Here is the reason: I had to look up on Google whether it is possible to bake cookies over a campfire and also how you do it.
Spoiler alert: It is possible, and how you do it is use lots and lots of foil.
Why I had to look this up is long and complicated. One day, when I am safely grown up and you are in a really, really, really good mood, I will tell you. The important part is that we, THE MEMBERSHIP OF THE SECRET COOKIE CLUB, were helping to fix our counselor Hannah’s LIFE after her stupid evil boyfriend dumped her.
In other words, it was exactly the kind of noble, generous, and selfless project you and my Sunday school teacher, Miss Oakley, are always encouraging me to undertake.
So now you cannot POSSIBLY be angry at me anymore.
Right?
I miss you and Jenny and Ralph and even Troy, my star-athlete brother, the one you love more than me now that I got in trouble at camp and am a disgrace to the Baron family name.
Love for all eternity from your penitent daughter, Olivia
P.S. If you are wondering about the upside-down stickers, it is because I ran out of sad-faced ones and had to use happy faces.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
August 13, Saturday
Dear Lucy,
I have just received your amusing letter and am writing back immediately so you will have this note before you leave camp to come home.
It tickles me that so many Moonlight Ranch traditions remain unchanged from when I was a camper there long ago. In my day, we also looked forward to Pack Trip at the end of the summer and competed vigorously for Best Chore Score and Top Cabin. We also believed there were invisible sentries silently prowling Boys Camp for girls and Girls Camp for boys. Looking back, I realize that of course the sentries were a fiction invented by Buck to keep us all behaving ourselves.
Clever Buck! The phantom sentries were probably more effective than real ones would have been, not to mention they never expected to be paid!
It also tickles me to learn you have a kooky sense of humor like your father’s. Lucy, I know he hasn’t been much use to you, but one day you will grow up and maybe he will, too (!). God willing, then you’ll have a chance to get to know each other. Anyway, my point is that your altering your voice and calling, “Who goes there?” when you heard people coming on the path is something I can imagine him doing too.
It must have been hard for you to contain your giggles when the answer was straight out of “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”
I wonder if by now you have fessed up, or if you’re going to let your bunkmates think they really encountered one of the dreaded sentries. If the latter, you are perpetuating Buck’s myth, you know!
As for the failure of your matchmaking scheme, have you ever heard of a line of poetry written more than two hundred years ago by a Scot named Robert Burns? According to it, “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men often go awry.”
In other words, plan all you want and things still may not work out. You girls seem to have found the truth in this. I’m glad to hear that even without a new romance, she (Hannah is her name, right?) has cheered up after being so down in the dumps. Maybe she has come around to the view that boys aren’t everything.
Like you, I’m surprised your mother’s love spell didn’t work. If anything, she seems to have too much success with them. Has she told you how it is going with the Arizona highway patrolman she met when she drove you to camp? He sounded like a decent fellow, and at least he has a steady job.
Change of topic: Things are fine here in beautiful Santa Barbara. Unlike where you are, we have ocean breezes to mitigate the summer heat. Maybe sometime before school starts, you can come here for a visit? If those triplets you watch can spare you, that is. I bet they and their mother miss you desperately!
Hope to see you soon, and lots of love,
Aunt Freda
CHAPTER FORTY
(From the Moonlight Ranch Handbook for Families)
The culmination of summer activities is the annual Pack Trip, which promotes self-sufficiency in a natural outdoor setting, teaches valuable camping skills, and encourages appreciation of the power and beauty of the rugged Southwestern environment.
With their gear packed on their horses, campers ride beyond the boundaries of Moonlight Ranch to scenic Ocotillo Lookout, a promontory with a panoramic view of the vast Arizona landscape. The approximately four-hour trail ride gives campers the chance to utilize, consolidate, and reflect upon the equestrian progress they have made during the course of the summer program.
As with all Moonlight Ranch activities, appropriate breaks for hydration and allergen-free nutrition are built into the travel schedule, and campers are consistently supervised by well-trained and caring professional staff.
Upon arrival at Ocotillo Lookout, campers grouped according to cabin assignment set up their own outdoor kitchens and sleeping areas. This unique opportunity to customize accommodations enables each group to practice teamwork and to explore and realize their own potential for enterprise, creativity, and ingenuity.
During their stay at Ocotillo Lookout, campers cook and clean for themselves in addition to caring for their horses. At the same time, they have the opportunity to enjoy a curtailed schedule of educational and recreational activities, including athletic competitions, nature hikes, trail rides, and singalongs.
All in all, it’s easy to see why campers and counselors alike call Pack Trip a highlight of the summer.
Special note: In past years, some parents have expressed concern over the necessarily primitive nature of “bathroom” facilities during Pack Trip. Road access at the Ocotillo Lookout property is limited to passenger vehicles, and plumbing is nonexistent. For this reason, we must rely on time-honored strategies for waste processing and disposal. Of course, our methods are fully compliant with established best practices for hygiene, water quality, and the natural environment as outlined by the United States Bureau of Land Management (Publication No. 16-2783).
Most campers become comfortable with our old-fashioned arrangements as a matter of necessity. Please feel free to call Paula in the Moonlight Ranch office should you wish to discuss the particular needs of your camper.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Lucy
Before Hannah caught Olivia with the iPad and confiscated it because she had to or she would lose her job and there were tears on both sides and drama on Olivia’s side only, Olivia had the presence of mind to copy out the campfire cookie recipe she had found online.
But perhaps you have heard of a line in a poem by an old poet named Scot. It goes: “The best laid recipes of mice and man often get messed up.”
Perhaps Scot had tried making campfire cookies for himself.
Believe me, there are many possibilities for mess-ups, something I know because we experienced every single one during Pack Trip.
How you make campfire cookies is make normal cookie dough, then build a miniature oven in the shape of a hollow cube out of at least six layers of aluminum foil, drop cookie dough on the bottom of the oven, fold the foil over the top to seal it, and put the whole thing on a grill on top of a campfire.
Here is what will happen: You will burn the bottoms of lots of cookies, and lots more will stick so you have to eat them together with foil or not at all.
After a while, the foil will tear, and bits of dough will fall into the fire, where they will smoke for a long time before finally flames shoot up and they become charcoal briquettes. After this, you will raise the oven farther from the fire, and then your cookies will first be raw and later be dried out and hard as hockey pucks.
You will fight with all your friends and blame each other.
And you will feel stupid! Because you are the Secret Cookie Club! And if you can’t even bake an edible cookie, what good are you?
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Emma
If there is a world’s record for amount of cookie dough wasted in three days, we probably broke it during Pack Trip.
I felt r
eally guilty about this. With some of my friends at home, I volunteer at a food bank, and I know there are hungry people in this world. What kind of sense did it make to literally incinerate ingredients in, over, and around a campfire?
I said this to Grace on Tuesday afternoon. It was our last day at Ocotillo Lookout, and we were still trying to get the baking right.
Ocotillo Lookout is a mesa (not a butte!) that rises about one thousand feet off the desert floor. Because the country around it is rugged, flat, and treeless, you look out to the cloud-studded blue forever in all directions. It’s like being a speck on top of the world.
There is no natural cover at Ocotillo Lookout, so the first thing we did when we got here was help the counselors erect blue tarp canopies. These were to protect us from sun during the day and from thunderstorms overnight. Luckily, the nighttime weather stayed clear, so we got to sleep out under the stars.
At mealtimes, we sat on the ground or on rocks or benches we made ourselves out of whatever wood we could scavenge. I won’t tell you about the bathrooms because, short version, there weren’t any. We cleaned up with wet wipes or water from jugs brought in on a dirt road by truck. As for the other bathroom-type functions, I’ll just say shovels were involved, and it was all very environmental.
By the fourth afternoon, my clothes were dusty, and I smelled like campfire smoke. I was sweaty from the heat and tired from sleeping poorly on the ground.
And I was happy.
Olivia, Lucy, Grace, and I had fought till we were so sick of fighting there was nothing left but to be friends again, and now—at last—we were.
Also, I hope it’s not braggy to say so, but I was proud of the really sweet little outdoor kitchen we had set up for ourselves. Our utensils came from Mrs. Arthur back at camp and included a cutting board, pots, knives, bowls, plates, and napkins. Grace had found a forked stick and stuck it in the ground, and we had hung a ladle from it.
We didn’t actually need a ladle, but the setup looked really cool.
Each kitchen had a cooler for perishable food. The truck brought us ice, too. Anytime I felt like I was some kind of pioneer woman roughing it on the Oregon Trail, I reminded myself that the pioneers didn’t get ice deliveries.
In case you haven’t guessed, by this time I had taken back my vow not to be in charge. It was me that organized the kitchen, or more accurately, me that told Grace, Emma, and Lucy how they should organize the kitchen. With my broken ankle, I wasn’t good for much besides ordering other people around. Also, I could see that if I let anyone else be in charge, we wouldn’t get the kitchen organized till Pack Trip was over.
The prep area was the cooler, which we placed in the center of the space we had mapped out. The campfire was in one corner, and the cleanup area (a plastic tub with a sponge and a rag) opposite. We even had a flowering cactus centerpiece on a table we made out of rocks and boards.
Hannah helped too, but she emphasized that it was our kitchen, and we should be in charge. Same with the cookies, which is probably one reason we wasted so much dough.
“If we think of it as experimenting instead of baking,” Grace said, “we’ll feel better. The rules are different. Some stuff has to get used up.”
“Is that true?” I was dropping spoonfuls of dough onto greased foil for what had to be the zillionth time. If we were going to fulfill our promise to Jack, this batch had to work. We didn’t have time or ingredients to make another one.
“Absolutely,” Grace said. “I mean, my parents are scientists, and they do experiments. In the end it’s worth the waste if you learn something or get something good. Ready?”
“Ready,” I said. One thing about foil ovens, they’re flimsy. Now Grace pinched two lower corners in her fingers and I pinched the opposite corners, and we moved the oven from the prep area to the grill above the campfire. As always, the dough shifted and the sides drooped in transit, but when at last the oven was safely in place, I felt optimistic.
And what do you know, this batch worked!
Lucy and Olivia had been on a wildflower walk. With my broken ankle, I couldn’t go, and Hannah had given Grace permission to stay back with me. By the time Lucy and Olivia returned, we were transferring golden-brown cookies to a cooling rack made out of crisscrossed manzanita twigs—Grace’s idea.
Lured by the aroma, a small crowd came over to see how things were going. We had marked off our kitchen with a border of rocks and branches laid out on the ground. There was nothing to keep people from stepping over it, but no one did. Instead, they lined up and watched as if we had a cooking show or something.
“How many good ones ya got this time?” asked Angela, a seven-eight-nine from Primrose Cabin.
“Thirty-six, so far,” I said, “and I’m really sorry, but you can’t test one.”
“Yesterday you let me test one,” said Brendan, also a seven-eight-nine.
“Because it was half burned,” Grace explained. “None of this batch burned, and we have to save them to share at the campfire later on.”
Walking by, Jack must have heard this, because he made an abrupt course change and came over to join the spectators. “Is that a promise?” Wearing his trademark old-man hat along with a pink Hawaiian shirt, red cargo shorts, and flip-flops, he looked out of place as usual in the sea of denim, plaid, and Western boots. “ ’Cause if it’s not,” he went on, “I think my memory of certain, shall we say, transgressions, might be more vivid than I thought.”
I gulped. He meant he might remember about Grace and me in Boys Camp. But he wouldn’t tell Buck, would he?
Olivia said, “It’s absolutely a promise. Don’t you worry.”
Brendan said, “What’s a ‘grans-teshun’?”
“A sin,” said Jack, and then he waggled his fingers and bugged out his eyes. This made Brendan and Angela giggle, but he wasn’t looking at Brendan and Angela. At first I thought he was looking at me, but then I realized it was actually something over my shoulder
And then the something over my shoulder giggled too.
I turned around and saw . . . Hannah. Her eyes were bright, and so was her smile. She was looking straight at Jack.
O . . . M . . . G.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Grace
OMG!
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Olivia
OMG!
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Lucy
Wait, what?
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Brianna Silverbug
Olivia Baron and I both had afternoon riding, and all summer long I had wanted to ask her a question. Now almost everyone in the whole camp was riding back from Pack Trip—creating a cloud of red dust as we went—and she was ahead of me on the trail. As usual, she was mumbling something—talking to her horse?—but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.
I grinned and shook my head and wished for the millionth time I had my phone. If I had, I would have put a video of Olivia riding Shorty up on YouTube. The tall, glamorous black girl and the stubby, mousy horse were what my mom would call one odd couple for sure.
We were more than halfway back to camp and, maybe because I didn’t sleep well on the ground, my mind was wandering aimlessly. It was as if I didn’t have the energy either for conversation or for focusing on any single thing.
The day was cloudy, unusual in the desert, and Jane had told us there might be a storm overnight. Pack Trip had been fun, but I hated being dirty. The Flowerpot girls were our Chore Score archrivals, but they sure made delicious cookies.
We had been riding single file on a trail, but now the trail veered right and fed into a dirt road, the same road used by the nurse’s car and the truck that brought supplies for Pack Trip.
On the road, there was room for me to ride next to Olivia. This was the last day we’ d be on horseback and probably my best opportunity to ask my question. I hesitated. Everybody knew Olivia Baron was the most stuck-up girl at camp. If I spoke to her, she’d probably look down her nose as usual.
I bumped my horse’s flanks with my heels and clicked my tongue to urge her forward. Sheba is a purebred quarter horse, only five years old, and lively. Even so, she didn’t catch Shorty right away. Only after a couple of minutes did I recognize the significance of this. Shorty wasn’t poky anymore.
Now I really wanted to ask my question, so I goaded Sheba into a trot—even though I knew we weren’t supposed to. Sure enough, Cal, the counselor in charge of the horses, hollered at me, “Don’t trot that horse!”
“Sorry!” I called back, but mission accomplished. I was now riding next to Olivia. When I looked over at her, I realized she wouldn’t be looking down her nose at all, not even if she wanted to. Shorty was so short that for the first and only time ever, my view was the top of Olivia’s white hat.
“Hey,” I said. “How ya doin’, Olivia? Those were really great cookies you guys made.”
“Thank you,” said Olivia.
I noticed she had her braids tucked up under her hat and she was wearing a pink bandanna (so was I) with a plaid, Western-style short-sleeve shirt (so was almost everybody). The shirt was mostly magenta and turquoise, the most popular colors that year. Unlike me, she looked clean. In fact, somehow Olivia almost always managed to look better than the rest of us girls.
I was trying to think of a lead-in to my question when Olivia surprised me. “Uh, Brianna?” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
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