Old School Fast Food

Canned food has been a staple for fighters, vagrants and adventurers for more than 100 years. Lead poisoning from bad cans have wiped out whole arctic expeditions. Life saving moisture in canned food has saved many lives in the desert. Life or death; luck of the draw. Very Nevada. Can-Cans were the early fast food stops of the unsettled west, especially the desert where water was scarce. Easy to store, no preparation required. The cans themselves got re-purposed into whatever was needed. Sometimes a patch, sometimes a plate. Miners very typically used them to post their claim boundaries on site wired to a post. Sometimes the empty cans became the time capsules of lonely people filled with a poem or a keepsake; petroglyphs of a later age. I remember a very funny scene on the "new" Dick Van Dyke show where he is desperately attempting to open a can of peas with a dead rattlesnake's fangs. Queasy Rider- I also vividly remember my Bemaw tell her depression era story over and over. How, as a young teen she was hungry all the time. One night when she couldn't stand it any more, she snuck downstairs in the house where she was working as a live-in helper and "stole" a finger full of beans. Even as an old woman she said she had never tasted anything so good, but the guilt still clung to her all the days of her life. I believe Treasures of Darkness- Black Opal is not so much a story of the past but our immediate future. I currently live spitting distance to railroad tracks where 72 trains a day pass through. In the last year or so, I have seen the new breed of young hobos jumping off the trains in more visible numbers. For many of us, our future choices may be much more desperate; the consequences much more dynamic. Since no geo-caches were put out last month, I have two for you this month that are in the spirit of the old can-cans. The first one will be in the hometown of the Happy Burro; the second near Giggle Springs. Both will have an antique coin for the first finder. N36.90766 W116.76005 N38.06862 W117.22995 This month's free gift to you are retro-can labels. Bon Appetite checkout www.nevada150.org