The Best Cheeseburger I Ever Had
The time between Thanksgiving and Jan. 2 is collectively known as “the holidays,” a time to celebrate religious, secular, and cultural festivities with gatherings, traditional food, and gift exchanges.
Previous December columns have been about celebratory places, generational recipes, and food folks enjoy during the holidays. This year, I’m going to tell you about the best cheeseburger I ever had.
It was September 2017, a month after Hurricane Harvey hit Rockport, Texas, a coastal town near Corpus Christi. A friend assembled a group of 21 friends and acquaintances to travel there to help clean up efforts.
We weren’t organized by any group or church, but we affiliated on the ground with Samaritan’s Purse, which provided equipment such as shovels, chainsaws, and tarps, and assigned job descriptions for each location.
The smell of rot, mold, and despair permeated the wet, breezeless air in Rockport. None of us, including several military veterans, had ever seen so much devastation.
Fields of debris two-stories high lay parallel to Texas-35, the main road we took daily to and from the work sites from our base in Corpus. Our jobs included cutting down trees that had fallen into homes and streets, removing drenched, moldy furniture, including refrigerators full of rotten food, and other household items, and carting them to curbside debris piles.
Not being handy with a hammer or chainsaw, I mostly removed smaller items homeowners had in their cabinets, drawers, and closets. Items that make up a lifetime of memories – photos, souvenirs, clothing. We all have them. I even saw a large collection of mix tapes that a homeowner curated with titles such as “Summer of 87.”
On day three, we were in Copano Heights, a neighborhood with some homes completely wiped from their foundations, some that were only missing roofs and fences. A black pickup stopped at our site and invited volunteers to a nearby home for dinner after our workday was done. No one wanted to go. We were hot, tired, sore, exhausted physically and mentally. But we went.
And there is where I ate the best cheeseburger I ever had. Sitting in a camp chair with a Styrofoam clamshell container balanced on my knees, I ate a cheeseburger cooked on a grill fired with mesquite from one of the hundreds of fallen trees. Part of the garage roof was missing, there was no electricity, no place to wash up, and only few of the hosts spoke English so there was little conversation.
That meal, which also included charro beans and melted chocolate cupcakes, stayed with me as one of the best of my life. Prepared and served by grateful strangers who had little to give but gave what they could.
In broken Spanish and English, we expressed gratitude for their hospitality, and they thanked us back for helping their community. For me it was Thanksgiving and Christmas combined, gifts that can never be washed away.
Happy holidays to you. May you offer and enjoy unconditional generosity and hospitality to friends and strangers alike.
Kersten Rettig, a freelance writer with leadership experience in the food and travel industries, lives in the Park Cities, where she is known as “the restaurant sherpa” for her recommendations. Follow her on Instagram @KerstenEats.
