Okay– you guys want another cute story about my parents and food?
So my mother is an amazing baker. And as I mentioned in a reblog of the Oranges post, my parents now always keep fresh fruit in the house – particularly bananas (my dad likes them with his breakfast). And whenever the bananas go brown, mom makes (really goddamn delicious) banana bread.
My parents are very avid outdoorsy folks and do a lot of hiking. They live in a mountainous region and basically climb a mountain every weekend (most of the mountains here are under 6,000 feet, but rocky), including in the middle of winter. Because cold and exertion eat through your blood sugar, they always pack trail snacks, and they developed a tradition of bringing a mini loaf of mom’s banana bread that they share on the summit.
Now a few years ago my father was having a midlife crisis and decided he was going to hike a REALLY big mountain. So he signed up for an expedition to climb Mt. Denali in Alaska – the tallest peak in North America. The group he was going with had a trip planned where everyone would be responsible for hiking with and carrying their own gear, so you had to be prepared to hike up a big fuckoff mountain in potentially treacherous conditions with a heavy pack.
My mother was not going on this expedition (she has problems with altitude sickness) but dammit, she was not going to let my dad go get himself killed by being unprepared. So in the year leading up to his climb, she kinda became his personal trainer. They hiked the local mountains a lot and in all kinds of weather conditions, practiced rope training and crevasse rescue techniques, and she made sure he practiced climbing with increasingly heavy packs until he was hauling around 65lbs of weights on his back. Sometimes she would even sit in a sled in the snow and make him pull her.
When the trip finally came, dad was incredibly excited, and amused that his gear pack actually ended up being lighter than his practice pack. A number of other folks in the expedition had practiced going up a stair machines with weight on their backs, but mom had dragged dad through all the really rocky, treacherous trails around here with ice and water crossings, so he had solid balance from really moving with that amount of weight. Over the course of the climb (which took a couple weeks), half of the hikers ended up turning back (for various reasons), but despite being the oldest in the group, dad was one of the few to summit.
And on the day he made it to the top, at 20,310 feet of elevation, he pulled out of his pack, wrapped in foil and mostly frozen but intact despite the long trip, a loaf of my mother’s banana bread, to eat on top of the world. Because, he said later, even if she wasn’t there with him, she was the reason he made it to the top.
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