You can never have too much gear

Back in 1991 I bought an EverReady convertible flashlight/lantern which has been with me on every trip since (in the linked picture mine is the small one on the right).  It has served me well over the years, and has been one of the most useful pieces of gear I’ve ever bought.  These days I mostly take it along as a kind of rabbit’s foot.  The silver is coming off the reflector and the battery compartment is getting fussy, so I’m afraid one day I won’t be able to get it open to replace the batteries without it breaking.  I would have gotten another one a long time ago, but for some reason nobody was making anything like it for awhile.  It went from being able to see them in every sporting goods department and hardware store to not even being able to find this style of lantern on the InterWebs. 

But the new generation of led battery lighting has made for some really nifty, compact new designs.  I found Kelty’s Flashback Mini Lantern and decided this was the one to take over from good ol’ EverReady. 

It has an anodized aluminum body, available in black, green or yellow (I picked green), rubberized trim, and a solid, well-machined feel.  It is very compact, taking up much less room than what it is replacing.  Three intensity settings and a flashing mode plus a bail for hanging make this a really neat little light.  It feels like a precision instrument, solid in the hand and smooth to operate, changing from a flashlight to area lantern with a quick pull.  It’s a bit pricey, but with care it should last many years.  I used a good discount that I had available when I bought it from L.L. Bean, which kept the price down.  You might want to watch for sales or use a discount program if you decide to buy one. 

And speaking of L.L. Bean, it was one of the few places I could find a decent warm-weather sleeping bag.  My down bag is overkill for this trip, where hot, humid weather is going to be the challenge.  I still want to have adequate bedding for chilly desert nights or unseasonably cool weather, but I needed something less arctic than the down bag.  L.L. Bean’s Sportsman’s XL  40-degree bag fills the bill.  It’s roomy, has an actual cotton flannel liner (hard to find these days), and a tough outer shell.  Like all rectangular bags, it will unzip to make a decent comforter over a camp or RV bed.  It should last for many years, unlike the crappy low-end models that were all I could find at local retailers.  It was more than I’d planned to spend, but I’m not seeing the cheap-but-serviceable summer bags I used to find.  The cheap bags aren’t so cheap anymore, and they are beyond awful with shoddy workmanship and scratchy, pill-prone linings.  This one is much better, and seems hefty enough to be useful in a wide variety of temps.

For coffee, I knew I wanted something very compact and lightweight for this trip.  That ruled out my GSI press pot, and even the little stove top espresso makers.  After much experimentation with camp coffee making, I’ve decided the best tasting coffee probably comes from a simple drip cone.  These are less bulky than press pots, and are much easier to clean.  Cleaning a press pot in camp is a bummer chore, there’s no super quick, mess-free way to do it.  I’ll keep my press pot, but I want to try something new.

GSI makes a fantastic collapsible silicone coffee cone that snaps down an inch high and comes with its own little lid. It’s called the Java Drip, and it will accommodate a variety of paper cone sizes.  It calls for size 4 filters (whatever that is), but you could use any size paper filter they make in this thing.  Small ones drop in, large ones can just be gently pressed in and formed.  (Trust me, I do it all the time at home with filters that aren’t made to fit my at-home dripper basket.)   The Java Drip sits comfortably on a mug or wide mouth container for brewing.  Takes up almost no space when folded down.   When deployed it is large enough to brew a huge pot of coffee, but works just as well for a single cup.  Just adjust how much coffee you use.  One reviewer claimed the silicone messed with the taste of the coffee, but I didn’t notice that at all.  Silicone will tend to absorb odors more than hard plastic, so I probably wouldn’t use this every day at home, but for camp and travel, I think this thing is perfect.

Later I’ll talk about what I’m using for GPS navigation.

Conversations with The Gray Goose

I have had a long talk with Goose.  Goose knows a lot about me, including one or two things nobody else knows.  She is a good listener, like all her kin, and she will never tell.  Each time I talk to her, telling her the long, drifting narrative that spools out as we ride straight roads, me letting her have her head and dreamily trusting her to keep on course, a little more of me goes out into the space contained by her body and each of us becomes a little more a part of the other.  It usually starts with an apology, reassurances that I do not love her less than the other.  It’s just that there is so much history with that other horse, the blue one.  I am at pains to explain to Goose why I, or more often others, will refer to her by the wrong name, forgetting she is not the same as the other one, the beloved, the heroine who I envision as a great blue roan, probably Percheron crossed with some long-lost indian pony from not long after the Spaniards arrived, a mix both mysterious and great.  A horse quintessentially American, born in the heart of this land and having galloped its roads.  A heroine with an ungainly, even an ugly name, but a name which has become like a prayer, a whispered lament, a great, sorrowing cry into the night.  A name which has become beautiful, in the way that a homely face becomes beautiful when it is the face of one much loved.

Goose is very much like the other one, yet she is not the same.  There is great familiarity, great comfort in her wide, solid embrace, in her familiar smells and sounds, and in how my hand knows just where to go to direct her warm breath onto me in the chilly nights, or her cool blowing on hot days, or to put her into the gear that lets us go leaping off the road into the wild, unpaved desert tracks.  She is of the same race, though she does not have the same wicked sense of humor, the cranky, sometimes willful penchant for disobedience (though there are times that disobedience was in response to a cry from afar, really an act of loving service given as perhaps a final act in a long history of service).  Goose is more biddable, a quieter, more peaceable soul, but it may be because she is a bit younger and has not been worn so hard by as many miles.  It may be that her first girl, a woman by the name of Laura Graham, shaped her into a gentler creature, created the foundation that I would one day build upon.  I never met Laura and know little about her, except that she took delivery of Goose back in 1989 and kept her until she passed into the hands of a lovely couple with the wonderful last name of Buck.  And then she came to me. 

It pleases me that Goose belonged to a girl first, it feels as if she is meant to belong to a girl, though you wouldn't think it to look at her.  But I think she is meant for a tough girl who has places to go and has a lot of gear that needs hauling and wagons that need pulling.  A girl with a secret pain in her heart which very few people would understand.

I lean my forehead against her, lay my hand on her, weep, tell her she is good and true and strong, and that God has given her to me just like I was once given another.  She does not ask me if I would trade her for the other one if I could, if I had to.  She is patient and stands quietly, her great heart beating steadily, awaiting my command.  I draw a ragged breath and tell her there has been enough loss and despair, we should think of other things, things more pressing to the moment.  Like the road that is waiting for us.

I tell her I am a little scared.  Actually, if it comes to it, more than a little scared.  I tell her I have never been as far on that road as I am preparing to go.  She says, calmly, “I have.”

I blink, look at her regarding me peacefully with the gentle gaze of her round gauges.  “You have?”

She tells me what I should have already known, talking in the way she has that is not words but pictures that spring into my mind, showing me what she wishes to convey.  She says that when she first came west she did not gallop all the way herself, but rode on the back of another beast, but that she remembers the wind in her face, the scenery going by, the vastness of the Great Plains, the beautiful emptiness of the desert. 

“Don’t be afraid,” she says.  “I know the way.”

And I smile.

 

Oklahoma!

Like a lot of other people watching events in Oklahoma, I was seized by what my Dad would call a “horrible fascination.”  I look at the blendered remains of peoples’ homes and lives, and I see that no matter how good or stable your life is, it can all be taken away in a moment.  I am not alone in the universal experience of loss, grief and the bewildering sense of displacement following a traumatic life event.

For a while I looked at pictures, watched videos and read news stories, completely forgetting that in a matter of weeks I would be driving through Oklahoma City myself.  When I remembered this, it brought me up short.

Should I avoid the area altogether?  Delay my trip until after tornado season is over?  Give up my plan to return via the southern route and come home on Highway 80? First of all, I won’t need to drive directly through the damaged area, since I’ll be on Interstate 40, which did not take a direct hit and runs north of Moore, right through Oklahoma City.  So I don’t have to worry about being held up by debris or detoured around areas of damage (at least as of this moment).  I don’t plan to get off the freeway and take a tourist run through the wrecked neighborhoods, even though I’ll be right there and it will be perhaps the only chance I’ll get to see tornado damage on this scale in person.  I don’t want to get in the way of folks trying to pick up the pieces or crews trying to clean up and restore infrastructure.  And out of respect to the people who have suffered so much, I don’t want to gawk at their loss and pain.  I have a good enough view through the media coverage.  If I had the time, I would try to hook up with a volunteer group that would allow me to put some real time and effort toward the area’s recovery.  In that scenario I would feel okay about viewing the devastation first hand.  But I just don’t have the time.  Instead, I’ll try to buy gas and supplies from a local business and offer what words of encouragement I can to any local person I meet. 

The more pressing concern is what will I do to keep myself safe from these storms while driving through the heart of tornado alley during tornado season?  Statistically speaking, I’m safe as houses, as the Brits would say.  My chances of being anywhere near an actual tornado let alone being struck by one during my brief passage through the area are vanishingly slim.  But there are precautions I can take.  I’ve watched enough Storm Chasers and assorted other torn porn on the Interwebs to know what severe thunderstorms look like, so the first line of defense is to keep an eye on the sky.  But I’ll also have AM, FM and NOAA weather radio, as well as mobile Internet connectivity and the ability to see the radar and read the watches and warnings for the whole country.  My NOAA radio can be listened to at any time for immediate weather conditions and lists of all the weather alerts for the area I’ll be in.  The great plains are well covered by NOAA transmitters which all broadcast alerts and information specific to the area they are serving.  I can also set the radio to alert mode.  If any warnings come through, the alert tone will sound and the radio will come on so that wherever I am, even while I’m driving, I’ll be warned about dangerous conditions.  From there it’s pretty simple to check the Doppler radar to see exactly where the cells are that could potentially produce a tornado.  This allows one to route around them or wait until they pass before driving through the affected area.  There’s also hail, lightening, torrential rains, downbursts and high straight line winds to consider with severe thunderstorms.  All good reasons for staying out from underneath them, especially while towing a trailer!  You can bet I’ll be paying attention to all aspects of the weather while driving through Tornado Alley.  Maybe I’ll even see a famous storm chaser or two on the road!

This is a test.

This is a test.  This is only a test.  Life is not a test, it's a journey, but the journey begins with trying things out, or, to put it another way, testing how the world works.  Pretty soon 'ol Mountain Kimmie is goin on a road trip, and this is part of getting ready.