TRAVELING TOO LIGHT?

摘要

Once a Year or so, i Visit my old gear. If s all lined up in a storage unit in suburban Illinois, like relics in a fluoro-lit Wunderkammer: a blue internal-frame backpack, my first love (age 10), kindly donated to me by LL. Bean to replace the Kelty external-frame I lost when my summer camp burned down; a negative-five-degree sleeping bag that got me through a two-day snowstorm on Aconcagua; a pair of double-plastic Scarpa mountaineering boots I wore up a volcano in Mexico, across a glacier in Alaska, and to the bagel shop one morning in snow-stunned Providence; a wooden canoe paddle; a wobbly headed ice axe; a row of scuffed and sticker-slathered Nalgene bottles that I used to fill with boiling water, throw in the bottom of my sleeping bag, cuddle with through the night, and then, come morning, crack open and drink from, the water now a lukewarm, plastic-infused tea; as well as an array of gimmicks (remember the Kelty Back Balancer? the Garmin Geko?) quickly disfavored but never discarded.