[pct-l] re: ultra-lite packs

[Brett Tucker" <blisterfree@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Brett Tucker)]

Who are these wusses, these incompetents, these musculo-skeletal
degenerates, claiming that a 20+ pound load is too burdensome, too painful,
beyond nature's delicate scheme, for mere shoulders to bear?

No hipbelt.

Who! I ask. Bring them forth. Show them the problem: no patience toward
gradual processes of adaptation, insufficient marveling over human body's
miracle-before-our-eyes, not enough pre-hike conditioning, and in
particular: hipbelt perpetually worn on thru-hike cinching the lifeblood out
of possibilities to the contrary.

Hipbelt. Look at that thing for a minute. Kinda ridiculous, really. Just
sitting there, over in the corner, on the pack, waiting to grab you about
the midriff and chafe you, love you, wear YOU, all the way to Canada.

Now look at those shoulders. In the mirror. Naked shoulders. Look how
shapely, how unfat, how potentially capable of truly awesome things, if not
already. Envision. Picture them going the distance. Whisper to them,
encouragingly. ("yes...")

Those who have met me on the trail recognize straightaway that my shoulders
are my strongest feature. They see how I carry 35-40 pound loads squarely
upon my deltoid, trapezoid, and straptoid muscles, all the while smiling,
head up, no wincing, good posture, zero repression, hardly diffident. They
know it's possible, because they've seen me do it.

But sometimes they steal backward glances after we've passed, and I hear
them whisper, discouragingly. "Must be genetics."

And at once I turn about-face, look them straight in the eye, search my soul
and theirs for innate blessings of primal capitulation. "Yes... must be," I
say. "The sublime, far-reaching, ever-expanding genetic perfection of all
humanity."

Then a sacred sunbeam enlightens them, as cherubim descend, and all the
hipbelts unclip themselves, Grieg's "Morning" playing in the background,
etc, etc.

IMHO,
- blisterfree