Not too long ago, I was backpacking in the Cascades, around the Enchantment Lakes, which was like taking a vacation on the moon—if the moon had lakes and streams and brown trout and mosquitoes and mosquitoes and mosquitoes and camp robbers and mountain goats. Very sociable mountain goats, who were so starved for salt, they licked up our urine. It was shocking.

But not as shocking as these instructions for the camp stove we brought. It was dusk, on the first night, two of us preparing dinner, one of us on the ground, fiddling with the stove, trying to get it to work, the other, sitting on a log, reading aloud:

“Oil and stretch out the leather pump cup.”
“What?”
“Oil and stretch out the leather pump cup.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”

She kept reading and we all went to pieces.

The stove, a WhisperLite, was made by MSR. Anybody have any leads on who wrote these brilliantly doubled instructions?