Helium

Another trend for the new year---ultralight. Two years ago I went on a weird binge of deciding I needed to get real outdoor gear. I had been motivated by my trip to France the year before that, when I realized how poor my gear was, and how it limited my movements and options. Then when I got back to Colorado in spring 2010, I got obsessed with visiting REI everyday and figuring out what I wanted to buy. I went through a phase of buying out lots of gear with the idea of being able to take off on the spur of the moment and hike up into the mountains, if need be.

This phase culminated in the trip I took this past summer/fall to the west coast. I camped using much of my gear, although some of it turned out to be a bust, and hardly useful at all. I guess that's a common experience. Nevertheless it did allow me a great spontaneity of travel---being able to camp anywhere I wanted, and to take off into the mountains in my car on whim, as I did when I left Fresno and headed up into the Sierras. I felt very mobile.

But now I feel like I've entered a new phase again. For one thing, I've decided that I'm going to take to the road again, but I am going to ditch my car. I'm either going to sell it or store long-term, I haven't decided which. I'm going to go back to being on foot, and carrying everything on my back. Where I'll go...well I haven't decided that, but I know this is the right thing.

As part of this, I've decided to embrace the concept of "ultralight," which is a trend in backpacking that, as it sounds, indicates that one tries to travel as light as possible. Every ounce counts.

I've learned that many of my gear choices from 2010 were poor choices on this score. They were okay for car camping, but were not ok when one tries to minimize the weight one carries on one's back. So it means buying a bunch of new gear. I've been making out a list of what I need, and using the site geargrams.com, which lets one keep a gear library/list organized by weight and category.

My first major purchase was a new backpack. This stung somewhat, since I'd recently bought a 350 dollar Gregory Baltoro internal frame that is awesome, but is over seven pounds in weight. I never have really used it, except to keep it in the trunk of my car. But it's too heavy.

I wound up purchasing a new Golite Odyssey on sale for a mere ninety bucks at the local Golite outlet in downtown Fort Collins. It's about three and half pounds. I could have gone even lighter, but I wanted to keep some excess capacity in the bag, because I figured I may need it for the various kinds of travel I might do.

It was fun to buy it. I thought about it for a couple weeks and finally dove in while the clearance sale was going on. It was especially fun to buy it here in my hometown. It reminded me of buying my old blue Camp Trail Explorer pack way back in the spring of 1985, at a little now-defunct store on South College, earned with money I made delivering singing balloon-a-grams. Lots of helium involved. I took that to Europe that summer, and trekked through the Eastern Bloc,  Turkey, and all the way to the ruins of Troy. It was "the trip that changed my life" right before I went off to Oregon as a transfer student.

I need that kind of energy of transformation again, and I felt a little of that old magic buying the Golite backpack. I was all of twenty years old back in the summer of 1985, and the world felt so different. Times have changed. It's freaking awkward trying to feel that way again. It's more than a little bit painful to feel how the world has changed, and trying to feel that optimism about life again. It seems so easy when you are young, to think you can summon newness into your life no matter what age you are. When are approaching fifty, it is a different story. You have to find a way to give yourself permission to be new, and that is not so easy to do sometimes. Or least it doesn't feel that way. I have to fight the voice that says "who the hell do you think you are, getting another chance to be new?"

Or as Satan himself once told me, in play:

Can't be born twice over, Can't be!

I thought it was good luck that while I was trying the pack on, I remarked to the attendant that I felt lighter with it, than without it, as if it were filled with helium. He replied that they had actually joked about helium-filled packs.

Then I walked down College with my back and stopped at a food cart vendor (something that didn't exist here in 1985). It was directly across the street from the offices of the long-defunct Balloon Family, my place of work. The building was bought out a decade ago by a locally famous billionaire businesswoman and turned into the headquarters of her charitable foundation.

I looked at the chalk board of food items and realized they were all Greek items, exactly the same kind that one buys in Greece---spinach pies, cheese pies, baklava. I could tell at once that the proprietor was Greek, so I used some Greek phrases interacting with him while I ordered. I showed him my new Golite Odyssey backpack.

"Maybe I'll use it in Greece," I told him, before biting into my spinach pie.