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Gettin' in Gear

When you feel you and something were meant to be together, well, that adds certain soulful symbiosis to that something.

By Ken Wright

I so love this time of year. Sap flowing. Flowers blooming. Trees budding. Rivers rising and swollen, and the snowy skirt hiding the high country finally lifting . . .

And the stuff needed to go play with all that is coming outta the garage.

This seasonal disgorging of sporting equipment - attire, footware, accessories and various sundry gadgets and gear and frames and parts - is an annual rite in my personal calendar. A sacrament. A celebration. A sensual, sensuous, tantric foreplay and tender fondling that teases with promises of full summery backcountry gratification to come.

Come mid-spring, I get to finally pull that gear out after its long winter's nap. I crack myself a beer, tune in a baseball game on the radio, then I set about reacquainting myself with the tools of my many play-trades. I sort and clean and organize them. I touch them. Smell them. Sometimes I just sit and sip and admire that great heap of well-used and many-storied funstuffs. And no sooner is the gear spread out before me, prostrate and exposed - even though it may be days or weeks before many of these fantasies will actually get consummated - than my travel-lusts are already hot.

There's something about gear. Especially well-traveled and travel-worn gear, in which each blemish is a tale, and every scuff, scrape, ding, gouge, and repair a strand of one's own life's DNA. But don't get me wrong: Despite my well-stocked garage full of essential equipment required for the many outdoor activities we engage in here in the mountains and deserts of our varied and rugged Four Corners country, I'm no gearhead. I don't find myself coveting the most popular brands or keeping up on the latest and greatest extensive, expensive, engineered and specialized collection of whatsises and gottahavits from all over wherevers.

The fact is, when it comes to my outdoor gear, I don't try to keep up with the Joneses. I just wait for them to have a yard sale. Look at me as a passive/aggressive opportunistic outdoor-sports consumer, a sort of recreational dingo with a credit card. (Or, more often, pocket change, a few bills, and a loose crumpled check or two.) My modus shopperandi is that when I find a piece of equipment or apparel that works - fashion or technological evolution be damned - I tend to stick with it until it decomposes, disappears, or falls apart.

Part of this stems, I think, from having been a long-time economically challenged American outdoorsman. As such, I have always met the vast majority of my hiking, biking, fishing, hunting, boating, skiing, and camping needs as a 21st century frontiersman might: by what can be bagged and foraged in the surrounding urban/suburban wildlands. And when you outfit your adventuring that way, well, your hardware comes pre-loaded with story software - that yard-sale score, that thrift-shop kill, that crazy close-out sale, that fine gift, that sweet pro-deal from that job that one summer . . .

When you feel you and something were meant to be together, well, that adds certain soulful symbiosis to that something.

Ultimately, though, my deepest and fondest feelings arise from the grand adventures together - the experiences I have been able to encounter and embrace because of this athletic apparati, regardless of it's market value or it out-of-date state-of-the-art-ness. I love my gear because it takes me out there.

And I think, sitting there, tasting the beer, savoring the cool spring night air, and enjoying the flirtatious promises of days and nights on rivers and trails, that it's not too much of a stretch to say that this slowly accumulated collection of well-storied and long-lived equipment has taught me all I really need to know in life:

Beauty is only skin deep. But function is forever.

May that be my own epithet.

Ken Wright covers his stuff in Durango. He is the author of Why I'm Against It All and The Monkey Wrench Dad. Learn more at monkey wrenchdad.com. You can also read his blog at sanjuanalmanac.com.