 |
 |
||||
 |
|||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||
|
|
|
|
13 | (continued) Many people complain that sleeping bags are too confining. It is the “mummy” style bag, very fashionable now, that they’re referring to. And at 5' 11", 255 pounds, I have belatedly come to agree with them. The mummy bag is undeniably warmer than the old square-cut style, simply because it has a smaller surface area through which heat may be lost—its chief reason for being. But having used both kinds now, I must opt for the roomier of the two—for sheer spaciousness, if not for warmth or lightness. Yet there is a further factor in this widespread displeasure with mummy bags, which I suspect many designers have not fully considered: the claustrophobic effect of a zipper, as opposed to Velcro. If a bag fits you properly, the natural rollings of your body during the night are not likely to open a two-inch strip of Velcro, provided it has been well pressed into position. Yet in an emergency, genuine or imagined, the Velcro will open at any point along its length by force alone; it presents none of the mechanical challenges of a zipper, especially to gloved hands. I have no doubt that the use of Velcro in place of a zipper would reassure a great many people, who might otherwise feel trapped in the type of bag so common today. I never knew I had the capacity for panic at this sense of over-secure enclosure, until one exceedingly cold night in the Muskokas, when I quite lost my composure by being wrapped far too snugly in a blanket within a bag—the latter being a bit too small for me in the first place. Not a pleasant memory. Another memory, equally unpleasant: As the fall and winter progressed, the tent began to show its age and the effects of UV radiation, by leaking more rainwater than I could tolerate, so I biked to the nearest Canadian Tire store and bought a sheet of clear woven polyethylene, big enough to cover the sleeping compartment. The tapered shape of the tent left two flaps of the sheet lying free on the ground beyond the edge of the fly, and I laid a pair of old waterlogged branches on each flap to hold the sheet in place, and keep the wind from picking it up and blowing it off entirely. When all of the branches are bare of leaves, the wind in the woods can be surprisingly strong. Later, when Damien brought me the tarps that I used for the tipi, I cut one of the huge sheets and draped it over the vestibule of the tent, which gave me what I thought I needed: a totally leakproof shelter. Alas, it turned out to be a trifle too leakproof. One snow-covered morning, when the atmosphere must have been uncommonly calm, I awoke with a startling infirmity: I could not get my eyes to remain still; they oscillated in their sockets from side to side incessantly, sending the tent and everything in it into seismic gyrations, sufficient to cause, in those few seconds, the rising nausea of motion sickness. Truly frightened for the first time since the whole adventure had begun, I frantically unzipped the inner flap, then the vestibule, and pushed the carefully overlapped plastic sheets apart, to get a faceful of clear, cold winter air. I stayed on my knees in that position for several minutes, indifferent to the temperature, before I could feel my nervous system gradually return to normal. I never did determine whether it was some specific vapor, or merely a shortage of oxygen—I suspect it was a little of both—but I took to leaving the window flap at the foot of the tent permanently open after that, and had no recurrences of asphyxia. There are moments out there when you are reminded of your degree of exposure to the elements, and their incalculable energy, in a way that allows no evasion and brooks no denial. One day in late fall, after the trees were bare, I was reading in the tent at dusk when there arose, well above ground level, a wind the like of which I had never heard before. It seized the upper branches of the ancient maples with a howl so loud that I fully expected one of the giants to be stressed beyond its limits and squash me like a hapless toad. After ten or fifteen minutes of its steadily rising roar, I thought surely it must have peaked, when a terrifying crescendo of unbearable pitch screamed at me from directly overhead, and I went stiff with fear that what I was confronting was the approach of a tornado—a rare but not unknown threat in these parts. The gusts soon subsided, but that one pinnacle of raw, natural power, utterly beyond the control of man, and wholly new to my experience, remains in my memory as a precious but unnerving spectacle.
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
