If It Ain't Broke....(An Ode to Old Gear)

WARNING: Every story told below pretty much sounds like Christopher Walken's presentation of the watch to young Butch in Pulp Fiction.

Anyone that knows me very well would agree that I am not a fan of spending money.  I tend to hold on to things for a long time, partly because I am kinda cheap, but also I am a pretty sentimental person.  I like it when items have a history.  I am NOT a hoarder.  I only hold onto things that I use and take care of.  Over the years I have accumulated a pretty decent collection of outdoor gear.  But if it is taking up space, I make sure that it gets used, by either me or the latest rookie participant/victim of one of my adventures.  Here are some of my favorite oldies but goodies:

1) Compass - 1996

One night on a family vacation in Gatlinburg, I bought this compass from a store called Acorns. The next day I carried it on a very long day hike with my dad up to Rocky Top and Spence Field.  This compass has stayed in my right pocket on just about every major outdoor trip since. I can count at least nine States. It has saved me from temporary directional uncertainty more times than I can count. 

2) L.L. Bean Knife Edge Pack - 1999

On my 19th birthday, I asked for this backpack. Had I ever been backpacking before?  Of course not! But I had this crazy plan to go on my first trip that December. Why would you go on your first backpacking trip in December? See the above statement about having no experience. Why L.L. Bean? Because they used to really sell a lot of legit outdoor stuff and there was always a catalog laying around my parent's house. Catalogs were these things made out of paper, and you ordered things out of them.  This backpack was with me when I survived that first ridiculously planned backpacking trip.  Although I got a better bag a few years later, this backpack became my loaner bag for any newbie that I could talk into going on a trip. And even today I continue to take this bag on any trips that involve air travel because it just has one single massive compartment (a garbage can with straps).  Most recently it went to Colorado this past summer, and it hauled the heaviest load that I have ever hiked with.

3) CamelBak - 2001

When I was a Junior in college, my friend Andy talked me into becoming a mountain biker and the epicenter of our trips was Land Between the Lakes. I bought my bike from this guy named Bob, who owned Wood and Wave near Grand Rivers, Kentucky. Bob was a retired chemical engineer that transformed an old water ski shop into a legit bike store (just never changed the name). Bob knew his customer service. When you banged up your bike, he typically fixed it for free, right there in the store. As you waited, you typically spent no less than $50. CamelBaks were relatively new then, and I had never seen one. I am sure I bought this one while Bob was truing up a wheel on one of our bikes. Besides coming along on mountain biking and trail running trips, this CamelBak has also served as a quasi day pack of sorts. It has also been on the top of Estes Cone in Colorado and Old Rag in Virginia. This past winter I got a fancy new CamelBak with additional pockets and compression straps.  But I still like my original CamelBak, it is so old that it doesn't even have a pocket for a cell phone.....oh the humanity!!!!

4) Kelty Daypack - 2004

I got this pack as a present at my grandmother's house on Christmas Eve. On the previous year's trip to Colorado, I had summitted LaPlata Peak while carrying my old backpack from high school. Over the past 14 years, this bag has had quite a life. This pack has gone to the summit of Longs Peak, Grays Peak, Torreys Peak, Mt. Evans, and Mt. Bierstadt in Colorado. It has been to the summit of Mt Hood in Oregon.  For two years I used it as a school backpack for all of my graduate school classes. It has navigated the streets of Chicago and Nassau, Bahamas. This pack has served as a beach bag, hauling towels and beach toys in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and the Bahamas. It has spent some 16 hour days at Disney World. It has been on scuba diving trips, deep sea fishing trips, and ski boats on the Tennessee River. The side pockets are a little stretched out, but it is still going strong.

So, since I brought up the Pulp Fiction reference, the question has to be asked. If I lost any of this stuff, would I face off with Vincent Vega, Marsellus Wallace, Maynard, Zed, and the GIMP, just to get it back?  Of course I would!!!  I like my odds.

Pulp Non Fiction: All The Beauty and Truth You Can Stand for $9.99.

I have been wanting to try to write a book for a while now and the ideas for this project came along easy enough:

1) There really are very few books about the Cumberland Plateau.

2) I have a lot of adventure stories about the Cumberland Plateau, and I could mix them in with a lot of other educational facts like history and ecology lessons. Fun stuff!

3) I bet the book will pretty much just write itself.

I was right on the first two points anyway. Two years later, here we are. The really crazy thing is, because I write a detailed story about almost every hike anyway, the content was probably 50% finished before I even began.

I have had so many maps and notes spread out in the dining room that it looked like I was planning an invasion of Crossville.  There has been a cardboard box full of proofs, and drafts, and drafts of proofs, and proofs of drafts, sitting at my kitchen table for the better part of a year. I have named so many Word files and Adobe files that I am going to have to start using exponents. I have seriously worried that the mountains were going to erode into the ocean before I finished. But somehow or other, I got it done.  Here are some of the lessons I have learned along the way:

1) Yeah, it is nothing like writing a blog.  I can’t ever remember working for a month on formatting a blog post or worrying too much with sources. But I will have to give a shout out to my Amazon Overlord for making the process easier.

2) All of those authors that churn out a book or more every year….they don’t have a team of proof readers and editors working behind the scenes, they have an ARMY.  On the final and 708^th review, I had about 78 errors to correct…on a 130 page book.  Is it perfect now?  HECK NO. It is in English. It is legible. I think.

3) It ain’t about the money.  Even I sold 1,000 copies, which is ridiculously unlikely, considering the time I have put in, my profit would work out to be about the hourly minimum wage, in 1795. 

So, in short, if you are looking for a quick-read piece of travel literature that will enrich your life beyond the bounds of your wildest imagination, look no further. It’s available on Amazon (Prime too!!!) at:

https://www.amazon.com/Seem-Have-Been-There-Before/dp/1543196691

Or just search Bill Parnell. I ain’t gonna lie.  It’s pretty cool to 

see your work pop up in an Amazon search.

So if you get a chance, buy a copy, or a few dozen! And don't forget those super positive Amazon reviews! Can you do a six star rating now? I didn’t include a critical review on the back cover, but if I had to write my own it would be something like…..

“Bill Parnell has once again pushed the limits of human artistic achievement. Seem To Have Been There Before possess both the humor of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods as well as the epic plot devices of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, all bound together with Shakespearean prose and really neat maps.”