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The cold, hard facts A Chilling Adventure in the Great IndoorsBy Rick Horowitz I could tell you that I once suffered frostbite in a camping accident, and it would be true, and you would be impressed. If I said those words with just the right catch in my voice and gazed off mournfully into the middle distance, you might conjure up visions of forbidding winter landscapes, of trackless wastes and polar ice caps. But if you pushed me for details, I'd be toast. That's because my particular accident happened just a few days ago, in the merry month of June. In the upstairs bedroom. I can explain. Understand, first of all, that the adult contingent of this household hasn't gone on a camping trip since Smokey the Bear was a cub. Suddenly, somehow, it seemed like a good idea -- a night, or even two nights, in the great outdoors. Start small, we figured, with a campground close to home and only slightly less equipment than they used for the Normandy invasion. But some of our equipment was...dated. The tiny (but highly aromatic) canvas tent without a floor, for instance. The huge (but barely insulating) sleeping bag with the flannel lining and the pictures of the hunting dogs. There had been plenty of improvements in camping gear since the last time we were out; we decided we should be at least partly up to date. So we found a new tent to keep us dry, a new sleeping bag to keep us warm. The lantern was a different story. I had a perfectly good lantern tucked away in the basement, encased in bubble wrap and stuffed into an empty carton of Sprite. (Not necessarily the Boy Scout-approved method of lantern tuckage, but good enough for us.) The younger and more adventurous members of the household had used the thing not that long ago, and it had worked just fine. Why mess with success? The only question was fuel. This lantern ran on little fuel canisters that slid into the lantern's base, where a little pin pierced the canister's little nozzle and sent liquefied petroleum gas up to the business end for that famous hissing glow. We had one partially used canister, purchased who-knows-when, still sitting inside the lantern -- but beyond that, we were fuelless. Even worse: I hadn't seen that kind of lantern in any of the stores we'd visited; was anyone even making the canisters anymore? So I started calling around. Turns out it's not so easy trying to describe a 30-year-old lantern to a 20-something sales clerk. "You say there's a canister? And it goes inside?" "That's right -- just a little canister about..." And I'd spread my fingers four or five inches apart; this was less than totally effective over the phone. Did I happen to know who made these canisters? No, but I could certainly find out. I steadied the lantern with one hand, and with the other I pulled on the canister holder until it slid loose of its moorings. Imagine my surprise when gas started squirting from the nozzle. I hadn't camped in years, true, but I was pretty sure that having liquefied petroleum gas sprayed all over you was no better now than it used to be. I pressed an index finger over the hole to stanch the flow while I tried desperately to end the conversation. Was I imagining things, or had the sales clerk gone thoroughly, obliviously chatty? I pressed down even harder; it was starting to hurt a bit as the gas tried to force its way out. I pressed even harder, and it hurt even more. Finally, I managed to hang up the phone, race down the stairs and out the back door. I took my finger off the nozzle and let the remaining gas go wherever it wanted to. I noticed that ice crystals were forming on the canister holder. I also noticed that the tip of my finger was red and tingling. Within three or four days, I'd have a milky white crescent of loose and achy skin. "Oh yeah," said the guy at the army-surplus store when I showed him my damaged digit. "LP gas freezes when it's exposed to air." The pain I'd felt with my finger on the nozzle hadn't been just pressure; it had been frost! There have been plenty of improvements in camping gear since the last time we were out. Now, if only they could do something about the campers... Posted 6/8/00. Don't
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Rick Horowitz