The Importance of Cookies to Travel

You can't expect to know a place without sampling its cookies.

Some of my friends have gone over to gluten-free, others avoid butter and dairy; others stay away from sugar. But I persist in eating cookies. Eating a locally baked cookie can tell you more about a town than anything you'd learn from the Chamber of Commerce guidebook. Ice cream can do the same, if it's made locally, but generally it's shipped in from distant places.

I try to eat the cookies at a spot where I can enjoy a distinctly local view. The other night I stopped to watch a sunset from a beautiful, high ridge. Sitting on a boulder, I ate a cookie purchased from the town's Main Street bakery. A snickerdoodle, rich in cinnamon.

Dogs want treats, too, of course, and I carry healthful dog cookies for them. Ones that won't harm their teeth, are vitamin-enriched and have coat brighteners in them. The dogs go nuts over them. I don't hold to such a high health standard for myself. I'm after flavor.

A few summers ago, when the dogs and I were driving a long, empty stretch in Yukon Territory, Canada, I dreamed about a buying a cookie when we finally reached a gas station. The station we came to had one pump, rusted and ancient. Inside, I bought a large gingersnap.

I asked the woman how cold it got there in the winter, and she said minus 60. I asked her how the stock survived those temperatures and she looked puzzled. “The horses and cattle,” I said. “Oh! We don't have any of them. The wolves would eat them.”

Later, the dogs and I took a walk on a deserted road. I pulled out my cookie. It apparently had been baked the previous year; I bit into granite. A gingersnap with emphasis on snap. I persevered to chew it, but then, somewhere on a hillside, a wolf howled. My three dogs came tearing down the road, I dropped my cookie, and all of us sprinted for the car.

I've heard no wolves this summer, and the cookies have all been fresh. There was the warm chocolate chip cookie in Moab, eaten beside a river swollen with snowmelt, the peanut butter cookie eaten at a pullout while gazing at Mount Borah, the Swedish cookie from a German bakery in Jackson, WY . . . You get the picture.