And now for more of those well thought-out, carefully constructed, completely serious essays on sensitive subjects of a political or important subjects which in no way should you take as humorous, tongue in cheek, parodies, or social terrorism (trying to piss you off because I think you could use a good off pissing (piss offing?).
Essay 1: We are all pigs beneath a tin roof.
Anti depressants do not work. Now, hold your horses, there, dear reader. Before you write me an angry letter to tell me how depressed you are, and how much more depressed you would be (or less because you would be so depressed you would kill yourself and thus stop existing entirely) without your magic happy pills, and before you write to me and say, you jerk, you drink beer, you are worse than Hitler (remember I am in Utah you out of staters) and should be burned at a stake, just bear with me, and grant me 3 hours of your time to finish a short blog of the usual length, with my usual brevity and concise treatment.
My first reason to suggest anti depressants do not work, is that no people have ever been more depressed than Americans. Also I have never met a single person on anti depressants who was not obviously depressed. Actually I can tell who is on them almost immediately, for the simple reason, that they are depressed. Now if you are paying an arm and a leg for a thing, you sure hope it works, and are bound to believe it does, and if you feel you need a thing, you sure will convince yourself you do. And hey, when you feel helpless you try anything. Every culture for about 5,000 years had a rain dance, except in Seattle, where they had dances for droughts, probably. If the ground wasn't too soaked and slippery for dancing. Does this mean, even when it rains, that there is truth to the rain dance? Benefit? Well there is no harm to it. I doubt one could argue that rain dancing made the Gods think, "look at these idiots, they actually think that thrusting of the hips and all this groveling would make us send them rain? Didn't they read the instruction manual we sent down, oh no, no...wait, here it is, we didn't send it. So they'll have to invent science. Whoops!
Well, actually I can argue that, and am, as of now. I think a better policy would have been to waive middle fingers all together at the sky and sneer, give us rain now, or else we will use our primitive cave tools to carve into the mountain face that you are a chicken and no one should worship or listen to you, because you lie, and lie, and lie again, like every drug addict, or boyfriend.
There is a benefit to placebo effect, but if you are going to suggest that taking brain altering chemical combinations is good for people, and paying a lot for them also helps, then you are a jerk. Sugar pills for free would be much better. Or how about this: stop making people feel bad in the first place. Jeez guys, try skydiving before you start messing with your brain, or go get drunk. Okay if you don't keep getting drunk, it makes you more depressed after you sober up, but just keep getting drunk! That still does less damage to your body than these pills probably do.
Now for a quick introduction to how chemicals are developed. Ever hear the 10,000 monkeys on a typewriter analogy? That with enough monkeys one of them will by accident write "War and Peace?" Well, big pharmaceuticals hire thousands of chemists and say, play around. They invent new compounds, these compounds, synthetically tricked up in labs through no plan or foresight, are then given to various animals. If the animals die, the compound is a poison and is sold as such. Pest control, and so forth. If the animal gets perky it is a stimulant or anti-depressant. Then it is given to different animals, say monkeys. If they don't die, it gets tested on humans. Any report or result that proves nothing is not reported. The companies only have to report what they want. So 10 dud results and 1 study that shows a slight improvement means a new anti depressant is on the market. And people actually tell me to take these things! Depressed people! Who admit to me they get so sad sometimes they just with they were dead or can't get out of bed for 2 days! These people say I am crazy to go do risky things all by myself in the middle of nowhere, though that: gets me high on my own natural hormones without the use of drug or alcohol, is fun, makes me happy, gets me in fabulous shape, is a break from the otherwise unbearable safe monotony of ever day life, has the benefit of taking me to natural wonders, has given me more confidence than I ever would have thought I could have before starting, and has numerous other benefits, the only downside being, I will probably die while doing it one day. So okay, it isn't exactly innocence. But its not a habit I have to steal electronics and cars to hock to support. So its got at least one up on meth.
You people are all insane. Have I mentioned this? You are. But you don't know you are. That's part of the insanity. Just because everyone is doing something does not make it sensible. Parents used to say this, now they do not, because they are too busy texting, which they used to tell their kids not to do. Now they rarely know they have kids. Anti depressants do not work, lastly, in my mind, for this reason: people are not all depressed for chemical imbalances. Autism, boredom, and depression were all invented a little after electricity, and hot water heaters. Until then, life was hard, and anyone who said that was looked at as an idiot not doing their part. If they were doing their part, they would not have had time for talking. People still died then, so mourning was tasteful, and within bounds. You buried your dad, you didn't whine about missing him to your kids and therapist for 20 years. Life was a challenge so quitting it was seen as cowardice and people thrived and succeeded as much on pure hate and refusal to be beat as to enjoyment or the pursuit of happiness. Or maybe, I mean, I wasn't there you know? But now, we are so removed from our natural environment, that I am convinced there is a fundamental disconnect. We are unhappy because we are not doing what we were designed to do and have not quite evolved out of. Our eyes cannot adjust to light changes as quickly as a light switch can open a circuit. So we get tingly dots for a few seconds. If we can keep electricity around for another 40,000 years, our descendants may be able to see instantly going from pitch dark to blazing bright rooms, but in the mean time, you cannot take enough of the cave man instinct out of a man to make reading a newspaper on a subway train in an underwater tunnel content. In his tie and business suit, some part of him, even if dormant, and never stoked or suspected, feels this is wrong. He will go to a doctor and be told he has a chemical imbalance and be assigned some pill or other. He trusts this doctor as a professional with more knowledge and expertise (or why would he be there? I have not gone to a doctor in over 5 years by the way, even for broken ankles, wrists, fevers of 104 degrees that made me break out into hives wherever skin touched skin (armpits, inner thighs) and you would not believe what else) and so will trust the pill, and expect it to work. And when we expect a thing, we will convince ourselves it is. After all, the problem is hardly defined, is at the edges of awareness. Can be kept at bay by busyness and chasing skirts or bowling or whatever else.
Pigs on big farms spend all their lives under a tin roof, never seeing the sky. They do not even know what a sky is, so how could they know they are missing it? Chickens who are "free range" (a garbage term) are provided access to fresh air, but only after 5 weeks- until then they are kept indoors for their own safety from germs (legal) and by that time, they are so accustomed to life in a pen, they will not go outside, for fear, and from shaky legs that they do not trust. But this choice of staying inside does not mean they are meant to, that they are happy having wobbly legs and having never seen a sky. They miss the sky, though they fear it and it feels unnatural. They have no nature anymore, and they cannot be happy. Yes chickens and pigs are now bred selectively without a "stress gene", meaning they cannot be happy or unhappy, and can now be cultivated with their tails and with their beaks as they will not let other pigs eat their tails and open them to infection, and will not peck their neighbors to death in frustration, but that is not happiness, and if you think it is, then go sign up for a frontal lobotomy, or shove a pencil through your eye at just the right angle...I support D.I.Y. attitudes in all things.
Do I need to bang home this analogy? Touch screens are not our natural environment. TV is not our natural environment. Rock and roll, or bless me, thank you depression era stars for writing it, early swing music, is not natural. Spend a little time each day detoxing: garden, meditate, read (still not natural, but closer than a computer screen), make food from scratch, take up a new hobby. Play darts (the modern miniature golf of spear hunting), go skydiving. Do something you never thought you would do, and never thought you could and think you should not. Move across country, or to Alaska, or to Siberia. Try anything. You're depressed already. And its still better than taking drugs from evil bloodsucking corporations bent on world domination that you have no idea even how to pronounce. Take a risk. Risk everything even. Go gamble, hell, why not? We are the least happy people in history, I imagine. There was no whining, few diaries in older times. People did not walk about in fear, or misery. Slaves were happier than Americans are right now. And yet look at all our pleasures...our bodies are designed for bouts of activity, for desperate escapes, for danger, for threat, for long periods of inactivity- broken up by emergencies. Without the emergencies we fall into malaise. I was never happy growing up. And I thought the problem was me. I was comfortable, I was loved (theoretically), I was safe, the environment I was in was good. It was just all so damned boring. I thought that all the time. It would be better if it were worse, just so something might happen. The Diary of Samuel Pepys is interesting. He gets into these zones where he says "Up. And to the office. Went as far as I dared with a pretty wench at the King's Tavern. Then home and to my wife." About 10 times in a row. And then you get, "All of London is on fire! And the Dutch fleet is rumoured to be at the mouth of the Thames, having sunk or captured 5 of our best ships. God preserve us! We shall all be sold into slavery or worse!" Then the entries are good for a few weeks before settling back into the tedium. We really need that government Viking program of mine.
Essay 2: Look what you've done with Zeus!
Blogs are a funny thing. Mostly, they are badly written without much thought and are dull if not trash. Few people say anything and few readers want to find anything being said. They are generally tedious. Hey at least I am not that! I make it a full time hobby to offend people. If you can go even a day without offending anyone at all, you probably are not saying anything. Or much. And if you have not been offended today, your friends and enemies are too boring. Find some new ones.
But if I were to write a brilliant poem about a deep and abstract concept, you would not read it. But a half-hearted blog, which amounts to little more than a diary, with the added vulgar touches of being written for others to see (oh the vanity!) and wasting electricity to be both written and read, a blog, I say, you are reading right now, as you can see. Yet I am writing one. It amuses me mildly at times.
Had the founding fathers had a magic crystal to see the future with, and if they could view you, and your neighbors dear reader, how do you think they would feel exactly? Proud? Happy? Confident and assured they were on the right path breaking from England?
"Look what a well-read, fit, healthy, moral, intelligent, and industrious people we have formed. Honest in their dealings, happy and generous and communal. They have done away with slavery and are atop the world." Is this what they would say? I doubt it. I think instead they would have torn up the Declaration of Independence and turned themselves over to England for immediate hanging. Hanging would have been too good for how they felt. Look what we have done with the powers of the Gods. With free time. When a man got any leisure time in the 18th century he invented a thing, or at least named it, whether it was the origin of species, or oxygen. And now what does one do with it? We have more of it than we can put to use and fun is getting to be too much of a chore. With the power of the gods to capture time and freeze it into images, we get average doughy mothers taking 400 pictures per hour of their normal average and superfluous children (99 percent or more of the species could be wiped out tomorrow by plague or meteor with no harm- and strike that- even large good. Those who remained would pollute less, be forced to breed with those unlike themselves, and live lives of stimulation and interest, and would represent in some way, a stronger gene pool, as something in them would have spared them) in fields of tulips where hundreds of other average doughy mothers did the same thing all day. Curse you Deguerre (modern inventor of the photograph by accident- and yet we celebrate him?), how happy children were before the strange device of cameras was known! How free children could run, not being stopped every few feet a Tulip Festival to pose, which leads to a lot of damned egotism that does harm (especially in those children who grow up to be ugly and unpopular; its like a tease- when I was six people like me! They think).
And though health obsessed, your average American will not walk a quarter mile to a grocery store or restaurant or gym, where they will walk on a treadmill, wasting electricity that for all you know or care, comes from feeding tigers through mesh strainers. (This would not stop you from using it. Nor would learning it comes typically from burning coal, which is mined dangerously by family men (in America) and by small children (in some but not all, other places.) Do you care? Of course not. Hey I'm using electricity to write this too, but at least unplug your appliances when not in use and try not to have a light on it you could just open the blinds hey? Americans are disgustingly fat, dress pathetically, never take their eyes off screens, are news obsessed but know little of what is going on at any given moment, retain less, know no history, understand less, barely pay attention enough to vote in elections, bitch constantly, drive recklessly, buy homes they cannot afford, did not build, take pride in that, sneer at anyone who likes to read, learn, or exercise (a favorite question I get: why are you on skates? As if there is something shameful to being good on wheels and not driving everywhere or doing something fun that requires skill), who have little will power, are slaves to their stomachs, to many companies, are hive minded, cowards who perform in their lives no military service and look down on those who do, yet insist on trumped up military spending, and I could go on and on. I doubt the founding fathers would have gone on with their experiment if they knew their eloquence and philosophy would give way to text messages of 140 or less characters and a public who cannot handle basic math.
And look what we do with everything. Free time. Destroyed. We fritter it away. Four generations back, your family was probably illiterate. Now you can read, and the highest art you utilize it for is Tom Clancy, if that. The farmer who slaved away to make your life possible down the line would smack you, if you could get textbooks and manuals and novels out of his hand long enough for him to notice you. Flight! Sweet! Weekend trip to Vegas! That's putting it to good use. Fire? Prometheus was chained down for stealing it from the gods to bring it to man. Why? Were they unjust, selfish? Ha. The gods knew just what they were doing. Look around at your neighbors. You think anything beautiful or potent can go unharmed in our care? Is not sullied? Or that fire has done us good? We are helpless in the dark, afraid all the time, and outside of professional athletes who could crush Roman gladiators easily, are weaker than other humans have been. We have comforts and the most average slacker can lounge about more than the highest Pharaoh ever managed, and can be more comfortable, for being free of flies. But he does not even know it. Don't point it out. He is too busy being a loser, feeling down. Fire has made us soft, but not much better. All right, we are not animals. And an interesting book "How Fire Makes Us Human" suggests that cooking food is a kind of pre-digestion which allowed more tissue to go to our minds and brains, as our intestines could shrink compared with primates who have to process raw and dangerous foods. Okay, but we are moving in the wrong direction. Our machinery is better but we let it rust. The gods are still furious that fire was given to us. Had Prometheus stolen it for himself, and used it to read at night, to cook his own food and develop a fine pallette, he would be in the stars with them. But he made the mistake of thinking the masses deserved what they would not reach for themselves, that they would put to good use what he would put to good use. Free time should be earned. It is a travesty how many hours I have had to waste in lurid cubicles. But there is no tragedy in most people having to rot in lurid cubicles. And democracy was a fine experiment but the problem with voting is no one cares a damn for it when they feel it is a right. Make someone fight for the vote, they treasure it, they follow the issues deeply and weigh their decision. We ought to take the vote away from everyone. That would fix America. Because every average Joe would get pissed off enough to pay attention and take the power back. But that will have to wait for another day and another (bad) essay.
Showing posts with label theories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theories. Show all posts
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Sunday, April 8, 2012
If you Use a Camelback, you're a sucker
When hiking I rarely meet anyone without a Camelback these days. I find them unnecessary and silly. They are difficult to clean, the hose can break or rupture, there are several parts to replace, they can tear (mine did when I had one), the twist cap where one fills the bladder can slip and leak (mine did) or slip and cause tearing around the rim for permanent leaking (mine did). And it costs $40 or more for a decent one, and is annoying to store unless in a specially designed backup. Those are all the bad. What is good about them? Well everyone assures me it is essential to get a constant and steady influx of water, which is nonsense, and counter-productive. First, studies and experimentation will show you that your body and mind attain more satisfaction from one gulp than an equal quantity of water in sips. Second, sipping a little water at a time encourages your body to sweat, as it gets the idea that you have water to spare. Third, if you are worried about hydration, then replacing what you lose is idiotic. Would you rather replace hubcaps the neighborhood punks steal, or not have them stolen to begin with? A better plan therefore, is to soak your shirt. Start wet and your body is tricked into thinking it has already sweated, or at very least, will not sweat. You sweat more as the sweat beads evaporate, so with a layer of water atop your skin, the sweat does not come out, or much slower. Last, off the top of my head, having a water bladder and sipping from it makes you weak. Either you have water nearby (a creek, rain, a waterfall) or not. If you do, then you need not carry water. It is silly too. More weight on your knees and back are bad for the body and the stamina. I suggest you lose more stamina with the weight of the water than you gain by the constant rehydrating. If you do not have water nearby, then you need to be working on wilderness skills: how to not only read, but interpret a topographic map, for one. If crossing desert or leaving a canyon or creek bed, study the map for stream crossings, and try to guess based on the terrain around you (color of leaves/bushes/brittleness of ground/recent weather if you know it, or what you can guess of it) which will be running and how deep. Or seek out springs, estimate how far you will travel until you hit water again. Then carry a little more water than you think you need. And never drink water (this is my best advice for all hikers) until you start to need it. If you baby yourself you will be a baby. I don't know when it came into fashion to coddle one's tummy while punishing the muscles, but people these days will work out like demons, all the while making sure to get a perfect influx of electrolytes and all that. Let's call this the marine principle- but I needed a new paragraph about a paragraph ago.
How marines train (if every memoir I have read was not making up the same lies; I have no direct evidence or experience): you get no gatorade and no protein bars. You get water, and food. Large meals, in a hurry, not snacks, and water only rarely, mostly at the end of the day. Snacking, and I have mentioned this on my food blog, fits into the same principles as water bladder sipping, with the nozzle right an inch from your mouth so you never take a parched step is a scam. Let us get there the Socratic way. I will ask you this: why do we keep seeing million dollar studies on vitamin C and colds? Do you think the benefit of vitamin C is yet in doubt? If so, then why are the orange juice companies promising us good health and fewer colds? Are they lying? The link is quite proven, conclusively, to put you at ease. Orange juice industry people are not lying to you. But why then the studies? Is this all the doing of scientific experts and specialists who with 25 years of vitamin C behind them are too old and settled to try a new line? Well they are abettors, but how do they get money? Begging. And by producing desired results regularly. Who would want these results regularly, in press releases, and tied to famous big name scientists at big name research labs and universities? Well in our vitamin C example, the orange juice industry. Out of sight out of mind. But every few months, particularly near the beginning of a new growing season, you will see lots of vitamin C and colds studies popping up in magazines. So back to snacking. Why would hundreds of studies prove "grazing" is better than meals? Who would want these studies? Right, the food industry. Any branch of it, but snack companies in particular. Companies are always looking for ways to get you to pay more for food (over your dead body as they find, Americans think of food as quantity only, not quality, we want more, not good, food for our money, which makes sense since Americans have bad taste in everything and pick loud and long movies over thoughtful and meaningful ones) or if not more for the same food, than to eat more food. Thus we have all these studies, funded by the food industry where nutritionists discover and prove it is better to have 6 small meals than 3 and even better still to have 12 than 6. Why? Because you eat more, stupid. People are not satiated by a snack. It does not even register in the brain, nor does it trigger much in the way of digestive hormones. It is a non-event, like a small earthquake you sleep through and have to read about in the paper. What's more, look at all the new products we have, all with sickening amounts of packaging to dispose of, though that is beside the main point: 100 calorie snack packs (a genius move by the food industry- people pay up to 10X more per calorie for these to stay thin, and the people buying them are often not thin, and these same people if served a 1/4 pound burger at a sit down restaurant rather than 1/3 pound burger would cause a scene or not come back), single serve yogurts, slim jims, and on and on.
And this allegedly to stop the spread of diabetes, which became a problem about when the "grazing" theory came out and became popular. This also did away with the family dinner (well it was a nail in a very tightly sealed coffin anyway) which is better for the various food industries, because if the kids aren't going to sit with Mom, why should she bother making something from scratch when there are TV dinners and boil in a bag dinners and all that sort of thing with much wider profit margins. I have strayed again, but I will find my way back. Would you believe I adore the book Tristram Shandy? It is a mock auto biography by an author who is barely born by the end of the book, as he keeps getting distracted and going into details about friends of his father, philosophical debates between cardinals about whether a baby trapped in the mother's womb can be baptized by "squirt" or no before both expire at the hands of the clumsy midwife, the correct pronunciation of things in Latin, and so on. At first (and here was my problem at age 12 when I first tried to read it and threw it away in disgust) one thinks, my blessed soul, I am 50 pages into this book and this clod has not gotten himself born yet! And then, poor woman, his mother has been in labor near 100 pages! But then by the 200th page, it is really just a marvel that the author could draw the thing out. I am listening to the audio version right now and I have never laughed so hard as when this comic genius reading the thing, takes a shallow breath to drawl out in fine classical british accent the single word "foot...note". And now, I need a new paragraph again or we shall never see the light.
You are told to snack to sell you 100 calorie wheat thin packs. You are told to sip water constantly to sell you a water bladder with replacable parts, that, if they are marketed as replacable on the label, you can be sure, will need replacing. There's more money to be had that way. And also to make you a week sissy weenie, there I've said it. The weenier you are, the more crap REI can convince you you need. I know how you feel. They spend the few sentences of every paragraph enticing you in these outdoor magazines. Then they tell you how prepared you must be. Which involves a staggering expense of gear. Now I learned the hard way that some gear is necessary. One cannot simply live in a fine place like Utah and throw on old beat up tennis shoes and go sally up a mountain for a day. I tried that first thing on moving here. And ran out of water on a dry trail, had to eat some dirty snow (I found two handfuls of it between some rocks in a miserable gully in late August) because all the small creeks and springs in the area were dry, sucked a pebble for three hours to keep my throat from getting too dry, resisted blowing my nose or spitting for fear of wasting the fluids, got so dehydrated I could not walk anymore, and just rolled myself down the steep gravely slope, ruining clothing and skin in the process, but recovering when I heard a creek some hundreds of feet below me, enough to drag myself to it, plunge in, cool my overheated body, gobble up water until I threw up (I knew better but you try stopping yourself sometime- torture is pure audacity, it is sexual frustration acted out. There is no need for it. Simply do not give a man water for 24 hours and keep him in the sun. There is nothing worse I promise you. If you disagree you have not been thirsty, you only think you have.) I dreamt of water for miles, I could think of nothing for an hour but the word "water, water, water." I learned a valuable lesson and went water bladder shopping the next day. Which took things too far. Only after the thing broke and I was too cheap to replace it (let me here insert that those who tell you something like a Camelback will last years do not hike much. My roomate has a tent that has lasted him 6 years and he will scold me with superiority when I find a small tear in a backpack or sleeping bag. Well, he has never used his tent. So I would hope it did not tear by being stored in a dry closet. And he hikes at most 2 days per year, so his Camelback is still in fine condition, true. But even taking care of my things, which I do, they wear out and break. This leads me to believe I must post on products very soon, in a more general blog.
Back to water bladders. Once it broke, I began to just let myself get thirsty, because the water bottles were on my back. I could not drink easily by walking. So I would just stop for a gulp every hour. Then that got tedious, day after day, so I went to every 2 hours, then 4, then I was only sipping water at noon, and rehydrating when I stopped around 4 to set up a camp. As I was not drinking, I stopped eating. Now I eat only a few handfuls to start the day and the rest when I stop. It is wonderful convenient if you want to make big miles in a day, and it is not even close to a hardship anymore. That's the thing about hardship is you get used to anything. When people sipping their waterhose (IVs will be sold in a few years) and eating a handful of trailmix or a 100 calorie craisin pack every 45 minutes by a timer meet me, and imagine what I must be going through, they cannot imagine. Well it is this: much less than they. Every 40 minutes they start to crave that snack, and every 5 steps, to want water. My body and I are in perfect concert. I demand that it endure, and when we stop, I will take the boots off, not put them back on, and pamper my body fully. I know how to rest and I know how to push. For my troubles, I get no hunger pangs. I can go a whole day without food and not even get much of a rumble. I love it. I start to notice hunger as I am eating. I have to press myself to eat at first. I get thirsty when I am drinking. There is no constant denial that the Camelback kids believe I must go through. I suffer so much less having suffered. For one gets to the other side, or over the crest, well, use your own analogy. Its better, trust me. And you can lighten your load. I am all about a light load and will blog on that soon too. The other consideration, even if you do not want to be a mighty man of blood and iron, is that when something goes wrong, such as you run out of water and are lost, if you are not used to getting water all the time, you will be able to endure without it. This summer I got myself into trouble with a friend who always sips water and politely suggested to me I was silly not to take care of my body. Well we were nowhere near water and wound up on our feet for 18 hours, covering 20 miles, going up or over 2 peaks, climbing all told 8,000 feet of elevation, much of it on broken vegetated cliffs with loose rock, debris, and with lots of exposure. It was stupid and should have been avoidable, but the difference in our staminas was rather shocking. He noticed it too, and I think I may have won in some part a convert to my method of thinking. I only wore out at the very end, when I had been without water and food for 10 or so hours, though I hid it from him, as I'd been a pillar till then and it was dark and I did not want to worry him. I ate some snow every few feet. He had more water on the day as he had his Camelback, but his bag was enough heavier for it that he dumped some expensive and nice equipment. And this is a very fit person. In ideal conditions, he can whip me: that is, running a marathon on asphault he would run circles around me. I had 1 liter of water in those 18 hours. I have also done 12 mile desert hikes in the last year on 90+ degree days with 1 liter or less of water. I usually bring a few swallows back with me and ritualistically pour them out or over my head when I reach my car. I do not ever want to be truly thirsty again.
So, carry either: a 1 liter bottle to refill, or if going more than 5 miles from road or town or car, then I suggest taking 2 bottles of that size. One should be narrow-mouthed and one wide-mouthed at the opening. Why? The narrow is easier to drink from when walking, the wide can be stuffed full of snow if you cannot find water. Try stuffing snow into a small opening sometime and you will see how frustrating it is,and time consuming. Also, eat all she snow you want I say. I have never gotten sick from it. Beware of water though. However, consider that guardia and other viruses won't get you sick for a few days to a few weeks usually. So do what you need to to make it through the day, then worry about the cramps later. When you are in your own comfortable house and have people to listen to your moans and pity you. Priorities. For purification, there are 2 good options, and one decent one. The decent is to carry an emergency filter straw by Aquamira. It costs $6, will work for 20 liters of water or so, and will kill most anything. It weighs one ounce. A better choice is a water pump. I prefer the Katadyn Hiker Pro, by far, to any other. The next best option is the Katadyn Hiker, which is the same pump but a less stylish color, and with a lower quality filter that will need replacing faster. However, if you will use the pump less than often, go with that one and save $10 or so. They weigh about 1 pound, have a fine carrying case, are an up and down easily pumped device which it would be hard to break, and offer some hose features that I lack the power of words to communicate, but which will make sense reading the instructions. Those I know with other brands are envious as the Katadyn is easier to clean, store, and use. I do not like the MSR as it has a swing hinge pump and will wear out over time, I expect. Let us say it is an established fact that a swing hinge on a single pivot is more vulnerable to physical stresses and forces than a pump that simply goes up and down, though I have no evidence that the MSR will break faster. I only know, that it should, in most cases. A hypothesis. Also I like the bottle adaptor with the Katadyn pump, as it has fit snug onto every bottle I have tried it with, to prevent spills and make for even easier pumping. The MSR would not fit a narrow-mouth Nalgene bottle and spilling was a problem. The Katadyn is a really fine product and at $79 or so, in the middle of the pack on pricing. The other option I used to prefer is Aquamira (not iodine) droplets. The trouble is, the bottles leak, though if you leave the foil seal mostly on under the cap, and press it down after using, it is better. But for each liter of water, you need to mix a few pipette drops from Bottle A with Bottle B. And scrambling around, they do leak. So you need to bag them. But they will kill anything, with even more certainty than a filter, so if going into a wilderness area where there will be cows (yes the government allows herds of non-native animals into wilderness areas to do much harm to it; the original definition of wilderness area explains that they are needed to keep jerks from overgrazing and destroying the lands, but assumes the right to graze; perhaps I will blog about the trip some of you have heard about where a herd of mother cows and I had a showdown and four of the ladies marched in line towards me snorting before I noticed I was between the herd and a wobbling little calf that had strayed off) or sheep (Uintahs, Wind Rivers), you may want to go with these to be sure you don't get infected from cowpies in the water. Also they weigh about 2 ounces and will not leak on flat terrain. And cost $15, which will last you for a hiking season, unless you are on the Appalachian Trail, and then they will last you a month to six weeks.
This has been another smug and exuberant rant where I come off as a superior know it all. I hope you enjoyed it.
How marines train (if every memoir I have read was not making up the same lies; I have no direct evidence or experience): you get no gatorade and no protein bars. You get water, and food. Large meals, in a hurry, not snacks, and water only rarely, mostly at the end of the day. Snacking, and I have mentioned this on my food blog, fits into the same principles as water bladder sipping, with the nozzle right an inch from your mouth so you never take a parched step is a scam. Let us get there the Socratic way. I will ask you this: why do we keep seeing million dollar studies on vitamin C and colds? Do you think the benefit of vitamin C is yet in doubt? If so, then why are the orange juice companies promising us good health and fewer colds? Are they lying? The link is quite proven, conclusively, to put you at ease. Orange juice industry people are not lying to you. But why then the studies? Is this all the doing of scientific experts and specialists who with 25 years of vitamin C behind them are too old and settled to try a new line? Well they are abettors, but how do they get money? Begging. And by producing desired results regularly. Who would want these results regularly, in press releases, and tied to famous big name scientists at big name research labs and universities? Well in our vitamin C example, the orange juice industry. Out of sight out of mind. But every few months, particularly near the beginning of a new growing season, you will see lots of vitamin C and colds studies popping up in magazines. So back to snacking. Why would hundreds of studies prove "grazing" is better than meals? Who would want these studies? Right, the food industry. Any branch of it, but snack companies in particular. Companies are always looking for ways to get you to pay more for food (over your dead body as they find, Americans think of food as quantity only, not quality, we want more, not good, food for our money, which makes sense since Americans have bad taste in everything and pick loud and long movies over thoughtful and meaningful ones) or if not more for the same food, than to eat more food. Thus we have all these studies, funded by the food industry where nutritionists discover and prove it is better to have 6 small meals than 3 and even better still to have 12 than 6. Why? Because you eat more, stupid. People are not satiated by a snack. It does not even register in the brain, nor does it trigger much in the way of digestive hormones. It is a non-event, like a small earthquake you sleep through and have to read about in the paper. What's more, look at all the new products we have, all with sickening amounts of packaging to dispose of, though that is beside the main point: 100 calorie snack packs (a genius move by the food industry- people pay up to 10X more per calorie for these to stay thin, and the people buying them are often not thin, and these same people if served a 1/4 pound burger at a sit down restaurant rather than 1/3 pound burger would cause a scene or not come back), single serve yogurts, slim jims, and on and on.
And this allegedly to stop the spread of diabetes, which became a problem about when the "grazing" theory came out and became popular. This also did away with the family dinner (well it was a nail in a very tightly sealed coffin anyway) which is better for the various food industries, because if the kids aren't going to sit with Mom, why should she bother making something from scratch when there are TV dinners and boil in a bag dinners and all that sort of thing with much wider profit margins. I have strayed again, but I will find my way back. Would you believe I adore the book Tristram Shandy? It is a mock auto biography by an author who is barely born by the end of the book, as he keeps getting distracted and going into details about friends of his father, philosophical debates between cardinals about whether a baby trapped in the mother's womb can be baptized by "squirt" or no before both expire at the hands of the clumsy midwife, the correct pronunciation of things in Latin, and so on. At first (and here was my problem at age 12 when I first tried to read it and threw it away in disgust) one thinks, my blessed soul, I am 50 pages into this book and this clod has not gotten himself born yet! And then, poor woman, his mother has been in labor near 100 pages! But then by the 200th page, it is really just a marvel that the author could draw the thing out. I am listening to the audio version right now and I have never laughed so hard as when this comic genius reading the thing, takes a shallow breath to drawl out in fine classical british accent the single word "foot...note". And now, I need a new paragraph again or we shall never see the light.
You are told to snack to sell you 100 calorie wheat thin packs. You are told to sip water constantly to sell you a water bladder with replacable parts, that, if they are marketed as replacable on the label, you can be sure, will need replacing. There's more money to be had that way. And also to make you a week sissy weenie, there I've said it. The weenier you are, the more crap REI can convince you you need. I know how you feel. They spend the few sentences of every paragraph enticing you in these outdoor magazines. Then they tell you how prepared you must be. Which involves a staggering expense of gear. Now I learned the hard way that some gear is necessary. One cannot simply live in a fine place like Utah and throw on old beat up tennis shoes and go sally up a mountain for a day. I tried that first thing on moving here. And ran out of water on a dry trail, had to eat some dirty snow (I found two handfuls of it between some rocks in a miserable gully in late August) because all the small creeks and springs in the area were dry, sucked a pebble for three hours to keep my throat from getting too dry, resisted blowing my nose or spitting for fear of wasting the fluids, got so dehydrated I could not walk anymore, and just rolled myself down the steep gravely slope, ruining clothing and skin in the process, but recovering when I heard a creek some hundreds of feet below me, enough to drag myself to it, plunge in, cool my overheated body, gobble up water until I threw up (I knew better but you try stopping yourself sometime- torture is pure audacity, it is sexual frustration acted out. There is no need for it. Simply do not give a man water for 24 hours and keep him in the sun. There is nothing worse I promise you. If you disagree you have not been thirsty, you only think you have.) I dreamt of water for miles, I could think of nothing for an hour but the word "water, water, water." I learned a valuable lesson and went water bladder shopping the next day. Which took things too far. Only after the thing broke and I was too cheap to replace it (let me here insert that those who tell you something like a Camelback will last years do not hike much. My roomate has a tent that has lasted him 6 years and he will scold me with superiority when I find a small tear in a backpack or sleeping bag. Well, he has never used his tent. So I would hope it did not tear by being stored in a dry closet. And he hikes at most 2 days per year, so his Camelback is still in fine condition, true. But even taking care of my things, which I do, they wear out and break. This leads me to believe I must post on products very soon, in a more general blog.
Back to water bladders. Once it broke, I began to just let myself get thirsty, because the water bottles were on my back. I could not drink easily by walking. So I would just stop for a gulp every hour. Then that got tedious, day after day, so I went to every 2 hours, then 4, then I was only sipping water at noon, and rehydrating when I stopped around 4 to set up a camp. As I was not drinking, I stopped eating. Now I eat only a few handfuls to start the day and the rest when I stop. It is wonderful convenient if you want to make big miles in a day, and it is not even close to a hardship anymore. That's the thing about hardship is you get used to anything. When people sipping their waterhose (IVs will be sold in a few years) and eating a handful of trailmix or a 100 calorie craisin pack every 45 minutes by a timer meet me, and imagine what I must be going through, they cannot imagine. Well it is this: much less than they. Every 40 minutes they start to crave that snack, and every 5 steps, to want water. My body and I are in perfect concert. I demand that it endure, and when we stop, I will take the boots off, not put them back on, and pamper my body fully. I know how to rest and I know how to push. For my troubles, I get no hunger pangs. I can go a whole day without food and not even get much of a rumble. I love it. I start to notice hunger as I am eating. I have to press myself to eat at first. I get thirsty when I am drinking. There is no constant denial that the Camelback kids believe I must go through. I suffer so much less having suffered. For one gets to the other side, or over the crest, well, use your own analogy. Its better, trust me. And you can lighten your load. I am all about a light load and will blog on that soon too. The other consideration, even if you do not want to be a mighty man of blood and iron, is that when something goes wrong, such as you run out of water and are lost, if you are not used to getting water all the time, you will be able to endure without it. This summer I got myself into trouble with a friend who always sips water and politely suggested to me I was silly not to take care of my body. Well we were nowhere near water and wound up on our feet for 18 hours, covering 20 miles, going up or over 2 peaks, climbing all told 8,000 feet of elevation, much of it on broken vegetated cliffs with loose rock, debris, and with lots of exposure. It was stupid and should have been avoidable, but the difference in our staminas was rather shocking. He noticed it too, and I think I may have won in some part a convert to my method of thinking. I only wore out at the very end, when I had been without water and food for 10 or so hours, though I hid it from him, as I'd been a pillar till then and it was dark and I did not want to worry him. I ate some snow every few feet. He had more water on the day as he had his Camelback, but his bag was enough heavier for it that he dumped some expensive and nice equipment. And this is a very fit person. In ideal conditions, he can whip me: that is, running a marathon on asphault he would run circles around me. I had 1 liter of water in those 18 hours. I have also done 12 mile desert hikes in the last year on 90+ degree days with 1 liter or less of water. I usually bring a few swallows back with me and ritualistically pour them out or over my head when I reach my car. I do not ever want to be truly thirsty again.
So, carry either: a 1 liter bottle to refill, or if going more than 5 miles from road or town or car, then I suggest taking 2 bottles of that size. One should be narrow-mouthed and one wide-mouthed at the opening. Why? The narrow is easier to drink from when walking, the wide can be stuffed full of snow if you cannot find water. Try stuffing snow into a small opening sometime and you will see how frustrating it is,and time consuming. Also, eat all she snow you want I say. I have never gotten sick from it. Beware of water though. However, consider that guardia and other viruses won't get you sick for a few days to a few weeks usually. So do what you need to to make it through the day, then worry about the cramps later. When you are in your own comfortable house and have people to listen to your moans and pity you. Priorities. For purification, there are 2 good options, and one decent one. The decent is to carry an emergency filter straw by Aquamira. It costs $6, will work for 20 liters of water or so, and will kill most anything. It weighs one ounce. A better choice is a water pump. I prefer the Katadyn Hiker Pro, by far, to any other. The next best option is the Katadyn Hiker, which is the same pump but a less stylish color, and with a lower quality filter that will need replacing faster. However, if you will use the pump less than often, go with that one and save $10 or so. They weigh about 1 pound, have a fine carrying case, are an up and down easily pumped device which it would be hard to break, and offer some hose features that I lack the power of words to communicate, but which will make sense reading the instructions. Those I know with other brands are envious as the Katadyn is easier to clean, store, and use. I do not like the MSR as it has a swing hinge pump and will wear out over time, I expect. Let us say it is an established fact that a swing hinge on a single pivot is more vulnerable to physical stresses and forces than a pump that simply goes up and down, though I have no evidence that the MSR will break faster. I only know, that it should, in most cases. A hypothesis. Also I like the bottle adaptor with the Katadyn pump, as it has fit snug onto every bottle I have tried it with, to prevent spills and make for even easier pumping. The MSR would not fit a narrow-mouth Nalgene bottle and spilling was a problem. The Katadyn is a really fine product and at $79 or so, in the middle of the pack on pricing. The other option I used to prefer is Aquamira (not iodine) droplets. The trouble is, the bottles leak, though if you leave the foil seal mostly on under the cap, and press it down after using, it is better. But for each liter of water, you need to mix a few pipette drops from Bottle A with Bottle B. And scrambling around, they do leak. So you need to bag them. But they will kill anything, with even more certainty than a filter, so if going into a wilderness area where there will be cows (yes the government allows herds of non-native animals into wilderness areas to do much harm to it; the original definition of wilderness area explains that they are needed to keep jerks from overgrazing and destroying the lands, but assumes the right to graze; perhaps I will blog about the trip some of you have heard about where a herd of mother cows and I had a showdown and four of the ladies marched in line towards me snorting before I noticed I was between the herd and a wobbling little calf that had strayed off) or sheep (Uintahs, Wind Rivers), you may want to go with these to be sure you don't get infected from cowpies in the water. Also they weigh about 2 ounces and will not leak on flat terrain. And cost $15, which will last you for a hiking season, unless you are on the Appalachian Trail, and then they will last you a month to six weeks.
This has been another smug and exuberant rant where I come off as a superior know it all. I hope you enjoyed it.
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