You Need What?

You Need What?

(Why you may need a backpack.)

– Doing without a backpack? Are you kidding? –

One thing you may discover if you are not equipped with a backpack is that you don't really need one, and therefore you don't miss it. Or you may be stupid, which works for a lot of people. Maybe even most of them. Most of the time.

But we dither.

Another possibility, if you go without a pack, is that your arms are always full and you keep dropping essentials. Of course if you have lots and lots of arms this becomes less problematic, especially if you have a fleshy web between each pair of arms, and that fleshy web forms a sort of basket to help you carry all your odds and ends.

It's very possible if you are lucky enough to have a big collection of arms that you are really an octopus and shouldn't be out backpacking or even hiking at all on dry land since you breathe water, lack a skeleton, and need to stay seriously wet at all times.

But suckers can be a lot of fun, especially at parties.

Anyway, didn't we sort of manage to get away from the frontpack in the last chapter?

We hoped we'd have moved entirely into backpacks by now, and carrying big wads of stuff in one's arms is not nearly as efficient as stuffing those wads into an artificial hump and strapping it onto one's back where it belongs. And you don't get so much slime on everything that way, either. And it's easier to breathe. Even if you insist on breathing water, which is OK if that's what you need.

So.

– Pass the ammo. –

You can do without a backpack if you want, and sometimes it's the right thing. If you're only out for a short walk around town it may be smarter to carry a sidearm and plenty of ammo. If you're absolutely sure that you won't have to shoot anyone, then you can go even lighter and leave the gun home and carry only a stick.

Very short walks in parks or rural areas are generally safe to do with no equipment. Typically you'll at most want only a bite to eat, a sip of water, and maybe a light jacket just in case. These items don't require a $400 pack to carry them in. Or ammunition. (Though a hand grenade or two can be surprisingly useful at times.)

The Mountaineers club in Seattle ( www.mountaineers.org ) has a list of 10 things you should deliberately think twice or thrice about not bringing before leaving home:

• Map and compass
• Sun protection
• Extra clothing
• Flashlight or headlamp
• First-aid supplies
• Fire starting kit
• Repair kit and tools
• Food
• Water
• Emergency shelter

This is worth thinking about since few of the Mountaineers club members die while being outdoors trying to enjoy life, and you probably don't want to either (die). Being prepared means never having to say you're accidentally without a pulse.

Maybe you don't want to start a fire or go through any kind of first-aid routines. You don't want to need emergency shelter or extra clothing. Try telling yourself this when you're shivering, lost, bleeding, and a cold hard rain is a fixin' to fall. About sundown. While something unknown is howling nearby. Nearby enough that you can hear it scratching at and sniffing the dead.

If you need to carry only few things then you can carry them in your hands, in a bag, rolled up in a jacket, or in a fanny pack, book bag, or a knapsack. We're not considering any of these as equivalent to a backpack.

– The universal digital appliances. –

Hands are especially handy because they have so many fingers, which in turn is one main characteristics of hands, and so on. If you ever need to count small quantities of things, well, your tools are right there.

But carrying.

Fingers, like tentacles, aren't all that good in death-grip mode. They're more fun to use for touching and poking at things, for sticking up your nose, or into your eyes or ears, and they get tired if used only to hold things, or to hold bags full of things.

This gets tedious.

Small packs are dandy though.

You can go backpacking (i.e., getting out of sight of your car, parking lots, roads, railways and bus lines, or other traces of "civilization" and staying out on your own for one or more days and nights) without carrying a pack.

One of the first things to think about is how much you like being cold, wet, thirsty and hungry. Once you're done thinking about those things, then go ahead and think about them some more. Then sleep on it and do some more thinking whenever you regain consciousness for a few hours.

When you're done thinking and have your mind made up, then leave your jacket, sunglasses, cap, water bottle and sandwiches at home and go for a walk around town, preferably in the rain, on a windy day.

This will give you some perspective. Don't put yourself in danger but do get tired, hungry, cold and wet, and stay out late. If you have a safe place to do it then try going to sleep unprotected from the elements. A fenced-in back yard is a good bet.

This will give you even more perspective.

You will learn.

Fast.

You will learn why you need stuff, and why you need something to carry that stuff in.

And you will also learn the names of various things so you don't have to keep saying stuff.

– Am I a fool for tools? –

Remember the 10 essentials from a few lines back?

The 10 essentials are what backpacks are for. The list of 10 essentials was originally designed for day outings. It is a reminder about what to drag along so your name doesn't end up in a book, in the Deceased column.

Let's modify the list a bit for backpacking use, as we've just defined backpacking a few moments ago:

Function	Items fulfilling the function
Bedding	Sleeping bag or quilt, warm jammies, warm hat and gloves, small stuffed animal or significant other (though the latter must be warm and breathing, and gets extra points for thickness of fur).
Cooking and eating	Stove, pot, matches, lighter, fuel, windscreen, utensils (we'll include spork here because it's a fun word).
Extra clothing	Shirts, socks, underwear (can be out of fashion or even tasteless because out in the woods no one can read your shirt, or underwear).
First-aid	Bandages, antiseptics, pain relievers and medicines.
Food	Food, food carrying bags, food hanging gear, trash bag.
Light	Flashlight or headlamp.
Navigation	Map, compass, guidebook.
Protective wear	Wind shell, hat, waterproof and windproof gloves, rain wear, umbrella, head net, warm gloves, sunscreen, long pants, long-sleeved shirt, snorkel (rainy season only).
Shelter	Overnight weather protection, emergency shelter.
Toiletries and sanitation	Soap, dental floss, toothbrush/toothpaste, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, washcloth, rubber ducky.
Tools	Sewing kit, rubber bands, safety pins, knife, bandanna, cord, spare stakes.
Water	Water bottles, water treatment, water identification kit (if you've never seen free-range water before, and haven't quite memorized all its identifying characteristics).

– Tooling around. –

A backpack is a tool for carrying other tools that you need to

• keep you from dying, and to
• keep you from hurting, and to
• keep you happy and cozy.

It helps to think of everything as a tool. Food is a tool. Water is a tool. A flashlight is a tool. A sleeping bag is a tool. See the pattern?

Tools enable you to do things.

Food is a tool to feed your body with so it stays alive and warm and moving around. Food gives you enough energy to snore all night. Food gives you the energy to look up at the sky and see little puffy sheeps and horsies in the clouds. Food does this by keeping your brain alive and happily spinning thoughts. Food is the best drug ever.

Water is a tool to quench thirst, and also to keep your body alive. Water keeps your brain tissue soft and squishy the way it should be, and thins out the blood so it can squeeze into all those miles and miles of itsy bitsy vessels that form an endless mesh throughout all the tissues of your body. When you skip the water drinking part of life and then your blood reaches the consistency of tomato paste, you catch on, but often you do this too late, like shortly after death. You need water, so drink. Have some now. Get wet inside.

A sleeping bag is a tool to maintain a warm bubble of calm humid air around your body all night, so that your body stays alive and comfortable and can have fun colorful dreams, and so on.

You need more tools to stay alive and comfortable for several days or weeks on the trail than you do for an afternoon hike. This is a simple, boring fact. In fact it's so plain and simple and obvious and boring that we'll let you have it for free. Go on, get out there and spray paint it wherever you want to - no royalty payments required, not now, not ever.

The longer you stay on the trail the more food and stove fuel you need, but the other items stay more constant. If you're on a two-week hike rather than a two-day hike, you'll need a few more clothes, a dab more of toothpaste and sunscreen, but that's about it. You pick up water as you go, so that really isn't an issue. But the weight of the extra food you'll need will crush you.

You will also need to prepare for a wider variety of weather conditions, but that in turn pretty much depends on the season, so you know it ahead of time. Summer will have summer weather. The same applies to spring, fall, and winter in turn. And then the cycle starts over again. Don't try to memorize all of this just yet, but let it settle in. You'll catch on eventually.

Weather varies day to day, but in the summer you get the day to day summer variations. In the spring and fall you get the day to day spring and fall variations. If you're out for two weeks rather than two days you'll mostly have to pay more attention to how many pairs of socks you need than just about anything else, after you take care of food and fuel.

Carrying and keeping all of these tools is what a backpack is good for.

– Why. Why what? –

Pay attention now. This is important.

Let's look at this from an adult's point of view.

On the one hand you need to look at, well, what you need. On the other hand you have to look at how you will meet those needs. These are two things that adults can handle. Children see adults as boring. Adults don't see themselves that way. Adults see themselves as really cool adventurous people out doing interesting things and not getting frozen to death, zapped, or eaten.

Adults have learned to look ahead a little bit and to look back a little bit, and to compare experience to what they might find around the next bend. Adults do not like surprises with teeth.

In other words adults have been bitten already. Sometimes more than once.

Adults have thereby learned to see into the future, to avoid being bitten again. Show me any sixth grader who can do that. Now who's boring? This is another triumph of experience over youth, or if you must put it in such terms, of trickery over talent. Some of us will do anything to win. That means me, and that means you. (Both of us are on the same side here, aren't we?)

So back to the why.

Your main need is to stay alive and comfortable and come home with all your body parts in good working order, still attached, and in their normal locations.

Deviousness and trickery are acceptable.

Extremism in the defense of your body parts is not extremism. You don't want to hurt anyone, so if need arises, warn them to stay out of your damn way. Wave scary things. Make any threatening gestures that seem appropriate. And always be prepared to run away. That works if nothing else does.

Convenience is an issue in choosing tools. If you have a great tool that isn't convenient to use then you don't have a great tool. You won't use it or you will use it poorly, and maybe you'll hurt yourself.

Pain belongs at work. Leave it there and shoot for the best on-trail experiences you can create. Convenience is a good benchmark. If convenience runs through everything you're doing then you can almost hear that low, satisfying hum in the background. That hum is your life force tuned to mellow.

– Safety: Inconvenient necessity or necessary inconvenience? –

Safety is another big issue. It's related to convenience. How convenient is that?

If using a tool offers you a wide safety margin but is inconvenient to use, you won't use it, and you'll be less safe. Being safe is good for you, so do it. Using an appropriate pack adds to your safety. Not too big, not too small, not too heavy, not too light.

Go ask Goldilocks, our best and most famous survivor yet.

Appropriate technology. That's your watch-phrase.

Repeatability is the result of convenience and safety breeding happily. If you aren't safe you might not get a chance to repeat anything. Now repeat that.

Say for example that you've gone and tied your boot laces together in a moment of absent-minded insanity and you can't walk. You keep trying but every time you try to walk you sort of fall right straight down on your face.

This is a face plant, and though it sounds like fun, it isn't. Not really. Kids think it's fun, for a while, but they catch on when it's their turn. Pain has a way of focusing the mind and maturing the discriminating faculties.

So there you are, lord of creation, you've tied your laces together and really screwed yourself. Your face is all lumpy from crashing into the ground. Where do you go from here?

Well, luckily for all of us you are reading a cool book on ultralight backpacks that told you what to do when you did just this very incredibly stupid thing and messed yourself up.

"What's the answer then?" you say while lying on the ground with your feet tied together and a mouth full of dirt, madly thumbing to get to the right page.

You didn't want to do it. You didn't mean to do it. But damn, you did it.

You are in real trouble because you have no idea how to get yourself out of this mess. You only want to go home and see your dog again. That's all you want and here you are flat on your face with this weird pack thing on your back and no clue.

OK then, listen.

If you want to attain repeatability, as in repeating your breathing and your heartbeats (also known as staying alive) then you need to practice safety by having brought a knife and then you need to practice convenience by having the knife

• with you on this trip and
• within reach.

Now slowly and carefully remove your pack. You can do this with your feet tied together - it's been proven possible, even for the very stupid.

Open the pocket on your pack where you keep your little tools, reach inside and remove the knife. Then cut through your boot laces. Once you've done that, find the spare cord you've brought along, remove the boot laces and fashion a new set from the spare cord.

Then (and this is the most important part) tie each boot lace separately, so your feet are no longer tied together, but so each boot is pleasantly snug, and not tied to the other one at all, at any point.

Check your work to be sure you've got it right.

Done.

Now that I've saved your life please send me some money. As much as you can find, anywhere you can find it. Pronto.

How much?

Whatever your life is worth.

– Ultralight. What about that? –

What about ultralight packs?

Having a sleek clean clever and sexy ultralight backpack not only puts you among the highest ranks of the elite among backpackers, it also advertises that you're pretty smart.

Anybody can carry a paper bag with a can of malt liquor in it, but you? No.

You carry your malt liquor in a super-duper ultra-designed Spectra Dyneema Tensegrity 9000 pack with lots of snaps and drawstrings and rhinestones.

Your pack shows that you know what you're doing (or that someone has coached you), and that you are in charge (or know how to look like you are in charge). Either way, you rate.

That's cool.

You don't need a backpack to look cool, but it can't hurt, especially in places where people are attracted to well-designed humps.