly-labeled, sleekly-packaged food and all I can think is I don't want to eat any of this. What is this stuff anyway? People dart around me with their wheeled carts, snatching items that they recognize instantly and have no need to examine, while I drift through the aisles like a visitor from another country, or an escapee from the mental ward, reading descriptions and ingredient lists with a mixture of horror and hilarity.

During each visit I cull another few items from the mystifying array, then bring them home, toss them into the orderly lineup of clearly-labeled large flat-rate boxes on my living room floor---and see that it is not enough. Not by a long shot. Or is it? How much will I eat over the course of five days? More to the point, how much of this will I eat over five days? How many of these bars, how many of these cookies---which are nothing like the cookies I would make for myself to eat---how much of this does it take to fuel my body for twenty miles a day? Will I want two candy bars a day, or eight? Will I want a hot breakfast, or something to eat in motion? What does "lunch" mean when you snack all day? Am I even going to care about cooking a meal when it's a hundred degrees out? How long before I'm utterly sick of everything with almonds in it? Will I get tired of chocolate?

I didn't think it would be this hard. I thought I would start by allotting one cooked meal for each day--that's where the Outdoor Herbivore stuff came in--and work backwards. But I'm stuck. I am PERFECTLY AWARE that it's all in my head. With an adventure of this magnitude drawing steadily closer, SOMETHING was bound to wind up channelling all of my cumulative anxiety, so guess what.

"Paul, d'you think this is enough?"

"How many days is it for?"

"Four and a half."

"Well how many calories is it?"

"What?"

"Just add up how many calories it is, that should tell you."

"...are you serious? I'm not going to sit here and tot up the nutritional information on every goddam Luna bar."

"Ohhh, I see, so you're stressing, but you're not willing to do the work, is that it?"

"No, that bloody isn't it! The calorie count??? I want to know if this is enough FOOD, and you're asking me about the calorie count? We aren't even having the same CONVERSATION!"

"Then just stick with the two pounds a day rule!"

"Aauuugh, that doesn't help! I don't know what I'm doing! Never mind the fucking weight, I don't know if I'm going to want to eat any of this shit! I get a handful of Odwalla bars and think, 'Hrm, better not put two of those in the same box in case they're horrible.'"

"You're just too picky! I don't care, you understand? It's just food! I'll eat anything that's put in front of me."

"This is why we aren't hiking together! We are on TWO DIFFERENT TRIPS! Same destination! TWO DIFFERENT TRIPS."

I'm trying to think of a way to explain this mental roadblock. It's like...a completely unfamiliar unit of measurement. The thermometer has degrees Fahrenheit on one side and degrees Celsius on the other--and the experiment is written in Joules. They're related, okay, but they're NOT THE SAME. I need a conversion table, something to translate. There's a particular leap from figuring meals in loaves of bread and dozens of eggs and bundles of kale, to figuring meals in breakfast bars and cheese crackers, and I don't have enough experience with the latter to be able to do the conversion in my head. I have no tangible sense of this food, what it means to my stomach, to my body. And it's really REALLY hard to go the store and buy things that I would never buy under any other circumstances. I don't want to buy any fucking Pepperidge Farm cookies because I don't want to eat any fucking Pepperidge Farm cookies. Ever! I hate Pepperidge Farm cookies! But this is the sort of thing I'm going to have to eat if I'm trying to resupply out of a small store! Pepperidge Farm, hell--what about Oreos? What if I have to eat Oreos? I'm unquestionably going to have to eat Oreos--or starve. DEAR GOD I'M GOING TO STARVE.

MYOG - maildrop identification stickers

No, I'm not going to starve. I'm coping with the Irrational Food Freak-Out in a predictable, time-honored pattern.

1) Overcompensate. For the Warner Springs maildrop, I decided---screw it. Just fill the box. Let it be too much. FILL THE BOX.

2) Stall. For Kennedy Meadows, 700 miles later, I will pack the box; pack it the way this family have been packing suitcases for the last twenty years. PACKED. Shake it. Stand on it. Keep adding things until, no matter how hard you kick that box, nothing budges. I have time to keep shopping. Trader Joe's will help. One flat-rate box might not be enough food, at that point, but there'll be a general store to supplant any glaring omissions. I'll know more by then, right? A lot more.

3) Dodge. The rest of the maildrops--the other three--the ones I won't need until July--I HEREBY ENTRUST TO MY MOTHER!

HA HA HA HA HA!