I Think I’m Gonna Need A Donkey…

Well, that was my first thought… but I’ve got the cart before the donkey. Before I talk about “dunkeys” (as my German wife would say), I have to talk about…

GEAR… man, think about it! GEAR!! Stuff you can buy and own and use! Special stuff just made for YOU to use, exactly the right stuff for what you want to be doing. Specific stuff – stuff that’s almost tool-like in it’s specificity! Oh, wow, what could be better than gear, right? Except that with gear comes…

WEIGHT. A word as dreadful as the word gear is exciting. Weight is what’s gonna be pushing you down into the earth in a nihilistic, utterly uncaring and cavalier manner. Shove, shove, shove it’s gonna push ya down… Unless, of course, you have the right…

GEAR… That luscious ultralight gear, all sweet in its silnylon downyness, the taffeta colors singing their clarion call of lightness.

Yeah. I don’t have that stuff. I have the… other… stuff. And apparently a fair lot of it. I was listing all the things that have to go into my pack and it filled up the paper. It was a big sheet of paper. And I have most all of that stuff. I’m at the end of a long process, full of enough information to choke a donk… well, a lot of information. And all of it gathered painstakingly by the sweat of my keyboard and, to be honest, the sweat of countless REI and trail shop employees, bless their heroic hearts! I came into this green as grass, so it started out with one question, and that question generated six or seven other questions about things I didn’t even know to ask questions about. Followed by analysis paralysis – especially when I went to Trail Days and started talking to vendors (hi, Dutch! Hi, Jacks R Better!). Each encounter had a certain breathless, “swimming upstream” quality to it.  I was slightly crazed by the end of the day.

But over time things began to coalesce for me and I found myself confused on a higher level, as they say. I finally have a sense of what I need and why I need it – the latter in no small part due those heroic and knowledgeable sales folk and to Andrew Skurka and his lovely book, The Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide (great book – can’t say enough good stuff about it! Tells the why, not just the what.) And now I’m all geared up. Almost. (I think it’s the same phenomena invoked by the question, “What’s the perfect number of kayaks to have?” The answer? “Just one more.”).

It seems like a lot, when it’s written down like that, but you know, it all went into the pack with room to spare. And my base pack weight is around 21 lbs, without food or water. So it’s getting coming along. It’ll go up a bit with some added gear (“just one more..”), but not that much. I did a shakedown the other night with the REI instructors and there’s just not that much that I can take away. I’ve got a heavy pack at almost 6 pounds (I can hear the ultralighter’s heads exploding as I type this!), but my weary and broken back needs the support that pack gives me. When someone shows me an ultralight pack that will carry what I need it to carry and doesn’t hurt my back, I’ll likely buy it. But MY pack is the beautiful yellow of foreward-looking possibilities and it would take a lot to get me to put it aside. As it stands, I have mostly all I need to go walking for a long, long time if I should choose to do that. And I choose exactly that, don’t I? Yes. Yes, I do. Gonna go see what’s around that next outcrop…

(photo courtesy of viralnova.com)