To Do

As we prepare to head into the wilderness of Brentwood on Thursday, here are more details on the things that will need attention at the work session.

1. Trailer Safety Chains

First, we need to get rid of those terrible quick link attachments:



They don't fit through the holes on the side of the hitch and would never stop a runaway trailer anyway.

As you can see in the picture, one of them is missing and the other we tried to supplement with a wimpy S-hook that is now bent. We need to just replace the chains with a new set that has built in hooks. The current chains are too short, too light-duty and decent S-hooks won't fit through them. As a bonus, we'll get to light our ready-rolls with a welding torch.


This is the kind we need:

















2. Trailer Bumper Light

One of our side lights is prolapsed like a Russian weightlifter. It will require surgery.





3. Trailer Cargo Latches



Two or three of them have been bent and you can't run a padlock through without having another person pushing the clasp down with their boot. Unacceptable.


4. Trailer Bottle Opener



This is a going to be a new addition. We need sheet metal screws or bolts and washers and maybe a metal plate behind it to keep it from pulling through the wall of the cargo box. We anticipate heavy use.





5. Fire Grate


Need new screws or bolts on all four corners.





6. Guitar Strings

Some people think we need to replace all of them, but those strings were fine when they came with the guitar from the pawn shop two years and four rivers ago.





7. Big Daddy

The bolts and wing nuts attaching the handle are stripped out.





8. First Aid Kit



It needs an inventory. Anesthesia and euthanasia are about the only things we're equipped to do well right now.



9. Lantern



This Club owns a vintage white gas Coleman lantern that won't ever do the things it oughter. We have a box full of replacement parts so we should be able to get it going again.




10. Washtub Bass















Dang! Was Kirk driving this thing?


As you can see, we have plenty to do after the post-trip dinner. And the above does not count all the miscellaneous jobs like sharpening the kitchen knives and the machete; putting a new string on the washtub bass, canoe maintenance, Old Smokey, etc.

Someday we'll get a whole crosscut saw sharpening kit and do that too. But we have to go to Montana to learn how first.

Don't laugh. That's where the Blackfoot River is. The one in "A River Runs Through It."


___________________________________


When camping for a time is the way of one's life, one tries to improve his style.

One resolves on changes for future trips - a tiny and exactly fitted cook box; a contour-cut tarp over the canoe hooking to catches beneath the gunwales; no peaches in the mixed dried fruit. . . . One experiments and invents, and ends up, for instance, with a perfect aluminum-foil reflector for baking that agreeable, lumpy, biscuit-mixed bread that the Mexicans call "pan ranchero" and the northwoods writers "bannock" and other people undoubtedly other names.

One way or the other, it all generally turns out to be work.

Goodbye to a River, p. 170.