The World According to GORP

I don’t know if you know this, but I have this epic trail mix that’s been an ongoing part of my life since 2001. The person I most clicked with at Camp Little Cloud during the summer I was a camp counselor was Emily (or Pebbles, for those in the know). We both came with our own trail mix, and at one point, mixed them together. My sunflower seeds were in with her raisins, and her two-year-old Valentines M’Ms were in with my stale Cheerios.

As the summer progressed, we dumped more variants into this bucket of GORP. GORP stands for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts, which is the base of any good trail mix, but now because of our combined efforts, there were now soy nuts and Craisins and dark chocolate bits and a bunch of other stuff. At one point, I began adding dinner mints, for when your trail mix is your lunch, it’s nice to finish it off with a minty bit so you don’t continue mowing as you hike. These alterations and Frankensteinations ultimately became what is known as Zen GORP. I have the recipe somewhere in a journal.

At the end of camp, Emily and I went our separate ways. She went off to college in Ashland, WI, and I went off to D.C. for a year of liquid intense at AmeriCorps. She helped save wild Utah, I fought fire in Maryland. She studied at the Audubon Society Center in Minnesota, and I went to Florida to work with Habitat for Humanity. We got together that next summer and traded GORP again. We doubled the sights our GORP had seen by remixing it together.

I stored my GORP in a gallon ZipLock with the heavy duty zip. On it, I wrote all the states the GORP had been to. We both just kept adding to what we had, and much like Friendship Bread (ask your mothers) the stuff always had a little bit of an old addition. My favorite was finding a really old Valentines M&M, and eating it triumphantly.

The GORP travelled with me to Munich, and I always meant to send Em a baggie full so she could add it to hers and have truly international GORP. The GORP hung out in the freezer for a long time when I lived in Chicago, for there’s no real reason to lug around a gallon baggie full of food everywhere you go.

Thus began the downfall of the GORP. I dont need a constant travel food the way I used to. I lament this fact. I wish I was hiking and canoeing and camping and travelling around, and required a culinary companion. I haven’t restocked the GORP bag in a long time. I’ve merely added chocolate chips to fill it out a little.

Today, I brought GORP with me to work, because I won’t have a chance to eat dinner tonight, and it pinch hits nicely in this capacity. I’ve been sitting at my desk, eating handfuls of the bottom of the bag. As I sat here, I looked down and realized that the years and years of nut hulls had accumulated at the bottom of the bag, and I was now eating this dust. (Much like the last bowl of cereal.) My dark shirt and pants were bespeckled with bits of GORP dander.

It ocurred to me that this wouldn’t be a problem if I was outside; most likely the wind would blow it right off of me, or I could stand up and brush it to the ground, making a snack for ants.

Sitting in my cubicle, I became sad.