The lure of the ultralight

Caution: late-night web surfing can rock your world. At midnight, when I should be climbing into bed, I flip open my laptop to google “Camino de Santiago gear list.” The query catches the usual net of fish, some dead, some wriggling with life.

Backpack45 has a good site covering the Camino and other less urban backpacks. Drill down to their gear section and you see that they’re proponents of ultralight packs, packs that can weigh less than a pound! Check out Gossamer Gear or Golite if you want to have your structured pack world turned upside down. Gossamer's G5, pictured, weighs about 8 ounces. I’ve never seen packs like these—as unstructured as nightgowns, as light as airmail letters.

Well, not quite. But learning there are packs that weigh a fifth of the pack I’m taking along makes me question all my choices, just as unhappily marrieds might feel when they see that new billboard in Chicago, the one with buff unclad men and women and the message, “Life is short; get a divorce.”

I’m not convinced I want to divorce my Deva 60, but the Ultralights do lure me a little with their lovely insubstantiality. Again there’s that paradox of buying more so that you end up with less. More and more money for smaller and lighter gear—that’s what the computer world is all about, too.

I may look into those packs when I have more time, but I imagine what they lack is structure. The shoulder straps and waist belts (when they have the latter) are empty wisps of nylon that you can stuff with socks or spare clothes. Needless to say, there’s no internal frame, though supposedly you can use a sleeping pad to create some structure. For now this girl with back issues will stick with her well-structured Deva (see the well-padded waistband in the photo of a Deva 60). Maybe next time I’ll try ultralight.

And as wm commented on my last post, “Getting the weight you'll be carrying down to the bare minimum is symbolic of reducing excess mental baggage.” True enough. And in the end, the heaviest thing I’ll be carrying is most likely myself. I’m the lug I have to lug along, no matter how light my pack and gear.

Camera or binocs?

Since I'll be carrying everything on my back for over 200 kilometers, weight is a real issue on the Camino. No back-up vans or donkeys for me; I am the beast of burden on this trip. And so I'm considering what for some would be unthinkable: leaving my camera behind.

Yes, I want to document the walk, but I've also been on lots of trips sans camera and have never really regretted it. I'm not much of a photographer, and my snaps of places never do them justice anyway. Also, I'll be lucky if I find internet cafes where I can post on this blog. How much harder will it be to find a place to download my photos and then post them? Will I need the little card reader too, or will the USB cable be sufficient? Sure, it'd be nice to have photos even if I can't post them along the way. But still...

I'm thinking of bringing a lightweight pair of binoculars instead. My painter friend Andrea, who recently got a Masters of Fine Arts at Rutgers, writes, "I am excited for you to see all the portals that I so diligently memorized only two years ago. Beautiful carvings to be seen. Notice how the religious message gets less threatening and condemning as the cathedrals get younger."

I'm excited too. But some of those portals soar pretty high and my eyesight is poor. With a pair of binocs, I'd get to see just what sort of torment those saint are enduring.

My old Nikon Coolpix 775 weighs 6.5 ounces without the battery, but the battery doubles the weight, plus I'll need an extra battery, compact flash cards, a cable, and maybe the card reader. That's over a pound total and maybe more like a pound and a half. And remember, I'm trying to keep my total load under 15 pounds (my pack itself weighs 5 lbs.).

My REI 8 x 25mm binoculars feel like they weigh about as much as the camera with its battery.

Maybe I should forgo both tools? Some may say the solution is easy--just buy newer, better, lighter equipment. But I've got a list of new gadgets I need to get first, starting with a job.

Just say no to convertible pants

In preparing for my walk, I have to quell a perverse desire to do it all wrong. To ignore the good advice about sturdy boots, sun protection, and packing light.

Why not hike the route in green suede wedgies, dragging a wheeled suitcase, a Chinese rice paper parasol over my shoulder, lugging a hardcover copy of Christopher Hitchen’s God is Not Great? I dream of being belligerently unprepared, but still walking circles around the geared-up masses.

And masses there will be. Since the pilgrimage started to come back into its own in the late 1970s (after centuries of few pilgrims walking the route), each year brings more walkers. Two thousand four hundred and ninety-one pilgrims officially completed the Camino in 1985, requesting the Compostela (the certificate that says you walked the route). In 1995, 19,821 pilgrims did the same, and in 2005, the number was 93,921.

Of course, if I gave in to my anti-gear urge I wouldn’t add my number to the burgeoning holy hordes. I’d last less than a day on the trail. So I’m getting serious, making the effort to find the right tools for the job. I have a good pack (I hope—I’ll report on how it treats me on the trail), and two pair of good and well-worn-in boots to choose from (I’ll only bring one, of course—boots are heavy). My boyfriend is an avid backpacker so I can borrow a few key items from him, including a lightweight sleeping bag for the pilgrim hostels, which will probably prove to be the real challenge of the trip.

The pilgrim hostels, known as refugios or albergues, require a pilgrim ID (a credencial) for admittance. They’re ridiculously cheap at around 5 euros a night, but it’s been a long time since I slept in communal quarters, with bunk beds and shared bathrooms. Other Camino blogs warn of loud groups keeping you awake at night and early-rising bag rustlers who wake you up before dawn. I’ll bring earplugs, of course, but it may be like trying to change the course of a river with a hat.

The amazing thing about these hostels is that some have served pilgrims since the 9th century, like the one in O Cebreiro, a few days’ walk from León. During the height of the pilgrimage traffic, in the 11th and 12th centuries, some small towns along the Camino had half a dozen hostels (where now there is one or none). Often the hostels were geared toward a specific nationality—one refugio for French pilgrims, another for the Germans, etc.

But back to gear. Though I’m trying to find the right equipment for this walk (as few things as possible, and as light in weight as can be achieved), I have to draw the line at convertible pants. You know the ones I mean—a zipper at mid-thigh lets you—presto! —transform an ugly pair of pants into an ugly pair of shorts. When they’re pants you’ve got a zipper weighing down the thigh region and poofing it out; when they’re shorts you’ve got an odd half-zipper hem that makes them hang weird.

Now I like multifunctionality as much as the next girl—witness my Swiss Army Knife and my love of sporks. But convertible pants, though deceptively useful, are All Wrong, like the teletubbies. My heart sinks when I think of this neither-nor conflagration of two important items than in a perfect world would have maintained their separation.

It’s not just that they’re nerdy. I favor stretched-out long underwear bottoms under hiking shorts. This droopy-drawers over baggy shorts look is neither flattering nor fashionable, and it embarrassed my mother when we hiked together near Sea Ranch in Northern California. But convertible pants are beyond nerdy; they signal that something is not quite right. The horizontal seams make me think of a seam in a human limb—suddenly we’re in Frankenstein or crash test dummy territory.

Which is all a long way of saying, I suppose, that I’ll be taking both pants and shorts on this trip. Ask me how I feel about convertible pants once I have blisters on both feet, chafed shoulders, and am jettisoning every unnecessary ounce.

Trial run in San Francisco

Just a few weeks until this mostly secular pilgrim flies to Spain to walk part of the Camino de Santiago (the Way of Saint James), the medieval pilgrimage route across northern Spain. It ends at the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, where the bones of Saint James are said to be buried. Pilgrims walk to be absolved of their sins; in holy years (when Santiago’s saint day, July 25, falls on a Sunday) you get super-charged absolution. 2007 isn’t a holy year, and I’m only walking a third of the route, so I’ll have to pick and choose which sins I want forgiven. Even so, it’ll be a physiological purgatorial experience, as my friend William the former Benedictine monk points out.

I took my new pack on a test run today. I’m no gearhead but I’m kind of in love with my Deva 60. It’s made by Gregory, weighs just under 5 pounds (2.26 kg), has a smallish capacity at 3500 cubic inches (57 liters). It took me a while to get acquainted with all the pack’s straps and bells and whistles—I think if I looked hard enough I’d find a trash fiction pocket and a special pouch for pet ferrets. I’ll be keeping such baggage to a minimum, however. I read in the Pilgrim Guide to the Camino Frances (the best-known route), put out by the British Confraternity of St. James, than you should carry no more than 10 percent of your body weight. In my case that’s about 13 pounds, and my pack already accounts for more than a third of that weight. I doubt if I’ll be able to keep to the suggested limit, but I’ll try to keep my load under 20 pounds.

Medieval pilgrims in Europe didn’t fly to a starting point; they just walked out their front door and heading for Santiago de Compostela. A faint network of trails linked up with larger tracks and, as pilgrims got closer to their destination, they joined up with others walking well-worn roads—some built by the Romans—that felt the footsteps of everyone from kings to criminals hoping to atone for their offenses. Sometimes criminals were tried and sentenced to walk the Camino, getting their Pilgrim’s passport (their credencial), stamped along the way to prove they’d made the journey.

In the spirit of those early pilgrims I walked out my front door this afternoon with my loaded pack strapped to my back. Ignoring the elevator, I walked down 6 flights of stairs and out into the cool of a San Francisco day. I’ll have to fly to get to my starting point, but in a way I feel as if the pilgrimage starts today, the day I strap on my pack and walk out into the world.

Backpacking through urban areas makes people think you’re homeless. I got some looks, especially in the upscale Seacliff neighborhood, where Robin Williams and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have homes. But you’ve got to walk the city streets to get to the trailhead at Lands End.

I walked to Mile Beach, ate an apple and drank all my water so I wouldn’t have to carry it back. At the top of the stairway down to the beach I saw a shifty looking guy take stock of me and then disappear into the undergrowth. This place is pretty wild for being in the middle of the city; a year ago they found the skeleton of a guy who’d died in his hidden tree house here many years ago. No camping is allowed but there’s no way any ranger could patrol the overgrown network of paths and tracks. As I watched to see if the dude would reappear I wondered what it was going to be like walking solo on the Camino. I pictured lonely stretches of back roads and thought about what I would do if menaced. Yelling and brandishing my Swiss Army knife will be a start. If things heat up I’ll channel Uma Thurmond’s character from Kill Bill.