Hobo Dinners

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Hobo Dinners

For 23 years I have been going to Dale Hollow Lake (the Tennessee side) with my husband and his parents for vacation. It’s a pilgrimage of sorts. We camp – well, sort of. Tim’s folks have a big RV now -- but in the beginning they had a truck camper and we’re still sleeping in a tent. Back when I first joined them, we were cooking all of our meals either over the open fire in the campsite pit or over a Coleman stove (I think we went through at least two).

As we began having children, the favorite meal on vacation became “hobo dinners.” This distinctly American delicacy is prepared in aluminum foil and cooked in the hot coals of the fire pit. When our kids were younger our hobo dinners consisted mainly of a hamburger patty, some onions and carrots for flavor and salt and pepper for spice. The kids would toss out the onions and smother their burgers in ketchup.

Part of the ritual is preparing it yourself – a huge rite of passage for each of our three children was the day they could finally assemble their own hobo dinner. You must complete the ritual by engraving some sort of identifying label on the outside of your meal with a black Sharpie marker. It's sort of a contest to see who can be wittiest with their moniker.

This past May, our eldest child graduated from High School. Her senior year was bittersweet, as I’m sure every parent has experienced, as we passed through each event “for the last time.” Concerts, dances, holidays . . . it all went so quickly. She had a busy summer and while our youngest child, Noah, went to the Lake with his grandparents twice this summer, Mary, our graduate, Sara, our middle “angel,” Tim and I could only catch a three day weekend. It was two weeks ago. We left Friday night and arrived at the Lake around dusk.

We had eaten dinner on the road and we were leaving Sunday around lunch time. We had one night for which we needed a dinner and the kids asked for . . . you guessed it, hobo dinners.

Our kids all prepare their own now. We added a few new ingredient choices this year: sweet potatoes in addition to “new” red potatoes, mushrooms and all the Chef Paul spices in my in-laws' cabinets. A smorgasbord of ingredients from which you picked your favorites.

I watched as Mary laid her hamburger patty out on the foil. She placed a baby carrot in the middle vertically, two purple half moon slivers of onion at the top on each side and about 5 slices of new potato along the bottom in a smile. “Meet Mrs. Tastyface,” she announced proudly.

Mary is 17 and she will be a freshman at a small college here in Kentucky in the fall. She’s blonde, but not stupid. She wants to be a teacher. In that one moment, I saw her at 4 or 5 making her first hobo dinner, at 17 as a teacher’s assistant at a local elementary and at 25, teaching someone, perhaps her own child, to make a hobo dinner. This was not her “last time.” It’s just the beginning.