Great-Gramma Lange was a walker. She washed and ironed the linens, aprons and lab coats for Grampa Lange’s pharmacy and then walked with the bundle halfway across Albany, N.Y., from the South Side to the Capitol neighborhood. If Grampa stopped by her flat in the morning on his way to the store to give her a ride, he’d usually find her gone. Never mind her place was between Grampa’s and the store; she didn’t want to “waste the gas” by having him stop for her.
On the days of the week when she wasn’t scrubbing down the four-story building and its sidewalk, she was our nanny. She took us for long walks through Washington Park and the state museum. She wasn’t an especially jolly old gal — just very active, right up until the stroke that felled her in her 90s and slowly took her away.
Her grandson, my dad, inherited her impulse, but took it more to the heroic. Somewhere here there’s an old photo of him smiling at the camera, hands on hips and feet apart, wool shirt open at the neck, bandana, knee britches and high leather boots with a little jackknife pocket on the side of one. All of us little guys wanted a pair of boots like that.
We moved to Syracuse when I was 8, to the edge of what seemed then a vast green infinity — fallow fields, a golf course, second-growth forests and abandoned limestone quarries. The Second World War was in full cry: News from the Eastern Front hailed the terrific defense of Stalingrad by the Russians, and the U.S. Pacific Fleet, after its victory at Midway, was beginning to nibble at the Japanese Empire. We boys bought surplus helmets, webbing belts and gas masks, made rifles of broomsticks, and played Army on the slopes of the nearby reservoir.
About that time, I discovered my father’s stash of old camping equipment. World War I surplus, most of it. He had a pair of “shelter halves” — khaki-colored half-tents (each doughboy carried one) that buttoned together and, staked out, became a two-man pup tent. We camped with them and slept on grass inside. If it rained, we were invariably wet by morning.
Dad had a few knapsacks with narrow leather shoulder straps and mysterious black stains that we fancied were blood. Some gear still had German names: A knapsack was a small pack originally for carrying lunch; a rucksack was literally a back pack; and a haversack (a name favored by the Boy Scouts, who have always clung tenaciously to tradition) came from habersack, a horse’s nosebag full of oats. Another of his ancient treasures was something he called a trench knife, an unwieldy, curved slab of steel in an artistically fitted leather sheath that was better adapted to hacking down saplings than any kind of warfare.
The huge camping and outdoor boom that today has grown to threaten the very environment it celebrates really got its start after the war. Returning GIs became scoutmasters eager to get their boys out of church basements, and the Army-Navy stores were flooded with surplus equipment — everything from K-rations to military-style Coleman stoves to double down sleeping bags that were burdensome and bulky to carry, and impossible to get dry when once wet, but kept us warm right in the open on balsam boughs over the snow on frigid February nights.
Not every military innovation was a masterpiece. An updated version of the pup tent with the attractive name, “mountain tent,” was a coated fabric envelope olive-drab on the outside and white on the interior, with zippered doorways and strange little ventilating stovepipes sticking out the ends up high, supposedly for ventilation. After a cold night in a mountain tent, the ice on the inside of the fabric rained down upon everything and everybody inside; and after a couple of nights, the big fat surplus down bags were several pounds heavier with condensation. It wasn’t just the enemy our troops were fighting; it was the Quartermaster Corps, as well.
It was still another war, the Korean, with its midwinter disaster at Chosin Reservoir, that gave us outdoor enthusiasts another breakthrough: the Mickey Mouse boot. Molded in two layers of rubber with wool insulation between, they were heavy, ungainly and murder on the ankles unless you trimmed them artfully. They were the warmest boots ever, and may be yet — so warm that, after a day of heavy hiking in winter snow, we competed to see who had the most copious collection of “boot tea,” which we poured from the boots and wrung from socks into drinking cups.
You don’t see gear like that anymore — except for the occasional old-timer in the White Mountains with an edelweiss-decorated rucksack. Even an innovation like high-count, water-resistant goose down is giving way to artificial fleece. I no longer take down with me in the winter — except in a lovely minus-20-degrees sleeping bag. White gas cookers have given way to spider-like gas canister stoves, and our treasured metal Marble’s match holders to Bic lighters. Hiking boots are now light sneakers with Gore-Tex liners to keep out water. I keep waiting to see if somebody, disdaining all this modernity, will try to reprise Granny Gatewood’s 1955 Appalachian Trail thru-hike, in Keds with a muslin bag over one shoulder. I doubt I shall; even in her day, Granny was one of a kind.
The new gear catalogs full of irresistible sales have begun flooding in, but I shall resist and instead play the hand I’ve got. I can retire happily from heroic hiking, for our older daughter, armed only with walking shoes and a Fitbit, has been knocking off 100-mile weeks and on her 50th birthday a few years ago, hiked 51 miles to raise money for a summer camp for indigent girls. Great-Gramma Lange lives!
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
