I'm Special. You're Special Too, Just Like Everyone Else
Intro to what's special about backpacks.
– Remember me after we've become acquainted. –
Remember now, we're still getting acquainted. We're still in the introductory phase, so we're not quite considering ultralight backpacks yet. We still have a few small training hills to hike over before we can traverse the ridge guarding the Kingdom of Ultralight Delights.
First, let's talk about uses for backpacks. This sounds like a really dumb topic, but think of this section as a test, and remember what they say - "There are no dumb questions, only inquisitive idiots."
Did that make sense? I didn't think so either. See? One of us is getting smarter already.
OK, back to our story.
Backpacks are really good for carrying stuff. So are other things. Oil tankers for example. Maybe you've never thought about it but the only purpose in life for an oil tanker is to carry oil from one place to another.
Does an oil tanker complain about this? Does it whine? Does it get itself all wrapped up in a hissy fit and then start screeching and throwing things? We think not.
But.
Backpacks are a little like oil tankers. They do their job, faithfully, gracefully, professionally, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and so on.
Backpacks are bulk carriers. They carry large quantities of whatever it is you need them to carry.
Normally this bulk stuff they carry is the stuff that keeps you alive. You got your food and fuel, of course, and then your water and nose drops, and like that. Then you got your shelter and bedding, rain gear, spare clothes, and your teddy bear.
All of that goes into your pack and then you lug it around on your back. If you bump into a rock you get a bruise and not a goopy world-class environmental disaster, so that's different. And oil tankers are pretty much the opposite of graceful, unlike backpacks.
So that's what packs are good for.
– No Kitties? –
Backpacks are special this way, in the quiet, faithful, graceful, professional way they handle bulk. Backpacks aren't pink with kitties printed on the side, for carrying bubble gum and a couple of books to class and back. Nor with Darth Vader printed on the side. Those are book bags. (Though some of us may be partial to the special Darth Vader Hello Kitty collector's edition book bag. In Empire Black and Purrfect Pink, with death rays and ruffles.)
Backpacks can be used for hauling groceries back from the store but it's rare. You know if you've seen it. Doesn't happen much. You see somebody doing this and you know right away you got a special case on your hands, and you pretty much decide to back away slowly.
Carrying change? Try a pocket. If you're fussy and old-fashioned then try a coin purse with a pinched brass clasp.
Got a tube of lipstick, some tissues, a bit of mascara and a mirror? Do you like people to call you Rocky when you're not being Giselle? OK by us, but a clutch purse matching your outfit might work better for those special nights out (all things considered) than a 45-liter pack with a hip belt and sweat stains.
Paper bags are pretty good for toting a sandwich to work. Bad in the rain though. Next.
Dump trucks work great for big loads of rock and gravel. They burn diesel. Next.
Those stainless steel over-the-road tankers are priceless if you need to haul a few thousand gallons of acetone. But backpacks aren't. Next.
Backpacks, they are less like long-distance carriers than long-distance lovers - purely recreational but breathtaking and oh so satisfying. That is enough.
But more strictly speaking a backpack is a portable hole to keep things in when you want to go from Point A to Point B. (In Canada it's "Point A to Point B, eh?", except in Quebec, where it's said with a French accent, eh?)
A portable hole to put things in and then pull things out of again. Think about it.
A backpack is like a portable black hole, your personal black hole, though you may order it in a different color if you wish. Black is only a suggestion, though it goes so well with the word hole. A backpack is a refuge for your dreams, a vessel transporting your hopes across optimistic sunny seas. One that you and you alone can sail to the horizon and beyond. But mostly a hole you put stuff in. And then pull it out of again.
And one you really should wash once in a while, as is proper with holes.
Backpacks can be pretty big. Scary big, as you'll see if you go backpacking, especially after you get smart and switch to light, ultralight, or superultralight, or superduper ultraspecial hypersonic teensy itsy bitsy ultraultraultralight packs. Once you do, and after you get adjusted to the sudden lack of pain you'll notice all the big packs and start shuddering with revulsion.
It happens. It's like you get sensitized. Suddenly you see how big normal backpacks are. Hah!
Normal. Strictly over-rated.
– Heavier Than Air Machine. –
Which reminds us of a little talk once.
It was part of a set of introductory classes for people who had never backpacked before. Where someone who worked at an outdoor shop was showing off the newest model of pack, practically right off the production line. It may even still have been slightly warm. The hip belt she swiveled, to match your motion as you walked. For comfort. Oh, she swiveled and rocked, that belt. The buckle was the size, nearly the size of those things that professional wrestlers wave around at each other on TV while they do all the yelling. A buckle like that.
You know?
Trophy belt things with great flat buckles that make hub caps look small. It had one of those. Big hip belt. Way, way big.
And the best part was that the pack, empty, weighed 10 pounds.
In metric, that's still too heavy. Something around 4.54 kg, whatever kg means.
Containing only air plus an insignificantly small amount of nothing else, the pack weighed 10 pounds. Let's not even mention that it was big enough for a normal person to crawl into. You could crawl in there and die. That big. Weld a cannon on one side and you had a tank turret.
But let's not dwell.
What you ought to do is remember that number. Ten. Later on when we get into ultralight packs and pack weight and base weight and from skin out weight and total pack weight, your hair will have several reasons to stand on end, and then it will be fun to remember what you read here, so hang onto that number for dear life.
Yes, folks, packs have weight.
In the early days when backpacks were made out of twigs and animal hides they were light. They were light and flexible and supple and light and easy to repair and light. They were constructed of all-natural local ingredients. A person could fine tune a pack. A person could make a pack in an afternoon out of things within easy reach.
Life was good. Sunlight dappled the peaceful woodlands.
Then darkness fell.
People forgot about backpacks.
People didn't need backpacks because people stopped walking. They had horses to ride and oxen to drag around big wooden things with wheels, and then they had gigantic iron machines stuffed with lumps of flaming coal, emitting soot and noise, and then woofy honking big diesel trucks and aircraft with whirling engines stuck on every possible surface.
So with all that going on, people forgot about backpacks and got dumber for an awfully long while, and started some big wars, and then invented backpacks again so they could carry war stuff around. And as you might expect the war packs were not lyrical and light and did not inspire gentle wootling music played on bamboo flutes during poetry readings.
No.
But.
Eventually the big wars tapered off somewhat and a few guys kept their packs and continued to carry heavy things around in them, like surplus steel boxes stuffed with sandwiches and ammo, and those guys shot animals dead. Then they carried the dead animals home and ate them. This was called sport.
After a while longer some of these guys decided to stop shooting at things and just hike around with their packs, unarmed, which made sense to a few of them. Then backpacks started getting made kind of for their own sake, namely recreation, and they continued to be made of the original materials, plywood and canvas, and then of aluminum and canvas, and then of aluminum and heavy nylon, and then later of some more clever materials.
Backpacks stayed hefty because they had been born hefty. Hefty it was. People didn't know any better. Maybe it was all the shooting that they had been through, and keeping their heads puckered into their shoulders, a posture that stifles blood flow, slows the creative juices, and keeps thinking stunted for a long while.
– Twigs In Retreat. –
No one knew about the original ancient twig and rawhide packs. The modern watchword was hefty.
Packs got bigger and bigger all on their own and humans evolved apace, to endure the crushing weight of ever bigger backpacks.
For eons humans had held steady in the five foot to five and a half foot range (around a meter and a half-ish). In school you are taught that the size of earlier humans was due to poor diet and lack of Flintstones Chewable Vitamins. This explanation may satisfy the mentally inert, but it is not the truth. No, far from it.
Humans remained slim of body, svelte, lithe, and of moderate height and weight because it is both right and good. This is the human ideal - what it means to be human. This is the ideal as ordained by Heaven. Only in the modern age have the spawn of humans grown to be giants.
Only very recently did human feet enlarge to rival the proportions of snowshoes.
It is a fact that only during the latest few flickering moments of human existence did our species take a quick turn toward the lumbering and the oafish, and it is solely because their backpacks got too big. It was either evolve or die. A case of the survival of the brutish, and though we survived we became ugly.
Obtuse.
Dense.
Wretched.
– Here Come Da Elves. –
Only in the last few years have a scant handful of exceedingly intelligent and perceptive individuals recognized the true cause of our predicament, and working in relative obscurity, often scorned, reviled, and ridiculed, did their nimble minds and delicately flicking fingers reinvent lightweight backpacks. Even ultralight backpacks, superultralight backpacks, etc., etc. as mentioned previously.
And now we can go back the other way. We can return to our roots. We can become smaller and more slender and more lithe, a little more like elves, like the joyous woodland creatures we ought to be. The joyous woodland creatures we once were.
Modern materials first allowed the traditional backpack to grow grotesquely huge. It lost all resemblance to its ancestors, the original featherweight all natural and slightly furry conveniences that could be fashioned by anyone. It became an onerous weapon of dismay bristling with rasping weighty straps and hard steel buckles.
It grew zippers. With teeth.
But these selfsame modern materials and their continuing refinement have also permitted innovative clear-headed designers to reconceive the backpack, to recreate it, and to turn the modern backpack into something smaller, lighter and even more effective than our earliest ancestors could have imagined.
New age ultralight backpacks will allow human evolution to return to its natural course the way gentle spring returns to earth after harsh winter. Before long our descendants will regain human proportions. They will again enjoy smaller bodies. No longer will slabs of muscle, ranks of bone and mats of body hair divert nutrients away from the vital centers of higher thought. Humanity will re-enter an age of reason and delight.
Our descendants will be swifter of foot, able to do more with less, and joyously too.
Because of smaller packs and lighter loads they will walk more, and more comfortably, shunning motorcars and aeroplanes (and even, perhaps, motor-bicycles), spending their days far away from large cities that restlessly toss and turn each night under unnatural mechanical lights.
The strain of humanity on the world's resources will lessen, global warming will cease, and frisbee golf will replace war as the most popular sport.
We can do this.
To the barricades!