on the philosophy of gear

Sun, Jun 8, 2008

This might sound a bit of an oxymoron at first sight. It might also seem a ridiculously pretentious post but what I’m trying to do is work out why I blog. Whereas I’ve got 25 years of hill diaries tucked away on the top shelf, this blog has only been going for about 18 months, with my first post back in December 2006. Looking back, it was a change in direction for me, with respect to wandering the hills. I’d decided that I’d go for the ML and start leading folk and to mark the occasion I thought I’d also launch into the blogosphere. Since then I’ve mainly posted about stravaiging, training and guiding, which is what I’ve written about in my diaries, minus the training and guiding. The diaries are personal accounts, to remind me of the friends, weather, conditions and routes we did and the solo trips I’ve done but the blog started to include articles that other people might find informative. The audience I was writing for slowly changed from my humble self, to whoever was interested in my electronically distributed opinions.

So why write a blog?

A lot of this blog is about recording hill days online using the connected media of Wordpress and Flickr (I’ve binned youtube as Flickr now do videos and I’d rather keep everything in the same place). Whereas my written diaries were purely textual, the online equivalent is both graphical and interactive and to boot, people looking for information on the areas I’ve blogged about can add comments. This sort of thing was called annotations years ago, using special software such as Annotea. However, simple platforms such as Wordpress have brought the “semantic web” to most people and the simple act of commenting on someone’s blog post can add a great amount of value to the information.

And then it occurred to me that blogging about hillwalking is just another form of review, really. Whether a philosophically abstract account of wanderings in numinous (to borrow from Jim Perrin) fastnesses or simple “go here, do that” style narrations. So why not do the same about gear I wondered? I ranted a bit about gear reviews here but started to go off topic as I couldn’t really find that much to rant about. Rather, I was brush stroking all gear reviews as irrelevant and “un-outdoorsy”. However, the simple act of trying to find a new bit of kit got me thinking about what gear means to me.

I tend to do a lot of research before I buy and that normally means scanning back copies of TGO or reading online fora, although the latter I don’t find that useful as the topics normally tail off into either flame wars or trivia not connected with the original question. The printed medium is much more focussed and the reviewer much more experienced in both a wide range of kit and the methods of objectively reviewing it. But the digital retail landscape is slowly changing. Much more bloggers are reviewing the gear they use and although I jump up and down at some of it, particularly the Paramo stuff (I think it’s too expensive, too heavy, too warm and the material is too flimsy - I’ve seen it ripped on rocks - much prefer Buffalo!), the netiquette of the blogosphere prevents flame wars developing and you tend to get comments added to reviews by people who have different opinions, which are backed by experience.

So if I stumble upon a gear review on a blog (of which there are multitudes) I’ll more than likely think, “that’s not for me” but I’m free to comment why and that might inform someone else, all in the open and accountable way that blogging netiquette demands, rather than the uninformative “I’ll punch your face in you Paramo ponce” type debates that develop on online fora. People who have these opinions have a corollary in the computer world, in the Microsoft vs Linux wars. They just quote from the rhetoric of the community with which they identify. They have no intrinsic proof of their opinions. It’s that proof that gives opinions in the blogosphere value though.

So is there a symbiotic relationship between gear and our outdoor selves? Should I perhaps start blogging about the gear I use? There are two points that come to mind.

The first is the whole bag of memories that gear, long used, comes with. When winter arrives and I pull on my old Buffalo, the feel, the scratches and holes all bring back memories of mountain epics, or the time I was ribbed for opening the vents in the Clachaig Inn and ponging the place out, the bit where I tore it on sharp axes. The logo patch that came off and Dawn, my wife, sewed back on but back to front. All the little “add ons” are me and my relationships, my experiences in the mountains. Not only that but the gear distills a lot of experience into what in effect becomes a cloak of, not quite invincibility but of ability and almost, courage. Standing at the foot of a long snow climb, alone, foul weather and gale force winds. The memories inherent in my battered buffalo remind me of the times I’ve done just this. I can do it again. Sleeping on a summit in mid summer, the whiff of old gear reminds me of trips just like this in the past. The more I use new gear, the more experiences I imbue it with and the more it reminds of who I am and what I can do in the mountains. Hence a symbiotic relationship is built up over the years. Good times and experiences resonate in gear in the cupboard, urging me out on the hills.

The second point is even more philosophical and in a way is an attempt at justifying why I should write about the gear I use. In Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter, Philip Koch talks about solitude in the context of societal relationships. He argues that inanimate objects resonate with personal experiences and relationships we project onto them, when a walker, perhaps, goes into wild country and experiences solitude. However, to experience true solitude, without descent into loneliness, the temporary hermit must operate within a sphere of influence, which he calls the containment of solitude. We cannot go into the wilds divorced from who we are and what made us that way. Sometimes the best solitude experiences are had, knowing that our relationships and engagements are there, waiting for our return and the solitude itself is not completed until we relate our solitary experiences to those we care about. The solitary wanderings are a chance for us to get to know “us”. A bulwark against a hectic society. A journey into ourselves, that reinforces who we are, when we return to the sphere of engagement, of the everyday world. A life of solitude has less value than one of balance between being alone in remte places and being with friends and family at the heart of society. How great is the pleasure in recounting experiences to a willing audience? Thinking about it, a blog that recounts nothing but uncontextualised wanderings, or one that is purely gear reviews, can be less entertaining than one that stikes a happy balance between philosophical musing on wild land journeys and descriptions of the gear used as a means to explore those wild lands. One can return from solitary wanderings and relate the experience to an online audience, in the context of the gear that supported the journey. For it is the gear that provides the aether within which we are connected. Personal experiences are just that, personal to us and our relationships. Gear, however, we can all relate to and as I’ve said in the first point, gear is symbiotic to our own relationship with the outdoors.

It’s the great circle of life. I talk about gear used in a phiosophical journey to the heart of the Cairngorms, which may inspire others to make their own journey, to store up their self in their own gear, to build their own symbiotic ecosystem.