“Don’t skimp on your mattress or your shoes.
If you’re not in one, you’re in the other.”
In the summer of 1977, I met some nameless guy on the trail in the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, NM. This encounter as with all my Philmont experiences, along with my mother’s advice changed my life forever. This “guy”… was wearing a pair of boots unlike anything I have ever seen on the trail… before or since. As a fledgling back country hiker, I asked him about his unusual choice of boots. At the time, I listened, collected and stored this data… into my limited and flawed mind:
- He described them as “paratrooper boots.”
- He told me they were cheap… available at any decent military surplus store.
- He told me good used ones were better than buying new ones. Used ones are already broke in.
Since then I have often ruminated upon this conversation. My little pea brain cobbled together this line of thinking. Gee.. if anyone out there knew anything about proper foot support under impact, and hiking under heavy loads, it was probably a manufacturer of paratrooper boots.
Decades rolled past… and yet I still remembered those boots.
Theses days we have this thingy called the internet. About six months ago I was thinking about the boots I first met on some long by-gone trail. Even with only the information in my three bullets listed above… five minutes later I had located the manufacturer and was browsing used offerings on Ebay.
Okay, to cut a long story short… it is totally amazing what $38.00 will buy on Ebay to the savvy bidder.
Today was quite possibly the best day I have ever had in west Texas… my best friend from Georgia is here, riding with us. (He’s the tall one in the near left center.)
Tomorrow… Marfa, Presidio, FM 170 and the National Park.
The hits just keep on coming! Clicky-clicky on the image for the gallery link…
If you are here looking for the Texas Horn Toads Spring Break 2012 registration page… click HERE!
As is typical about this time of year since almost before I can remember… my soul is longing for my desert homeland… again!
“It used to be I was really free
I didn’t need no gasoline to run
Before you could say Jack Kerouac
You’d turn your back
And I’d be gone
Now days I got two good wheels
I seek refuge in aluminum and steel
It takes me out there for just a little while
And the years fall away
With every mile
Back out on this road again
Turn this beast into the wind
There are those who break and bend
I’m the other kind
Steve Earle, 1991
Ya know, for a guy that likes his bike to be spotless, I surely do hate washing motorcycles. However, there are only four weekends left before spring break and the time has finally come to begin scraping the grime off my girls.
This is the wing, my beloved Blue Ox, about one third of the way done. I suspect I have about two more evenings of wiping and detailing yet. Spring break is coming! Whoo-hoo!
“Texas droughts end in Texas floods!”
In typical Texas fashion, an absolutely brutal hot and dry spell stretching back to October of 2010 was only marginally alleviated today by profoundly heavy weather.
Just after midnight, a massive Pacific storm rolled in and brought what my mother calls a “frog strangler.” Here in San Marcos we had over 6″ of total rainfall within a 12 hour period. One of the things about being so dry for so long is that it makes you lazy. This is an image of a bucket I had casually been using as a trash can behind the Culleycave.
It was completely empty and dry 24 hours ago…
Oddly… the ground is so dry, this has done little to nothing to end our 30+ inch 16 month drought. Mixed with the ash from the wild fires of last summer and fall… this is a real mess. A burnt ring in the course of future tree fossils. Another drastic and sudden environmental change laid down in the fossil record of this planet. We delude ourselves of our own importance.
I have said it before and I will say it again… anyone that doesn’t believe that climate change is indeed “real” needs to come to central Texas and hang out with me for awhile. The earth is changing… it is turning into a desert.
Deep in my heart… I will always be a backpacker!
Here lately, I have been rooting around in the Culley Cave. Going through everything.
This has been precipitated by my recent project to insulate the truss rafters of my manly-man cave. It has been a complete and total mess. First, it has taken me about 7 months to complete the project. (I started last June.) And secondly, it has been a total cluster ever since. This insulation project has completely disrupted my entire life, livelihood and life-flow… for months on end. Every single thing within the 480 square foot Culley Cave has been moved… and then re-assembled at least three times. Things have been pushed into corners… moved for reasons dictated at the time. These… mostly motivated by the parking and maintenance needs for the motorcycles. Now the entire space is without reason or order. (Which COMPLETELY freaks me out!) Of course, I knew this would be a huge undertaking even before I began it. But it seems the end is near… all the insulation is up, tucked in and helping to reduce my energy costs but lawdy, lawdy, it has been a complete mess…. for what seems absolutely forever. Even building the Culley Cave didn’t take this long!
So as of late, I have been going through boxes and bags… sorting through tools… winding cords…. moving ladders and the motorcycles around a lot. Trying to get nested into my new “insulated” space. I have been opening things that have not been opened in some time. Sorting things out. Deciding what to keep and what needs to go. So today… I pulled my old maroon “mule bag” down from the rafters… the one I bought decades ago to facilitate checking my backpacking gear as airline baggage. (Airline don’t like backpacks. Too many buckles straps and zippers to get caught in the luggage handling equipment.) I learned pretty early on to put the whole thing into a zippered duffel I learned to call a “Burro Bag.” Once I had this thing down from the rafters I unzipped it and took a look at the contents of a bag that hasn’t been opened since about the time I left Charlotte, NC.
Over eleven years ago! An entirely different era of my life.
For me, opening this bag was a window into a far distant and complicated past. First and foremost… it smelled most righteously ripe. It had this deep cheesy smell that told me some sort of fungus had thrived in the past decade of being moved around from apartment to apartment, pushed hastily and rudely into moving vans, stashed into countless storage units, stood in the back of closets and eventually hoisted into the rafters of the newly constructed Culley Cave back in 2005. So I guess the rather ripe smell would be somewhat understandable considering what the tall lady carpenter from Boone, NC would address as… “The Circumstances.” But tucked away inside… were the most marvelous things.
Foremost on this list of ancient treasures was a my Jansport D5 external frame back pack. Back in those days internal frame backpacks were relatively new and the technology was rather un-evolved by today’s standards. I bought this pack for $59 at the Oshman’s Sporting Goods outlet store along the Gulf Freeway in Houston. In 1982 $59 dollars was a lot of money to me and would probably be about the equivalent of me spending $250 today. If I only had a video of every step of back country trail this pack has seen. This pack has seen every single mile of every trail in the Guadalupe Mountain National Park. It has seen good portion of the national parks of north Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. It has seen Andrews Bald, large portions of the Appalachian Trail… it has seen the White Mountains of New Hampshire, parts of Nevada, the High Unitas Area of Utah including Kings Peak. It has seen the Canyon Lands and the La Sal Mountains… also in Utah. It has seen portions of Colorado, bits of Wyoming, large sections of New Mexico and most of West Texas. And these are only the snippets of memory I can recall as sit here at the keyboard. The chances of me ever really using this backpack are slim, I am getting old and the arthritis is beginning to take it’s toll on my joints. I probably need to let go of this useless icon of a by gone era, it is just taking up valuable space… but this tattered old backpack is a personal heirloom and powerful memory trigger for me.
Another artifact contained in my magic maroon mule bag was my Optimus 8R camp stove. This thing, along with the Svea 123 , were the work horse “always works and burns practically anything” backpacking stoves of their day. While a bit heavy and requiring liquid fuel, this stove would perform when all those in the crew carrying the new-fangled MSR Whisper Lites couldn’t get theirs to light due to the fuel being so cold that it wouldn’t come out of the external canister. My 8R would burn when the others couldn’t keep theirs lit due to high winds so common at high altitude (notice the MSR’s don’t have a wind shield) and primarily it would burn when the others couldn’t find their particular brand of disposable fuel cell anywhere on a shelf in Rosewell, New Mexico. This thing runs on unleaded gasoline quite well. I actually had two friends abandon their MSR Whisper Lites sold to them by hipster sales associates at the REI Store in Austin for these clunky, ugly, outdated World War II technology just because they were so versatile and ALWAYS… (I mean always!) worked. So all-in-all, in spite of it being just a bit heavier and somewhat spectacular to light… it isn’t really surprising that the Optimus 8R and the Svea 123 are BOTH still in production today. (Heck… the SVEA 123 even has a Wikipedia page written about it!) A bit more expensive than what I paid for mine… but worth every dime. This one is nearly 30 years old and still works, has never been rebuilt even though I do have the rebuild kit on hand just in case it does fail. With only one moving part, this is one of the best investments I ever made. I absolutely LOVE this thing!
Next, I found my ’70′s era official Boy Scout mess kit. Yes… I was indeed a Boy Scout and I actually have the Philmont images to prove it! That’s me, second from the right on the back row. I was 14 at the time. Don’t get me wrong here… in retrospect I would have to say that being a scout was one of the most positive elements of my early life. It taught me stuff… useful stuff. Stuff I still use daily. Not the least of which is the ability to tie dozens of “use specific” knots. In can secure a load. I can tie a pretty mean taut line hitch! People like to poo-paa the Boy Scouts and make fun of them… but those of us that know what scouting is really about, know what we know!
I will defend the Boy Scouts of America to my dying breath.
I have learned to Be Prepared! I’m a planner!
In the last few years I have recently had the chance to re-connect with scouting because a buddy of mine, DrifterTex and his lovely wife Saralou, work every summer at Philmont. You can see some of the images I collected of the Philmont back country in 2010 HERE! I literally cried like a baby when I got out of the truck and wandered off into the meadow at Beaubien with my camera. I am dead serious here… at fifty… I fell to my knees and cried! It has been a hard, hard life for me, full of heart break and loss in the nearly forty years since I was last there. It was like coming home at last! A soothing balm applied directly to my wound. The timeless beauty of that place completely overwhelmed me… so I cried! I have come full turn.
If the Truth were to really be known, my first Philmont experience in 1975 is most likely the birthplace of my love of going! I absolutely LOVE to go! I need to go! My life revolves around going! Ever since I can remember… I have always had a plan to go somewhere. Not because I really want to do anything in particular… it was just because I wanted to see what might be there. I have always wanted to see what’s on the other side of that ridge… or down the trail a piece further… or what might lie at the end of that road that leaves the main highway at any given point. For me it’s no longer about getting anywhere… it’s about exploring what others mindlessly drive by. Why would I stop now, just when I am becoming really good at finding the most obscure places… and relishing those mostly for their purity and emptiness. I seek out places which are off the beaten path, obscure, unknown and God forsaken. I find there a purity which I cannot describe. It is hard to really know and come to terms with yourself in places that have full time internet and cell phone coverage. There is a lot to to be said for the emptiness of the road. (I cannot accurately describe it… because it is empty! Empty has no limits, boundaries or borders.)
There is a venerated and revered poster on the Steve Saunders Goldwing Forums who sum up my life stance as well as anyone I have ever encountered.
“It’s never too early to plan and never too late to go!”
Dusty Boots
So here I am, 30+ years after my first Philmont experience, holding my official 1970′s era Boy Scout mess kit I just pulled out of a stinky bag I have hoisted out of the rafters of my garage. I marveled at it’s simplicity of design and the high quality of the materials. I am acutely aware that parts of it are missing. The plastic measuring cup, shown here from an image I yoinked off the internet. The nested three piece utensil kit, which came in a brown vinyl case with a fold-over snap closure. I kept, used and cherished these items for years and years after my Philmont trips until time, distance, use and loss took them from me. Where they might be now… I have no clue.
In my life, so much has been lost, and yet… so much has been regained.
Just a bit more rummaging turned up this little jewel. In the backpacking world this is a luxury. A luxury I often insisted on carrying. (One must never forget… I actually CARRIED every single thing I would need for days and days on end… including the water!) This is a candle lantern which I primarily used as ambient light in the tent. This is not the sort of light you’d use to cook dinner… or search for a lost sock… but this little doo-dah is awfully good for providing enough light to navigate around inside the tent. If one of my buddies had another of these we’d string em together under a tarp and hang out into the evenings. Waiting for the cameras and the telescopes to adjust to the cold desert nights so we could spend the evenings examining the Cassini divisions of the rings of Saturn… the M31 globular star cluster or maybe taking long exposures of the sky. This is yet another useful little item, which is still in production. In fact… not only can you still buy these, you can get parts! I just ordered a new glass globe for mine this past weekend.
This brings me to my very last treasure. Deep, deep within the smelly remains of a Cordora nylon bag I bought 25 years ago at an Academy Super Surplus store in Austin is a very curious item with a long, yet somewhat unappreciated history.
This… is some sort of a Swiss Army “Toilet Kit” bag that I bought for $5 on a whim at an army surplus store in Galveston. This was before Galveston became all Hotsy-Totsy, uptown and Chi-Chi. This was Galveston back in the 80′s, when it was very dirty, dank and unrefined. Cruise ships didn’t set sail from Galveston back in those days and the Strand was full of rowdy bars, strip clubs, sailors and whores! This is without question, one of the most used and useful items I have ever owned. On a back packing trip this item held four important items that every member of the crew used:
- Toilet Paper
- Moist Baby Wipes (affectionately dubbed by Garry as “Butt Wipes”)
- Ziplock Bags (many of the places we hiked frowned on us “littering” with our used T.P.)
- The Hand Shovel (for burying the evidence)
This bag passed from hand to hand… regularly. It saw many. many “productive” trips into the wild. It was and is adequately sized. It has a little drawstring inside that holds a standard roll perfectly with left over room for “amenities.” It is well constructed, innocuous and discrete enough not to draw unwanted attention if left out on a tailgate at a barbecue. Yet it is a very necessary and useful part of an active outdoor lifestyle. It’s the poop bag! The bag you took when you were heading out in search of a place to… well… poop! Wherever that might be. I do not want to get into a tutorial about the benefits of what I would term “field fecal distribution.” That is a post for another time!
Contractors UNITE!
