As told by Susan; recorded by Kathy~

One 4th of July holiday my sisters, Kathy and Genie, and I decided it would be fun to go camping. Mom and Dad had gone to Seward over the holiday to watch our brother Russ run in the Mt. Marathon Race, so we were on our own.  For food, we decided to make baked beans. They would be hearty, nutritious and easy to make: a little water, some bacon, onion, other seasonings, no sweat.

I have always loved to bake and, if I do say so myself, I do so with a flourish – along with just about every mixing bowl, baking utensil and counter-top in the kitchen. Mom was pretty impatient with my “baking style” and the cleanup required afterward, so while she was out of town I couldn’t miss the opportunity to bake. Little did I know what I was about to get myself into; not to mention the entire kitchen.

The recipe called for navy beans, but the store had just small bags that each had only about two cups of beans. That didn’t seem enough for the three of us, and since beans get better after a few days, we wanted some left overs, so I got four bags. Mom had a good-size t casserole, which is a deep dish with a lid. It held four quarts which was plenty big for 8 cups of beans so I poured in the beans, added enough water to cover them and left them to soak.

Meanwhile, Kathy and Genie had found a tent (and enough stakes to put it up) and I helped them round up sleeping bags for each of us and started packing other things we might need, including Dad’s 357 pistol. You never know when you might encounter a bear in the wilds of Alaska, after all. When we checked on the beans a little while later, they had swelled up so much that they were almost to the top of the casserole. Mom didn’t have a bigger pot, so we went to the local grocery store and bought the largest pot they had: a large metal pot called a Dutch oven that held eight quarts twice size of the casserole. We agreed that it would be more than big enough. But we hadn’t considered one thing – the other ingredients we still needed to add.

By the time we got back to the house the beans had soaked up all of the water and over-flowed the casserole. We dumped them all into the Dutch oven. But when I started frying up the half pound of bacon and sautéing a couple of minced onions, I realized there wouldn’t be room for these ingredients plus a cup of brown sugar and generous portions of tomato sauce and other spices. Unbelievably, we needed a bigger pot.

We decided to go to Kimball’s a household store downtown where we regularly shopped for presents for Mom. They had a great selection of tea cups that were ideal for her collection. In hindsight, I’m not sure Mom ever actually collected tea cups. I think we just created the collection by buying her the cups for every gift-giving occasion. The store had lots of fun and fancy kitchen dishes and specialty utensils and, of course, those pretty little cups, but they didn’t have anything even close to big enough for our project. We asked the clerk if she knew where we might find a big pot and she suggested an Army Navy Surplus store. There we found a 12-quart (3 gallon) stockpot.

All this pot changing and cooking was starting to take a toll on the kitchen. The sink was full of used cookware and most of the counter space either had beans on it or evidence of the other ingredients. The clean-up could wait, I thought; we had to get these beans in the oven. Thankfully, all of the beans and ingredients fit into the stock pot and it fit in the oven, set at 350 degrees. Now the beans just needed to cook.

It was about then that my boyfriend, Ron Cupples, showed up. He wanted me to go somewhere with him and was quite put out when I told him that my sisters and I had plans to go camping at McHugh Creek Campground. Telling him where we were going turned out to be a near fatal mistake, but at that moment I thought revealing our destination made our plans more concrete and helped to encourage him to leave. Once he was out of the house, I noticed the beans smelled like they were burning. When I opened the oven to check on them, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The beans were boiling over this 3-gallon pot! I should have put a cookie sheet under the pot, but it was too late now. The spilled beans fell onto the heating coils and their charcoal remnants were welded on to the floor of the oven. And, the boiling pot had splattered all over the inside of the oven. This was a mess even by my standards. The only thing I could do to stop it was take the pot out of the oven. We needed a bigger pot, but we couldn’t think of another store that would carry the size pot we needed. But I knew who would.

I called my friend Bonnie. There were 15 kids in her family; surely she would know where to buy a commercial-size pot. Bonnie suggested a store called Brewster’s in Mt. View. With the beans off the heat, we headed across town to our last hope of finding the pot we needed.

Brewster’s was an old-fashioned dry goods store and it was amazing. We could have spent the rest of the holiday just marveling at the variety of items they sold – everything from hardware to dress cowboy shirts; and an entire section of the store devoted to cookware, including what today we might call the “mother of all pots” – a 5-gallon ceramic crock pot. The girls and I managed to carry the behemoth to the car and then into the house. We placed the crock pot on the floor and poured the beans from the stock pot. Then, I lowered the oven rack to the lowest position and put the ceramic pot in for what we hoped would be the last 30 minutes of cooking.

Once I closed the oven door, we all took a good look round.”It looks like The Cat in the Hat was here,” Genie said and we all laughed remembering the story about that messy visitor. But it was true. the sink was full of dishes and utensils, and beans were everywhere! They were on the floor, the oven top, the table top and practically every counter top. But the real mess was from the other ingredients. Cutting, measuring and pre-cooking the ingredients had dirtied a cutting board, knife, frying pan and bowls to store them in while we shopped for bigger pots. And as the pots got bigger, the difficulty of pouring the bean mixture from one to another increased exponentially. As a result there were bean-colored drips and splotches everywhere. I tackled the dishes in the sink and the girls worked on all the drips and splatter. When the buzzer rang 30 minutes later we didn’t exactly have the kitchen back to its original clean state, but it was nearly there.

Finally, we were ready to go camping – I packed up a about a quart of the beans and left the rest on in the crock pot on the counter – there was nowhere else to put it!

We drove out to McHugh Creek Campground, which was only about 30 minutes away, and with plenty of Alaska summer daylight left, we climbed a short way up a hill where we pitched our tent and arranged our sleeping bags and other belongings inside. I put Dad’s gun just inside my sleeping bag so it would be handy-by should I need it. We had a great time singing camp songs, playing card games and as it got darker, telling scary stories. The best part was the beans – they were delicious!

As we got ready to sleep, I heard a noise outside the tent. I could hear it breathing heavily as it stumbled up the hill and wandered through our campsite. I grabbed Dad’s gun and pointed it at the door of the tent, ready to shoot if the bear came near our tent. The intruder’s shadow got bigger and bigger as it came toward us. Quietly, the girls and I scooted to the back of the tent, as far from the door as possible. Closer, closer it came. I pressed my finger tighter on the trigger.

“Susie?” someone said.

For a moment I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked hard through the darkness at the shadowy figure. It wasn’t a bear; It was Ron Cupples!  If  he hadn’t called my name I surely would have shot  him! Reeling with the knowledge that I nearly killed someone, plus the fact that he was making a pest of himself, I lashed out at him with adrenalin-stoked anger and told him in no uncertain terms to leave us alone. He got the message and stumbled back down the trail to the parking lot.

When we got  home the next day, Mom and Dad were in the kitchen. Mom was scrubbing the stove top and Dad was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of our beans. “Where did these come from?” He asked. “They’re delicious.”  Mom turned around as if she was curious about the answer. But as she went back to scrubbing, I had a hunch she already knew.

But, not about the ‘spill the beans’ on our cooking adventure I said simply, “Oh, they’re just a little something I cooked up.”