Inventory

I remember as a child marveling at a Boy Scout mess kit. Inside a green canvas cover embossed with the Scout emblem was a shiny aluminum flying saucer. Loosening wingnut at the end of two extended metal tabs let me rotate a metal strap away and lift off the top half disk which magically became a deep plate or a shallow bowl. Inside was a pot with a lid, and inside that a pale green plastic cup marked with measuring gradations. The bottom disk, with the strap rotated and re-secured became a frying pan. Add a fire and you had a complete kitchen.

Such designs are ingenious in their compactness, but also carry with them a process that is an inventory. The act of assembling the mess kit also assures all parts are there. Long-distance hikers tend not to carry such kits today. They may be a compact way to store all the parts, but those parts weigh a fair amount and most are unnecessary. For cooking, I only carry a Jetboil which is an isobutane burner attached to the bottom of a half-liter titanium pot/cup (It too ingeniously fits together– burner/fuel inside the pot/cup for transport), a titanium spork, and a very small pocket knife. But all of my gear combined fits together in a way similar to the mess kit. The act of packing is in itself taking inventory.

Many long-distance hikers become equipment obsessed, something I, almost of necessity, share. The lighter, more compact the backpack, the more distance you can cover in more comfort (comfort is not the right word, less pain). A quick inventory: I’m hiking the Te Araroa with a 27 liter cuben-fiber Zpack backpack (1 lb). I have a Nemo 30 degree down sleeping bag (1 lb), and a Zpack cuben-fiber one person tent (1 lb). My gear is distributed in 10 dry and/or compression bags. Two exterior dry bags extend my pack volume and carry stove and a Nalgene bottle on one side, and heavy weather gear (rain pants, coat, etc.) on the other. A 20 liter dry sack contains my sleeping bag, clothes bag, a small toiletries bag, and a small equipment bag. A Sea to Summit micro backpack doubles as a food bag (and the bag to carry to the grocery store for re-supply). Those all go inside the main bag along with a 2 liter camelback water supply. My tent is in a stuff sack in the outside mesh compartment. And my attic (or as some people call it, the brain) is a small Zpack bag carrying wallet, passport, iPad and charger. It clicks off the pack easily and can then be carried to the store, cafe, pub. Other items outside the pack include a thermarest foam sleeping pad, rain cover, teva light-weight sandals, and a pair of Leki carbon fiber trekking poles. Total base weight– about 18 lbs.

I know, boring list, but just like the mess kit, all of those components fit together in a specific configuration. Every piece of equipment is important–even crucial– to success, comfort, and perhaps survival. Keeping track of it is paramount, and requires a degree of care that borders on obsession. That’s where assembly inventory come in. All the equipment fits in bags which fit into other bags, counting and being counted as the process unfolds. There is a temporal dimension to this spatial organization as things are packed and unpacked daily in particular sequences, and are often redistributed in another careful/ obsessive fashion. My tent, which is a single layer tarp held up by my trekking poles has a tub base suspended by mosquito netting. Apart from the gale on the Ninety Mile Beach dune, it has functioned incredibly well, snug and dry in the pouring rain. The tub is large enough for me, my sleeping pad and bag, and, distributed about the edges, all those small bags described above, each in a particular place so I can find them in the dark and so they can be re-packed in the morning. In some ways it is like being on a boat or a tiny house. There is nothing you don’t need, and there has to be a place for everything you have. It is a precision that enforces austerity and fosters care.

Nutrition also falls into the category of precision and care, but not because of preparation. Of course one can exercise both care and precision in camp cooking. Remembering to bring Tabasco, buying sundried tomatoes, or finding mushrooms can make a bland dry meal delicious, but the real issue with food is consuming calories. Backpacking 25-35 kilometers daily generally burns more calories than most people can easily eat in a day. Eating on the trail is much less about taste and culinary fulfillment than it is about pure consumption. Food must be lightweight yet packed with nutrition, and eaten carefully across the day.

There is a moment in Earl Shaffer’s book North with Spring where he complains about fading energy and expresses concern that he will not be able to continue his quest to be the first Appalachian Trail thru-hiker. He is a good distance into his hike, I’m guessing around one month, and he finds himself eating the equivalent of two suppers one night. He then realizes he simply was not eating enough. A probable explanation for this event is fat. Obviously it varies among people, but most long-distance backpackers lose most of their body fat about a month into the trip. Hikers note weight loss, but the accompanying energy loss can go unnoticed for a while. They are usually tired and just assume they’ve put in a big day. But careful attention can signal that shift which means you really don’t have reserve calories to call on at the end of the day unless you have eaten them that day. My Earl Shaffer moment came on September 27th mid-afternoon up on a muddy ridge. Just did not understand why I had run out of gas.

The equipmentality of hiking is a form of inventory, but in parallel, there is body inventory, those moments in the day when you check physical components. For me, those times are most vital just before sleep and on awakening. I lie there wiggling toes and fingers, rotating feet and hands, flexing all muscles, seeking out pain, anticipating trouble or discomfort. What is interesting is that such care translates into everyday gestures. It becomes hard to disentangle the pain inventory of your feet from the care you take with each step. Ideally each neither produces nor inflicts pain. Careful walking brings with it the desire to lessen all impact, producing gestures that do not disrupt micro-environments. Constant inventory attunes hikers to how everything fits together–that Boy Scout mess kit, marvelous and precise.

T. Hugh Crawford

Footpaths

First writing is done by feet. When we walk, we make marks and we make meaning. A path is deep writing. It is a material surface that over time becomes worn and accommodating, but it is also indexical, pointing out a direction–actually two. In addition, paths are communal: formed and maintained by community while at the same time forming and maintaining those very communities. They enable movement and embody memory. For children, at least those who are able to experience childhood outdoors (not on flooring, pavement or artificial turf), paths are possibility. Each day they start yet another adventure. Their windings are a wild writing, leading not to places of labor or commerce, but instead to the hidden which is also the imaginative.

Writing takes many forms, but the classic scene is a steel-nibbed pen scratching the surface of thick paper with the ink leaving a dark line modulated by the faintest lateral threads, liquid drawn out infinitesimally by capillary action of the paper’s fibers. The direction of the mark is, at a glance, obvious, but the possibilities of divergence are framed by those faint lateral marks. Drawn lines and footpaths–diagrams–have direction, but like their childlike wild counterparts also signal other possibilities.

Footpaths and words can take you places or get you lost, which is just a word for a place unknown. Through use, paths enforce a certain directionality. They are habituated to the feet that speak their direction, discourage divergence, dampen wildness. Even walking in blankness is all about making and possibly following marks. Ninety Mile Beach is flat, often 30+ meters wide, and can be walked comfortably anywhere in a wide section, but I still found myself following paths defined by earlier walkers or car tracks. On other beaches (I’ve followed many a beach track on the Te Araroa which is Maori for “The Long Path”) where the sand is often too soft to walk, my feet seek out a thin trace of shells that form a tide line and mark out firm footing. But paths are not just directors, they can be aesthetic, as in Richard Long’s famous 1967 “Line Made by Walking.” They remember passersby, and, for example, express grief as in Rider’s walk down his dead wife Mannie’s weekly pathway in William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black,” or they express and embody love, lovingly demonstrated in Eudora Welty’s “Worn Path” or the footpath of my own youth which led through an orchard to a girlfriend’s house.

On the other hand, a long-distance footpath must be precisely legible, so they tend to be multimediated. There is, of course the path itself, the reminder of where to step, step by step. Long-distance trails are, almost by definition, unfamiliar. The childlike pleasure of the wild path is, in long-distance hiking, overwhelmed by uncertainty and the physically high stakes of mistakes. A wrong turn can take the trekker many miles from intention. When crossed by another path, the trail needs further indication, often supplied by signs (made of wood or other ponderous material, but which can still be taken as wonders). Theirs is a writing that supplements the first pathwriting. Trail anxiety is also alleviated by other visual marks, usually some form of blazing. On the Appalachian Trail, these are white vertical rectangles (approximately 2 1/2″ x 6″) painted on a tree or rock, usually at eye height. Change in direction is signaled by the turn of the path itself, and reinforced by double blazes, often slightly staggered to indicate direction. In addition, the AT has blue blazes which point out secondary or supplementary trails, usually those which cannot be recognized by the differential width and wear of the path itself.

The Te Araroa is blazed by orange plastic triangles nailed to trees and posts at something that approaches eye height. Change in direction is indicated by doubling the blazes but also by tipping the triangle in that direction. Such indices are important on the TA, not just to alleviate anxiety, but also to embody the path which often, particularly in the Northland, can be more-or-less non-existent. In steep areas of, for example, the Herekino Forest, the slope can be completely washed out, giving no indication from the ground where to put feet. There the orange triangles become the path. But blazes also transform the experience of the pathway, moving it from feet and downcast eyes to scanning vision at human height, something that seems unimportant but is nevertheless phenomenologically significant.

Even with paths and blazes, it is still easy to lose trail direction. Often in the deep bush there is that heartsinking moment when you realize you have lost the trail. Usually, rather than returning to the last meaningful place (obvious path or blaze), a slight change in perspective, a simple shifting of head and eyes, reveals the obvious–Oh, there it is! Further mediation often takes the form of maps, usually topographical but also terrain profiles. I found that the Appalachian Trail itself was so well-worn and well-blazed that traditional topo maps were not necessary, though profile maps were useful in gauging the overall difficulty of the day. The most recent media form to layer over these others is GPS, which on smart phones takes the form of many useful apps that can obviate the need for all other writing except the path itself, which remains, as always, the first writing.

In a somewhat neglected essay, “The Biology of Cognition,” Humberto Maturana makes a distinction between connotative and denotative language. He does not appeal to traditional definitions of these terms, instead using “denotative” to mean the careful representation of concepts or ideas (in spoken or written language) to another person– almost like tokens passed from one person to another. In his schema, “connotative” then means the use of language to orient interlocutors to each other. When I ask someone how they are, I really do not expect bits of information about their health or financial status, nor am I directly interested in their mood. Rather, I am initiating an interaction where our mutual interests and concerns might in some way become aligned.

Maturana goes on to imply (as I recall) that a majority of language use is connotative, seeking orientation. Humans and other animals, fish, birds, insects, and microbes all orient themselves to each other through pathwriting. It is impossible not to marvel at the subtle communication within a formation of birds whose wings write currents in the air, leading those who follow to shift ever so slightly direction and speed. In Moby-Dick, Melville describes with fascination the watery paths leviathans follow in their migrations. Paths may not be denotative unless they are part of a highly ritualized set of symbolic gestures (e.g., The Stations of the Cross), but without doubt, they are connotative, serving to orient all motile beings to each other, their umwelt, livelihood, and selves. The hills of New Zealand are an intricate patterning of lines, a corduroy of paths and ledges made by generations of cattle and sheep, all finding a home in a steep and difficult place.

Footpaths and writing often come together (witness Wordsworth), and paths can be a model for thought, from Gerald Edelman’s notion of neural pathways to Martin Heidegger’s holzwege. The latter saw the path as thinking itself. One was never in a particular place or thought, but instead was always on the way toward it. To write is first and foremost to experience the open. To be on a footpath is never to arrive.

T. Hugh Crawford