I could see the headlines now:Great coffee catastrophe at granite mountain; Drillers run cook out of camp to die alone in frozen hell.
Just then the cookshack door scraped open and the two yardboys, college kids, came in carrying four big buckets of water. "Hi, Cookie, here's your water." They'd lugged it up from the creek where they kept a hole open in the ice all winter. They set the buckets on the floor, then hustled out and down to the creek to get some more bucketfuls. They brought the water in, then left to do camp chores.
I looked in despair at the assorted little percolators. I'd never be able to make enough coffee in those dollhouse pots. It looked like I was going to be on the next plane out too.
A little Yankee ingenuity!
Then I looked around and found just what I was looking for: a ten-gallon soup pot. I poured the pot full of cold water, put it on the stove and turned the fire wide open. I found a container of coffee grounds and dumped the whole thing into the pot, then turned to other matters.
I looked around and found a sack of potatoes. I sliced them up, skins and all, and put them on to boil in another big pot.
Luckily the stove had a grill on top. I found some bacon and eggs and fried off the bacon, naturally saving the grease in an empty peach can. Next I found some pancake mix and a couple cans of blueberries. I cooked blueberry pancakes in bacon grease and while doing that I found a gallon can of half-frozen pancake syrup. I floated the whole can, unopened, in the hot potato water to warm the syrup up.
As my coffee began to bubble, I gave it a stir, poured in some cold water and turned the fire way down to let the grounds settle.
Meanwhile, I found a roasting pan and put it in a slow oven. I kept cooking blueberry pancakes and throwing them in the oven. The potatoes had come to a boil. I had sliced them thin so they would cook fast while not getting mushy.
I took the syrup can out of the potato water, opened it up and poured hot syrup into three pitchers and set them on the table. I grabbed a strainer, put it in the sink and poured in the steaming potatoes.
All of a sudden my feet got hot. Huh? I looked down and saw I was standing in a puddle of hot water. I looked under the sink and found an open pipe leading to a single overflowing bucket. What do you know? No drain. I mopped up the water, then dumped the boiled potatoes on the grill with some bacon grease and chopped onions. They browned nicely. I put the fried potatoes in a big stainless steel bowl and shoved it to the back of the stove.
Cooking up a storm!
Next I scraped the grill clean and scrambled a big mess of eggs, keeping them soft by adding some water. I put the scrambled eggs in a container and pushed them to the back of the stove. I opened some canned peaches and put them in a couple of bowls on the long wooden table.
Seven o'clock. Where was the crew?
The two yardboys entered and picked up their plates. "Oh, boy! Yippee! Blueberry pancakes! Bacon and eggs! Home-fried potatoes! All right!" They loaded up their plates and dived in. One of the boys, his mouth full, chomping and chewing, looked up from his plate, and said,
"This is great, Cookie! But I gotta tell ya, you've cooked way too much breakfast?"
I said, "What do you mean? I've got a whole gang of hungry drillers coming in here for breakfast in a couple minutes."
The boys laughed. "Those guys never eat breakfast. They're so hung over from drinking whiskey and playing poker all night, they just want to fill up their thermoses, get on the choppers, and fly out of here. The coffee keeps "em from freezing to death out on the sites."
Empty coffee pots!
They looked at the empty percolators. "Uh, Cookie, shouldn"t you be making some coffee? Those big drillers get mean if they don't get their coffee.”
So this was the big breakfast I'd worried about. I motioned them over to the stove and showed them the soup pot full of ten gallons of steaming black coffee. They looked at me in astonishment.
"Cookie! You're in!"
