Backpacking Pussies

There are two newly-added photos to the right, one taken thirty-five years ago, and one taken five years ago. The top image is of my wife and me backpacking in Colorado in 1979, on the second day of a two-night, three-day trek. I think we hiked about a dozen miles, and went up above the tree line across the top of Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountains National Park.

The photo under it is me (standing on the left) near the end of a “campaign” Civil War reenactment in Tennessee near Fort Donelson, not far from Nashville. It was taken after two chilly, wet nights on the ground and over a dozen miles of “marching,” slogging, I’d say, along a muddy dirt trail.

In the hobby of Civil War reenacting, “campaigning” means backpacking, carrying your stuff all weekend. But to backpack as things were in the 1860’s means carrying only things that had been invented by the 1860’s. What both modern backpackers and Civil War campaigners have in common is a deep appreciation of packing light, of only taking essentials, of leaving at home all that neat stuff you “might” use.

As a modern backpacker since the 1970’s, and a Civil War campaign “backpacker” since 1998, I’ve concluded that modern backpacking is for pussies compared to Civil War campaign reenacting. That’s right: Pussies.

Modern backpacking is strenuous, sure. It requires self-assurance and minding a lot of details, but consider:

The light nylon tent, pack, and sleeping bag, the foam sleeping pad, the aluminum pack frame, the goose-down vests, the near-weightless boots with thick waffle-stomper soles, the cute little gas stove and tiny flashlights, the freeze-dried dinners, the foil-wrapped energy bars, the trail-mix of wheat chex, raisins and M&M candy in plastic baggies, the packs of fruit-flavored powder to add to God’s good water in a plastic bottle.

Under all of the light-weight modern camping and eating wonders, look at what we wore on the trail: Shorts and t-shirts for goodness sake! And, finally, no nine-pound musket, steel bayonet, and leather accoutrements. Pussies.

The Civil War was fought in an age before nylon and plastic, in an age before Coleman stoves and freeze-dried dinners, and before Tang went to space. Civil War shoes and boots were made of leather from top to bottom, and had slick soles. Wool and cotton were the kings of clothing and bedding.  I could go on, but you get it.

As a sidebar, wool was warm and shed water pretty well. But it was heavy and killer-hot in the summer. Cotton was cool, but soaked up rain, and didn’t keep the cold from your bones in the winter. The northern states had lots of sheep to grow wool, while the southern states had lots of cotton fields and slaves to grow cotton. Neither side had lots of both sheep and cotton fields.

Consequently, the Yanks, dressed in wool shirts, wool jackets, and wool trousers, sweated and suffered from heat and dehydration during the southern summers. Meanwhile, dressed in cotton blend “jean-wool,” as the Union blockade cut off the supply of English wool, the Rebs froze and suffered from pneumonia in the brutal winters of Virginia and Tennessee.   

The point of this post as related to my Civil War novels is to reinforce an appreciation for how tough people were in the 1860’s. They routinely walked long distances. They spent far more time outside than we do. They didn’t have air-conditioning and central heating, or cars, refrigerators, phones, radios, TV’s, X-rays, sonograms, computers, or “hand-held wireless appliances.”  

Hell, they didn’t even have aspirin for head-aches or anything for allergies. Water-treatment plants weren’t around, but then neither were twist-knob faucets, hot-water heaters, buried water pipes or flush toilets and sewer lines. It was the age of the outhouse and the water bucket. Tragically for many soldiers on campaign, it was the age of drinking filthy river water, shared with their horses and mules.

Like I said, those Civil War soldiers who stayed healthy, were tough hombres.

So that’s it for this week. The Cowboys lost to the Packers yesterday in Ice Bowl 2, and the first college football play-off championship game is tonight. I guess I’ll be an Oregon Duck fan, if for no other reason than their pioneering the current trend in flashy uniforms. Sort of like the Civil War Zouave uniforms did in the 1860’s, but that’s for another post.