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Appendix: Winter Gear | (continued) A word about tents—the most ancient of man-made shelters. The variations of design through which they have passed, over tens of millennia, are astonishing to behold. Every conceivable framework and every possible covering has been put to use in their construction. Shapes and sizes have varied enormously. Campers who imagine that the lightweight dome tents of today, with their aircraft-aluminum poles, constitute the last word on the subject of tent design are in for some surprises. As a singular example, I would suggest that the age of the Instant Tent will soon be upon us. Imagine unrolling a broad, hexagonal shape of thin but very strong fabric, staking it down at each of its corners, then pulling a lanyard and watching its airbeams raise it into a dome high enough to stand up in, and wide enough to accommodate your whole crew, in complete comfort. Elapsed time: less than two minutes. The technology has existed for decades. The appearance of the product has simply been a matter of refining the materials and preparing the market. Well, the materials have been refined, and the market is soon to be prepared. One experience of erecting such a tent (or rather, watching it erect itself) will vaporize all of your fascination with flexible tubes of .38 inch, 7071 extruded aircraft aluminum, complete with integral shock cords. History. But of course, size will always matter, and so will shape. I once camped on a small island in Gull Lake that was so flat it looked man-made (named, if you can believe it, Easter Island). Flat is fine, but it was also so thickly wooded with second growth that if I had had the tent that I have now, I could never have set it up. I was using a Cannondale Wabash at the time, which is a good forest tent—long and relatively narrow. In a mature forest, ground space is not at a premium, but among second growth, there are very few spaces big enough for a tent eight feet wide—you may find long spaces, but seldom wide ones. Hence a long, narrow tent will serve you in more situations than a broad dome that could fill a middle-class living room. The best idea of all, of course, would be to carry both kinds, for both settings, for some variety, and an added measure of safety. Properly designed, they weigh very little, and properly stowed, they take up less space than a winter sleeping bag. (Again, I’m referring to canoeing, not backpacking.)
A word about coated flies. The fly of a tent is its outer covering. When I first got my Cannondale, which has a sewn-in fly, I tested it for water-repellency by pouring a flask of water over it just to see what would happen. It rolled off like quicksilver, yet the fly wasn’t coated with urethane, as was the tent floor. In fact the fly didn’t seem to be coated with anything visible—and even silicone waterproofing is visible (especially the way I use it). The ripstop nylon fly of that tent, when it was new, could shed thunderstorms and yet breathe readily—before, during and after a rain. I have since learned the answer to that puzzle: most fabrics, especially thin weaves, are treated with sizing before being woven. Sizing is a class of substances (usually polymers) whose primary purpose is to lubricate and toughen the fibers, to give them a greater ability to withstand the stresses of being wound on spools and woven into cloth. They also provide the finished textiles with a generally more presentable (saleable) appearance—better “body,” greater density, firmness and sheen. The greatest benefit of sizing to the camper, of course, is that it makes a tightly-woven fabric extremely water-repellent, as well as breathable, as long as the sizing is never removed from the fibers. But if care is not taken, the sizing will prove to have a rather short life-span. Every tent, however carefully handled, will need to be washed sooner or later, and if detergent is used, it tends to remove the sizing—not necessarily all at once, but sooner or later. (Dry-cleaning, which I’ve never attempted, would probably remove every molecule of the sizing in one operation.) Then there is the factor of mere age, which in this part of the world means prolonged exposure to ultra-violet radiation and acid rain. |
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