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.

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.