Our guest today has been dead for five thousand three hundred years, but this has only enhanced his fame, if not his fortune. Even in our modern era of credit default swaps, toxic assets, identity theft, and hedge funds, banks still, for some reason, are skittish about dealing directly and honestly with the deceased. For his sake, we can only hope this will change soon.
So, on to our guest.
Q: Sir, you are known to the world as both Ötzi the Iceman and Frozen Fritz. What do you prefer to be called?
A: Well, when I am alive, my Mutter call me lots of name. I say "Anything you want meine Mutter, but not so much late for the dinner, ja?" Then she hit me with the stick once. But I always like the Jerome. Is a name common among my people then. Call me Jerome.
Q: All right then, Jerome it is then. Jerome the Iceman.
A: No. Name is Jerome. No joke on the name. Only Jerome, or I haff to bang you with the rock on the head once.
Q: Well Jerome, sir, from recent genetic studies of your mummified corpse, it appears that you may have had brown eyes and abundant facial hair.
A: Ja. This is true. My people have with the hair a good relationship.
Q: Scientists have also determined that you had type O blood. Is this true as well?
A: I don't know. When they find me in ice I am dry of blood already. From blood I don't know, but whenever I kill the deer I have a drink of the blood. It is good. Keep the body young, nicht wahr? Not so much any more since I am dead though.
Q: Tell you what. I'll try it next time I bring down a deer.
A: Ja. You try it. Is good for the skin too. Keep it from falling off. I have many years in the ice and no blood, so my skin it comes all off. Is better to avoid this if you can.
Q: So, apart from you being lactose intolerant and having parents from Sardinia, what was the best part of living along the neolithic Austrian/Italian border that wouldn't even exist for another 5000 years or so?
A: Well, I think I say my backpack. I make it from the animal skin and the stick. We have plenty sticks back in my time but your scientist people get all excited pretty much on that one somehow. Scientist people never see the stick before, maybe.
Like, I quote to you: "The picture that emerges from my analysis of Ötzi's possessions is of a mature, highly skilled hunter. His kit provided, with minimal weight, all the necessary tools for hunting, butchering and bringing back meat, skins, antlers or horn on his lightweight pack frame."
Pretty good for a dead guy, no? Meine Mutter is all the time calling me Dummkopf. She might be proud of me now maybe, if not also dead.
Q: Well, you may not know this, but these days we have a trend called Ultralight Backpacking, based on a lot of the principles found in your gear. Have you heard about it and if so, what do you think?
A: Ja. I have the light pack. Is good. I carry moss around and some few rocks. That is all I have to eat. Once I have the elk liver too, but I eat it right away, so there is not so much to carry. Know what I am saying? No shopping. No money. Nobody has the car, not even used one. We eat dirt sometimes, from the hunger. Is why I carry the moss. Only a snack. But is all I have.
Q: Sounds like life was tough, but with your light gear you must have been able to travel long distances in comfort. How was it?
A: Always hungry, me. I steal once some roots and a piece dried rabbit meat. Then they come after. Long chase. Way long, up the mountains. All over me for piece of stupid meat. Shoot me full of arrows, they. Then I die and the ice get me. Not fun.
I should have stayed in the Sardinia after all. Instead I go up north. I wander. I hunt. I even learn the language but nothing work out. Now you. You are idiot. Go away or I kill you. I am Jerome. You are fool. Go away fool. Leave me dead.
There are different uses for packs. You know this. Everyone knows this. But in the interest of being tedious, we'll hash it out once again. There are packs for day hikes, for long and short backpacking trips, for various kinds of expeditions, canoeing, climbing, military games, hauling supplies, hauling game, and probably lots of things we don't want to even think about. Got a problem? There is likely a pack made for it.
– Day hikes, like mating on the wing. –
Fly fast, mate quickly, die young. Day trips are like that, and day packs are made for day trips and those who love them.
Day trips have brief life spans, like mayflies, some of the shortest-lived insects there are. Take the female American Sand Burrowing Mayfly (Dolania americana). She typically lives as an adult for less than five minutes, after spending a year or two in the water creeping around and biting things and working up to that One Big Moment.1
A good day pack is not only light and flexible but tough, and should last more than five minutes. A good day pack can outlast your trip and you too, if you show it some respect. A good start is to refrain from wearing it while swimming, bathing, sleeping, or while at formal dinner parties. If you rob banks for a living, then please leave your day pack at home. Bullet holes in any pack will seriously shorten the span of its working life. Maybe your life too, but who cares about you? We're into packs here.
A day pack can be anything from a paper bag up to a plastic bag, and beyond. Amazing but true.
Generally a day pack will be fairly small, around 2000 to 2500 cubic inches (32 to 41 L) at the high end. Small because it doesn't have to carry too much, and since each day hike is a short relationship, you don't really want to get that involved with it. A sandwich or two, some water, and the other eight essentials will do. Or if you're the right sort of hiker only the three essentials — cigarettes, beer, and cookies. Smokers can add matches, and nonsmokers can drop the cigarettes, and stick to the beer and cookies, which provide every essential element necessary for a long and healthy life, let alone a measly afternoon hike.
Some day hikes are in truth pretty gnarly. It depends on who you are and what you think you are up to. For example, would you hike the Timberline Trail around Oregon's Mt. Hood in one day? That's about 45 miles (72 km). Some people do that for one reason or another. If it's done in a day, is it a day hike, Mommy? Yep, but you don't have to do that sort of thing if you don't really want to. You can take it way easier than that, and generally you should.
The terms for foot travel vary. You may come across walking, tramping, bushwalking, hiking, rambling, trekking, scrambling, daywalking, and others. Doesn't matter. What really matters is your intent. If you plan to come home the same day and sleep in your own bed (or that of a close friend or associate) then you are day hiking.
– Big O, big K. –
Day hiking is nothing to be sneezed at, or on. It's also nothing to spill soup on, or throw things at, feed to your cat, wipe your feet on, send nasty letters to, or spread false rumors about. Day hiking is OK, with a big O and a big K. Day hiking is the basis of everything else in the hiking, backpacking, and climbing worlds. Even an eleventy thousand mile thru-hike is a bunch of day hikes stitched together with a combination of grit, determination, stick-to-it-iveness and possibly pig headed stupidity, with flies and skeeters thrown in, but still a bunch of day hikes that are related by birth and permanently roped together in a long line.
Day hiking demands that you be able to stand up and walk pretty much on your own and find your own way back home again. These are basic skills. You need them. You can't do it without them.
Day hiking means you also have to be able to stick food and water into your mouth and figure out where to go from there, and keep doing it every now and then, every day you happen to be out there. Then you have to put on your jacket, take it off again, slather bug juice or sun repellent, check for blisters, ticks, and unpleasant companions, change your socks, get out of the rain, and learn to use a long stick rather than your bare hands to check under rocks for rattlesnakes and scorpions. But if you do this last bit here's a hint — there are better ways to find friends.
Day hiking will hone skills.
These skills. Other skills. Skills in general. And.
Of course a day hike is a great excuse to buy and own a pack. Many of the packs made for day hiking are probably floating right up there near the top of the tank well above the sludge line. They tend to be smallish, styled well, not so expensive, light, handy, and to have lots of pockets and cords and straps for anyone with a fetish related to yanking on and/or tightening things.
Day packs are really the core of the market because almost everyone can day hike, and can afford a pack to do it with, so makers make them. And makers compete against one another, because they really like you, and want you to come over and buy a pack or two every now and then.
Because day packs are small you can get a whole lot of them into almost any closet around, and once you close the door no one will know exactly how many you have. Showing up at every hike with a new pack will give you a reputation as someone who really knows their stuff, so people will look up to you. Can't beat that with a stick, especially since day hiking is so easy, and because you already have the stick to look for friends with, anyway. You can appear to be a world class expert but not have to walk more than, say, five miles or so in any one day. Less if you fake it.
Day hikes, acquaintances, friends, lovers, and spouses may come and go in a flash but actual day packs can last forever. Along with the effects of snakebite, of course.
– Fear and idiots. –
Pack makers sweat big wet drops of steaming blood day and night just for you. Because they are afraid. Of you.
They are afraid of some idiot (think of a typical idiot you have met and then multiply by 7.8 billion, up from 7.01 billion when the first draft of this was written, so they're prolific too) who comes along and puts the pack on over his head and then tries to climb a big rock, or who puts a big rock into his pack and then tries to swim across a really cool foaming river, or who stuffs two cases of beer and some cookies into his pack and then goes out on a winter hike.
Manufacturers are afraid of people like that. They are afraid that you might be one, or related to one, or sit next to one at work, or have some of them play with your kids. And these aren't the really scary idiots. Believe it or not strapping a pack onto your feet and then hopping into a burning building while blindfolded isn't as bad as it gets. It gets much scarier. And manufacturers are even more afraid of those people than they are of you.
See, the deal is that people like this, the idiots (From the Latin idiota i.e., ordinary person, but now meaning a person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning. You know some, right?), are some of the most dangerous people in the world. They will not only go out and destroy their own perfectly good equipment and maim themselves in the process, but then they will come home again and start suing people like crazy because of dumb things they themselves did. Or their peevish survivors will do this if they have any encouragement at all, and just enough brains to figure out how, which they always seem to have.
And pack makers have to guard against all of this, so packs are made really well. Packs are made better than well. They are overbuilt. Severely. They are built to last and last even if some yahoo continues to fire bullets of stupidity at them day after day, week after week. Et cetera.
You follow, right? Wink, wink.
This is a good deal for you, right here at the day pack level. Because day packs are smallish, and sort of cheap because of the competition, and because of being made in China or Vietnam, or maybe on one of those little specky islands out in the South Nowhere Sea where people have nothing to do but gaze at the horizon and occasionally pound rocks together and will work for really cheap.
This is to your advantage. For bigger packs the deal isn't so good, but for day packs it is, so quit complaining.
– Backpacking — now there's something. –
Backpacking — that's the gem of outdoor experiences. Really something. Backpacking was invented way long ago, in the dim reaches of time before color TV, before whitewall tires, before steam engines, before catapults, before shoelaces, before soap, before even farm animals. Way back. Way, way back.
Why? you might ask. Because it feels so good when you stop is the answer.
That's true. Think about it. You can say you like tight shoes because it feels so good when you take them off, or you can say you like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop, but you won't feel good in the same way. Backpacking isn't like poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick, or even having someone else do it for you if you haven't got the time. It's actually considerably better than that.
Backpacking is tedious, sweaty, dirty work. A lot of it is. Most of it is. Backpacking can go on forever and ever until one day you wake up from your trance and just want to stop and stand there for a while and try to figure out what's going on, and maybe you do figure it out.
Backpacking puts you out there among all the flies and other things with excess legs and unnatural appetites, and among the various other things with teeth and claws, and among windstorms, hailstorms, lightning, snow showers, rock falls, avalanches, cold, and wet evil slithering stuff that no one has named yet because the ones that see it have never come home again.
You, the backpacker, feel creaky when you get up in the morning, and have leg cramps at night that challenge you to even get to sleep, let alone sleep enough to wake up feeling creaky after even a little bit of sleep. You stink, even if you wash twice a day. You always stink. Your clothes get dirty and wear out like nobody's business. You're always hungry and can't seem to ever get to bed early enough. All of that. Even your thoughts stink.
And despite all that, backpacking still feels right. It takes you closer to where you need to be. You feel more alive and aware of everything, even if your awareness on a given day begins with a thorn in your butt when you sit down for breakfast and ends with aching, steaming, blistered, dusty feet. Even those experiences seem to have a deeper significance. Everything does somehow, and at the end of a trip you feel better, deep down somewhere. You feel like you understand things a bit better, or have had your feelers tuned to the right frequency again. You don't care so much what happens next even if it's going back to that job again. You know, that job. We've all had at least one. You may have managed to keep yours.
Backpacking doesn't compare to much of anything else in life. It can hurt a lot while you are doing it and you can get yourself involved in various dicey situations and have to go to bed hungry and slimy every now and then, and all that. And when you are done, on the way home, if you let yourself think about it for a minute you realize that it's over and you feel good. About yourself, about the trip, about life, about tomorrow. About next time. But mostly about having it over.
And maybe that's why backpacking was invented. It feels so good when you stop.
– But what do I need? Please tell me now! –
To go backpacking you need a pack. A real backpack.
You could say you need a manly pack, a real man's pack, but real men stand around in parking lots drinking beer, flexing their tattoos at each other, and throwing punches. Not even backpackers are that dumb, not even the women. Hi, girls!
So, another kind of real.
If day hiking is hiking during the day then backpacking is hiking extended past curfew. It is hiking for adults. It is hiking beyond the map of daily experiences. These are pretty loose definitions. No need to be fussy, though. We welcome everyone. Take your time. Settle in. Relax. Let your horizons expand at well below the speed of light, at whatever rate you can manage. There is plenty of room under this sky for everyone. Invent your own definitions.
Some people never go out for more than a night or two, a three-day weekend maybe. Others turn pro. That's true. The world is big enough now for professional backpackers, though the field is small. You kind of have to define your own niche as you go. These two extremes and every step in between are all fine. Backpacking is made up of so very many steps.
If you like to go out and walk as much as you can on every day of a trip, then you are doing it right. If you like to hike a few miles to some lake and set up camp, and then explore there, you are doing it right. If you do something else you are doing it right. No matter who you are or what your experience level is, you can always teach someone else a thing or two, and they can always return the favor. That's nice too. Unless one of you is a real smartass, of course. But that's why there are so many sticks lying around within reach.
Backpacking is related to day hiking and is a lot like day hiking but different. With backpacking as compared to day hiking, you have to handle the extra 90% of your life that is not walking a couple of miles and eating a sandwich. Backpacking puts more demands on you and on your equipment. You wake up every morning with bed hair. That happens not because you've been bad but because you spent the night trussed up in a bag, on the ground somewhere. Right away you know that this is a different sort of experience.
Then you have a drink of water and have to go poop. Here's hoping that you already know how to handle that. If not then go back to first grade and work your way up. We're all adults here, right? OK, then. Handle the unmentionable stuff, and you still have the whole dang day ahead of you, and most of the fun parts.
– Food in the trees, water in the dirt. –
Like breakfast.
Retrieve your food and stove and fuel from the tree tops and set up. Pull out the stove, fuel it. Whoops. Got to make sure the ground is clear. Don't want to set the world on fire for a bowl of oatmeal. Get your pot ready, full of water. Don't have any water left? Whoops again. Go get some. Since you're an ultralighter you most likely aren't carrying a filter, which means that you need to boil the water before it's safe, and then let it cool. Or throw some stuff into it and let chemistry work in your favor if you don't like the fussiness of boiling your water. All of this takes time but you eventually work it out.
You get breakfast prepared and eaten and then you wash up. You might bathe and brush your teeth and take care of that bed hair in case you meet someone on the trail who is either unexpectedly good looking or easily frightened, or both.
You don't do this on a day hike. Because you don't have to.
What you do while backpacking is to pack up all your belongings, your whole world, and put everything away for the day, so you can carry it all around on your back. You need a backpack for that. A backpack isn't any more definable than a day pack or day hiking or backpacking in general but it has to meet your needs, which are mainly staying alive and remaining reasonably comfortable for one or more nights and two or more days while carrying everything you need to keep you going.
– Huh. Never knew that. –
The first thing you notice about a backpack is that there is nothing special to notice about it.
That's why sales people were bred.
Someone long ago started with a few loud opinionated self assured air headed jerks, put them in vests, and bred them. Over the decades the line was constantly refined. Note that we said refined and didn't say improved. You can refine the rapacity and blood lust of a mosquito but you can't reasonably call it an improvement.
You can refine the ability of a sales person to home in on an unsuspecting and hopeful innocent to the joys of backpacking, and tune the sales person's antennae to the frequencies of gullibility, inexperience, and uncertainty, and specialize the ability to sniff out and destroy wallets, but these are not improvements, any more than ferret breeders whose efforts result in weasels who easily wiggle out of any pen whatsoever and go darting down the streets lunging at the throats of school children and the elderly could be said to have improved the breed.
Refined — yes. Improved — no. That's our story and we're a-stickin' to it.
Sales people will tell you what to look for and what you need and why. What you need is one or more shoulder straps attached to a bag big enough to put your stuff in. The rest is like ice cream on a stick.
What you need to look for and why you should pay attention are really things you have to learn as you go along. The main thing is the bag and the straps. Remember that, and also doubt everything you read here. That's to keep you healthy. While you're at it, learn to doubt not only everything you read but everything you hear, and everyone you meet, including yourself. If someone knows something, then doubt it, whatever it is, until you get some proof.
Watch as the sales person shows you the dozen or so zippers and the flocks of cinch straps, the swishing, whirring load lifters, and the clicking 18-position adjustable, inflatable hip belt with four on the floor and built in toenail clippers. Enjoy yourself. You may learn something, even something useful, especially if you later on decide to make your own packs. You never know what might come in handy.
But not all of it will. Not much of it really.
– Want the optional pipe wrench holders with that? –
You probably don't want zippers anywhere, or lots of heavy square pockets jutting out the sides of your pack. Or much volume either. If you're going for light weight then you will have a small load and will not need enough straps and padding to outfit a football team. You will not need much adjustment. There won't be much room in your life for buckles and runs of daisy chain webbing and tool loops. Ask yourself — really, seriously ask yourself what use you have for a cell phone pocket in the Brooks Range. (Hint — Think far northern Alaska. Think skirting the edge of death in the Arctic. And then put a cell phone over in the corner of that and stand back. How's it look then?)
What you will need is adequacy. Adequate and its cousin adequacy are words that never appear in advertising. Go look. They don't.
There are reasons for that.
Adequacy doesn't exist in the commercial world, but adequacy is pretty big in the real world. It means that you know what you need and you go for that. No more, no less. That's what you want in a backpack.
Here's what it means, this adequacy.
As noted before, you need shoulder straps and a bag. The straps attach the pack to your body so it doesn't just fall right down to the ground, and the bag holds your belongings so you can take them along. It's kind of like a community effort. The bag (let's start calling it a pack from now on) should be comfortable. It should be durable enough to do what you want for a reasonable length of time and it should not feel heavy or be painful. The pack should be easy to load and unload and it should allow you to get at the things you need during the day.
Any complaints so far?
A backpack will generally be bigger than a day pack, but like everything else we're talking about here, there is no absolute definition. You get to decide what is right for you. Better than that. You must decide. You and only you. If not, then it won't work. Simple but hard. Sorry.
Some people manage (at the right time of the year, in the right places, and with the right amount of experience behind them) to go on shortish backpacking trips with pack weights of five pounds or less, a bit over two kilograms. That's
base pack weight, the weight of the pack plus everything you bring home again.
You and us, maybe not. OK, maybe you. Good luck. Get it working, then come back and show us how. We have things to learn too, but five pounds it skating on ice so thin that it's merely theoretical.
– A good morning stuffing. –
A good backpack will allow you to stuff it full in the morning and arrange your things inside in a pleasant and reasonable sort of way that will preserve them. (You don't want to destroy your sleeping bag or shelter, do you?) The backpack will allow you to do this stuffing and loading and arranging fairly easily. It will have some way for you to tighten everything down when you are carrying a small load, and will expand a bit for larger loads. It will have some arrangement for keeping small things easily get-at-able but won't be fussy about it or make it too complicated. The good backpack will have a way for you to deal with sudden changes of weather. This might be an opening or flap at the top (extension collar) or some kind of strap or pocket or pouch for holding rain wear. The pack will be easy to load, easy to put on, easy to take off, easy to adjust, and easy to unload again in the evening.
One more time — there is no strict definition of any of this, and there is no one backpack that does everything right all the time under all conditions, even for one person. The main thing is that whatever pack you have is pretty good for you. In a day pack you need a way to carry some food and water, a jacket, and the other necessary odds and ends. In a backpack you need a way to carry your personal ecosystem.
The backpack can be externally framed, internally framed, or frameless. It might load from the top (top loader) or from the front (panel loader or front loader, the front being the side farthest from your back). It might have built in pockets, no pockets, or detachable pockets. It might have an extension collar (an expandable area at the top) or not. It might be made of extremely expensive and hard to get fabrics, or of ordinary nylon ripstop, or even canvas. It might be made by a multi-national corporation, by a boutique maker, or by you or a friend of yours. It might be brightly colored or drab and stealthy.
Any of the above are OK.
For an ultralight pack, for trips of up to a week, you could expect a pack to weigh from less than a pound up to maybe two and a half pounds (12 to 40 ounces or 340 to 1134 g). It may have stiffeners of fiberglass or carbon fiber to simulate a full frame, or it may use a sleeping pad for rigidity. It may have a waist belt (a simple webbing strap, more for stability than support) or a light hip belt, or nothing. It will probably have external pockets made of mesh, and an extra strap or two to lash things down with. Most ultralight packs are top loaders. Most packs are. It's easy to keep the contents in a thing shaped like a bag, and bags are easy to make and to work with, and to understand.
There are endless variations on these themes and we'll get to them as we continue our journey.
– Expeditions. –
Most any catalog or online store will tell you that an expedition ranges anywhere from one week to a lifetime, and that you need a huge and heavy pack for it. If you come face to face with an actual live salesperson you will get the party line from someone who probably never went much beyond the parking lot without a Sport Utility Vehicle. (Nice phrase. Vrooom!) Expeditions are scary. Expeditions are big. Expeditions are expensive and require equipment piles of gigantic proportions and expense.
Go for it then.
As backpacking is to day hiking, so expeditions are to backpacking. In other words, the step up is really a step out. There is not much difference between a longer trip and a shorter one than the length. If you want, you can carry everything you need for a week of backpacking in pleasant and dry weather and still come in at under 25 pounds (11 kg) at the start. Easily. Going out unsupported for two weeks is harder because you have to carry food for two weeks, which kind of hurts.
But that's most of it, right there. Period.
If you are out longer you will have to be ready for a bigger variety of weather conditions, and will need more soap and fuel and bug juice. Maybe an extra battery for the camera and an additional band-aid or two, just in case. Let's see then, anything else? Hmmm, nope.
Aside from food.
– Bite me. –
Food is heavy even if you take light food. Figure 1.25 pounds per day on the light end (using high-fat food to keep the weight down), two pounds a day on the high end, or 1.5 pounds a day in the middle. That's 8.75 to 14 pounds (4 to 6 kg) a week. Double it for a second week and you might be carrying 28 pounds of food when you start out. That does hurt. Round off with additional fuel and other consumables and let's call it 30 pounds, tops (14 kg).
OK, it hurts even in metric.
The good news is that you can still handle this with a light pack. You don't need a buddy driving along behind you in a six ton half-track with machine gun turrets, barrels of water, shiny steel propane cylinders, medical staff, and blinking lights. You also don't need an eight pound $500 pack. Chances are that you can use one pack for two day, one-night trips, and use the same pack for 14 day outings. It is likely to hurt a bit though, at first, on the long trips, because of all the food.
If the standard pack you use has no hip belt, then you are going to get a pack with one one as soon as you find your way home again. If you have a slightly heavier pack, one that empty is still a marvel of lightness and clever yet simple and efficient design, then you will use that for pretty much everything. You will learn as you go because you are smart and sensible and a backpacker. Backpackers are like that. By the time you begin having hot dreams about the
X-Ped-Iton™ Mark VI Pro-Level Three-Tone, Competition-Model Forever-Pack with racing flaps and built in soft drink dispenser, you will have done short trips and medium length trips and longish trips and you will know pretty much who you are and what you actually need, and how important racing flaps truly are.
And what you actually need will be...definitely something with a serviceable hip belt, and maybe even a light internal frame. But you are free to choose whatever you want. A Kelty Cloud 5250 at $800, made entirely of 100% Spectra fabric, weighing 71 ounces (2 kg) or a Gossamergear Mariposa at 18 ounces (520 g) and $75. They both work. So do many others you can buy.
Or go ahead and make your own.
If you are climbing Mount Ever-So-High then you are out of scope. You are not a backpacker anymore. You are a mountain climber.
If you are trekking all of Asia then you are not really backpacking as we mean it here. Instead, look for luggage. If you do this other sort of backpacking, you will want to carry a pack that you can sort of carry but not one that is made to be carried all day, every day, on your back. You will want a pack that can be thrown across international boundaries by those trained in the arts of luggage destruction. This is not our kind of backpacking, even though it is called backpacking. You are not us. You are tourists. We are not you.
If you are doing a long backpacking trip you are doing a long backpacking trip. If you want to call it an expedition then go ahead. Or not. But don't get too wound up in ideas related to big muscles, macho fantasies, machetes, and firearms. Backpackers walk, and stop to eat on the trail, and wash, and then sleep overnight and do some more walking.
Eat, Sleep, Hike — You can handle that with a little common sense, and so can most any pack that you can stand to wear for three or four days in a row. You do not need a license, or permission from an expert. You do not need to be certified. You are OK there. Relax.
Are we clear?
– Climbing. –
Packs for climbers are not packs for backpackers. Climbing packs tend to be especially durable. If you spend significant amounts of time stuffing your pack full of metal things, then dragging that pack over sharp rocks and tossing it around, you need a rugged pack. A climbing pack.
You probably also want the smallest one you can get away with, one without too many protuberances. Think smooth. Smooth and small and tough, with places to tie things on. With a place to attach crampons and ice axes. OK.
These packs will work for backpacking but their rugged construction will mean that they are heavier than you need for backpacking. McHale uses the acronym SARC (Super Alpine Rocksac) for some of their alpine packs. How many rocks do you intend to carry? Make that decision up front, before you go.
Since climbing is a whole separate subject way off the scale for most backpackers, we'll leave it there. As always, do what is best for you.
– Other. –
As always, to repeat a phrase, there are other specialty packs. If you are in the military, or used to be, you might want to retain those feelings. Get an ALICE pack. ALICE is the All Purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment pack made for two types of load — the fighting load and the existence load and for all environments. 2
Very few backpackers fight, even when sober, or travel through all environments though they do tend to try maintaining existence. Depending on the model, one of these ALICE packs will come in at seven to 10 pounds (3 to 4.5 kg).
Empty.
Yes'm. Scary, isn't it?
If you work for the Forest Service or do volunteer trail maintenance you might want a pack to carry tools. This sort of use is a kissing cousin to military service. Likewise for hauling dead animals if you are a hunter. Nothing wrong with that, but again it's pretty well outside the realms of lightweight and ultralight backpacking.
Canoeists are in another separate world. There is nothing so pleasant as pulling into a camp site reachable only by water, miles from any road, miles from any house, and hauling out 75 pounds of food, wine, linen tablecloths, folding furniture, and any accessories needed to turn the place into a world class restaurant. Pleasant as long as the canoe carries them and not your back. You may have everything stuffed into Duluth packs or in baskets or boxes or into something else again, but at least it doesn't have to go on your back.
That's the difference.
– Footsie Notes –
1: The American Sand Burrowing Mayfly Dolania americana from South Carolina Department of Natural Resources: http://bit.ly/1AXUMpC
T hese people, they are ruining our land, said Skunk. "I can no longer find tasty lizards or moles to eat. The people have scared them all away. What shall we do?"
The other animals, all gathered together, thought and thought, but they had no good ideas.
Day by day, and every day, all season long, the people came marching past on the trail. Their big hind feet raised clouds of dust that choked all the animals, and the noise of their tramping annoyed them as well.
"I know," said Ant. "We will sneak up on them at night and pull out their leg hairs. When they wake up without fur they will become frightened and run home, leaving us in peace."
The animals discussed this, and then they thought about it, but they were not sure that the people valued their leg hairs so much.
Then Moth told them a story about seeing the people using their great flat front paws to swat with, and how they killed many members of the Mosquito Family, and then the animals all became afraid again, though most of them were happy to see fewer mosquitoes, but no one said anything.
Next, Bunny Rabbit cleared his throat to speak. He looked like he had a good idea, so all the animals turned to listen. But Bob Cat came up behind Bunny Rabbit and ate him.
"Hey, I was hungry," said Bob Cat. "We have been here all day and I was hungry. Gimme a break, OK?"
Some of the animals nodded and sighed.
Some of the other animals moved farther away from Bob Cat, in case he wanted dessert.
Then some of the other large animals ate some of the other small ones, without even making excuses. A few of them belched and licked their whiskers afterward.
"This meeting is not going well", said Turtle. "We must have order, or else we are all lost. We must save our home from these people who constantly walk through it, carrying their giant backpacks and trampling everything. We must have a business plan."
Suddenly all the animals became silent.
They remained motionless, staring at Turtle. They realized that Turtle, whom they had always regarded as just a rock with legs, was on to something.
"This is the only good idea I have heard all day," said Weasel. "It is a start. I can help. My MBA will finally pay off, I think. I will save our home with a clever business plan."
"No, wait," said Crow. "A plan is good, but we must remain flexible. We can outline a business plan if we really need to, but the key is a killer business model. There is no need to go into debt, or to generate mounds of paperwork. We do not need a plan to submit to lawyers, or banks either, just the right ideas. We can do this if we remain agile."
"Yes," said Spider, "we can weave a web. Then we will catch these people and bite them on the butt."
"Agreed," said Bat. "But better yet if they catch themselves in their own webs. If they never suspect us, then they will not seek revenge."
The animals discussed this.
Then they acted.
First they designed a backpack with sparkly things all over it, and many tabs and straps to pull on, and the people were fascinated. It sold and sold.
They they branched out. Into titanium cookware, and fashionable clothing. The people became obsessed with shopping for toys and playing with them, and they nearly stopped backpacking.
The forest became civilized again.
Then the animals created waterproof/breathable outerwear. The people bought into it, big time, even though the laws of nature decreed that any waterproof fabric could not also be breathable. It was impossible but the people bought it anyway, and raved about it. Endlessly.
The animals rolled on the ground, laughing all day. Right after counting through their mountains of receipts. Every day.
The people were so stupid that many animals laughed themselves sick, and farted a lot too.
Before long the animals became rich, and had money to open satellite stores in malls in every conceivable location.
Then they invented credit cards, the internet, and online shopping. This required superhighways and gigantic trucks whizzing every whichway to make deliveries. The superhighways went straight through the forests, and destroyed them all.
But the animals no longer cared. They were rich, and that counted for a lot.
Finally, the animals built a rocket ship and went away to someplace quiet, to savor their revenge and to retire in gated communities, with servants. Hey, they could afford it.
The people never caught on.
Not with so many cool toys and sparkly things for them to buy.
To make fabric you start with fibers. Unless some bug-eyed dudes swoop by in a flying saucer and drop a factory nearby, you start thousands of years ago with whatever fuzzy stuff you find lying around, and work up from there. That fuzzy stuff has gotten exceedingly trendy and is now called natural fiber. You can still call it fuzz if you want, but you have to start back there, back in the Dark Ages of Fuzz if you really want to understand where it comes from.
So, natural fiber, in the Fuzz Age.
Wool, for instance, that's one, that's natural. There's nothing like an especially hairy animal to inspire some folks, and that's one of the things that happened between sheep and humans. A lot of other things have been rumored but we're really only interested in stories involving the fuzzy, woolly parts.
Wool goes way Back in the Creepy Era, like 3000 years B.C.E. or more, well within the Late Stone Age (when our ancestors were still attempting to put tail fins on rocks, stayed up way after dark because of this obsession, and nearly went extinct because of all the toothy night-creepers on the prowl for snacks). But sheep. Someone discovered sheep and sheep proved to be so useful that now there are about 40 different breeds, producing around 200 types of wool of various grades. New Zealand is big for sheep, and Australia, the former Soviet states, China, South Africa, and Argentina and so on are too, as if you cared.
But.
Let's not forget cotton, and linen, and silk.
Cotton and linen and silk — oh my!
Linen comes from the flax plant, and it might be the oldest natural textile fiber, dating to more than 5000 years B.C.E.
Cotton is a lot newer at about 3000 years B.C.E.
Then there's silk, from about 2600 years B.C.E. This is pretty surprising when you wonder who started unwinding cocoons to see what was inside, and then made something out of the leftovers. But back then they had more time because the future had not been invented yet, so many, many strange things unfolded. No one so far has made a backpack out of silk, even after all these millennia. (Or thought of a reason to try).
Maybe you can do it this year. Maybe next year. Maybe never. Never works for most things.
Anyhow, people got by, but all the fussing with fuzz and nature and all was tedious.
– Life in the Tedious Age. –
Here's how it went...
First they went out and grabbed a sheep (or a cotton plant or a stalk of flax). Good. OK. Now.
The next step in the process is to remove as much fuzz as possible from the target plant or animal without getting any of your body parts bitten off or getting so beat up in the process that said parts are hardly worth remaining attached to.
Sheep are nasty and nippy. Avoid if possible. They may look puffy and dumb, but are in truth a tribe of angry and ornery stumpy-legged bastards, especially ornery if you try yanking fuzz from them. Wiry little buggers too, who know how to use those teeth of theirs. Cotton and flax? No. No, they don't fight nearly so much.
So OK, you have a wad of fuzz, a big wad. Now you have to pick the
foreign matter out of it. That's a euphemism there, that one. And score another one for cotton and flax. Cotton and flax don't defecate wildly in all directions while you rip at their fuzzy parts. So, foreign matter. It can be things other than poop, like dirt, insects, leaves, seeds, or anything you don't like the look of. Poo has always been the gold standard in the world of foreign matter, and is the unit of measure to judge every other kind of foreign matter by. Remove all foreign matter, first the nasty, and then the more delicate and innocuous kinds, and move on to the next step.
Which is — to wash your hands.
Which is (the real next step, that is) loosening up the fibers by teasing them out of that big matted wad of fuzz you have. Then you
card the fuzz. Carding is like combing. Carding gives you a thin smooth layer of fuzz with all the little fuzzicles going in the same direction. Think of your high school geography teacher's comb-over. Like that but maybe dustier, and possibly not so greasy, but yet containing a last few devious, remnant stray bugs attempting to avoid detection, intent on catching a free ride into the big city with you.
After debugging and carding comes spinning. Spinning twists and pulls all these fibers (the fuzzicles) into a tight, string-like yarn that holds together by itself. By this stage things are beginning to look familiar in that you have something almost threadlike.
Next, on a loom, combine a bunch of these yarns parallel to each other (the
warp yarns), and then weave them with some other yarns going the other way (the
woof yarns), and then you have a
fabric. For proof, look closely at a piece of fabric. Hold it up in front of you. Squint. You will see some yarns going up and down (the warp) and others weaving among those from right to left (the woof). That there is your fabric.
This great long fuzz-handling process is all so massively tedious to even read about it's no wonder people were banging their heads against trees just waiting for mechanical looms to arrive on the scene. Which they did. And then things remained insanely tedious (by our standards) for a long, long time yet.
But at least by this point we finally had fabric to work with. The future had also recently been invented, and then, on schedule, one day it arrived and sat its suitcase down on the pavement and looked around.
So what?
Time for the appearance of factories and mass production, that's what.
Ah! Most appropriate!
– Hang some tinsel on the smokestacks, Jane! –
Well, eventually all kinds of people got to tinkering and re-tinkering with new kinds of fuzz and new machines to tweak and torture fuzz, and then everything got to be steam powered and there were lumbering giant factories all over the place, and fabric began piling up like crazy. We've already been over the next step, the sewing. No matter what, there has always been a shortage of fingers, and fingers can only sew rags at a fixed rate, so the sewing machine had to be invented, which it was.
Done, and then...
Then, once the sewing machine arrived people began sewing together pieces of anything they could get their hands on, furiously, but there were still no backpacks. Or not many. Backpacks were handy for war, and war has always been popular, but very few people ever had the idea to pick up and go out hiking for fun, and most of them were stoned to death before they got past the city limits. Because see, when you have an idea, even if it's a pretty neat idea, it's no good until everyone else gets used to it, and thinks they invented it, and are sure that everyone around them agrees with it, which makes it OK to do, and that takes a while. In the meantime, you reach for the rocks.
So there was no backpacking, but the occasional stoning did relieve a lot of the remaining boredom.
And World War II helped.
The war disrupted many things. Big new factories sprang up everywhere. Unforeseen people did unheard of things in surprising places. Some things that people did, they tried hard to forget, but some of the other things were good and people tried to continue doing them. Synthetic fibers and synthetic fabrics were invented around this time. And they were found Good. And the people did Praise them, and did then manufacture Useful Products from them. And it was Good all over, pretty much. After the war and all, which was not great in itself, you understand.
– Older than weasels, but newer than dirt. –
Some synthetic fabrics are older than you might expect. Most of them are older than you, or your parents, or your grandparents. True, true, and again true (in that order).
Take rayon, the first manufactured fiber. Rayon was supposed to be an artificial silk, and dates from around 1900. But the idea goes way back to an English scientist in 1665 or thereabouts who speculated about making artificial silk. This idea, however, took another 200 years to become a reality (there is something about English ideas, you see, that requires them to sit for decades and stew, unnoticed). And there was another 50-year period, or thereabouts after that, while the futzy, persnickety, annoying details were sorted out. And then rayon happened.
But rayon manufacture is pretty typical of synthetics in general, even now.
First, purified cellulose from wood chips or cotton mill leavings gets converted by chemicals into a soluble compound — a big vat of liquid glop. (Glop perennially rises to the top of almost every manufacturer's list of things to put into vats.)
Then this glop is squeezed through spinnerets, devices something like your bathroom shower head, though conceptually similar to a spider's back end but without the attitude. A spinneret has lots of little holes. Put glop under pressure on the upstream side and long fibers extrude like spaghetti from the downstream side, and then solidify in the presence of the right chemicals.
After that, the fibers are treated, and treated some more, and eventually spun into yarns, which are ultimately woven, and then you have rayon cloth.
– The N word, in a rainbow of colors, all inedible. –
Nylon was the Big Synthetic, with a capital B and a capital S. And still is. It was developed in 1938 by the E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company, known up to then mainly as an explosives maker.
The raw materials for nylon can come from coal, or petroleum, or natural gas. Mix them with a bit of water, and air, in the right way, and you get something special — molecules of hexamethylenediamine and sebacoyl chloride. When molecules of hexamethylenediamine and sebacoyl chloride meet, they link together to create chains of new molecules, chains that are thousands and thousands of atoms long. You get millions of these chains, called polymers.
That is nylon.
Nylon can be shiny, semi-shiny, or dull. It is stretchable, resilient, and has great abrasion resistance. It is water repellent, easy to launder, and dries fast. It keeps its shape during use and during washing. It melts instead of burning. It defies insects, rot and mold. Animals don't want to eat it. It can be made into fabric or produced as solid chunks for mechanical parts or things like buckles, cord locks, D-rings, grommets, hooks, ladder locks, snaps, tiedowns, zipper pulls, doodads, diddly-bobs, and whatchamacallits.
Nylon is available in any color you want.
Nylon pretty well opened the floodgates. After it, there was a torrent of other synthetic fabrics. Here is a partial list of current synthetics:
The last couple thousand years have moved us beyond flax, cotton, wool, and silk into the chemical era, which is very technical. In fact, if you make your own gear you can't buy most of these new fabrics, no matter how much you might want to. They are available only to manufacturers, in bulk lots, and require training and even special equipment to sew, and you will never be allowed to gain the secret knowledge of how to deal with them. Nor will you get your own secret code whistle, let alone learn the sacred handshake.
Today the manufacture of a simple thing like a commercial backpack requires a factory full of complex machinery, trained workers, and office staff. Such as — accountants, advertising experts, bar tackers, bookkeepers, buyers, cutters, designers, expediters, inspectors, inventory controllers, lawyers, maintenance and equipment technicians, markers, marketers, pressers, receivers, seam rippers, sewing machine operators, sewing machine repairers, sergers, shippers, supervisors, tax experts, trimmers, and warehouse staff. And probably several more categories that are too arcane to imagine.
Hundreds of people. All buzzing with energy and expertise, working together to make things we absolutely take for granted.
Luckily ultralight backpacks are simple by design, and therefore simple to make out of simple materials, even if you are simple-minded, so if you want to make your own ultralight pack you still can.
But if you want to get into
The Business you have to decide if you can do all the work yourself or afford to hire someone. And either way you still have to compete with bigger companies that send their work thousands of miles away to distant countries where people are glad to have something to do, let alone earn a living from it. You'll be competing in one of the most ruthless businesses on the planet, where high pay is a few cents an hour.
W ell, we had to do something, said Helmut ('Pit Bull') Kreuznach, Chief Legal Counsel for German outdoor equipment maker Deuter. "Just because some random isotope exists is no reason it should be allowed to whiz around and infringe on our brand identity."
You might think that a constituent of nature that has existed for at least 13.6 billion years might be immune to the legal hassles of copyright and trademark law, but apparently this is not so.
Deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, is one of two stable isotopes of hydrogen. It has been around since the very beginning, long before tailless apes decided to go backpacking, but now it is at the center of a huge dispute recently brought before the World Trade Organization (WTO).
At issue is whether deuterium the isotope should be allowed to continue existing, and if so, what it should be called.
"This is very important to us as an international brand," asserts Mr Kreuznach, stroking his beard. "We are extremely concerned that if we allow just any sketchy, possibly counterfeit version of hydrogen to pop up here, there, and anywhere under a name that is suspiciously similar to our brand, consumers might become confused."
"For example," he continued, "what proof do we have that so-called deuterium is even a legitimate isotope, let alone an element? There is no paper trail. It is not mentioned anywhere in existing trade agreements. We have only the word of a few unreliable scientists that this substance even exists, except to threaten our business."
A court review is scheduled for late this year under guidelines set out in the WTO's Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes, adopted in 1994.
Deuterium could not immediately be reached for comment, though its attorney did play a recording of a very soft hissing sound, said to be coming from deep space.
There is some precedent for cases like this.
For example, The North Face has sued not only The Butt Face for brand dilution, but also butter itself. And late last year Big Agnes, a maker of tents, sleeping bags, and related gear sued Big Agnes Johnsson Moving and Storage Co. of Windswept, Kansas "just in case".
There are also rumors afoot that Osprey Packs, Inc. may be after not only ospreys, but also anything that could possibly be referred to as a fish hawk, sea hawk, fish eagle, or any animal ever seen around fish, living or dead.
And if your parents named you Jan, and you like sports even a little, then you may soon be in deep trouble, legal-wise.
Or, if you are called Gregory, for example, then look out. You could be next, bud.
And then last year I bought two Dieter 9000s, the ones made with Krepplar, only I'm not supposed to talk about that with anyone, since it's still experimental, well, anyway, after that...
– But...I can't see it from here! –
The backpack industry doesn't really exist, in case you decide to go looking for it. It is part of the outdoor products industry. Maybe you prefer to call it the Recreational Products Industry, or just Leisure Biz. Anyway, it's all part of the same corporate mega-structure.
This mega-structure is worth more than you and all of your relatives, and your friends and their relatives, and their pets, and their pet toys too. This is big business. Not as big as the arms industry, though the two do overlap, and share some basic attitudes. But it is still big. The word industry provides a clue, doesn't it?
So let's capitalize and italicize while we're at it. The Industry.
The Industry has associations and conventions and trade shows. If you are invited to any of them you will be initiated into the mystic rites and learn the sacred handshake and get a secret code whistle, but then you won't be allowed to go home again until you swear a vow of silence. This is all hearsay of course. No one who is privy to the real inner secrets is allowed to talk about them, and live. For long.
Because they mean business. The Industry does.
You've heard of some, some of the big guns — ArcTeryx, Bergans, Black Diamond, Burton, Deuter, Granite Gear, Gregory, JanSport, Kelty, Lowe Alpine, Macpac, Marmot, Mont-Bell, Mountain Hardwear, Mountainsmith, Osprey, Outdoor Research, REI, The North Face, Vaude, Wild Things.
And some of the lesser guns, who tend to appear and vanish with the seasons — CiloGear, Fanatic Fringe, GossamerGear, LuxuryLite Modular, Moonbow Gear, Mountain Laurel Designs, Six Moon Designs, Ultralight Adventure Equipment, Wingnut, ZPacks. But you don't know what goes on behind the Cordura curtain.
Because you can't.
Because it's business.
And they mean business. And business is mean.
Which means you don't get to know, even if you ask politely.
– X marks the pack. –
To give you some idea of how little you actually know about these familiar names (the big ones a few lines back), consider this, from one of the real manufacturers (we'll call them X), located in a stupendously large and well known Asian country teeming with happy and industrious people. The following is an exact quote from them (except for the company name):
X Industry Co., Ltd. was established in 1970 for bags manufacturing industry which is professional in producing bags. It has an area of 2,500 square meters, 150 facilities, 200 workers, and with matched printing workshop. We are the bag manufacturer to be awarded with ISO 9001:2000 certification. Our principle is to provide our clients with products of reasonable price, high quality and punctual delivery. Since 1989, we have been appointed to produce Disney products, which gives us good credit standing by the high quality. Various styles, delicacy working, good quality, pleasing and practicality, reasonable price, and pure-hearted cooperation, obtain us repute from the clients. In case your company want to give us quotation, welcome you contact us betimes; we will reply you as soon as possible. We are not the best, but we can do better. We believe a good beginning is the half of success!
"Welcome you contact us betimes. We are not the best, but we can do better." That's your first clue — this is truly not an American company.
A few of the names of the real players are:
• Anhui Garments Import & Export Company Ltd. • Bags & Luggage. • Anhui Technology Import & Export Company, Ltd. • Anjie Solar Energy Company, Ltd. • Artel Manufacturing, Ltd. • Binki (Group) Corporation. • Brummend Enterprises Company, Ltd. • China Riversuny Waterproof Garments & Bag Manufacturing Ltd. • Chuangfuyuan Hardware And Plastic (Shenzhen) Company, Ltd. • Eliza Industrial Company Ltd. • Fengye Group Company, Ltd. • First Plus (Ningbo) Foreign Trade Company, Ltd. • Fuzhou Baige Bag Manufacturing Company, Ltd. • Fuzhou Hunter Bags & Luggage Manufacturing Company, Ltd. • Fuzhou Oceanal Star Bags Company, Ltd. • Gem Fastival Ltd. • Good Decision International Ltd. • Green Energy Technology Company, Ltd. • Guangzhou V-Goal Handbag Company, Ltd. • H.P Solar Company, Ltd. • Handfa Industrial Company. • Hopemax Industries Company. • Jing Jin Travelling Bags Manufacturing Ltd. • Kingsco Products Company, Ltd. • Kwan Kin Handbag Manufacturing Ltd. • Lap Shun Manufacture Company, Ltd. • Lexon Bags & Accessories Company, Ltd. • Million Time Industrial Ltd. • Ningbo Besli Industrial &Trading Company, Ltd. • Ningbo Bright Company, Ltd. • Ningbo Hi-sun Industry Corporation Ltd. • Ningbo Top Green Enterprises Company, Ltd. • North Peak Trading Company, Ltd. • Pinghu Haomai Industy Ltd. • Quanzhou Haiheng Sports & Tour Goods Company, Ltd. • Quanzhou Jiangnan Handbag Factory. • Quanzhou ShanLiang Bags & Shoes Company, Ltd. • Quanzhou Xinheng Outdoor Equipment Company Ltd. • Real Success Trading Ltd. • Rongchuang Handbag & Clothing Factory. • Shanghai DPS International Trade Company, Ltd. • Shanghai Fine Trading International Ltd. • Shanghai Oumao International Company, Ltd. • Shanghai Paloon Company, Ltd. • Shanghai Well-Signed International Trade Company. • Ltd. • Shenzhen Saintmart Crafts & Premiums Company, Ltd. • Topbo Industrial Ltd. • Tung Hsien Luggage Company, Ltd. • Uni-Ray (China) Ltd. • Unison Light Industrial Manufacturing Company, Ltd. • Waterpride Enterprise Company, Ltd. • Winfung Worldwide Enterprises, Ltd. • X & M Bagson Company, Ltd. • Xiamen B&G Company, Ltd. • Xiamen Bestwinn Import & Export Company, Ltd. • Xiamen Carl Import & Export Company, LTD. • Xiamen Daysun Bags Industrial Company, Ltd. • Xiamen Goldenway Enterprises Company, Ltd. • Xiamen International Trade & Industrial Company LTD. • Xiamen Senyang Company, Ltd. • Xiamen Uptex Industrial Company, Ltd. • Yesun Bag Industrial Company, Ltd. • Yiko Bags Manufacturing (H.K.) Ltd. • Ying Kit Handbag Manufacturing Company Ltd. • Yiwu Unique Bags & Cases Company, Ltd. • Yongchang Industries Company, Ltd. • Zhumadian City Kangmao Arts & Crafts Company, Ltd.
As stated, these are a few of the names. Only a few. There are hundreds more, but they share one characteristic — they are all after your money.
Even the Binki Group.
– The real Mountain Outdoor Hardware Jan Gear. –
The next time you buy a new pack bearing the colorful and distinctive Mountain Outdoor Hardware Jan Gear label, remember that you may be buying a pack actually made by the Xiamen Tung Ningbo Jing Jin Foreign Trade Company. And the pack may be great. It may be made by a different company than the next pack in the bin, even if they look identical and bear exactly the same label and price tag. And that probably won't matter at all.
Because the Xiamen Tung Ningbo Jing Jin Foreign Trade Company "believes the fundamental function of management is to inspire employees with sincerity and affection, establish a relaxing and autonomous environment to create value efficiently," through "fierce competition" which "enables service to be the biggest add-on value source." Because "profound R&D capability, reliable manufacturing process control, outstanding service system and solid team spirit make Xiamen Tung Ningbo Jing Jin Foreign Trade Company products upgrade regularly and receive warm welcome home and abroad."
And that's what you, as a consuming organism really want, isn't it?
Isn't it?
We don't hear you breathing...don't forget to take a breath now.
Try it.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Relax. Do not become overwhelmed. Not to worry about details, sir or madam. Your needs are being efficiently met by friendly background processes. Which came from somewhere, but where?
– 20,000 years of quality and counting. –
Remember Frozen Fritz? Or Ötzi the Iceman, as he is officially known (by those who have never actually had a beer with him)?
Well, his people started sewing things together as far back as 20,000 years ago, during the last ice age. Who knows for sure if it was absolutely the last ice age, so let's call it one of the more recent ice ages. Archaeologists, clever and observant folk, have discovered bone needles from way back then, and these needles had eyes, and were used to sew together skins and furs way back when. So far no one has determined what the eyes were for or what they saw, but teams of researchers are continuing work on this as we speak.
So, leaping over several thousand years as though they weren't there we skip ahead from Fritz's time into the early Iron Age, around 300 B.C.E. (Back in the Creepy Era). By that time some forward thinking Celts had somehow developed sewing needles of this stuff (iron, named after the age they found themselves in) and a few of these Celts seem to have absentmindedly dropped some of these needles inside one of their hill forts at what is now Manching, Germany. These same needles were found many, many hundreds of years later by people who had no haystacks to look in, and so had gone seeking needles on German hilltops out of sheer desperation.
Research indicates that the diet of these early people (the Iron Age Celts) was mainly barley and spelt, with some millet, einkorn, emmer, avena, wheat, and rye thrown in whenever they could catch any of it. On good days the sturdy Celts might have had enough additional lentils, beans, nuts, or fruit to make a difference. Considering their diet, they may simply have invented needles in order to poke themselves for amusement rather than for any other purpose. No one likes eating something called spelt, and it, einkorn, emmer, and wheat are pretty much different names for the same boring tasteless whatever.
These are, after all, foods that can be fully described in words of at most two syllables, and none of them has ever gotten more than a one-star recommendation from anyone who matters, at best. And at their best they taste like clinical depression, though chewier, on a good day, and contain more weevils, if that helps. If you get one of the better brands, of which there are none.
Whenever possible, those people (the Iron Age Celts again) also caught, killed, hacked apart, and ate anything that looked remotely like meat, possibly to help relieve the unendurable annoyance of endlessly poking themselves with needles for amusement. No one knows what the hell Celts were doing mucking around in Germany either. What was that about then, back in the Creepy Era?
All of this seems suspiciously out of character. Especially since the rest of the Celtic clan, the ones we actually are familiar with, have stubbornly hung out in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England (as a last resort), spending their days drinking in pubs, tormenting various kinds of bagpipes, tootling on tin whistles, and clomping around feverishly in what they insist is a kind of dancing. Between brawls.
Go figure.
Nevertheless, the discovery of ancient needles in Germany sent Chinese archaeologists straight into a howling patriotic snit, enough of a snit to force them to fan out across the landscape, furiously digging up endless reaches of it until after years and years they finally came across a Han Dynasty tomb dating from somewhere around 202 B.C.E to 220 A.D. (After Daybreak). They reported finding a complete sewing set, including even a thimble. Take that, Celts.
Technology — it's out there.
– The rise of the machines. –
In 1790 (as we blithely skip another 1500 years) the first passable sewing machine was patented by British inventor Thomas Saint. Fancying himself an adept at marketing, Saint titled his patent An Entire New Method of Making and Completing Shoes, Boots, Splatterdashes, Clogs, and Other Articles, by Means of Tools and Machines also Invented by Me for that Purpose, and of Certain Compositions of the Nature of Japan or Varnish, which will be very advantageous in many useful Appliances.
Thomas Saint's machine.
This patent contains descriptions of random varnish concoctions and at least three different machines, only one of which was for stitching, quilting, or sewing. Obviously Saint couldn't make up his mind about what he was up to, and so, with a level of enthusiasm equal to Saint's level of clarity, the rest of the world delightedly ignored him and his ideas, and Saint's whole workshop full of prototype gizmos and thingamabobs vanished like a crab apple dropped down the sit hole of a pit toilet. Silently, beyond reach, and forever.
Thomas Saint.
For the following 83 years, the nearest thing to a commercially-successful sewing machine was only a hazy dream.
Though much, much later (well into the Plastic Era, or Modern Times as we see it from inside our smug, cozy iBubble) someone pried the idea of Saint's sewing machine from history's dung heap, built a model, tweaked the model a bit, and got it working. So maybe Saint wasn't inept, but devious (as are many of the British persuasion, we are told), and had deliberately obfuscated his patent description, to prevent anyone from copying his invention.
At least he got the mechanical part right, but overall, nothing came of Saint's work. Marketing in secret, how smart was that?
Ladies and gentlemen — On to France!
– The era of raging French tailors. –
In 1830 a Frenchman named Barthelemy Thimonnier invented the first really functional sewing machine for use in his garment factory, but he almost went nuts trying to get it working. It happens.
Thimonnier's sewing machine.
See, the deal was that many of the people where he lived were weavers.
Thimonnier had a personal moment of awakening when he first thought things through, and then — an inspiration, to him she came!
Thimonnier noticed that weaving was really quick compared to sewing fabric that came off the looms. By his time weaving had been fully mechanized, but sewing remained a handicraft. Catch the drift?
Thimonnier decided his mission in life was to invent a machine to do for sewing what programmable Jacquard looms had done for weaving. But inventing a machine that sewed turned out to be even harder than the sewing. Machines were hard to invent back then. Tons of that clunky iron stuff had to be cast, and hammered endlessly, and the wheels and pulleys all over, and those decorative whirling doodads, all of which, it seems, were required by law or royal edict or something. Something. It was hard.
Anyway, Thimonnier was the man for the job, he thought.
Barthlemy Thimonnier.
So he holed himself up in a shed and worked like a madman for years and years and years (in secret) before he got his machine working. His neighbors thought he was spooky, and not in an agreeable way. He may have been spooky. He probably was spooky, and possibly very spooky. Imagine what kind of shape you would get into, locked in a shed for years, tinkering until your tinker began to bleed. And then continuing to tinker, and so on, day after day, year after year, until your tinker eventually became calloused and almost unrecognizable.
Eventually though, Thimonnier did it (i.e., he finished the inventing part), and by 1841 he had 80 machines whirring along in his factory, churning out uniforms like crazy for the French army.
But wait. There's more! Rampaging tailors!
Those who made their living by sewing got nervous about Thimonnier's factory, and then they got angry, and so a mob of them sort of decided to storm the place one night — being French, and angry, and all. Anyway, it seemed like a really good idea at the time. And it was, because they destroyed everything, completely and totally.
Thimonnier tried to start over, but the tailors were watching from the bushes. They regrouped and struck a second time, once again destroying everything.
This kind of muscular rabid persistence is not something you see too often among tailors, but things were tough in France about then. People were rioting all over for all kinds reasons. It was the thing to do, and who were they to buck the system? Thimonnier had to bail, and escaped to England with his last, lone surviving machine, but England was not a great business move either. Thimonnier only managed to die there, in poverty. See? Not a great business move. Death was his big slip-up, and after that things only decayed further.
Score one for tradition, zero for Barthelemy T.
If you think the idea of rioting French tailors is funny then keep in mind who invented sabotage.
Yep — da French.
One version (mythical) is that a bit before Thimonnier's time, workers in fabric mills, upset by the idea of power looms putting them out of work, threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the looms. This makes a tidy story about how the wooden shoes then clogged the looms to death.
But it's more likely that the first sabotage actually happened much later, during a 1910 railway strike, when workers destroyed the wooden shoes (sabots, or what we call ties) that anchored the rails, thereby disrupting transport long enough to create a major kerfuffle. It worked. Get the wrong people mad enough and they can do anything. Even tailors. (Tip — one thing you absolutely do not want to see coming at you is raving, raging librarians. Or Quakers foaming at the mouth and screaming obscenities. Nope. Once you have howling Quakers (or librarians) waving clubs or poking pitchforks in your direction, you have very little hope of ever again sitting down to a quiet supper with the cat.)
So.
– Enter Elias, the loser. –
Time marches on. There were still no backpacks for sale, but sewing machines inched closer to reality, and they had to come before machine-sewn backpacks, so...
Switch to America. Yay!
On July 9, 1819, in Spencer, Massachusetts, a loser was born. His name was Elias Howe and he was the inventor of the first American-patented sewing machine.
Eventually Elias Howe became one of the richest men on earth, which is pretty good for a loser. But Elias Howe was a loser first, and for a long, long time, and he won the game only much later, in the last moments of the final inning, almost by accident. It was a squeaker for old Elias. A close one.
OK then, here's the story.
Elias Howe's sewing machine.
First, the young Elias Howe lost a factory job he had, but snagged a new one as a machinist. He soon took sick though, lost that job, and spent long, long days watching his wife support him by taking in sewing. This may have been his inspiration, though some say he started tinkering earlier, back during his machine shop days. However it went, we do know for sure that Elias Howe was another man who got his tinker on, and after getting a taste of that, was unable to quit.
Anyway, after enough thinking and puttering and poking and tinkering, Howe finally, somehow, invented the first two-thread, lock stitch sewing machine. That does have a nice ring. Two-thread. Lock stitch. Sewing machine. All American. Yay again.
Elias Howe.
Previous machines, the ones that worked at all, used a chain stitch, which is sloppy and can be unraveled if cut, which is the point of it. This stitch is still used, and is handy for things like bags of flour that need to be opened easily for dumping. Grab the correct loose thread, pull, and it all unzips. Pull, unzip, dump. Pull, unzip, dump. Etc. (Go ahead and check this out if you buy dog or cat food in one of those heavy paper bags that is sewn shut. Twiddle a bit, and you'll be able to unzip it rather than cutting it open — very elegant.)
But another stitch, the lock stitch, is better for most things, like, say, clothes. Because the stitch locks. Because it is a stitch that, once stitched, stays that way. Because the stitch locks. Get it? Clever. The lock stitch helps you keep your pants on without that constant nagging worry about having the seams all let go the next time you brush against some grumpy shrubbery.
Besides the lock stitch, Howe's sewing machine had other improvements to brag about.
For example, the needle had a hole at the pointy end, not the other one. This hole at the pointy end allowed the needle to push thread through the fabric so that the thread could be locked in place on the back side of the fabric as the needle pulled back out, which made the lock stitch possible in the first place.
Once Howe got his machine right, he patented it on September 10, 1846 in New Hartford, Connecticut, but it was clunky and awkward and not a big seller, mainly because Elias Howe was a lousy salesman. So he went broke. Dead broke. And remained a loser.
– Loser! And Howe. –
Even after putting his machine up against five fast hand-sewers and blowing the whole group away with an unbeatable 250 stitches per minute, Howe was unable to impress anyone.
Anyone at all.
No one bought Howe's sewing machines.
Does this remind you of Lloyd F. Nelson? The guy who invented the Trapper Nelson pack? Remember him? Anyone? Hellooooooo...
Elias Howe.
Same deal. No one could imagine why a machine was needed to do something that a crowd of dirt cheap women pulling needles by candlelight while stuffed into the back end of a dark shed could do. It was beyond understanding.
So Howe also went to England, and tried selling machines there for a couple of years. But. Failed there too. Failed. Utterly. He finally gave up and came dragging his tail back home, a total limping failing loser. Broke again.
But guess what?
Bing!
Something had changed.
Once he was back in the U.S. of A. again, Howe saw sewing machines all over, practically under every bush. The place was absolutely, madly hopping with sewing machines, all whirring away madly, everywhere.
Something strange had happened while Howe was in England. Which was that sewing machines had caught on like crazy. (Now do you remember Lloyd F. Nelson?)
There were lots and lots of companies making sewing machines, and they were all pulling in cash hand over fist, basketful after basketful, and exactly every single one of those machines infringed on Howe's 1846 patent. All of them. Every damn one. Without exception.
So guess what he did? He chose the American way, and one by one, Howe sued the other manufacturers into submission.
First, he won.
Then he won again.
And then he won again, and again.
Howe's annual income went from $300 to more than $200,000, and a bit later it hit a lifetime total of more than $2 million, making him, by the time of his death, one of the richest men who had ever lived.
In today's money this is like going from somewhere around $7000 or $8000 a year to $4 or $5 million a year, in one huge insane leap. Think about that. The dollars don't translate exactly between then and now, but you get the picture. In today's dollars, Howe's accumulated lifetime earnings were somewhere in the $28 to $55 million range, depending on which calculator you use. Not many back then had bucks like that. One source claims that Howe was the second wealthiest man in the world when he died in 1867. Which was also the year his patent ran out. And the year he turned 48. Howe had a disappointing, short life, but, in the end, decent timing.
Well Elias, you done it buddy, you done it after all.
There were still no backpacks for sale though.
– So what happened next? –
Hang on — we're getting closer.
Now comes on the scene Elias Howe's partner. You know his name. His last wife (one of many) was regarded as one of the world's most stunning beauties. She is rumored to have been the model for the Statue of Liberty. Some say yes and some say no, but hey.
Good story.
The two of them, this man and his wife, eventually left the U.S. under a huge cloud of scandal over something or other, and went on to build an English palace whose looming doors were large enough to accommodate horse drawn carriages so guests could embark and disembark out of the weather. This man fathered more than two dozen children (no one is sure exactly how many) by various wives, mistresses (lots — more than you have fingers to count them), and flocks of anonymous lovers. He was one of the world's best salesmen, and died one of the world's wealthiest men, richer even than Elias Howe. Much, much richer.
He never went backpacking either. But he helped make it possible.
And his name was...?
Give up?
Isaac Merritt Singer.
Isaac Merritt Singer was his name, and earlier on Elias Howe had sued Singer, and had severely whupped Singer's butt in court, but then they made up, partnered, and got filthy rich together by forming a sewing machine monopoly in cahoots with a few other, smaller manufacturers. Hey, it was business.
Isaac Singer.
They rocked. You, like almost everyone else, have heard of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, even if you can't tell a sewing machine from a rabid mongoose.
This Singer, he was a flamboyant rascal, he. Not at all what you think of when you see a prim sewing machine sitting on your maiden aunt's work table.
Sure, he had violated Howe's patent, but in the process he had also immensely improved the machine as well, and it sold like crazy, so for a while in the early days he could afford to be sued. He was an established inventor in his own right (getting 20 of his own patents), and a man overflowing with natural ingenuity.
Among his sewing machine improvements were:
a straight vertical needle instead of a curved horizontal one
power delivered by a foot treadle rather than a hand crank
a built-in table to support the work
a presser foot to hold the fabric flat while the needle poked it
a rigid arm with a moving needle instead of a needle stuck in the end of a vibrating arm
And Singer marketed well. Very well. Exceedingly well. Crazy well. He was a marketing genius, this guy.
-- img url goes here -- Isaac Singer.
Like Howe, Singer had set up contests between his machine and batches of the fastest sewers working in clothing factories. But unlike Howe, Singer created purchase lust. He actually sold machines, which was the point after all.
And.
Singer provided a 12-month guarantee for every single stitch produced by each and every one of his sewing machines. Think about it.
Singer's company had the first million-dollar advertising budget, ever. And a service department. And was the first to sell on the installment plan. That was the kicker, that one. Everyone wanted a sewing machine, but the machines were hellishly expensive then. Hellishly. So Singer let customers pay a few dollars a month, forever.
Deal. People loved that.
The money, first as little trickles, became creeks, then streams, then rivers, until finally the torrent of money raged and roared right into Singer's bank account in a gigantic, thundering, uncountable tsunami of cash.
Isaac Singer.
Born in 1811, Singer died in July 1875 at the age of 64, of heart failure, leaving either one or two wills, 24 to 28 children (or more), and a $13 million to $14 million estate. In today's dollars that would be somewhere between $250 and $270 million. In real terms, it was more like a multi-billion-dollar estate, since the mere numbers don't translate exactly. There was less money around then, and swinging a bag of cash in those days did significantly more damage.
After Singer's death there was furious infighting reported among his heirs and supposed heirs and most everyone else. Imagine. Finally, decades later, Daisy Singer Alexander, the last heir standing, wrote a note reading "To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle, and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike. Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937." Then she sealed the note in a bottle and dropped the bottle into the Thames River in London.
Alexander died two years later, in 1939. Her estate was worth $12 million, and the bottled note was her only will.
In 1949, in San Francisco, the unemployed and nearly penniless Jack Wurm (or Jack Wrum, or Jack Worm), walking along a beach, found a bottle with a note in it. The note was Daisy Singer Alexander's will. He got $6 million, and an additional $80,000 a year from the Singer stock that he also inherited.
The bottle is thought to have traveled to the North Sea, to Scandinavia, then past Russia and Siberia, through the Bering Straits and into the Pacific Ocean, where it drifted south until finally, after twelve years, it bumped into a San Francisco beach. True, maybe. Aren't good stories always true?
And so, with everyone safely dead, everything settled, and after all these years of struggle, the sewing machine was finally on the scene, and it became possible to manufacture backpacks commercially.
The only remaining hitch was finding some decent fabric.2, 3
– Footsie Notes –
1: Background on sewing machines: http://bit.ly/1A9uHCU
2: More background on sewing machines: http://bit.ly/1sg0zl7
