The 50 Year Cooker
Old is Good.. or gold. Let's go with gold.
Is it the sense of danger when pressurizing the canister? Or perhaps because it removes my knuckle hairs when igniting. My old 1970’s Coleman camp stove is perhaps my favorite piece of camping equipment. I’m quite good at romanticising the use of objects.. that feels a little weird now I’ve written it.
When I came across this green Coleman stove on Facebook it looked unlike all other cookers. Firstly it was large and cumbersome bordering on impractical like a camping suitcase. Along with an external fuel canister that you have to pressurize by hand and during longer cooks, re pressurize.
Not knowing the 50 year history of my new old stove left plenty of room for imagination. Maybe it had been around Australia already in the back of a Kingswood, or perhaps it started its life in America where it was manufactured and a family brought it over.. or what if it just sat in a shed for 50 years the bloke I bought it off wanted to make a quick $50.
Either way, I wanted to add another chapter to this cumbersome stoves life.
One of my favourite memories of this time in Australia was camping in central Australia for 6 weeks. At night the temperature would sometimes drop below 0 and I would wake up with a layer of frost on my traditional Australian made swag.
What I found was my Coleman cooker and my coffee grinder became my motivation to get out of the swag and face the cold. Waiting for the billy to boil while hand grinding coffee beans is what I looked forward to every morning, this routine would fill the gap between getting up in the dark frosty morning to still being cold but with the sun appearing over the horizon.
And I could take solace in knowing if the sun didn’t eventually warm me up… the large flame and the burnt knuckle hairs would provide some relief.