The Percolator That Made Camp Mornings Worth It

It got down to thirty-one degrees the night before, and I know that because I checked the little thermometer clipped to the trailer awning three separate times before I finally gave up and went to bed under both quilts. Biscuit slept at the foot of the bed instead of his usual spot by the door, which is his way of telling me the same thing the thermometer already had. Pearl and Sable didn't so much as poke their heads out from under the covers until well after sunrise. What finally got me out from under both of them was knowing the Farberware was two steps away on the stove.

This was a Corps of Engineers campground I don't get to as often as Kentucky Lake, one loop over from the boat ramp they close up for the season in October. Mid-week, mid-November, and I had maybe four other sites occupied out of thirty. That kind of quiet is exactly what I go looking for most of the year, but that particular morning it felt less like peace and more like being the only person left on the mountain.

I got the Farberware percolator going on the camp stove before I'd even put my boots all the way on, mostly out of habit and partly because my hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking. It takes about ten minutes from cold water to that first real perk, and I've come to know the sound of it the way you know a familiar voice. Quiet at first, then a soft chugging that picks up speed, then that steady rhythm that means it's actually working and not just heating up water for nothing.

The smell went out ahead of the sound. It always does. Coffee smell travels farther on a cold, still morning than it has any business traveling, out past the fire ring, past the picnic table with its skin of frost, out into a campground where nobody else's stove was running yet. I didn't think a thing of it. I just stood there in my coat with my hands wrapped around an empty mug, waiting.

Biscuit noticed the footsteps before I did. Ears up, head turned toward the gravel road that loops through the sites, that low half-growl he does that isn't really a warning, just his way of saying pay attention. A woman was walking a little terrier mix on a leash, both of them moving fast the way you do when you're trying to warm up by walking instead of standing still. She slowed down near my site, not stopping exactly, just slowing, the way people do when a smell has gotten hold of them.

A percolator that only makes coffee for one person never gives you a reason to ask a stranger to sit down.

I asked if she wanted a cup before I'd really thought it through, and she said yes so fast I think she surprised herself. Her name was Diane, up from a town about ninety minutes off, out here alone for a few days the same as me, her husband three years gone the way mine has been for longer than that. Her terrier's name was Scout, and Scout and Biscuit spent the first five minutes doing that stiff-legged sniffing routine dogs do before they decide whether they're friends, which they were, within about a minute more.

I poured her coffee into the spare mug I keep for exactly this reason, the one that lives in the cabinet mostly unused because I camp alone often enough that a spare mug can sit there for months. We didn't have much of a fire going yet, just embers from the night before that I stirred back to life while she held that mug in both hands the way you do when your fingers are cold and grateful for something.

We talked for the better part of an hour. About her husband's woodworking shop she still hasn't cleared out, about my twenty-eight years driving a school bus and the kids who still recognize me at the grocery store forty years later, about how a body gets used to camping alone and then some mornings it still catches up with you anyway, cold and quiet and a little too much like being the only one there. Neither of us said anything particularly wise. We just sat in two folding chairs pulled close to a fire that was finally catching, drinking coffee that was still warm because the Farberware pot holds enough to refill both our mugs twice before it ran dry.

She and Scout walked on eventually, back to her own site two loops over, and I sat there a while longer with the empty percolator cooling on the stove and Biscuit's head resting on my boot. It hadn't fixed the cold or the quiet or the fact that I was still, in every practical sense, out there by myself. What it had done was give one other person a reason to stop walking for an hour, and given me a reason to want them to.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you camp alone the way I do, I'd tell you not to underestimate what it means to be able to offer someone a cup of something warm. A single-serve pour-over is a fine little gadget, but it was never built to include a second person, and some mornings the second person is the whole point, even if you didn't know it when you woke up cold and quiet in an empty loop. I go into everything this pot does well, and where it falls short, in my full honest review, and if you're still deciding whether a percolator makes sense over instant coffee at all, I laid out the case for it plainly in my list of reasons. But the short version is this. Buy the pot that makes enough for whoever might wander by, because at camp, someone eventually does.