The square root of camper envy

Memorial Day looms, which means prime camping season, which means that any day now Catherine MacLean will be setting up shop in the woods with her husband and kids. And strangers will again be creeping up to their campsite to peer in envy and fascination at their hinged plywood cube.

It’s fancy, as plywood goes, 3/8 inch thick with a birch veneer. When closed, it’s 17 inches square. When it’s open, all things are possible.

Scones. Paella. Tea. Fire-starting, splinter-tweezing, ant-chalking. Tire repair and shoelace replacement. With my own eyes, under the redwoods at Big Sur, I’ve seen fellow campers approach like those hominids in the first moments of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” wondering at the obelisk.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, your husband made this,’ ” says MacLean while beginning the cabinet’s spring replenishment at her dining room table. “And I’ll say, ‘No. I made this.’ ”

MacLean’s husband, you should know, is a fully capable guy, an affable public servant who at this moment is puttering around their Silver Lake home with one arm in a sling, having been slammed to the sand while bodysurfing the day before. But even when he has two working arms, his wife is the inventor in this house.

The cube is the latest in a long line of camping creations inspired by her mother-in-law’s converted tackle box. MacLean calls it a camp cook set, but I prefer to think of it as Professor MacLean’s Cabinet of Wonder.

It’s 4 years old, having replaced an earlier, less robust model. It took about 16 hours to make and weighs about 40 pounds when full. Urethane footpads, piano hinges, sturdy metal latches to make it animal-proof. About $80 in plywood and $30 in hardware. As she speaks, MacLean leads me from drawer to drawer.

Matches, batteries, Morse code chart. Shoelaces, Allen wrenches, machine oil. Tire repair kit. Plumbing tape and whetstone. Scissors, zippers and Q-tips. Laser pointer ...

“It evolved out of the experience of our family camping, everybody looking for some widget they didn’t bring,” she says. “This has all the widgets. In some ways, this operates as a memory box.”

Flour, sugar, measuring cups. Motrin, Benadryl, moist towelettes. Band-Aids, antibiotic ointment, ChapStick. Sudafed. Tick extractor

Yes, you could say this is more than a hobby. MacLean, 45, has a master of fine arts degree in sculpture from Claremont Graduate University. Between carpentry sessions, cabinet replenishments and camping trips, she’s at the Art Center College of Design, teaching courses in how materials influence design. It was at school, in fact, that she borrowed the $50,000 laser cutter used to inscribe labels on the first-aid, hardware, tea and miscellany drawers.

Still, in its soul, the cabinet of wonder is an extracurricular affair, mostly made at home with a table saw, handsaw and drill press, aimed at a target market of four. In this age of adventure accessorizing -- $148 headlamp, anyone? $159 hydration pack? -- the cabinet speaks with plain eloquence. It says: “Why not make your own stuff?”

Think of the satisfaction you get from the ritual handling of beloved props while far from home: the crusty boots, safari hat, fishing rod, walking stick and Frisbee. Now imagine the sensation if you’d cobbled those boots yourself. That’s what made Ralph Waldo Emerson sing the virtues of self-reliance, and it may help account for the bulletproof calm of this woman currently responsible for one 13-year-old son, one 6-year-old daughter, one sling-wearing husband, six dozen students, two turtles, two birds and one guinea pig.

The cabinet, MacLean says, is an old-school sort of device. In many ways, she adds, “it’s pointless to bring new technology to the camping experience. And that becomes more imperative as these kids get hooked on electronics.”

The family camping habit takes them to Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park every August for at least a week, a 16-year tradition that has grown to include as many as 84 fellow campers at 11 campsites. In between there are regular sorties to a cabin in the Sierra and such coastal campgrounds as Montana de Oro and Leo Carrillo. Memorial Day weekend will find them, their tents and the cabinet of wonder at Morro Bay.

Arriving, they’ll crack open the cube, and there on the left will hang a paper towel dispenser, next to the set of speckled blue camp dishes and camp cutlery, along with tinfoil and playing cards, bouillon cubes and poison-oak cream, a flask and vegetable broth packet. On the right, the spices and baking soda, maps and cutting boards. Then all that stuff in the drawers.

MacLean has considered installing an LED light for nighttime viewing. And she has come to believe a 16-inch aluminum cube would be lighter, easier to carry, more durable and less vulnerable to expansion in moisture. But like many before her, MacLean has found that her ambitions lead beyond the kitchen.

The next item on her drawing board, in fact, has less to do with food and more to do with those moments when the professor is off duty. The next creation to come out of her workshop, MacLean says, will be a cocktail box.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.